Author: Robert Wringham

Discombobulation is it?

You enjoy saying the word (especially the ‘bobule’ bit in the middle) but you don’t know what it means until you’re standing barefoot in the shagpile of a parallel universe, the smell of curried potatoes wafting though your nose.

I run up the stairs of my building, my daddy long legs assassinating three risers with each stride, thrust the key into my apartment door and blast into my familiar hallway. “I’m home!” I shout through the apartment into the tiny earholes of my oblivious goldfish. At last the weekend was here.

Absently, I abandon my keys atop of the bookcase by the door, kick off my shoes, shed my socks and dance into the living room where I find an alarmed Asian man in front of the television.

Many of you will that I do not own a television, favouring instead to fill my leisure time with books, sex and amateur taxidermy. The big three.

Many of you will remember that I don’t own an alarmed Asian man either.

Marge, Homer, Lisa, Bart and Maggie rush home each day to find someone out of place sitting on their sofa. I, however, am not used to this.

After a moment of discombobulation (there is is) I realise I am in the wrong apartment.

How could this happen?

I have entertained the possibility before. On several occasions I have been ready to thrust my key into the door of 801, only noticing at the last nanosecond that I’ve a further flight of stairs to ascend. I had never really thought I would end up on the other side of the wrong door though, shoes off and hollering to a goldfish who, in actuality, was a good three meters above my head.

They say a problem with city living is that you never get to know your neighbours. I know one of them now. I know that his name is Mr. Lee (or maybe just Lee), that he watches Eastenders, that he cooks curried potatoes and he has the same door key as I do.

Yes, it appears our keys will unlock each other’s doors. If I ever come home to discover “Bowie” before “Bolan” in the CD rack, I will know who is to blame.

Lee.

That’s who.

I wonder briefly whether everyone in the building has the same key but this is too horrible to contemplate for long.

Worse yet, maybe everyone in the whole world has the same key. Ever tried your door key in someone else’s lock? Me neither. Until today. To me, there is more evidence in favour of all keys being identical than there is evidence for them being unique. It’s all a massive scam and we live under conditions of a false sense of security.

The inside of Lee’s apartment is practically identical to mine. Whoever kitted out the building must have bought the furniture in bulk. We have the same sofas, the same lampshades, the same carpet and (weirdly) the same opinions on woolen head gear (it may keep your head warm but it looks silly and messes up your hair).

Due to someone’s laziness, Lee and I find ourselves living in parallel universes to each other.

My apartment is slightly personalised. I have introduced some bookcases of my own, a goldfish bowl and, as a finishing touch, a ten-by-ten portrait of myself.

The absence of these things in Lee’s place is eerie. In the hope of rectifying this, I offer him a print of my giant portrait but the tasteless fool declines.

I shake hands with my downstairs Asian counterpart and complement him upon his doppelganger sofa and table lamps. It is a very cordial parting but, still worried that he may abuse the sameness of our keys, I leave him with this message:

“Maybe I’ll come and watch you sleeping one night!” and then I laugh slightly too much: “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

When leaving Lee’s apartment, the poor chap’s face is as white as a filleted cod.

Fear is a good way of keeping him out of my stuff but I’ll booby-trap my collection of lower-mammal taxidermy just in case.

This time last week I was in Canada, visiting my new girlfriend: an illustrator and inventor of superheroes called Samara Leiberwitz. There is a cutesy picture of us on the left in the event that you would like to induce vomiting.

The trip concluded with Thanksgiving Dinner. Yes, it appears that Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving too. In fact, my Canadian friends were surprised when I explained that we have no equivalent in the UK. “We’re very, very ungrateful,” I told them truthfully.

I don’t know how accurate a representation of Thanksgiving this was, being Canadian, Jewish and at least partially vegetarian but I enjoyed it tremendously nevertheless. I had been a little nervous beforehand. I had never met Samara’s parents before let alone the twenty-three members of her family who would be present at the dinner. That’s a lot of Leiberwitz.

After dinner, I stood smoking on the patio with Samara, her dad and various uncles.

Looking skyward, I noticed that there was a wooden balcony on the side of the house, from which a wall-mounted ladder extended onto the building’s flat roof. I had heard before of the legendary rooftop parties of Montreal and had been substantially titillated by the idea. Imagine that. A party on a roof. Whatever next? A barbaqueue under the sea? A square dance on the moon? Crazy.

Momentarily forgetting that I was supposed to be acting like a responsible adult in order to temper the unavoidable fact that I’d crossed an ocean in order to ravish Mr. Leiberwitz’s favourite daughter, I said, “Wow, I’d love to go onto your roof.”

