Author: Robert Wringham

A glitzy showbiz tale from Leonard Nimoy’s incredible memoir, I am not Spock:

Within a month of Star Trek going on the air I had telephone problems. There was one phone on the sound stage and between cast and crew there were about 50 people receiving and making calls. I was getting calls for press interviews and personal appearances from all over the country. It wasn’t always possible for me to come to the phone because most of the time we were rehearsing and shooting. The message slips would pile up and when I got a break I would go to the phone and try to return some of the calls only to find people waiting in line. The next closest phone was a pay booth on the studio street outside the sound stage. This meant precious minutes wasted going to and from the pay phone and very often it too was occupied with people talking.

I spoke to the production manager about my problem and requested that the studio put a telephone into my trailer dressing room which was on the sound stage. He told me that he would pass on my request and I heard nothing about it for the next week. I raised the question again and was told that Herb Solow, head of TV production for the studio, was aware of my request and wanted to discuss it with me.

I assumed that this meant there was a financial question involved. There was no telephone deal in my contract. Therefore I would be required to pay for it myself. I decided not to bother Solow. He was a very busy man and this was a minor matter. I told the production manager that involving Solow would be unnecessary, I would pay for the phone myself.

Another week went by and I heard nothing. The situation was getting critical. Much of my phone business was to eastern cities. By the time I got finished with the day’s shooting it was far too late to get in touch with people on the East Coast.

I raised the subject again and once more was told that I would have to discuss it with Solow. He finally came to my dressing room to state his position. There were several actors on the lot who wanted phones. I could not be allowed to have one since it would set a precedent. Other actors would want to follow suit. “Herb,” I said, “there seems to be a breakdown in communications. I have already agreed to pay for the phone myself.” “I know that,” he answered, “but I can’t let you have the phone.” I asked him to explain. He said, “If the other actors find out you have it, they’ll want one. I’ll tell them you’re paying for it but they won’t believe me. There’ll be a lot of hard feelings.”

Eventually I was able to persuade Herb that the studio was losing money if I had to go to the pay phone while the studio waited for me. I got the phone and I paid for it myself.

“It’s not what it looks like!”

I’m on my fourth hit when my girlfriend catches me in the act. Agog, she wears a towel: hardly equipped to confront the sesame-sprinkled travesty hunched at the breakfast table.

“Four bagels?” she asks, “You ate four bagels? I was only in the shower for ten minutes.”

I also wear a towel, albeit a less well-fitting one. A few sesame seeds have skittled into my pubic hair. One has also found its way into my belly button and I momentarily wonder if, under the right conditions, I could nurture a Sesamum there.

It’s a real paparazzi shot, a difficult position from which to defend myself. All I can manage is the hopeless, “It’s not what it looks like!”

But it’s precisely what it looks like. A bagel relapse. I had scoffed them down untoasted, without a butter or spread in sight, accompanied only by coffee to facilitate efficient peristalsis.

It is time to admit publicly to my bagel dependency. To do so is Step 72 of the official bagel deviant’s reparation process.

They say that once you’re a bagel deviant, you’re always a bagel deviant. Even if you haven’t eaten a bagel in twenty years, you are still a bagel deviant. One sniff of the delicious egg-glazed snack and you fall right off the bagel wagon.

It’s been several weeks since the intervention. All of my friends gathered in a room and confronted me with the grim truth. They said there’s only so much starch a man can take and I had reached my limit. I’d either have to stop eating bagels or seek professional help from a psychiatrist or a baker.

“There’s nothing kinky about it,” I told them.

“Nobody said kinky,” they said, perhaps rightly suspicious.

I wish it was kinky. There are too few pleasures in life and if it were possible for a man to become aroused at the simple sight of the hoop-shaped Jewish bread product, one could get an entertaining game of bagel hoopla going.

To local bakeries, my friends delivered posters displaying my photograph and the words “Do not serve this man. He is a bagel deviant.” My supply is now cut off at the source.

My friends disposed of the several hundred bagels they found in my house and those secreted about my person: a Sesame in each jacket pocket, a marmalade-filled Cinnamon beneath my hat and a cheeky Poppyseed inside a swallowed prophylactic.

They even combed the town for anything resembling a bagel lest its ringed shape bring to my mind the salty taste of the forbidden Jewbread.

The spare tire was removed from my father’s garage (“From my cold dead hands!” he cried as they rolled it down the hill), my friend Dan‘s prize-winning collection of rubber valves and sphincters was confiscated and all lifebuoys were removed from the local quayside, resulting in several preventable drownings.

I daren’t get near a doughnut and I mustn’t so much as glance at a quoit.

Nontheless, ring-shaped objects would be my eventual undoing. If it weren’t for today’s unfortunate encounter with a box of multigrain Cheerios, I’d still be on the wagon.

“It’s not what it looks like!” I say to my girlfriend this morning but she knows only too well what’s happened. I’ve found and eaten her secret stash.

Together we go to the bakery. She will distract the guards with a dance while I use a broom handle to skewer us some sweet dough-oes.

“I’ve just got back from Transylvania!”

This was a lie. I had bought a new suitcase and now I was pulling it home. When a friend stops me to ask, “what’s with the luggage?”, I am unable able to resist concocting a flight of fancy.

“Yeah, Transylvania! It’s a beautiful town but you should see the bat problem they have there. Flapping about and getting in your hair. It’s a Chiroptophobe’s nightmare.”

The addition of the proper word for the fear of bats drives the lie home like a stake through a vampire’s heart.

“Wow,” says my friend, “I had no idea.”

She really didn’t.

Next up, I meet local celebrity Jon Ransom. He’s wearing a big floppy cap made of yellow vinyl. In this cap, Jon reminds me of an old Vic Reeves character called Tom Fun. I let this pass.

He says “Where have you been? You owe me a call!”

In truth, I do not owe Jon a call: Jon owes me one. Jon took a lot of ecstasy in the early nineties and it has monkeyed around with his memory and attention span so I overlook this. Instead I gesture at the suitcase and say, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’ve been out of town. I had a gig in Geneva!”

“A gig in Geneva? I didn’t know you could speak Swiss.”

He was on unusual good form today. I wouldn’t be able to divert his attention by pointing at an invisible bee like I normally would.

