Author: Robert Wringham

Back when I worked as a library assistant, we had a cash register at the circulation desk for the overdue charges.

With each transaction, the cash register would sputter out a receipt.

“Would you like a receipt?” we’d ask the punter, to which they would say “No.”

Nobody wants a receipt for a 15p library fine.

So we’d tear off the receipt and put it in a little bin. The receipt bin.

What a futile life that cash register had.

During a busy spell one summer afternoon, we stopped asking people whether they wanted a receipt and we stopped tearing off the receipts and we stopped putting them in the receipt bin. The receipts just kept on sputtering out uselessly and soon they formed a long chain.

On one occasion, we took notice when 27 receipts had printed without breaking off. It was glorious.

“Nobody tear off a receipt!” someone said. “Let’s see how long we can get it.”

It was one of those little survival techniques–little games you make up for yourselves–when you have a boring job.

Sometimes, a new staff member not yet indoctrinated into the game would break the chain and put it in the bin.

“What have you done?!” we’d all shout. “Don’t break the chain!”

Sometimes, a persnickety customer would ask out right to be given a receipt and you’d be forced to break the chain.

“Are you sure you want a receipt?” you’d ask.

“Yes,” they’d say.

“Why?” you’d ask.

“Because I’ve spent some money and I am entitled to a receipt,” they’d say.

We’d hate that person forever. If the library had been a restaurant, we’d have all gobbed in his soup.

On one occasion, I saw a library assistant writing out a receipt for 50p by hand. I didn’t have to ask why. She didn’t want to break the chain.

Sometimes, a supervisor would tell us to stop being so silly.

“Break the chain,” he would say, “it is a pointless mess.”

Needless to say, I was suddenly driven to pass my supervisor exam as soon as possible. With me in charge, we could let the chain grow as long as we liked.

The longest chain we ever cranked out was 136 receipts long. It was the most beautiful thing any of us had ever seen.

We sent it to the Kelvingrove Museum along with a letter explaining how we’d like to submit it to their exhibition about working-class life in Glasgow. We got no reply.

Shrug this off if you like, but Montreal is set to suffer a deadly dose of Christmas Radiation.

“Christmas Radiation?” you ask. “What are you talking about?”

I’ve tried to warn you about it before. Pay attention. I’m doing a public service.

Overtly Christmassy objects emit Christmas Radiation. Got that?

We can withstand it for a month or so, but soon afterwards it begins to warp our minds.

If you know someone who is mentally ill, check their home for holly wreaths left up all year round or Christmas trees moldering in the spare room. Remove these objects and your friend will be fine. No need for therapy or drugs. I personally guarantee it.

After a month, Christmas things must be packed into cardboard boxes and stowed safely in an attic or crawlspace. These are the only environments in which Christmas Radiation can be stabilised.

Montreal is especially at risk. I live in Montreal and I can tell you that every year, all through the spring, people leave their decorations up. I’ll be out on my routine voluntary Christmas Radiation Inspection (RVCRI) and I’ll find decorations left up until April or May.

This is why there are so many people hanging out on Montreal street corners, wearing cycling helmets and shouting “Nipples!” at innocent passersby. They’ve had their minds warped by too much tinsel.

Check desk drawers for rogue baubles. Check the fridge door for excess nog. Check inside your anus (or have a friend check for you) in case any half-digested roast chestnut has become lodged there.

You owe it to your sanity.

Madness in the workplace can all too often be traced to an obvious source: tiny remnants of streamer stuck to blue-tack in the corners of ceilings. So enthusiastically raised in December, so mercilessly torn down in January. Ghosts of Christmas Past, I call these little dods of glittery tack. They haunt the office all year round, pulsing their radiation into the aching brains of otherwise happy data entry clerks.

How could such pretty objects emit such harmful rays? Well as everyone knows, Christmas decorations are forged by elves in the mines of Lapland (or Greenland or the North Pole or wherever it is you think Santa lives) and it is in these mines where Christmas Radiation spumes forth from subterranean figgy pudding deposits.

They’d ban this practice but it’s where Saint Nicolas derives his supernatural powers. How else could he visit every child in a single night? By commanding the power of the mighty element Festivium is how.

Don’t look for it on your periodic table. You won’t find it. Its position is so far south of Cadmium that it’s off the map.

Holly wreaths? Christmas radiation.

Candy canes? Steeped in it.

Nutcrackers? Don’t get me started.

Be safe this New Year. Take your Christmas shit down on Twelfth Night. To be extra safe, ask for a Geiger Counter next Christmas.

Tower cranes. They protrude from our cities like candles from birthday cakes.