To my surprise the idea was seconded and an away-team quickly established.

We were going to the roof.

Eventually, sense was seen by various uncles and only Samara and I were to venture roofward. Samara may be my girlfriend but she’s new to the job and has not yet adopted the role of “the one who reigns him in”.*

(*I don’t see this ever happening.)

We played it safe. We each took a battery-powered torch and each donned an upturned colander, as is customary in exploration scenarios. I didn’t tell Samara this, because I didn’t want to alarm her, but I also secreted a small spatula in my sock. Better safe than sorry.

In order to get to the balcony, we first had to cross Mr. and Mrs. Leiberwitz’s bedroom. Parents’ bedrooms, as anyone knows, are the last places in the world a kid is supposed to be. Especially other people’s parent’s bedrooms. I was told that we had permission to be there but the butterflies still did the hokey-pokey in my tum. When in parents’ bedrooms, anything is possible: Let’s make a bomb! We can’t. No time. The roof awaits.

From the balcony we see that grandma has joined the various uncles on the patio below. “What are you doing in your mum and dad’s bedroom!” she shouts, “No kinky business! You’ve got your own room for hanky-panky!”

Hanky-Panky, on this very rare occasion, was the last thing on my mind. I had a colander on my head and was suffering from the sense of exhilaration which can only be found by trespassing in the lion’s den of a parents’ bedroom. I was also busy remembering the fact that I am significantly afraid of heights. Such mortal terror is not conducive to either hanky or panky. Not to me anyway.

Samara takes to the ladder first. As I watch her unthinkingly ascend, lemurlike, I realise there is no turning back now. In Canada, I suddenly remember, I have no medical insurance.

Torch in hand, I follow her. Looking down, the patio seems to rotate. Faces of various uncles now look like a roulette wheel in which the ball is my head for heights and at which the croupier, deranged and thanotistic, is my own stupid sense of adventure. The croupier and I would be having serious words if we were to survive this.

Once on the roof, we are treated to a secret world of protruding pipes, one of them belching laundry-scented steam into the Montreal night. Giddy I go to sit on a joist. “Don’t sit there!” says Samara, “You’ll get your suit dirty”. I had almost forgotten I was wearing a suit. I must be the city’s best dressed rooftop explorer.

It would make sense to sit down for a while before attempting to descend the ladder. Just until the stars stopped spinning. But casting the torch around the roof I see that there is nowhere to perch. Some kind of party! I muse that it’s much like any other party I’ve been to: while everyone else is content to dance, I am far more concerned about whether there will be a seating area. When people ask me to come to their parties, the first question I ask is whether its a “dancy party” or a “sitty party”.

The novelty of being on the roof and among the pipes soon wore off, just as, I imagined, did the novelty of unpopulated Canada to those French and Catholic pilgrims all those years ago. But by then it was too late to turn back.

But turn back we did. As I backed down the ladder, I held two handed onto the railings (was my trembling visible?). In something of a Proustian rush, I was taken back to swimming lessons, Age 10. Our ghastly instructor, Mrs Saunders (who, if born in a different era would surely have been one of Goebbels’ Schutzstaffel) would have us leap into the water: something for which I never found the confidence and instead backed down, gingerly, as I was doing now.

When we were back in the company of various uncles I felt relieved.

This morning, back in Old Blighty, I get an email from Samara. She says that the balcony outside Mr. and Mrs. Leiberwitz’ bedroom collapsed in the night. All of the supports had rotted through. Uncles Various say its a miracle we did not die that night.

A cutesy adventure so nearly became our woody, splintery death.

Of course, we can laugh about it now.

The new academic year officially began on Saturday. I can only take this to be an anti-semitic gesture on behalf of the state. On this occasion I shall let it pass.

As dewy-eyed undergraduates molest the West End, I am reminded of a beautiful occurrence almost exactly twelve Judeo-Christian calendar months ago today:

I had gone along with a student friend to the freshman fair so that we could investigate the clubs and societies available to young clever types.

As an employee of the university – honorary chair of fluff studies – I am entitled to join these student societies but had never really considered doing so before.

But what to join?

There’s the chess club for losers; the Pythagorian Society for other losers; the football team for the biggest losers of them all; and the ironically named ‘Loser Club’ (“Where Everyone’s a Wiener”) but I’m no elitist.

In front of me in the queue for general club enrollment was a cripplingly beautiful girl clutching an old-fashioned legal pad. Much like that pad, she was at once unusual, chic and spiralbound.

She was older than the other students in the room but I didn’t recognise her from the staff either. Perhaps a new PhD candidate? In any event, I suspected she had the right flavour of stuff to join my illegal underground army so I approached her, affecting the most remarkable nonchalance.