“I don’t,” I say truthfully, “I’ve devised a mime. Works in any language. I’ll show you some time.”

He seems happy with this and continues on his way. As do I.

Finally, I see Dennis, the guy who rents the office unit next to mine. He is standing by his parked car on the other side of the road, gesturing for me to go over and speak to him. Just for fun, I want to see if I can make him come to me instead so I gesture at the empty suitcase and pull a helpless “what can you do?” face. He acquiesces and crosses the road to talk to me instead.

“Are you coming or going?” He asks, referring to the suitcase.

“Coming!” I say brightly, refreshed from the holiday I didn’t take in the Bahamas, “I just got back from the Bahamas! They have giant coconut crabs there. They live in palm trees and eat people’s garbage. They’re basically a public service.”

“The Bahamas? I thought coconut crabs were in Hawaii?”

“Oh, maybe they have them there too but they have them in the Bahamas for sure. Biiiiiiig muddafudders.” I extend my arms as if to say “this big!”. Dennis looks sceptical but shakes it off and tells me about a party he’s having next week if I’d like to go.

“I guess I could go,” I say, “But I don’t want to. I can’t be bothered with parties any more. I could make an excuse but I don’t want to lie to you, Dennis.”

My nerve is huge.

When I get home I realise that the suitcase has a bright red sash about it, displaying the word “Sale”. Several cardboard price tags rattle from the handle.

My next holiday will be in Hell and I’ll deserve it.

“Democracy just doesn’t work,” says my dental hygienist in the brief gap between scale and polish.

Today is the European Parliamentary Election. I had used this for chit-chat as I sank into the chair but now I was beginning to regret it. My hygienist is thoroughly disillusioned with our entire political system.

As if that isn’t enough to contend with, her pregnancy keeps rubbing against the side of my head.

“It’s always about power,” she says, “The political class will always exploit the common man. By the way, there’s some serious gum inflammation here.”

Well, now I’m depressed. I live in a corrupt political system and I have serious gum inflammation. As I gaze at the ceiling tiles, I mentally add “overthrow the government” and “floss” to the bottom of my to-do list.

I wonder absently if Winston Smith had good teeth. Did the Ministry of Truth offer a dental plan? It seems like the sort of thing a Totalitarian state would be good at.

“There’s too many people at the top, making lots of money and not caring about people like you and me.”

I don’t like that she lumped “you and me” in the same basket but it’s hard to protest when the water is pooling in the back of your throat. I offer a gargle of protest but it doesn’t really have the impact I intend.

“I’ve always felt this way but since all that stuff about duck islands, I’ve been determined to spoil my ballot in protest. Do you know what else that guy claimed for?”

A swan peninsula?

“A twenty-grand shrubbery. You have some plaque on the lower arch but it’s not too excessive.”

My right ear is now completely folded back against her pregnant belly. It is soft and turgid like a space-hopper.

“And Europe! It’s like an afterlife for British career politicians. Okay, rinse and spit for me”.

I rinse and spit. Minty. I ask: “If you hate Europe so much, why don’t you vote UKIP or something?”

She says, “No, that would really leave a bad taste in my mouth.” As a hygienist she would be the authority on that, I suppose.

“I will not be voting. I will go and spoil my ballot.”

I’m not entirely surprised. This is the only dental office in the land with Morning Star in the waiting room.

“So now that you’ve turned your back on democracy,” I say to the hygienist, “what system do you propose we replace it with?”

“Philosopher King,” she says without even pretending to think about it.

“And what would be your first motion in the office of Philosopher King?”

Removing my goggles and bib she laughs, “Oh, I wouldn’t be a Philosopher King! No, I’d be a right tyrant! Book another appointment on your way out. See you in three months.”

At a party, I select from a plate of desserts a slice of fruit cake.

I offer some to a friend. “Oh, no thanks. I can’t stand dried fruit.”

“Makes you contemplate your own mortality?” I offer, “All parched and wrinkled, like one day we’ll all be?”

“No,” she says, “I just don’t like the texture. Chewy”.

On this, another friend comes over to us and says: “Are you on about your mortality again?”

Aghast, I ask when she’s ever heard me talking about my mortality. She tells me I was “on about it” only last Tuesday in the cinema queue. Apparently I had likened the queuing system to life; that we wait and wait in the hope of a reward at the end of the waiting, only to be fobbed off with food we can’t taste and a fart-smelling chair.

I’d swear she was making that up but she did it in my voice and everything.

It is Monday morning. I stop at the usual place to buy a fried egg sandwich and find that the two women who run the kiosk are talking about organ donation.

“Morning, Rod,” the first woman begins, “What’s going to happen to all of your organs after you die?”

They think I am called Rod but I do not mind. They must speak to a hundred people every morning, so that they manage to attribute any one name to my face is pretty impressive. For five minutes of a morning, I am happy to be Rod for them.

What’s going to happen to my organs after I die? It’s a fair question and perfectly reasonable banter for 8:30 on a Monday morning over the spitting fats of the griddle. My priority, however, is breakfast. Breakfast before discussion of post-mortem requirements. It’s a personal policy.

“A fried egg sandwich please,” I say, all business. But then: “I’m an atheist so I don’t mind what happens to my body after I die. Do you want it?”

“See,” she says philosophically, “I couldn’t give up my organs to just anyone. I mean, maybe if it was my daughter or something and she really needed them, but I can’t have a stranger walking around with my liver inside them. Soft yolk?

She’s talking about the fried egg sandwich now.

“Please”.

“I mean, it might go to someone I don’t even like. I don’t want my ex-husband to get his hands on my bone marrow. He got the car and the weekend access to the kids and dog, he’s sure tae fuck not getting my bone marrow as well. Are you having salt and pepper?”

“Just pepper, thanks”.

The second woman makes a contribution: “I don’t mind giving my body away after I’m gone. But not above the shoulders. They can have anything they need except for my eyes and brain.”

A grim image of the second woman’s head preserved in brine swims up in my imagination. Suddenly its eyes open, revealing milky whites: “You want sauce with that, Rod?”

“No thanks.”

“I don’t think they can take the brain anyway,” says the first woman, “They don’t have the science for that yet.”

“No,” says the second woman, “not for a full transplant but they might be able to use it for tests.”