I like cranes. I can see two from my window right now. They go about their heavy lifting as I go about mine. (What? I’m a humour writer. I lift people’s moods).

In idle moments, I watch the cranes and wonder what it’s like to be a crane operator.

The job is blue-collar, but their offices have the best views in town. White-collar psychopaths schmooze their way to what they think is the top, but the humble crane operator watches silently from an even higher top. Wanking.

It’s possible. Who knows what goes on up there? When I train binoculars on the cabin of a crane, all I see within is a tiny swiveling head.

Maybe that’s all there is. Tiny swiveling heads, all using their surrogate metal appendages to drop the imprisoning lids on new office blocks.

Unlikely I suppose. But the whole idea is unlikely to begin with: that there are humans in the sky, yanking on joysticks, under orders to plant sewer pipes. It’s a world gone mad.

The lives of crane operators are different to ours. They surely do not, for example, take elevators to their offices. They take ladders. A hundred rungs? A thousand? Just one big leap? Nobody knows.

They have special privileges. In most offices, workers are reprimanded if they so much as stand on a chair to unscrew a bulb. These people climb the sky.

Do crane operators bring their own lunches to work? Only two alternatives occur to me: food bundles delivered by owls; cheese rolls and oranges honked neatly into the cabin by the fancy air cannons used to distribute t-shirts at hockey games.

What do they most enjoy for lunch? If altitude numbs the senses, maybe crane operators like it salty. Does this mean they’re always thirsty? And if they’re always thirsty, do they quench their thirst or suppress it lest they have to climb all the way back downstairs for a wee?

I hope it’s not too big a slur on their character to suggest crane operators wee over the side. It must be better organised than that. Perhaps they take advantage of surface tension and wee down a 250-foot cable into an awaiting toilet. If so, the wees of crane operators must be among the world’s longest wees.

I once looked after my mum’s cat. She’d sit in the bay window, making eyes at next door’s cat who in turn was sitting in her own bay window, staring back at ours. Two blister-packed cats, locked in eternal speculation. I wonder if crane operators do that. Do they look out from their cabins into the cabins of other cranes? Or is that a faux-pas and crane operators all have to pretend they can’t see each other?

On the other hand, maybe they’re all good friends. Between cranes would be a exquisite way to play tin can telephone.

Do they ever get to work and realise they’ve forgotten their keys and have to go all the way back down to get them? Do they ever refuse bribes from government agents who want them to be their eyes in the skies? Do they drink from novelty mugs that say “crane operators do it while high”? Are crane operators successful with those mechanical claw games in amusement arcades or are the controls so different there can be no comparison? We will never know. They are out of our reach.

🏗

If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other flights of fancy.

I like squirrels. They are living paradigms of mischief.

I also have a particular fondness for those occasions where animals get into human places, like when a dog gets into a school playground and anarchy breaks out. A clever child will leave a couple of doors open to be sure the dog gets into the school building, runs around excitedly in the halls and classrooms and offices and ends up licking the headmaster’s face. They can’t even keep a dog out! Viva la Revolución!

Imagine my excitement today then, when a squirrel got into the apartment.

I’d been baking a cake so things were already teetering on the edge of madness.

One moment there was no squirrel. A moment later there was a squirrel. It was as simple as that.

A squirrel! A squirrel indoors. A flippin’ squirrel — the outdoors being his normal preserve — indoors now with all the people things. A squirrel indoors. What will they think of next?

To make matters more exciting, this was one of the rare albino squirrels we have in Montreal. A proper spirit animal if ever there was one; a totem of mayhem; a familiar of full-blown devilry.

He was a real phantom: ghost-white, pink-eyed, and sitting on my chaise like he owned the place.

He looked at me, trying to ascertain what I would do next.

I looked at him, doing much the same.

This was quite the meeting of minds.

As honored as I was by his visit, I’d have to get him out. I couldn’t share my home with a squirrel. I’ve had flatmates before and I know how it goes. He’d be eating all the nuts and berries no matter how clearly I labelled the containers. He’d be wearing my slippers and smoking my pipe and making lengthy international phone calls to his grey relatives in the States and his red ones in Europe. Before you knew it, he’d be bringing weasels home to dinner and letting them use our bathtub.

No. The line must be drawn somewhere.

I lunged with a beach towel in an attempt at netting him, but he coolly sidestepped the danger, nimble as a squirrel.

No good. Think, Robert, think. Put that British state education into action.

Let’s see. The only animals I’ve escorted from my home of late have been spiders, for which I used the classic glass-and-paper maneuver.

Well it was just a question of scale surely. A perspex bowl and a record sleeve later and I had the blighter.

He stomped about furiously under the dome, pink eyes blazing with the vitriol that only an incarcerated squirrel can summon.