“Hi there,” I said, trite as a pestle pathetically accommodating a mortar, “What club and/or society are you here to join?”

She rolled her eyes and sighed, disinterested.

“Oh, you must be here for the superior indifference club,” I tried.

“No.”

“The standoffish mysterious harlot society?”

“Guess again.”

“The easily bored society for detached young women?”

“No.”

“I give up then. What are you here for?”

“I’m Jewish,” she said.

To another man this remark may have been received as non-sequitur but Hemi-Hebrew myself I instantly recognised it as by way of an explanation. Why join a club when she’s already a part of God’s chosen people?

Me? I’m half in, half out.

I have many clever jokes about being Semi-Semitic (see?). My favourite is “So I’m not a complete prick”. But I resisted the opportunity to show off and tried to remain casual, coblike.

“I’m similarly awkward,” I confessed.

My student friend, silent until now, began to get restless as if asking for an introduction. “Don’t mind the shiska, I told the chic girl. She is neither girlfriend or wife. I just keep her around in case I ever need a human shield”.

Now feigning an interest, the girl said: “And what do you do?”

“At the moment I write comedy”.

The next morning:

“You’d never slept with a Jewish girl before had you?”
“No. But that’s not why I did, you silly racist.”
“Cool. And I’m not doing this because you’re a comedy writer”.
“I… what?”

I didn’t realise writing comedy was even currency. Surely that’s akin to sleeping with someone because they assemble Kinder Egg toys for a living.

I never saw the girl again. It was one of those whirlwind romances. I don’t even have her telephone number. This is all well and good but one year later I find myself thinking:

If she wasn’t joining a club, why the hell was she in that queue?

There is a class of men who make their living by standing near doors.

I’m talking about doormen, obviously. And within said class of men there are various sub-classes: strata of doorman society. At the top of the pyramid is the hotel doorman who receives tips, has his own union and gets to hang out with celebrities. At the middle there is the ‘concierge’ whose charge is to lurk near the door of a corporate or residential building, occasionally grunting at people who pass by. At the bottom of the pile is the lowly ‘bouncer’. Bouncers are born in vats and have painted-on suits.

Standing near doors may look like an easy job to you, dear and sophisticated reader, but you try standing near a constantly opening and closing door. You could catch your death. The doorman, however, laughs in the face of death because he knows that when he finally succumbs to the inevitable fate of pneumonia, he will be be rewarded in the doorman afterlife with a reception area of seventy virgins.

The first person the doorman meets in heaven is Saint Peter, the longest-serving doorman of them all.

The deceased doorman will have to wait a few minutes while Saint Peter finishes talking to the FedEx guy and then then the doorman will have to pass the test he has been waiting all of his life to pass.

Saint Peter: Greetings doorman. When is a door not a door?
Doorman: I have prepared to answer that conundrum all of my life, Saint Peter. It is a riddle with which I am entirely familiar and I am looking forward to answering it. A door, my lord, fails significantly to be a door, my lord, when it, if I may venture, is ajar.

And then he goes through the pearly revolving door where he meets his maker: Janus, the god of gates and doors.

We have a new doorman in my office building. He’s a lovely guy, is very well dressed and is seemingly played by Captain Birdseye. Either he’s fresh out of doorman academy and still idealistic about the profession or he really loves doormanship and has taken it up as a sort of hobby.

Every morning the new doorman holds the door for me, says good morning and calls me Sir. At first I naturally assumed he was kowtowing exclusively to me, as is my god-given right, but it turns out he does this for everyone.

Alas such matinal felatio grows tiresome. I find myself missing our old, grumpy doorman (may he rest in peace) who never held the door for anyone, never said good morning and spent most of his time unapologetically watching football mishaps on YouTube.

The problem is that I cross paths with the doorman on a bare minimum of four times a day. Once when arriving in the morning; twice when leaving for and returning from lunch; and once again at the end of the day. That’s an awful lot of pleasantry.

I’m trying to identify alternative ways into and out of the building. The laundry shoot is a promising option.

It’s trying for me and I’m sure it’s trying for him. How can he be so nice to so many people? It can’t go on forever. He’s sure to lose his marbles sooner or later and bash everyone’s brains in with a doorstop before eventually hanging himself with a draft excluder.

This morning the nice doorman wasn’t in his booth. He was probably off tending to an injured puppy or finding families for some orphans or something. It felt very fortunate that he was absent. To start the day without having to say hello and be friendly was an almost obscene luxury. I was able to slouch up to my desk without so much as having to clear my throat.