The first woman says she had never thought of that possibility and would I prefer a soft or crusty roll? I tell her I would like a crusty roll.

I ask the second woman why she’s so attached to her eyes if she’s happy to let everything else go. Apparently she just finds it icky. At 8:30 in the morning, I can’t argue with that.

Somehow my egg flies off the griddle and onto the kiosk floor with all the dust and hairs. After some laughter, the first woman gets to frying a second egg.

“Just like what happened to Walt Whitman’s brain,” I say, trying to appeal to their grim curiosity. “He was an American poet. Scientists wanted to get a good look at his brain after he died to see what made him tick. But a lab assistant bungled the job and the brain splattered all over the floor.”

They enjoy this story tremendously, the breakfast-cooking ghouls.

Bob Marley’s “Iron, Lion, Zion” starts up on the portable radio. The first of the kiosk women objects to it, “Och, no wonder his band are called the wailers.”

“I wonder what happened to his organs after he died?” asks the second kiosk woman.

“Oh, is he dead?” asked the first.

“Aye, drugs, I think,” said the second, “Hunnerds of drugs. I don’t know if his organs would have been worth much after all the drugs.”

As I begin to leave, the second woman is asking the first if she would ever accept a monkey’s liver as a donor organ if she needed a new one.

Another office worker approaches the kiosk. They greet him with, “Morning, Rod”.

Minimalism is Anorexia projected outwards.

That’s an entry for The Quotable Wringham, I reckon. Here’s another, which I plagiarised from a tee shirt my girlfriend saw in a mall:

I love Asceticism. I can’t get enough of it.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: Stop, our sides are splitting.

But seriously. What if my silly quip – Anorexia projected outwards – is true? What if my ongoing career in simplification is a form of mental illness?

If sanity is statistical, then I am a raving loon. Most other human beings tend to snowball through life, accumulating more and more and more. I do not. The only thing about me that expands, is my definition of “enough”, and so I constantly offload things from those days when I occasionally acquired.

When I tell people that I didn’t watch The Apprentice because I have no television; or that they cannot “text me” because I have no mobile phone, they either think I’m insane or lying. The BBC constantly warns me that “officers may call” unless I pay my television licence. They find it very difficult to accept that someone today wouldn’t own a television.

Perhaps eventually, I will live in a Japanese capsule hotel, owning just a handheld computer and an all-in-one bodysock, each day burning but a single calorie.

You might see such a vision as some kind of satire but for me it is a perfectly feasible future.

Where does it end? Cut to a future in which I’m soliciting for illegal medical operations: “I’ll keep one arm for now, to see how it goes.”

Sane minimalism stops at Body Bonsai.

But it might be an ever-advancing rationale. Perhaps when I am armless (“But I can give you a nasty suck”) and legless (“How dare you? I’m as sober as a judge!”) and shaved bald; and my spleen and appendix have been removed on account of their superfluity I will still insist that I am sane. Perhaps I will say, “Only when I’m a brain in a jar, will I accept the diagnosis of my mania”.

And then when I am a brain in a jar (“Is this spinal cord strictly necessary?”) I will still refute the possibility that I’m mad, drawing the line only at the point of voluntarily downloading my consciousness into a computer.

And then when I am but a digital soul on a server somewhere, tutting at the surplus data in the world recycling bin, I will accept that maybe I have gone too far and would there be any chance of downloading my girlfriend for some cyberloving?

Will it ever be possible to reduce oneself to an odour?

An evaluation: Minimalism is not Anorexia projected outwards. To have modest surroundings will only nourish, never starve: a maxim that won’t make it into The Quotable Wringham on account of it being true and not a stupid verbal handstand.

“Home baking!” she chimed.

The cakes were a bit sweaty-looking and the dye from the hundreds-and-thousands had begun to diffuse into the icing. I decided to have one out of politeness.

“Mm, lovely,” I said, selecting a small one.

Listen:

In my time, I have put some pretty questionable things into my mouth. I speak with authority when I say that this unassuming fairy cake was pretty bad.

The putrid morsel still in my mouth, my inner writer questioned whether “the worst thing I’ve ever eaten” would be hyperbole, but couldn’t think of anything comparably bad. At least not in this lifetime.

Flashback to a disturbingly alive smoked mackerel. Not as bad as the cake. Flashback to octopus sushi, to jellied eel, to various schoolboy dares. None were as bad as this cake. This was noteworthy.

It wasn’t just a bad attempt at a cake, but a thoroughly obnoxious perversion of food. This wasn’t food. It was some sort of military experiment.

The first thing I noticed was the texture. It may have mystified a less orally-fixated man but I knew precisely how this texture compared: it was exactly like Silly Putty.

It didn’t have the resistance of blue tack and at the same time, it was a lot less edible than bubble gum. Silly Putty was this cake’s textural twin.

The taste came in right after texture, in something of a photo finish. The almighty taste of it. A dirty slap of citrus akin to drinking the sweat from the wellington boot of a lemon who was down on his luck.

The experience of eating this cake transcended the culinary and into the existential. H. P. Lovecraft would write a book about this cake.

“They’re weight watchers!” she said, not so much as an explanation, but with pride.

The ingredients were carrot and orange. I had no need to worry, apparently, as each foot-tasting mouthful had a Weight-Watchers sin-value of less than a point each. I’m a living skeleton: I do not need to worry about “points” other, perhaps, than how to increase them.

How the hell was I going to get out of this one? It was too putrid a thing to finish but I was too polite not to eat at least half of it. I had only just managed a quarter and I was already gagging.

The tea would be my saviour. After fortifying my consciousness, I would put the next quarter in my mouth (any more in one go would be suicide) and saturate it with tea.

No good. It was still disgusting. The next piece, I tried to swallow whole, to trick my tongue into not sensing it. Who knew taste buds went back so far?

The final quarter was not going in my mouth. I mashed it up up with my fingers and folded the paper case around it, hoping that it wouldn’t be spotted as leftovers. When I left the meeting room an hour later, the mashed-up quarter cake remained behind, next to a centilitre of tepid tea.

I didn’t look back.

My dad has a maxim for every occasion. The same man who said “Education is no carriage” in a pub called The Kangaroo in 1990 also said, “Nobody likes a smart arse” over breakfast in our kitchen in 1991.