I marched him onto the balcony. Arrivederci, Nutkin.

At this point I’d normally drop the spider into the abyss, safe in the knowledge that a skillful spurt from the spinneret will save her. To my knowledge, squirrels don’t have such abilities. Not ones for web-spinning, the squirrels. They’re more at home obsessively hoarding acorns and forgetting where they buried them.

I briefly considered dropping him off anyway. He’d given me quite the runaround. Could I do that? Perhaps I’d make like William Shatner booting that Klingon into the lava flow. “I… have had… enough of you!”

But, as I say, I like squirrels.

This is how I ended up chauffeuring a squirrel downstairs in the lift.

We live high up in one of Montreal’s tallest buildings, yet our balcony is a major social destination for sparrows. “The place to be” ★★★★ — What Roost.

How do sparrows get all the way up here? Probably some kind of flapping motion. I’m no ornithologist.

It’s all a bit sinister if you want the truth of it. I can only imagine they flock here in such numbers to watch my girlfriend undress.

I open the curtains each morning to four-and-twenty sets of peeping little eyes. I’m yet to see one blink, though I fancy I once saw a wink.

Still, I can’t help but admire their persistence to survive in our freezing, stinking city. Their diet of bagel crumbs, discarded prophylactics, and remaindered Expo 67 souvenir geodesic snow globes cannot be nutritious, yet they pull through.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to install a bird table on our balcony. As long as they visit us, I’ll lay on the hors d’oeuvres.

I pulled on my coat and hat, and with as much pomposity as I could muster, marched out to the shops to acquire a bird table and some seed.

It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that I realised I don’t have the first idea of where to get such things or even what they should cost. Twenty dollars? A million? It’s also true that bird tables went out of style with screen doors, cobblers, and toffee hammers.

But this was Montreal, dammit! A city foaming over with hipsters, or as they’re called here, les doofus analogues. Where there’s a store devoted to dead people’s eyeglasses from the 1930s, I could surely find some coiffured popinjay making a loss on bird tables, could I not?

I could not. After three hours trudging in the snow I found nothing of the sort. Pet shops, hardware stores, supermarkets. Nobody could help me.

“Do you sell bird tables?” I ask a cheerful clerk.

“A what?”

“A bird table? A table for birds? You set it up with some seed and watch the birds come to eat.”

“You mean a bird feeder?”

“Well, that’s a kind of hanging thing with nuts in it, no?”

“You’re a kind of hanging thing with nuts in it.”

She had me there.

In the defeated trudge home, as is so often the case, I came to a realisation. A bird table was essentially a plank of wood. Is that what they don’t have in Canada? Ha!

I then remembered the wooden bar stool that’s been decomposing on our balcony for two years. There were also some unsalted sunflower seeds in our kitchen cupboard left over from a virtuous phase.

Why, that was everything I needed! Let this be a lesson to you all. Shopping is not the solution. Just use your own rotting bar stool and, as my grandfather Multiple Miggs Wringham, used to shout, it’s a rare problem that can’t be solved by throwing your own seed at it.

Curiously few sparrows have visited us since I laid on the grub. “Clichéd offerings from a naïve kitchen. A balcon to avoid.” ★★ — Modern Finch.

Only one sparrow has so far seen fit to grace our bird table. He pecked around most discerningly. Frankly, he had a rather regal air about him for someone who until recently ate off the floor. He kicked some seed about and flew away.

“Tell the others!” I plaintively called after him.

Once aloft, I imagined the sparrow communed with his fellows:

“You’ll never believe what I just saw. A bird table!”

“A what?”

“A bird table? A table for birds? The stupid mammals put seed on it and then sit around watching us eat it.”

“You mean a bird feeder?”

“Well, that’s a kind of hanging thing with nuts in it, no?”

“You’re a kind of hanging thing with nuts in it.”

“You’ve got me there.”

“Humans. They’re ridiculous. Nice jugs on some of them, mind.”

Birthday is it? Passing Go to collect two-hundred are you? Another lap around the sun is it?

Yes, yes, Thursday was my birthday. My thirty-first. Leave me alone.

I was going to open this entry with something like “Thirty-one? Hardly an evocative number,” but on sitting down to do so, I’ve realised it does evoke something.

When I was 18 or so, I had a Saturday job in a warehouse and had a friend there called Steve Hill. He was a sociable if meaty-breathed fellow with a shabby-glamorous John Cooper Clark demeanor.

Steve was popular enough to have his own catchphrase and an impressively Dadaist one at that. The catchphrase was, simply, “thirty-one”.