It suddenly occurs to me that the doorman is often the first person I speak to on the average day. If an ‘in order of appearance’ credits went go up before my eyes the end of each day, the friendly doorman would usually be the first person on it:

YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING:
(in order of appearance)

Friendly doorman…………Captain Birdseye
Robert Wringham………….Himself
Man in Toilet 1………….Fulton McKay
Man in Toilet 2………….Ben Kingsley

(I used to secretly suspect that my life was a Truman Show-style television programme orchestrated by Nazi occultists and some of my ex-girlfriends. But I’ve finally concluded it would be too big an operation even for them.)

The first thing I do after making my way through the doorman’s slalom of salutations and shoe-kissing is have a wee and/or a poo in the office bathroom. Why shouldn’t I? I’m only human. Stop staring at me.

Who should I see in the bathroom this morning but the friendly doorman. It gave me the shock of my life. How dare he present himself out of context so early in the morning?

“Get back to your booth, doorman!” I commanded. He quickly put away his urinating todger and, spinning on his heels, turned in on himself in the fashion of a revolving door and vanished into thin air.

Adjusting our anthropological lens, let us now move onto the lower class doorman: the bouncer.

After enjoying some cheap pitchers of pissy local brew last night, my friends and I decided to cheekily vacate the pub via the fire escape. I think I had objected to the “Fire Door Only” posters which had been plastered all over it. Laughing in the streaky face of dot-matrix authority, I hit the escape bar and we ran giggling into the night.

“See, you!” said one of the bouncers, his words a heavy pile of cured Scottish ham, “That’s a fire door only”.

I deliberately pretended to mishear him and said “Sorry, I’m not a puff” before scarpering and leaving him with his outrage and a flapping fire escape door.

My silly friends enjoyed this because (a) it was clearly unacceptable behaviour and (b) I actually am a puff.

“Well, you certainly stuck it to a man there,” said one of my pals.

And I had. I had stuck it to a door man.

“Hello there,” I said, trite as a thanksgiving turkey, “I’m calling from Scotland and I’m hoping to spend a few nights in your hotel next month.”

The girl at the front desk of the Toronto Renaissance seemed very excited to receive a call from Scotland. You would think that an international transitional space such as a hotel front desk would allow for such exchanges quite frequently but the girl said, “Oh wow!”

“Say, what time is it in Toronto?”
“Eight thirty in the morning.”
“Oh yes. You’re five hours in the past. Don’t worry. I won’t spoil anything.”

I could hear her blushing down the phone.

Alas I was destined to disappoint. I am not Scottish.

In fact, I was affecting an English accent so astonishingly Attenborough that the girl could surely smell the crumpets over the line.

Why the affectation? Stay with me.

Every so often, I like to book myself a suite in a five-star hotel. Why shouldn’t I? I can both afford it and deserve it. Unlike some people, eh, fatso? Don’t complain. You should have worked harder.

Much like any other ghastly pleb, I make the most of the facilities while I’m there. I’ll order an entire wedding cake from room service at 4am and eat it in the bath while punching a solid gold prostitute.

Nonetheless, such decadence always results in a liberal guilt kicking in. Like a nagging child it pulls at my pinafore strings, mysteriously even on those rare occasions I’ve neglected to wear a pinafore.

You know how it is. Phantom pinafore string syndrome.

I feel like a horrible fraud when I’m talking to the staff at these places and I become paranoid that the receptionist will sense from my bad teeth a working class childhood and immediately sound the alarm.

“Intruder! There’s an intruder amongst us!”. An army of bellhops will wrestle me to the ground and a doorman will escort me to an awaiting windowless van which will drive me off to a forced labour camp before I’ve even had chance to pocket the complementary soap.

It is out of this fear that I always find myself wearing my best suit when on the phone to these people and affecting a ludicrous Hugh Grant voice.

I knew that “calling from Scotland” would be the key to getting the receptionist on my side today. An expert fraudster, it was all part of my ploy for getting her to love me and to not sound the Phony Alarm.

Canadians love Scotland. Canadian scientists even tried to clone Scotland under lab conditions, in the highly controversial Nova Scotia project. Alas they failed to recreate deep-fried mars bars to an authentic standard and simply no one would believe in the cloned Scotland. “Ontologically identical” was their claim but the proof was in the pudding.

Nobody wants to wear a Canadian tartan either: it’s certainly patriotic incorporating a maple leaf or a moose head into the weave but nobody’s going to wear it.

Why such kinship between our two peoples? It is because Canada is America’s Scotland: both are substantial northern chunks of continents but both are overlooked by arrogant southerners who all too willingly dismiss an entire nation of people as their own country’s fancy hat.