I pointed out over half a Florida grapefruit, that Aristotle said it was unbecoming for young men to utter maxims, which is why my dad could get away with it.

“Again,” said my dad, “Nobody likes a smart arse”.

It was shortly after this breakfast that I decided to cultivate the smartest arse of all.

Here follows in reverse chronological order the four most clever things I can remember saying or doing.

In a physics class in 1998, our teacher asks me to identify the strongest force in the universe. I tell him, “Peer Pressure”.

In a sex education class in 1996, my teacher asks how one could catch an STD. I tell her, “In a clap trap”.

When the National Lottery began in Britain in 1994, my parents were excited to buy tickets. I told them it was all well and good but they could only defy the odds so many times.

In a department store cafe in 1992, I proposed that if the non-smokers were so upset by smokers, they should all move to the tables in the smoking section. That way, there wouldn’t be anywhere for smokers to sit.

Perhaps not the wittiest things ever said, but my legacy none the less. If you’re not impressed, speak to my assistant and she’ll ensure you get a full refund.

I am never sure which is the worst part of a haircut: the verb or the noun.

The verb, the actual process of the haircut, is always terrible. “What would you like done?” is always, not unfairly, their first question. Immediately, your hair naivety clashes with the knowledge of the hair expert. I once heard my dad laugh this off and say, “Reduce the volume”. Try that in certain quarters and end up bald.

The noun, the stylised thing that adorns your head, will attract remarks and opinions for at least the next fortnight. Cries of “Happy New Haircut” will be hurled at you from the mouths friends, from passing cars and from the insides of wheelie bins.

You could eliminate the agony of “Happy New Haircut” by having a covert trim every week so that nobody notices. But that would increase your exposure to “What would you like done?” more than is strictly healthy. It truly is a matter of noun versus verb.

Since my verb last Friday, I have had the shortest noun of my adult life. It’s a tufty little Mohawk like what someone’s receptionist or a trendy stockbroker might have. At first I thought that it made me look a bit gay but, after a few hours of mirror torment, I realised it’s my clothes, face, voice and latent homosexuality that make me look a bit gay and not the haircut at all. It’s a perfectly good haircut.

I choose my hairdressers very carefully. Since last July, I have used a Turkish barber. His English isn’t very good, which is precisely why I use him. The worst thing about getting a haircut is that you have to make smalltalk for the duration. I don’t know anything about sport or current television or celebrities and have difficulty faking it while someone is cutting small parts off my body. I have nothing to say so I choose a barber who also has nothing to say. It’s ace.

On Friday, looking forward to forty minutes of silently staring at my own face and occasionally saying “shorter”, I was surprised to see that Mr. Barber has employed a young blonde lady assistant. Lucky Mr. Barber. My heart sank as she patted my shoulders and asked in perfect Glaswegian what I would like done.

“Reduce the volume?” I suggested pathetically.

I think this quote should be added to the pull chord doll they will eventually make of my dad. It’s not as oft said as “use your bloody indicators” and “it’s not racist, it’s an observation” but it is similarly ineffective.

The new non-Turkish ladybarber suggested I get rid of my Adolph Hitler side parting and that she “cut it forward” instead so I would like a bit like that David Tennant.

Two years ago, I had long and unkempt hair like some kind of hoodlum. When I first had it all cut off, a colleague said on the cusp of sadness, “You just don’t look like Rob any more”.

Well, now I really don’t. But my girlfriend prefers short hair to long. When you start doing that thing she does, we can talk haircuts.

The gradual reduction of hair from that to this, however, has generated many comments along the lines of “you’ll be bald next time, hahaha, hur-hur-hur”.

But I won’t. Because I’m never getting a haircut again. I can’t face it any more. Either that or I’ll become one of those people who cuts their own hair and ends up looking like Keith Flint. Not that there’s anything wrong with looking like Keith Flint.

Once, when my girlfriend was little, she went along to work with her dad. While he went about his business, he gave her some highlighter pens to draw with.

Highlighter pens are not the best kind of pens for drawing. But this was an office after all and she was only little.

Hearing this story reminded me of the time I went to work with my dad. My gifts included a free spin on a fax machine and a small plastic G-clamp.

When I was very small, my dad drove a truck. There are photographs of me and my mum and my dad standing proudly in front of the house with my dad’s truck. It was shiny and blue.

Dad was an excellent truck-driver. He had an HGV lisence and liked truckstop breakfasts. It was hard work and long hours and he didn’t like to have the sunrise shining in his eyes in the morning and the sunset shining in his eyes in the evening. He now works as a highschool teacher where sunrise and sunset do not trouble him.

I once went out in my dad’s truck on a night time mission. We were kept company along the motorway by cat’s eyes. My dad explained that cat’s eyes are tiny glass balls that reflect the beams of car headlights and that they were invented by a man who had seen torchlight reflecting in the eyes of a cat.

We did not have to worry about damaging the cat’s eyes with our wheels because the glass balls are set in rubber.

I remember this very well because I was impressed at the cleverness of cat’s eyes. They light your way along the roads but they don’t use any extra electricity. Once they are set into the road, they will reflect light forever. You never have to worry about changing the batteries.

When we got to our location, a factory, my dad talked to an overalls-wearing man in an office and the man fed some details of their transaction into a fax machine.

“That’s gone all the way to France, that has,” the man explained to me.

Come again?

“To France,” said my dad, “that piece of paper is now in France”.

While I was smart enough to understand that the piece of paper had not been physically transported to France, I couldn’t work out how the machine had done what it had done. I was very impressed. What an age we lived in.

The man asked if I wanted to send anything to France so I drew a picture on some special fax machine paper of a frog with the phrase, “no more smelly socks” and the man sent it to France for me.

I realise now that sending specifically that image and that phrase specifically to France could have been misinterpreted. I hope it didn’t cause an international incident.

In the meantime, my dad had loaded his truck with whatever cargo he had come to collect and it was time to leave. My fax-sending friend gave me a small plastic G-Clamp from his overalls as a parting gift.

My girlfriend went on to become an illustrator and I went on to become an email jockey, frequently sending things to France. If ever you take your kids to work with you, remember to give them something to play with. It could be formative.