Somehow it was always applicable. If he was feeling down in the dumps, he’d shake his head forlornly and say “thirty-one.” If he received good news he’d jubilantly cry “thirty-one!”

On one occasion, I happened to be present when Steve lost a piece of fingernail to a improperly-sealed crate and I swear he said “AAAARGthirtyone!”

Imagine Steve presenting game shows. He’d come out and say “thirty-one?” and the audience with no further prompting would roar “thirty-one!”

What was the origin of all this? Steve, he explained, had been at a party one night when a comatose man had stood up suddenly from his drunken torpor and, seeing Steve, said “thirty-one” with great gravitas and import.

Perhaps the drunk had seen Steve’s future. Perhaps he’d picked up an important radio signal on his fillings. Perhaps he’d just had too much hooch and was completely insensible. We’ll never know.

“Thirty-one,” the drunk had said to Steve, and then collapsed.

Steve recounted this story to us and we liked it so much that “thirty-one” became a kind of halloo. You’d pass Steve in the corridor and shout “thirty-one!” and he’d shout “thirty-one!” in response.

It was a strange catchphrase, like something from an experimental spoken word night. After all, we were ten young men on the outskirts of an industrial estate, laughing at a number.

It did not take long for the original story to become lost in time. Staff turnover in the warehouse was high and the original gang who knew the providence of the catchphrase soon disappeared. The new kids on the team learned to say “thirty-one!” when they saw Steve, without knowing why. “Thirty-one!” in the corridor; “Thirty-one!” in the staff room; “Thirty-one!” when we were all stuck in traffic on the way home.

I remember thinking in the summer of thirty-one that I’d probably forget the significance of that number when I left that job, but that I’d maybe remember it with surprise in the impossibly distant future upon my thirty-first birthday. Amazingly, I did.

Happy Birthday to me! Thirty-one.

“Never learned to swim?!” they all gasp, groping around for something on which to steady themselves.

Honestly, they act as if I’d never tasted milk.

I never learned to swim, okay? Like those who live with the outsider burden of having never seen Gremlins or King Ralph, swimming, for me, simply never came up.

I don’t know why it’s so remarkable. There are many other things I can do which are seldom celebrated. Sleeping, eating, swearing. The list is endless.

Alas swimming–along with figure-skating, ventriloquism and javelin–is a life skill it never occurred to me to master.

And I stand by those sarcastic comparisons. Imagine you woke up one morning and everyone had gone javelin crazy and couldn’t believe you weren’t in on it. It’s all well and good, you might think, but what’s it got to do with me? In Cricklewood. That’s how swimming looks to me.

I grew up in Dudley, which, in Britain, is about as far as you can get from the sea. It’s the windowless office of the nation. I’d cite this as the reason for my never having learned, but everyone in Dudley was mad about swimming. Family legend has it that my six-year-old grandfather learned to swim in a local carp pond, so excited was he to master the backstroke. My father, if he is to be believed, learned in a bucket of turps.

But even now I find myself wondering why any youngster from Dudley, a place which hasn’t seen ocean since the Cretaceous, would get the idea that they must learn to swim. How could it serve one’s Dudley life? I suppose it might be a handy way to get to work in the morning: front-crawling up the canal to Birmingham.

While the other children were learning to swim in those chlorine-perfumed, wedge-shaped bacteria troughs they call public baths, I must was in my mum’s living room eating jam sandwiches and watching horror films taped off BBC2: something I do not regret. You should hear my Vincent Price impression. “They swim… the mark of Satan is upon them.” et cetera.

Swimming has nothing to do with me. But maybe I should make it to do with me, you may object. That’s what everyone else does. They live in cities, miles away from the sea or a Great Lake or even a decent pond, but they still find ways to submerge themselves, as if they have some primal need to reconnect with their jellyfish ancestry.

In one part of the city, we go to pains to pour cement into any hint of concavity lest a puddle form there. In another, we dig a pit and fill it with water for people to wallow in. It seems there’s quite the industry in digging holes and filling them up. It’s about time someone looked into that.*

(*On a similar note, have you ever noticed how bottled water in Birmingham comes from the Scottish Highlands, but the bottled water in Edinburgh comes from Shropshire? It can only be down to a lust for the exotic, and now there’s a whole industry in water-swapping. Further evidence that water makes people crazy and is best avoided.)

Safety was always the reason cited when I was a child to get to a pool and learn to swim. There was a fear among adults that children would wander off only to be found face-down in a waterlogged quarry. Why did they think we’d be drawn to such places? If I wandered off anywhere, you’d find me at the pictures. There’s hardly any drowning opportunities there. Unless perhaps you’d gone to see Jaws.

“You can drown in a glass of water,” was always the stern claim when they told you about water safety. To which I respond, “That may be. And how will backstroke help?”