Maybe our tourist boards should sort that out. Next time they want to come up with a promotional tagline for the country they should consider:

“Scotland: it’s England’s hat”.

Surely like many other arrogant idiots, I used to quietly believe that I was the subject of an on-going Truman Show-style conspiracy in which all of my friends were actors and events were orchestrated entirely by a director in the sky.

I even imagined what the marketing campaign for The Robert Wringham Television Programme might be like in the real world. Billboard effigies of my face surely loomed over cities. Interviews with the actors who play my friends would appear in magazines. Longterm characters such as my parents would be A-List celebrities while images of new friends would feature on the sides of busses with taglines like “Will she be the one to steal his heart? Tune in at 8pm for a crushing season finale.“

My mother’s anti-natal screenings would have been the first broadcasts. Years later, people would tune in to watch the ongoing decay of my festering corpse. Bill Oddey would present this part from the Springwatch hut but live webcam footage would be available online too.

I imagined the scriptwriters gathered in their meeting room, devising new plots, introducing cool new angles (“a monkey sidekick!”) and snuffing out unpopular characters (“People are getting tired of Dan Godsil. Let’s kill him off.”).

But then I came to the conclusion:

It’s just too big an operation isn’t it?

It wouldn’t just be about engineering situations immediately around me. All local radio would have to be fabricated; they would have to censor any movies that refer to my TV show or realworld events; and they would need to have created an entire artificial Internet for me to play around on. It would be a simply gargantuan task for very little reward. Who would want to watch 24-hour coverage of my life on television? I spend most of my time gawping out of airplane windows, picking my bum.

It’s just too big an operation isn’t it?

This may seem obvious now but with an ego like mine and with such photogenic friends it was difficult not to at least suspect this to be the truth.

Now I am free of such paranoia. (Either that or the continuity department of the production company have succeeded in selling me their deception but it’s best not to think about that).

I also used to fear triple-lidded manhole covers. This came about as the result of playground folklore. The kids at school liked to imagine that stepping on a triple manhole cover would result in bad luck. For some reason the idea stayed with me (while others did not – I’ve never cared about stepping on pavement cracks or opening crisp packets upside down) and until recently I have avoided them at all costs, dodging or pirouetting over them.

Not any more though. I have converted a negative into a positive. Instead of avoiding triple-lidded manhole covers I actively try to step on them. I’ve convinced myself that they bring good luck instead of cause cancer.

It’s all about perspective.

There was a time when I would flick the light switch six times before entering the bathroom. Just in case. What if I stopped and then an spoon-wielding madman hacked my family up? I would never forgive myself. But I have stopped and my family remain unhacked.

I am rapidly becoming a poster boy for the well-adjusted. If you don’t believe me, just use your iPod to listen in to my thoughts like that guy did on the subway yesterday.

I’m not a nut. I’m a legume.

Recently I moved from my lovely Hyndland attic to a sterile and expensive little cubicle in Yorkhill. The scent from the incinerators at the local abortion clinic is stifling.

Anneliese fondly refers to my new home as ‘the shit hole’, resulting in lots of delightful bon-mots such as “I can see your shit hole from here” and “You sure do keep your shit hole clean”.

And I do. My shit hole is immaculate.

The saving grace of the new abode is the location. While the apartment itself has all the charm of a parking attendant’s booth, it was built upon a layline of cool (or an ancient Indian burrial ground of awesomeness – you decide).

From my window I can see the laminated futurwolt of the Glasgow Science Centre, the Spanish Baroque turrets of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Medieval-looking Glasgow Steiner School, a pyramidal protestant church, two hospital buildings and the premises of a small company called Richlay Eggs.

When I see the sign for Richlay Eggs, I always think to myself, “They certainly do”.

In the far distance, there is an ever-advancing army of energy-generating windmills. Quixotic, I will one day set about them.

I can also see the new BBC Scotland building. The front of the building has “BBC Scotland” written in big letters on it. This is how I know.

One day I will walk down to the BBC Scotland building, enter the main foyer pretending to be a bicycle courier and blow myself up.

I suspect this would be Yorkhill’s first suicide bomb but I might be wrong about this.

To understand my wrath, you only have to look at this week’s TV comedy listings.

Speaking of such things, I’m writing a sitcom pilot for Channel Four with the charming Fergus Mitchell. Exciting.

I met with Fergus this week and he told me about a Saturday morning TV show called Hider in the House in which children need to smuggle a minor celebrity into their house and keep him hidden without their parents finding out.

Apparently Chris Akabusi spent seven weeks under a bed in Devonshire.