I don’t know where the small plastic G-Clamp is today but I imagine it is still in my dad’s shed with the other G-Clamps.

“You’re obsessed with bums, you are,” my grandmother once told me. I was five years old and she said it with a hint of outrage and a soupçon of portent.

To solicit this reaction, I had proudly revealed to her the naked arse of a Micky Mouse doll. She was correct, of course. I was obsessed with bums and would continue to be obsessed with bums in various ways for the rest of my life.

Not just bums, of course. I was also obsessed with willies and fannies and boobs. As a child, any extremity or orifice usually covered by an undergarment was my mental and conversational bread and butter. It is a pity I had not grown up in an Islamic culture where everything was left to the imagination. It is fun to think of a knee or an earlobe having the same comedy substance or horn value as a tit.

In spite of being perfectly clueless about the actual mechanics and vocabulary of sex until an educational encounter at Dudley Zoo on my thirteenth birthday, I knew there was something brilliant, exciting and frequently amusing about those saucy parts of the human body. I’m pretty certain that my fondest ambition at the age of five or six was to see a “lady’s part”: a distinctly different thing, I was aware, to my little sister’s one, which was completely gratuitous seen as it was every single week during her elaborate escapes from Sunday bathtimes.

The obsession with sex was realised from a very early age in the form of imaginative doodles in every spare margin of my childhood and teenage diaries. Ask me about this some time: I have a crayloa sketch from 1986 that would make your eyes water.

Long before I had even heard of pornography, let alone seen any, I had in my mind a collection of what I called “rude photos”. It had become a reflex reaction to press record on the old brainbox whenever I saw something vaguely sexy in reality or on television. I had, to all intents and purposes, a photographic memory. Oddly enough, the photographic memory could never be cajoled into helping me out in exams.

Even though I couldn’t understand them, I delighted in rude jokes. I remember reading the ‘fun fact’ off a penguin biscuit wrapper to my dad: “What is the British nation’s favourite sport?”, I quizzed him. My dad must have taken leave of his senses or forgotten to whom he was talking because he responded with, “Bonking”.

I didn’t know quite what “bonking” was but I knew from Russ Abbot’s Mad House that it was a rude word and it shouldn’t really be coming out my dad’s mouth: the mouth that usually spouted sobering parables about the importance of conserving sandpaper.

(He was dead into sandpaper, my dad. He had a great big bucket of the stuff in his shed, every sheet as smooth a pickup line).

My parents were not terribly good at talking about sex. I distinctly remember asking them word-perfect “where babies come from”. My dad suddenly discovered how to pass into the fifth dimension and my mum, not one to forsake parental duties but bashful nonetheless, actually used the phrase “special cuddles”.

This became quite a popular euphemism. I once asked why Popeye was acting in such an eccentric way around Olive Oyl only to receive a jaded “special cuddle” explanation over basting a half chicken.

Learning the mechanics of things was of course myth-shattering. I remember acquiring a book in the How my body works series about reproduction. My parents were happy that I would finally learn the facts of matters. I remember showing it to my better-educated friend, Tom, one day in my bedroom who found the cartoony approach the book took too childish until we got to a pretty biological illustration of a male gamete. “That is Rude,” my friend exclaimed, pointing at the page, “That is a Sperm!”

And he was right. It was rude. It was a sperm.

I went to bed that night confused about sex for the first time ever. The feelings of excitement I used to get when thinking about people undressing had been pretty straightforward. But now I had taken a nibble from the apple of knowledge, I had somehow to connect those feelings with this grim, biological portrait of spermatozoa and ova and an illustration of the female reproductive system that no longer resembled the cute and mysterious anemone I held in my imagination but now a pastel-coloured cross-section of something that looked like an ant’s head, ovary receptors bouncing from the end of fallopian tube antennae.

And so the death of innocence came in the form of a manual presented by Charlie and Samantha bloodclot.

I still like bums though. Haha. I said bums.

Talking to my mother on the phone last night, the conversation unavoidably arrived at the weather. The weather in Glasgow? Cold and snowy. The weather in Dudley? Cold and snowy with the smell of turpentine on the breeze.

My dad, suddenly revealing himself to be on the other line in his signature telephone ‘creep upon’, bellows his concern about whether my apartment is warm enough for the winter.

The truth is, it isn’t. I feel somewhat conned by the promises of this ugly modern building, which I chose over a handsome West End tenement with a thought to the cold and snowy (but mercifully unturpentiney) Scottish winters.

So I told my dad matter-of-factly that when the heaters are not on, the place can be a little chilly. His advice? Keep the heaters on.

I shall take his advice. A knowledge of heating and heaters is one of my dad’s superpowers. He can sense a draft at twenty paces.

Suddenly worried, my mum asked, “what happened to the heater we got for you?”

For a moment I didn’t know what she was talking about but after trawling through the milky grot of memory I remembered that my parents had bought me a pair of three-bar halogen heaters about four years ago.

Remembering these heaters made me oddly angry and defensive. It had reminded me of the shit-ass poverty I stoically tolerated during my year as a student and my further year of semi-employment. I usually look upon that period as a two-year Halcyon Day of idle reading and late breakfasts but my flatmate and I lived in pretty appalling conditions.

A converted Victorian loft, the wind would howl through the porous walls and up through the floorboards. To see the vapour of our breath was not unusual. We lived out a whole summer with a wasp nest in the eves: too strapped for cash to call an exterminator and too many storeys high for the council. The plumbing was a major problem: bolts of air would blast water from the kitchen tap hard enough to break glass tumblers. There were bugs, there were icecold showers, there were low ceilings and high taxes.

And there was a bloody ghost. Who you gonna call? Nobody. We didn’t have the wedge.

We survived on love, Stoicism and the knowledge that we were sharing the Bohemian dream. Also a lot of canned goods.

A tear came to my eye as I thought of those halogen heaters. Without their orange glow I doubt we could even have outstayed our rental agreement. They left my life along with the haunted loft conversion. I think my former flatmate still has one in storage and I gave the other to a neighbour. One of them, I remember clearly, had a dead wasp cooking gradually in the bottom of the grill.