Health. That’s the new reason. Swim! Swim! Swim for health! In the city. Yet there are many other ways to keep fit that don’t necessarily require speedos. Waving for taxi cabs, for example, or running from hoodlums.

Health? Safety? Nostalgia for trilobites? I remain unconvinced. Water thinks it’s such a big shot with its two hydrogens for every oxygen.

Bah, I say. It is nothing to me. You know what I do to water? I drink it. Take that, water. See how I consume you, old enemy of mine? You are nothing. You’re a jellyfish less the 2% solidity.

The Great Outdoors is not my element. I’m more at home with The Slight Indoors: a telephone box, for example, or a lift.

It was somewhat out of character, then, when I went off (voluntarily!) to explore one of Canada’s national parks earlier this year. I even went so far as to take off my oxfords so that I could paddle in glacier water.

I suppose I wanted to prove it to myself. That I could brave untarnished air with the best of them.

None of this would have been possible, of course, without hours of advance preparation in the library. After digesting Dewey 796.5 in its entirety, I felt ready for the world unpaved.

On the trail, I patronizingly impart some new-found wisdom to my girlfriend. The best way to do this is to affect nonchalance and to pretend that you knew everything all along.

“If a bear should cross our path,” I say, “the most important thing is not to run”.

“I see.”

“What you must do, dear heart, is stride confidently up to the bear as if you own the place. Maintain eye contact and then, while he’s still getting his shit together, you abruptly adopt Fig. 49.”

“What?”

“Fig. 49 from Creg Dennehy’s Over-Easy Guide to Outdoor Survivesmanship. Fig. 49: A Punch In the Face.”

There was a time in our relationship when the revelation of such pearls would result in a raised eyebrow or two, but she must have overworked those muscles over the years, for her expression betrayed little but constant adoration.

“I think that’s for sharks,” she said.

“No, silly. Sharks live in the sea. There aren’t any sharks around for miles.”

The nearest shark, as a point of fact, was preserved in formaldehyde some fifteen-hundred miles away in a San Francisco art gallery.

An hour later, we chance across the cloven footprints of a moose. There is a strong scent of musk in the air. My smitten partner probably assumed the smell belonged to me. But no.

“Do you smell that?” I ask, “it’s probably the moose but there’s an outside chance it could be a bear.”

“Shall we track him down and adopt Fig. 49?”

“No, dear, I think we should leap ahead to Fig. 52 and move very quickly in the opposite direction.”

Back in the cabin, we reviewed our nationalparksmanship over a restorative lunch of cucumber sandwiches and a cheeky gee-and-tee.

We agreed it was more exciting to think about the bear I could have punched than to dwell on the moment I got the whiff of a moose and ran away.

Why must I be such a snake when it comes to getting what I want? Why can’t I ever just ask for something?

I went to a meeting this morning at the house of a wealthy client. Her opulent home was in some disarray — partly because of the major construction work being done on the house, but also because some real go-getters had come for the meeting and were all competing for the comfiest seat.

Coming in through the front door (traditional, like) I’d spotted a mountain of books packed haphazardly into cardboard boxes and stacked up in the hall.

It was clear that the books were to be disposed of. On the top of the pile was a glistening, potentially-unread hardback copy of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.

A rather grubby voice from somewhere in my avaricious, bibliophilic depths said, “I’m having that”.

But how could I ask for it? I was here on business. It felt rather shabby to say, “Are you finished with that?”

Incapacitated by the idea of simply asking for the book, I fell back on my time-honored slippery ways. I began to spin a web of complex psychology, with which I could manipulate everyone as if they were painted marionettes and I their nimble-fingered puppet master. By the time I was through with them, they’d be sending me every copy of The Thunderbolt Kid they could find in the province. It’s just a little skill I have, which means I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life.

“I notice you’ve boxed up a lot of books,” I said, trite as a Thanksgiving turkey, “I suppose you want them out of the way while you’re having all the work done.”

“No,” she said, “I’m slinging them. Such garbage! I aught to give them to charity but I don’t know where to send them.”

I winced that she’d describe what would soon be my books as garbage but managed to keep my cool.

“Hmm,” I said thoughtfully as if the idea was only now forming in my innocent mind, “The library by my house accepts donations. I’d take care of this for you if only I could transport them. I don’t drive though.”

There was a pause as I waited for the synapses to fire. Somewhere up in the galaxy, a star burned out.

“Why, I could drive you!”

“Oh! What luck!”

It was beautiful. What a neat little heist I had arranged. Not only would I win The Thunderbolt Kid and every other treasure inside those boxes, I’d be getting a ride home in a Mercedes-Benz.