Chris was thought to be the series’ finest hider until the bones of Bubble from Big Brother were found in a Romford airing cupboard.

It’s only since I began dating a coffee shop manager that I’ve come to appreciate how instrumental coffee is to the romancing process.

This is why Starbucks and Durex always have the same stock market value.

“Would you like to come out for coffee?” is the universally-acknowledged code for “Would you like to have sex?”

Similarly, “Would you like to come up for coffee?” is code for “Would you like to have sex immediately?”

Try not to confuse your ‘out’ with your ‘up’. Doing so can only lead to a slap in the chops.

(Adjust accordingly. ‘Up’ only works if you live above ground level. Use ‘In’ if you live in the suburbs or ‘Down’ if you have a trendy undersea bubble house.)

There’s just so much secret language. For this reason, and one other, dating is very much like being a Freemason.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: What’s the other reason?

You know. All that bloody dancing.

Dating a coffee shop manager has forced me to abandon the classic caffeine-orientated code words. If I ask her out or up for coffee she’s likely to roll her eyes and say, “That’s the last thing I want”.

When asking her out, I am forced into being either creative or blatant.

Creative:

“Would you like to come out to that new ice rink?”.

Blatant:

“Intercourse? 8pm?”

With the former option, one runs the risk of actually having to visit an ice rink. With the latter, one once again risks a slap in the chops.

Going to an ice rink as a pretense for sex is a ridiculous game. You won’t realise this, of course, until you’re strapping on your boots.

When I say “going to an ice rink”, I also extend this warning to paint balling, ten-pin bowling, laser quest and badger-baiting.

Two cups of decaf: £2.90
Ice Skate Rental: £14.75

Only in exceptional circumstances will you be asked to do “a figure eight” in a Cafe Nero.

There’s a reason why the coffee invite is a classic. If you decide to abort the mission halfway through, you can just pretend the date was a perfectly innocent coffee all along. You will end the night in the usual, perfectly agreeable way: TV Dinner and a maintenance wank.

Nothing lost.

If you’re at the rink, however, you’ve already gone to so much trouble. Mission abortion is not an option. You will have to have sex now, even if it’s under duress and awkward for both of you.

Tonight: Discombobulate. Stand-Up comedy and author readings featuring Robert Wringham, Arnold Brown, Magi Gibson, Alan Bissett and more. Hosted by Ian Macpherson. Glasgow CCA. 8:30.

September 7th: OMG. Fauxkward diary-readings from Glasgow’s schmitteratti. Offshore Cafe, Gibson Street, Glasgow. This will be excellent.

“Rapina vestri auris eminus”

Go and listen to the podcast I’ve done with a man called Dan.

It’ll be on iTunes next week so get in there before it takes over the world.

The subject? Ghosts! Well, sort of.

Here’s the promo blurb:

Wringham and Godsil are from two different worlds. Wringham likes hollandaise sauce and Will Self. Godsil likes brown sauce and Jeremy Clarkson. Will they have anything to talk about on this podcast? Tune in to find out!

Robert Wringham (writer, comedian) and Daniel Godsil (radiophonic guru) take an anarchic and randomly scheduled look at science, religion, culture and the troubles of modern life. Sensless conspiracy theories, experimental science, interesting ‘facts’ and groundless prophecies are at the heart of this outlandish podcast duologue.

In this installment, Rob and Dan discuss the benefits of placenta-eating; Dan’s fear of beards; the true identity of Pacman; the size of Rob’s penis and the real Jesus-loving motives of Richard Dawkins.

Another unusual gig, this time for a ‘mini festival’ in somebody’s house in the West End of Glasgow. With some sort of installation in each room of the house (photography in the bathroom, author readings in the bedroom, movies in the living room), my job was to do two half-hour stand-up sets: one in the front garden and one in the back garden.

The first one didn’t go so well. I think it was mainly my fault for being so tired after a long week but partly because the audience was very small and the front garden didn’t lend itself well to standup with people coming and going between the house and the street. But I did enjoy how the neighbours all came to their windows to see what was going on.

The second set, however, was hugely enjoyable. Because I was fairly unprepared for the event and had hoped to use my megaphone only to find at the last second that it wasn’t working, I had to think of an improv plan quite quickly. There was a stepladder in the garden as part of an art installation and on a bookshelf in the living room I saw a book called The Best Pub Joke Book Ever!: No.1. Surely the perfect ingredients for a piece of performance art!

So I sat atop the rickety step ladder (“Not my real ladder, my step ladder” – Harry Hill) and orated relentlessly from The Best Pub Joke Book Ever!: No.1, giving commentaries on the jokes as I went along. I told the audience that I would be there all night, even after the party had finished and even if it began to rain. I liked the idea of the audience disappearing off into the night only for me to stay there, talking to myself until falling asleep.