But I was also annoyed that my mum thought I still needed them. Halogen heaters are usually used by outdoor market traders, retirement homes and corner shops. In the last four years I’ve worked hard, come a long way and have become pretty successful in the various things that I do. I have money. I’m doing really well. I sure as hell don’t need a halogen heater. Bah.

And so we see how a person’s success can be measured in a chronology of his heating appliances. My next place, I hope, will have underfloor heating and a condensing boiler. And the house itself will be a solid gold kok – just to make sure my parents know how great I am.

Sometimes I like to draw. Not a lot of people know that. It is a secret talent.

Recently, however, my illustrations have received some unusual attention. Firstly from the facilities manager from my office and secondly from some illustration professors at a trade school in Ontario.

My stupid drawings started off as a way of combating dayjob fatigue. (Not my fatigue. I am perfectly satisfied by the predictable sterility of open-plan life. I do these to entertain jaded colleagues).

I would quickly sketch a little cartoon and pass it over the divide to one of my pod pals. I love the way they always accept them graciously and pin them up next to the photos of their children.

I think they think I am proud of this rubbish. Soon all of my colleagues will have my “work” displayed in their line of vision. This I am proud of. There’s an unlimited supply of these too: I have a mind like a roulette wheel and coming up with something pretty random is easy and impulsive. These drawings (as you may be able to tell!) are the work of moments. I think that’s what I like most about them: they are almost like automatic writing.

Later, when staying in a Toronto hotel with my illustrator girlfriend, we had a draw-off. Who could draw the most things and how fast?

It was me, obviously. My girlfriend is an actual illustrator and will put time into making a beautiful piece of art. I, on the other hand, am a stupid boob with a machine-gun tendency to externalise my most immediate ideas with no sense of shame and no patience for refinement.

Also, I cheated. I recreated some of the office-worker favourites. Among their number were such classics as “John and Margaret Lungs” and “Billy Seamine Head”.

Billy is probably my personal favourite. He just wants a friend! But thanks to the honking great sea mine he has for a head, no one in their right mind will go near him. He lives in a tragic world of people leaping out of his path in horror.

I often draw Billy Seaminehead in the margins of notepads and sudoku pages too. He usually has something hanging dangerously (often a bra or an English flag) from one of his detonator rods. His catchphrase is always the same: “Friend?”

Poor Billy. He has an acid battery for a brain.

It was Billy Seammine Head that the facilities manager of my office recently spotted, thankfully while I was out of the office. Apparently she was amused. I bet I will still receive a memo ordering me to take them down though. I am already getting away with a pair of false teeth on my desk, an inflatable Father Christmas and a piss-takingly large plant called Philip Nostrum.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, my girlfriend has my drawings tacked to the walls of her illustration cubicle (I do not know the correct term for these work stations. Inky Boxes?). She is studying a one-year comic book illustration course at a trade school and two of her professors are fans. Well, one of them is a fan. The other thinks my stupid rubbish is her work and sympathetically gives her advice on how she can improve her game. Haha!

Apparently John and Margaret Lungs have attracted the most attention. I admit they are bizarre. One of the profs apparently asked which was John and which was Margaret. I have decided that Margaret is the smiling one: John thinks he has won their latest argument but Margaret is not letting on that she has done a wee in John’s alveoli.

Other favourites include a very good drawing of a pencil with the caption, “I drew this with this pencil”; and a friendly snail with the caption, “Ian Henderson. 442, Chartwell Close”.

I am exactly like Tony Hart. (I think this entry is a fitting tribute).

Another brilliant OMG! in the bag (covered nicely by cohort and fellow reader, Neil Scott).

Probably because of the apocalyptic Glasgow weather, there was a lower audience turnout than usual: a stark comparison to November’s standing-room-only gig. At first, Fergus (the organiser/compare) and I were worried that we wouldn’t be able to whip up the usual energy in the room but we shouldn’t have worried. The audience here is appreciative of the format, familiar with the regular performers and, with no alcohol to mess up the proceedings (the venue is a coffee shop) the atmosphere is always warm and supportive.

For my opening set I related my childhood obsession with A very first poetry book: an anthology containing the charming likes of Roald Dahl and Spike Milligan and the always-popular Anon.

It amazes me even today at how diverse Anon’s works can be.

One of my favourite of Anon’s poems from this particular book was about Humpty Dumpty embarking on a disastrous mission to Lunar Mare. It went (from memory) like this:

Humpty Dumpty went to the moon
on a supersonic spoon
he took some porridge and a tent
but when he landed the spoon got bent
Humpty said he didn’t care
and for all I know he’s still up there.

I think the poem captured my imagination because (a) it was brave enough to fill in some blanks about the egg’s interesting career prior to his suicide and (b) presents the absurdly impossible image of something as fragile as an egg doing something as dangerous as space travel.

In a way it also explains why the entire military (“all the king’s horses and all the king’s men”) were dispatched upon hearing the news of Dumpty’s fatal accident. As an astronaut egg, he probably qualifies as the world’s only celebrity ovum. Only he had been triumphant in the great egg spacerace.

As a nine-year-old child I clearly enjoyed the idea of an egg-based space-travel epic poem because in one of my early diaries I had set out to put Humpty Dumpty into the high poetic echelons of Beowulf by writing said epic.

My first attempt at a sequel to Anon’s poem went thusly:

Humpty Dumpty went to Mars
All he ate were chocolate bars
He took a telescope to look at stars
Humpty Dumpty went to Mars.

You might dismiss my poem as childish rubbish because the last line is the same as the first. But I’ve just finished editing an article about Edward Lear and it turns out that Lear would often end his poems with the same line as he began with. I am the same as Edward Lear.

There are some other nice touches too. I like that Humpty’s only provision were chocolate bars. This stanza is a clear nod to the “porridge and a tent” of the original poem. It was funny that Humpty was so ill-prepared to visit the moon and it is hilarious that he was equally unprepared for his second interplanetary voyage. You would imagine that the time he spent marooned alone on that godless rock with only porridge to eat would have taught him a valuable lesson about preparation. But no. Humpty would never learn.

My poem doesn’t explain how Humpty got back from the moon in order to reach Mars. How could he return to Earth? We know from the original poem that his spacecraft was rendered inoperable on landing on the lunar surface. I guess some facts about the incredible career of this space travelling egg will have to remain a secret.