Later, as the meeting drew to a conclusion, I saw to my horror — my abject and undying horror — that one of the go-getters had spotted my books and was lustily fondling The Thunderbolt Kid.

“I love Bill Bryson!” he said. “Could I have this?”

“Of course you can dear!” said the client sunnily. “It’s one less for Robert to take”.

I’ve never mentally murdered anyone so brutally.

This was how I came to have five dusty boxes of art catalogues and National Geographics cluttering up my living room.

Does anyone know when they come to collect the bins?

More tea vicar? This is a catchphrase we have in our office at WringCorp. More tea vicar? More tea vicar? More tea vicar?

It’s a friendly way of saying “I’m bored. Let’s liven things up by watching the kettle slowly progress towards bubbly climax”.

It occurs to me today that I don’t know what a vicar actually is. I know they’re some kind of holy folk, but what kind? Catholics have Priests and I think Baptists might have Ministers. Are these all clergymen? Or is a clergyman a person who rods the drains?

It’s shameful that I’m so ignorant in these matters because I used to know a vicar. I could have asked him all about it. His name was Mark the Vicar.

Our primary school sat at the bottom of a steep hill. At the top, there was a toyshop with a clumsy shopkeeper, so we were never short of marbles.

Something else that rolled down the hill every so often was Mark the Vicar.

Mark the Vicar was a well-meaning fellow who took it upon himself to cycle from John o’ Groats to Land’s End once a year, stopping along the way to address the children of any school who’d have him.

Like a moth to a flame, Mark the Vicar came to see us.

Whenever his name came up in assembly, I’d shout “What with?!”

The other children loved this joke without understanding it. I knew they didn’t understand it because when our headmaster introduced an entirely different speaker one day called Madame Claudette, some of the other children shouted “What with?!”

Poor Claudette. She got such a Madamming.

Mark the Vicar’s schtick was to tell us about his adventures in between stints of pedaling in a Cornwallerly direction. He’d then find a tenuous way of connecting those events to something he believed had happened to a certain Mister Jesus.

“I had quite an adventure in Hadfield last week,” said Mark the Vicar, “when I ate some food in a Chinese Restaurant.”

Say what you like about Mark the Vicar, he was never one to use the word “adventure” correctly.

He then segued with the grace of a mangled hunchback into the most bizarre and quasi-religious story I’ve ever heard.

“A man died,” said Mark the Vicar, winning our attention immediately, “and his soul was welcomed into a large reception area by Jesus.”

By this age, I was fairly familiar with New Testament ideas about the afterlife and never up until this point had a reception area been mentioned. I wondered if it had a decorative fish tank or some old National Geographics lying around for while you were waiting.

“‘Take my hand,’ said Jesus to the man, ‘and I will show you your place in Heaven but also what you’ve avoided in Hell.'”

A gifted storyteller was Mark the Vicar. He did the voices and everything.

In a bizarre narrative twist, Jesus reveals that the people of Heaven and Hell alike use chopsticks, just like Mark the Vicar had done for the first time recently. Except, Johnny Deadfellow uses giant chopsticks.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

To theatricalise his incredible claim, Mark the Vicar, had brought along (on his bike? From John o’ Groats?) several pairs of six-foot-long chopsticks, with which he encouraged some volunteers to eat some crisps.

Salt & Vinegar Monster Munch, of course, is one of few staples common to Chinese, Celestial and Infernal traditional cuisines.

I wish I could report that the feat was impossible — for Mark the Vicar’s entire parable hinged on it — but one clever girl succeeded in eating the crisps by raising them six feet in the air and sliding them down the chopsticks, fireman-style, into her awaiting maw.

Redfacedly overlooking the girl’s ingenuity, Mark the Vicar revealed the “correct” technique. The volunteers must feed each other with the giant chopsticks. And so we learned a valuable lesson in cooperation.

Readers, please do not confuse the help-each-other-with-the-giant-chopsticks technique with with the putting-on-of-oxygen-masks procedure in a tanking airplane, or indeed any other situation which might actually happen.

“The people of Heaven are able to fill their bellies while the people of Hell are eternally hungry,” explained Mark the Vicar, “Because in Heaven, they have learned…”

He paused, composing himself for maximum vicarage.

“…cooperation.”

In the twenty years I’ve lived since this assembly from Mark the Vicar, I don’t think I’ve encountered such an impressive torrent of drivel.

More tea vicar? Yes, and perhaps a nice happy dose of Mister Benzodiazpam too.

North Americans are awfully squeamish about maggots.

Barely a day goes by without some terrible slur against the noble corpse-dwelling pupae.