The result, I hope, was an interesting commentary on the relationships between comedian and joke and act and audience. The fact that I was stranded in the cold atop of a step ladder, reading unfunny and occasionally hateful jokes was nicely representative of the lonely indignity of being a comedian.

I explained at the beginning of the routine that jokes are anathema to comedians: that we hate being asked to tell them all the time. So the whole thing was painful to me. But my pain was their pleasure. They lapped up tired punchline after tired punchline and made “ooh!” noises at the vaguely misogynistic or racist ones (and there were plenty!).

I would periodically ask the audience whether they would prefer to hear some “short and sharp” jokes (about flies in bowls of soup or animals crossing roads) or a “long and tortuous” one. The people who understood the idea properly would shout back “long and tortuous!” knowing that these jokes were the most painful to me.

When I got heckled I reminded the audience that they could leave whenever they liked. It was only I who was forced, by my own self-inflicted contract, to stay.

Someone suggested that buckets of vegetables be provided to throw at me. A great idea! The audience are very much a part of this “piece” so a bit more interaction would be a good thing. If I were to make a show out of this in the future, I could charge people to try and knock me off the ladder (50p for a small vegetable, £1 for a potato, £5 for a squash). This is how I would earn my wages. Like so many office workers I could maybe pay for a house by doing something demeaning. But at least I would be being honest about it.

A future show would also involve assistants to help in selling the vegetables: an Englishman, an Irishman and a ‘Scotchman’ perhaps or maybe an actress and a bishop.

One joke started with the words “Ahmed goes into a bar”. Understandably, there was a cry of “careful!” from the audience. I reminded them that the jokes were coming from a book and not from me and that I couldn’t be blamed. But then I said “Maybe the joke has nothing to do with him being called Ahmed. Maybe you’re the racists!” which went down very well.

As the sun began to set, a man opened a window in the house. At first I was worried that it was a neighbour telling me to shut up but in fact it was a man who had been in the audience at the start of the set. “Just checking you’re still there!” he said. Indeed, I had been on my ladder for quite a while. Almost an hour, apparently. The man at the window had brought an electric keyboard with him and took to making comedy parp-parp music after the punchlines. This was great! I loved how the whole thing – the ladder, the book, the comedian, the audience partipation, the keyboard – had all come together at the last minute without any planning. A lovely piece of impromptu silliness.

On Sunday evening, I went to the Offshore Cafe to participate in the first edition of Fergus Mitchell‘s brilliant spoken word night where the speakers read entries from their real teenage diaries. Since my solo show is already based around being a diarist and since the idea of ‘shame’ is rapidly becoming an alien concept to me, I went armed with my 1997 diary and some loosly prepared banter.

1997 was significant because it was the year in which I started taking a proper interest in hanky-panky. It was the year in which the anatomically correct dinosaur posters in my bedroom were replaced with Radio Times articles about Red Dwarf and with centrefold-style posters of the various Star Trek babes. It was the year of the horny nerd.

En route to the venue, I mused over what would happen if I were to get run over by a truck. The paramedics or professional guts shovellers would find the diary among my remains. Since the diary came to an abrupt end on November 28th 1997, they might conclude that I had stepped through a time vortex and into the face of that truck.

“He was from 1997,” they would mourn, “he couldn’t have understood that the truck wouldn’t slow down. They didn’t have trucks in his time”.

And then Sting and Elton John would release a ‘candle in the wind’-style CD single to help raise national awareness of displaced time travellers from 1997.

Thankfully this didn’t happen. I made it to the venue unscathed and in time.

I had selected in advance the entries I wanted to read so that I wouldn’t have to go riffling through the pages while on stage. Since I was reading from pieces of note paper tacked into the inside cover, there wasn’t really a need to have taken the actual diary along at all but I felt that people would question the authenticity of the entries if they couldn’t see the actual book.

Having the diary out of the house left me slightly anxious: I was worried about losing it but most of all I was worried that some joker would snatch it from my hands and read aloud from a random page. Even though I was going to be discussing some of my most vulnerable moments in front of a cafe filled with friends and strangers, I would have found such an unauthorised reading humiliating. But everyone was very restrained and nice. I did a couple of “requests” in the form of sharing what happened to me on people’s birthdays but that was as far from the plan as I felt like deviating.

In particular, Anneliese Mackintosh wondered what happened on her birthday. Here’s what: “Before we went home, I went back to a shop that we saw yesterday that sells sci-fi stuff. I bought 4 postcards and mum bought me a nice t-shirt. We had a nice time in Blackpool”.