Things are made even more exciting with a third installment of the epic:

Humpty Dumpty went to venus

(I left a pause here when reading it live. The OMG! audience have learned that my readings almost always dissolve into a shameful monologue about cocks. I had lured them into a false sense of security by reading from such an early diary. Now they delighted at the possibility that even my nine-year-old self was obsessed with penises).

On a great big giant penis!!!

Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark.

Alas there is no more. My nine-year-old self had bitten off more than he could chew. He just wasn’t committed enough to convert a simple poem into an epic space opera format. I imagine the same was true of Anon. He wrote a brilliant prequel to a classic nursery rhyme but never got around to fully documenting Humpty’s interplanetary sojourns. Maybe further texts will one day emerge: perhaps even Dumpty’s own ‘Captain’s Log’. But until that time we can only speculate.

ADDENDUM: I just looked at A very first poetry book in the library. ‘Humpty’ wasn’t, it turns out, written by Anon at all. It was by the great Michael Rosen. Sorry, Michael. You are even better than the legendary Anon.

In front of me right now is a supermarket carrier bag containing a pair of woolen gloves, an interesting book about landmines and two large cartons of a soya-based milk substitute.

The bag (rather than its contents) is an alien artifact, accidental souvenir and polyethylene stowaway from New York City. It is a reminder that I was in New York City five days ago: a fact I have trouble coming to terms with. My time there now seems like something that happened in previous lifetime.

The bag is yellow and it advertises “GRISTEDE’S NEW YORK MEGA STORES”. On it there is a picture of the Manhattan skyline including the twin towers. At first I thought the bag design might just be a bit out of date (why compromise a logo for the sake of currency?) but next to the image of the towers it says:

“Always on our minds. Forever in our Hearts. Never Forget What They Did”.

I assume this is a touching, if slightly mawkish, memorial to 9/11. It’s about time someone paid memorial to that.

But I wonder exactly which element of 9/11 it refers to. Who are the “they” to which the tribute alludes? It seems too sympathetic a tribute for the buildings themselves. No matter how fond you may have been of the NY skyline, I don’t think you would ever consider the memory of any two concrete structures to be “in your heart”.

Nobody is about to forget what the buildings did either. They were offices for accountants. God preserve them, they never heard the phrase “credit crunch”. They never heard the phrase “Post-9/11” either for that matter. So out of touch. That must be the worst thing about being dead.

There was a nice restaurant at the Trade Centre too and an observation deck at the top of each tower. I will never forget. Those top-notch Port Authority facilities will always be on my mind and forever in my heart.

Presumably, then, the carrier bag refers to the people who died in the event. But then the “Never Forget What They Did” clause seems a bit weird. They didn’t DO anything. They died. I don’t think I’m being cruel. But no one did anything particularly heroic or amazing other than get hit in the face by a plane. They weren’t soldiers offering their lives for the good of their country. They were bystanders. I don’t think I’m being glib. It’s a weird thing to write is what I think.

Statistically, several office workers would have been on the toilet when the first plane hit. Think about that for a second.

“September 11. It happened on the toilet.”

I salute those heroic poopers. I will never forget what they did.

I suppose the phrase on the bag could refer to the heroic fire fighters and police officers who helped in the aftermath but those are pretty much all still alive. The tribute seems a bit too memorial-like so it can’t refer to them.

Whatever. The sentiment is nice and a grocery store carrier bag is a good a way as any to lament the pending end of western civilisation and (especially) “100 YEARS QUALITY-VALUE-SERVICE”.

I think I speak for everyone who died in the World Trade Centre when I emplore you all (if you have one of these bags) to return it to a participating store for re-use.

And for goodness sake, keep it out of reach of babies and small children. This 9/11 memorial is a suffocation hazzard.

Flying, I think, will always be exhilarating to me. I love the liberation of the take-off, the scary landing and the fact that you are essentially forced to do nothing for such a long time. I love doing nothing. It is my second favourite activity in the whole world.

I don’t even care about the carbon footprint it leaves behind. I have always been an epic recyler, re-user and campaigner. I do not consume much, I buy second-hand, I don’t eat meat and I have never so much as sat in the driving seat of a car. I think the environment owes me this one pleasure. I love flight. There is no adequate substitute.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been on no less than eight commercial airplanes as I enjoyed a mini world tour taking in Birmingham, Amsterdam, Montreal, Detroit and New York City before finally returning to Glasgow. I figured I would become jaded of airplanes, eating what can only be compared to 1950s TV dinners or astronaut food with tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex arms and watching stupid inflight movies. But no. I enjoyed every last minute I spent in each of those airtight metal tubes.

One of my favourite moments on my world tour happened when leaving Amsterdam for Glasgow. Unusually, I had been given a window seat and we were flying during daylight. As the plane circled on the tarmac I was treated to a momentary glimpse of the runway up ahead of us. I never expected a runway to be a small thing but the way it stretched into infinity surprised me and I was excited to know that we would be traversing it in a matter of seconds.

It was like seeing at close range the instruments that the dentist is about to put in your mouth, or being allowed to meet the animal you are about to eat in burger form: a rare glimpse of the methodology behind the pending misadventure.

The flight between Birmingham (where I visited my parents for Christmas) and Montreal (where I visited my girlfriend for Chanukah) was less relaxed but certainly equally exhilarating. That’s if by exhilarating, one means paranoia-inducing. And one does.

Eating breakfast in Birmingham airport, I was treated to Sky News images of the Israeli attacks upon Hamas. On screen, clouds of brown smoke erupt into the Gaza skies. The press have clearly screened the more impressive plumes so that mushroom clouds are brought to mind but in reality are far more low-tech and less devastating. The imagery nonetheless brings about an end-of-the-world feeling in my gut. Nobody would want to be on an airplane during such a highly charged political period. I had little choice now though. I would just stay away from news channels while flicking through the on-board entertainment system. If I don’t think about it, it can’t happen.

The images unsettled me and so everywhere I looked I saw potential terrorism. A woman’s lunchbag became a sachet of Anthrax. A stuttering man at customs became an obvious terrorist. My breakfast bagel became a big ball of Avian flu. What do you call a Muslim in a cockpit? A pilot, you racist.