The North American vernacular is crammed with expressions derisory to the maggot. “The man’s a maggot!” they say. And, “I can’t eat that, there’s a maggot in it”.

I heard today that an otherwise tame horror movie can be honked up to an R-rating if a zombie happens to have a maggoty eye.

Keep the horror movies accessible to teenagers, I say, and whack a parental advisory on the poster, “warning: may contain thousands of maggots”.

You know, like certain supermarkets do with their microwavable pies.

What does this continent have against maggots? I cannot fathom it. They’re just baby flies. Goo-Goo, Ga-Ga, Wriggle-Writhe, Buzz Buzz. Adorable.

Yet you’d be a social pariah in North America if you were to make a special cradle for a maggot, dress it up in swaddling clothes and invite your friends to hold it.

Next you’ll be denying young millipedes of their rusks.

North America, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you a heart-warming story about the little maggot who grew legs. Proverbially.

In a science class at high school (and our school was very high — they built it in a tree), we were asked to race maggots against each other.

The point was to discover the experimental variable capable of building the champion maggot.

Would a maggot, for example, be empowered or crippled by exposure to light? Would it thrive or choke when soaked briefly in water? Would it chomp at the bit when shown titillating photography of celebrity maggots inadvertently exposing themselves while getting out of cars?

I was a step ahead in this guessing game because I’d witnessed fishermen along the local canal who’d used maggots as bait. Some of these stinking but wise oldsters would put the bait briefly under their tongue, thus warming the maggot and making it wriggle more appealingly when skewered on the hook.

Tongue heat! Tongue heat was the winning variable!

As any committed scientist would do, I copied the wacky angler.

Yes, I unflinchingly popped that maggot in my mouth, allowed it to squirm between the gaps in my teeth for a while (it felt to my tongue like a wriggly tic tac) and — upon the crack of the starter’s pistol — gobbed it from pursed lips onto the starting line and watched it gallop along the track to victory.

There were no photo finishes in this maggot race, I can tell you, North America. The other maggots — moistened maggots, lacquered maggots, maggots on the paleo diet, maggots who’d been trained in the Alexander Technique — were all left to eat my maggot’s dust.

What’s wrong with sucking on maggots, North America? If sucking on maggots is wrong, then I don’t want to be British.

Next you’ll be telling me you don’t like earwig caviar.

From the secret archives of Robert Wringham, this is a Glasgow-based diary entry about a frustrating day in 2009. Until today, it remained unpublished on grounds being too rubbish. But thanks to declining standards at this website and in life generally, it’s probably safe to air it now.

Cutting through the university quad, some animal rights protesters take me for a university employee (I’d be the Dean of Lint Studies) and one of them shouts at me through a megaphone:

“THIS UNIVERSITY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ANIMAL CRUELTY!” he bawls across the quad.

“I DON’T EAT MEAT OR DRINK MILK!” I shout back through my cupped hands. “I’VE NEVER DRESSED UP A CAT FOR FUN AND I’VE NEVER BEEN ENTERTAINED BY A CHIMPANZEE SMOKING A PIPE,” I lied. “I’M ON YOUR SIDE!”

“WHAT ABOUT HONEY?!” he comes back.

“I EAT HONEY IN LARGE AND VISCOUS PROPORTIONS! I THINK WE SHOULD STIMULATE DEMAND FOR BEEKEEPING. GIVEN THAT WILD BEES ARE ALL BUT EXTINCT WE NEED APIARY BEES IN ORDER TO POLLINATE THE EARTH! I’M A VERY CONSCIENTIOUS CONSUMER!”

That got him.

“UM. OKAY THEN. CARRY ON.”

This is not the first time today I’ve been shouted at for things that are nothing to do with me. I can only assume that Messenger Shooting has been added to the list of unlikely sports at the forthcoming commonwealth games.

This morning, I am pilloried by a dental receptionist for trying to pay for treatment with a fifty.

It’s not my fault the bank produces unpopular currency. What’s wrong with fifties? They’re great. They have John Houblon on them, his serious face forbidding you to spend the note on anything too frivolous: a responsible gesture on behalf of the bank, especially in these harsh economic times.

I couldn’t imagine why the dental receptionist would have a problem with Houblon.

“I disapprove of his 1695 fiscal reform,” I imagine her saying, “Also, his wig lacks schnooze. See you in six weeks for a scale and polish”.

Later, a pharmacist lambasts me for my dentist’s handwriting on the prescription. He can’t make out whether I should be given a week’s worth of antibiotics or just five day’s worth. I suggest he level it out at six and he shouts at me. The dentist and I should take prescription drugs more seriously.

“Sorry,” I squeak.