This is the sort of entry I deliberately didn’t read on stage! Can’t have people thinking I was a nice kid. Instead, I only read the stuff that made me sound unhinged.

The show got off to an amazing start when I told the audience that I used to be a paedophile! I don’t think they had come for this sort of comedy. Which is why I did it. There was something of an awed hush, one guy made an “oooh” noise and apparently there was a walk-out (though I didn’t notice this at the time). I’ve never had an awed hush or a walk-out. Today, at last, I am a man.

The point of the joke is, of course, that most people used to be paedophiles. I was talking about my fourteen-year-old self. When I was 14, my girlfriend was 13. Making me a paedophile. I am not a paedophile any more. Time is a great healer, my friends. So if you know any paedophiles, don’t tell the police: just take them into outer space and drop them into a chronosynclastic infundibulum.

Thankfully, the audience were quickly back on my side after some bankers about youthful indiscression. They also enjoyed the later risque stuff including a brush with homosexuality, the remarkably early discovery of the clitoris and a joke about the death of Princess Diana.

When people find out that I do spoken-word and standup they usually ask if I get nervous. The answer is yes. But only for two or three minutes. The ideal situation for me would be to perform for five minutes, to go away and to come back again later. This, of course, never happens. But here it did! Three short sets with other readers in between (including the rather spiffing Paul Puppett).

It was a very good night. My only regret was “confessing” to being gay in order to soften the blow of a rather rude punchline. I’m not gay! I’m annoyed with myself. If anything it was patronising to the audience. I’ll write about this in my personal diary tonight and maybe read it on stage in ten years time. How postmodern.

Alas, I won’t be sharing my actual reading with you, my virtual chum. I might want to do this again and I don’t want to spoil any surprises for people. Besides, a joke born in captivity seldom survives when released into the wild.

(Thanks to Fergus Mitchell and Neil Scott for the photographs. See also Neil’s review).

Sitting on the steps of my office building, I try to emulate the sound of a cricket.

You know the sound I mean: Chirrup Chirrup.

My first instinct was to tongue the roof of my mouth while curling the air around my right cheek but that results in a sort of purr like a telephone dial tone.

Next I try rumbling some air through my flaccid lips. It is closer than what I had before but still not a cricket. This new noise is brutal like a road drill even when I do it really softly.

Thirdly I try the road drill again but with a bit of voice behind it. This is completely wrong. Now I sound like an hysterical space chicken.

I muse that maybe humans just can’t make the sound of a cricket. But they can. I’ve seen it done on TV.

For a while longer, in a light drizzle, I persist.

A colleague emerges from the building. She asks me what on Earth I am doing.

“Trying to emulate the sound of a cricket,” I say.

It occurs to me that this is the behaviour of a mad person. Making animal noises alone in the rain is exactly the sort of thing mad people do.

“Why?”, my colleague asks.

“Because I’ve lost my umbrella.”

She looks right through me. And with good reason. That really does sound mad.

But it’s the truth. To explain: I had tasted the pending rain on my tongue and realised that my umbrella was not in my hand where it should be. I couldn’t recall that it was in my office either. Where had I last seen it? Oh yes, in the pub last night leaning against some folded up chairs. As I pictured my umbrella, I imagined it sitting alone. The sound effect for something sitting alone and forgotten about, as any movie will show you, is the sound of a cricket chirupping in the background.

And that is why the loss of an umbrella had resulted in my trying to emulate a cricket.

Such a train of thought is called a Kangaroo Communique. I only learned the term last night.

My colleague put her umbrella up, Padoof-click, and continued on her way.

Padoof-click

How do you make that noise?

“Dear employer. Robert Wringham cannot attend his job today because he is suffering from a bad case of Scrot Rot. Yours with gusto, Dr. Rhodri Hickinbottom”.

I am running a competition. Send me your sick notes – real or fabricated – to my email address or post them right here in the comments thread. All of the good ones will be printed in Issue 2 of New Escapologist in a feature about pulling a sicky.

“Dear Miss Anteater Hand. Little Robbie can’t come to school today because he’s suddenly become horribly aware of the atoms that make up his left arm. As you might imagine it has put him in a bit of tizzy. He won’t be back to school for six weeks.”

The three most inventive, clever or interesting ones will win a free copy of the magazine and an additional mystery prize.

“For the attention of Mr. Wringham’s employer. Mr. Wringham has fallen several fathoms off his rocker AND IT IS YOUR FAULT. Give him seven weeks off work on full pay and continue to provide his coffee and paperclips by mail. Yours, Dr. Aldus Rectangle”.