It’s possible that other people had been unsettled too or maybe it was just my stupid imagination. The guys at customs seemed to be more thorough than useful. All shoes off. All laptops out. They even asked me to remove my hat, forcing me to reveal my marmalade sandwiches.

One of the pleasures of a KLM in-flight meal is that real cutlery is used rather than crappy plastic knives and forks. Normally I rejoice at such a detail but today I could only think of the potential security risk posed by such “sharps”. Designed for spooning up curry it may have been, but that spoon could end up lodged by a terrorist into a steward’s bum.

I was definitely not the only paranoid person on the flight. A New Scientist-reading Japanese lady next to me was wearing a facemask. I think she may have put it on to protect herself from possible germs. I had been sneezing when I boarded the flight and I had some recollection that Japanese people don’t like that. I assured her than my sneezing had been the result of an alergy rather than a virus but she wasn’t taking any chances. She removed it periodically to eat and to speak to the stewards though so she couldn’t have been much of a scientist.

Her mask just made me feel more paranoid though. Seeing an Asian person in a facemask just reminded me of the Sars outbreak a few years ago. Another image from the news to put the shit up me.

Later on the flight, a pretty young pregnant woman in a floral dress, radiating the beauty that only pretty young pregnant women can, passed by. I couldn’t help but look at her. She was hot. But I got uncomfortably paranoid that she had seen me looking so I decided to return to my other paranoid practices: casual misophobia and checking the undersides of coffee cups for terrorists.

Over a man’s shoulder I read the travel edition of the Wall Street Journal. “EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL,” the headline screamed, “DOLLAR WORTH LESS THAN LINT”.

We were going to die, weren’t we? We were going to die on this plane: me, the beautiful pregnant girl, the Sars lady. We would all be blown up by some bomb-wielding lunatic. Maybe there was still time to engrave my last will and testament into my arm with my duty-free scalpel.

I wouldn’t need much space. All my will consists of is “Give nothing to Dan!”

And then we landed. A smooth Montreal landing where my excellent girlfriend would be waiting with her boobs. I was right to suspect she would bring them along. She knows I like them.

How could I be so paranoid to think that I would die? I had almost forgotten that I am the focus of a secret Truman Show-type reality series. The producers would never let me die. Duh.

Working late at the office, I witnessed a postman collecting our mail.

Seeing the mail being collected was a bit like catching your parents snogging: vaguely frightening but weird that you had never seen it happen before.

This postman, to the eye, was a brute. As wide as he was tall, his DayGlo orange tabard had been custom-made: stitched up the middle from two regular-sized tabards. The fist with which he clutched the mailbag was like a joint of cured ham and the other fist was even bigger. His bald head was as big and white and shining as something from a planetarium.

And yet he had a friendly manner to him; a manner which suggested that in the past he had tried to turn his massive hand to something gentle. Lepidoptery, he would have tried, or cross-stitch or, perhaps most appropriately for a postman, the philatelic arts. His efforts, however, would have resulted in nothing but rage at the undextrous snozcumbers of his fingers, his big bald head covered in stamp hinges.

If he had been born in 1950s Hollywood he would definitely have been touted around the studios by his mother where eventually he would get a job being whipped by Bella Lugosi and saying “Friend?” to beautiful women.

But he wasn’t. He was born in 1978 to Alfred and Agnes Cox and now he lugs parcels around for Royal Mail. One day he will die and there won’t be a coffin big enough for him so he will have to be buried in a barrel or minced.

The postman had been coming up the stairs when I saw him so by the time he was on the landing he was behind me. The institutional carpet before me became eclipsed by his hunched and mighty shadow. I could hear his breathing.

I turned to go into the bathroom and it crossed my mind that he could perfectly easily follow me inside and bum me in the cubicle if the desire so took him.

And it surely would take him. Postmen love gay sex. They do it all day at the depot. Bum, bum, bum. This is where we get the phrase “letterboxing.”

What would I do in this event? Logic would dictate calling the police or maybe asking my mum to have some very stern words with the Postmaster General. But in truth, because I am English, I probably wouldn’t say anything because I wouldn’t want to cause a fuss.

I never imagined I would be a suffer-in-silence type. Looks like I am.

Needless to say, I remained unmolested. But for half a second it seemed highly plausible: the fact that he could overpower me so easily combined with his frustrated gentleness made me think that it was definitely going to happen.

But instead of doing a rape, the postman went about his business of collecting the mail and dreaming of a better world.

The lovable knucklehead.

Good news, everyone. I am fifteenth on the International waiting list for a venue at the Montreal Fringe Festival.

This means that if fifteen of the other artists cancel their performances or myteriously die in the night, I will be a shoo-in.

I had really wanted to play the Fringe because I think the clean-living, roof-partying, high-IQ, sex-loving Montrealians would be the perfect audience for The Crinkle-Cut Man and also because my girlfriend lives there so I would be able to visit her while cleverly writing off the trip as a tax expense.

Oh well. At least this teaches me that fraud is not a cornerstone of a romantic relationship.

Getting onto the waiting list is no kind of achievement other than doing well in a game of chance. The artists are not picked on merit of a proposal but rather randomly via a lottery.

I still did well though. Hundreds of artists would have applied. Take that, random chance! I am the best at chance!

Well, the thirtieth best.

Out of those who entered.

It’s a very disappointing result, actually. If I had been fourth or fifth on the waiting list, I would at least have some significant hope of getting in. If I had been sixteenth (i.e. not on the list) I would have got my investment money back. Instead, I’ll have to wait until June to see that again.

Of course, I could be proactive about helping the other acts pull out. I could murder my way into the Fringe like a Macbeth.

Some might argue that cleverly murdering fifteen people from around the globe would be more of an achievement than simply having my name pulled out of a hat. But others may argue that it would be the act of a psychopath. Who to listen to?

Yes, I have decided to become a murderer. It is the only way I can see of fulfilling my lifelong ambition of being the Thane of Cordor.

Just when you thought the laziest comedian was Jasper Carrot from off of Golden Balls and All about me (take that, Carrot), I myself was caught asleep on the job, head resting on the mic.

“Shhh, don’t wake him,” a heckler says, “or he might do more of that rubbish about paperclips”.

Thanks to my time-wasting associate Dan Godsil for this. (Original image by Fergus Mitchell).