On the way home, exhausted from so many arguments, I see a sign strapped to a lamp post which reads: “It’s your dog mess. Clean it up!”

I want to protest but cannot. The lamp post, being an inanimate object and all, would be unable to comprehend my predicament and I’m just a middle man in all of this anyway and didn’t really want to get involved. I doubted that the lamp post would have had any say in what went on the sign either, but was forced to wear it like a gaudy and lambasting medallion.

In that lamp post I had found an equal: someone else caught up in the argument of two sides and ambivalent about the causes of either. Neither of us owned dogs and neither of us had any strong feelings on poo disposal. Of course, he was accustomed to dogs peeing around his feet so he had a more informed stance than I.

This lamp post was the most rational individual I had met all day. We’re meeting for coffee next week.

Fans of “But I need It!” will want to hear about the latest catchphrase to evolve in our house.

It is mainly used in moments that witness human ingenuity.

For example, instead of eating pistachios from the bag like some kind of hooligan, I’ve taken to eating them from a cup-and-saucer. I fill the saucer with the salty nuts and, as I eat them, flippantly discard the shells into the waiting cup.

This little system prevents me from eating too many pistachios and helps to perpetuate my reputation as an eccentric Englishman.

It’s also good if you enjoy slightly salty tea.

Amazed at my improvisational genius at inventing this neat little technique, I smugly announced: “You can’t get an app for that!”

It was met with much amusement. In my house, if nowhere else, I am the king of comedy.

Of course, the joke works even better when you use it for something for which there’s obviously an app. Scheduling, say, or goal motivation.

I like the new catchphrase. It’s a slight rebellion against iPad dominion and, at the same time, recognises the futility of rebelling against it.

I’m not very fond of iPads or other forms of jabscreen. They remind me of Fisher Price Activity Centres.

Another fine blog entry complete. You can’t get an app for that.

I’m three years older than my girlfriend. Occasionally we’ll alight upon a cultural phenomenon that I can remember but she cannot.

Nerf Blasters. Gina G. The Yorkshire Ripper. Things like that.

“Hey,” I said, “I bet you don’t remember detachable ring-pulls.”

“What are those?” she said, blinking naively in the morning light.

“There was a time,” I said, speaking grandly like wise man up a stick, “when the ring-pull of a drinks can was designed to come off in your hand.”

I may be imagining it now, but I fancy she may have gasped in youthful amazement. Like David Quantick on a Channel 4 clip show, I had put my hand on one golden recollection.

“It came off in your hand?” she said, nymphish eyes pinwheeling in fascination.

“Yes,” I said, nodding sagely, “But they banned them because they caused litter.”

I forget my girlfriend’s response but I expect it was something along the lines of a delighted “Wowee!”

“People would throw those ring-pulls everywhere, you see,” I said, “Even people who didn’t usually litter. As I’m sure you’ve observed, there’s an intoxicating sense of abandon when you open a can of 7Up.”

Ah, we were having fun scooping around in my adventurer’s memory like a couple of plongeurs groping around in a soupy basin of end-of-shift dishwater for an unaccounted-for teaspoon. Or whisk.

“You’d just tear that strip of metal right off the can,” I said with aplomb, “take a scrumptious swig of aspartame, and throw the damned ring-pull over your shoulder and into the face of Satan.”

“Those were the days,” I said, shaking my head nostalgically, tears beginning to well.

“Even as a four-year-old,” I whispered in a conspiratorial aside, “I preferred the detachable ring-pulls to the new ones. The new ones were far less satisfying. They didn’t allow you to pretend your can was a fizzy hand grenade. And when you take a drink from the can with a modern ring-pull, the damn thing can go straight up your conk. If you aren’t careful, a swig of Pepsi will claim an ever-so-fine layer of skin from inside your nostril”.

“That’s dangerous!” she definitely said.

“Right!” I said, laughing at the foolish design which has today become prevalent.

We both laughed at the drinks-can designers for about twenty minutes. Our breakfasts were going cold but that was okay.

“I wasn’t alone in feeling this way,” I said. “For years, people would tear off their so-called fixed ring-pulls, rip them from the lids of their drinks cans like a corybantic dentist excising a blackened incisor.”

Agog she was at my enthusiasm. And at my casual use of the word ‘corybantic’.

“Over the years, people lost their passion. Ring-pulls remained attached to cans and the numbers of discarded ring-pulls you’d see glistening in the gutters of the nation slowly declined. Many a pigeon remains unchoked.”

My girlfriend mulled over the story.

“When I was little,” she said, “My school would have recycling drives. We’d have to save the lids from drinks cans, which would be recycled into wheelchairs.”

“You see,” resting a case I didn’t have, “Everyone has a ring-pull story”.