The Occasional Papers

On our way to sunbathe in the park, my girlfriend and I chanced across three uniformed policemen enthusiastically singing ‘Jingle Bells’ by the roadside.

One of the officers was even keeping their rhythm with a set of sleigh bells, adding quite the festive vibe to an already merry scene. I’m not sure which was the biggest juxtaposition: singing policemen or the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ in the 30°C Montreal sunshine.

My first thought was that the carolers weren’t real policemen but surely some sort of performance art troupe. Such would be typical in the public spaces of Montreal, so this would explain the strange out-of-season caroling to which we were bearing witness.

I then noticed that the uniforms of the cops – complete with night sticks and firearms – were pretty authentic. What was going on?

My girlfriend pointed out that the nearest car to the trio of festive policemen contained a woman seemingly sleeping in the passenger seat. Ah, now it was clear. The cops, perhaps concerned that she might suffer heat stroke behind the car’s windscreen, were in the process of waking her up through the medium of Christmas songs. They were being civil-minded but also playing a joke: when the woman woke up, she would disorientatedly think she had slept until December.

Even to a curmudgeon like me who hates all acts of merriment or human happiness, this was pretty funny. I watched on for a while and enjoyed seeing the expression on the dozing passenger’s face as she awoke to this slightly bizarre spectacle.

I wondered for half a second where the cops could possibly have found sleigh bells at such short notice. The park is always full of creative buskers though so maybe the cops had formed an alliance with one of these musicians and borrowed the sleigh bells to complete the charade.

It was a quite brilliant and lovely scene. The policemen of England might be savage and humourless meat-heads but it became clear to me that their Canadian counterparts were not so bad.

We set down our beach towel and settled down for an afternoon in the sunshine. No more than ten minutes had passed when the chorus of Jingle Bells once again picked up from the location of the three policemen. Strange.

Ten minutes later it happened again. And again. And again. What the fuck was going on?

It soon became apparent that my impression of cops waking a sleeping woman in a jovial fashion was to overestimate the value of their joke. They hadn’t been trying to wake the woman in the car.

This had not been a spontaneous or well-meaning prank. The cops had been in the park all afternoon on some slack duty and had decided somewhere along the way that Christmas caroling in the 30°C sunshine would be amusing enough a joke to perform repeatedly in public. Drunk from the attention that the public (sadly including myself) had been giving them, this would continue ad-nauseum until the sun went down.

Or possibly until it went Nova and destroyed all life on the Earth.

But what about the sleigh bells with which one of the officers had been keeping festive rhythm? God, the bells were the damning evidence of a further level of preparation. They hadn’t quick-wittedly borrowed them from a busker at all. One of the cops must have planned this in advance and brought the bloody things along with him from home.

Not only was this not a spontaneous act of impromptu wit, it wasn’t even something they’d connived suddenly by way of passing the time. It had been planned at least a day previously. Perhaps it is an annual tradition they have. Perhaps they do this every day.

Comedy should really be left in the hands of experts. It’s a dangerous commodity and shouldn’t be tossed around by just anyone. In fact, I’d be willing to volunteer for some sort of comedy police force who go around arresting people who dare to make poor, dim-witted or laboured jokes in public.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: “Ah, but don’t you see that by being a humourist dabbling in the policing business, you’re committing the same sin as the cops were but the other way around?”

Quiet you.

Reading a library copy of Haruki Murakami’s South of the border, West of the sun today, I noticed that someone had fixed a typographic error in the book by penciling an ‘r’ into the misprinted word, ‘unb oken’.

The manual correction of typos in library books strikes me as a slightly odd thing to do but is something we’ve probably all seen before. Oddly enough, the last one I can remember seeing was in a copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: also an Haruki Murakami novel. Maybe there is specifically something about Murakami readers that leaves them so inclined.

If we were to ask them about this behaviour, I’d like to think that they’d have an appropriately mindful Murakami-esque response: “I just can’t stand to see an incomplete or misspelled word. I don’t know why. I just can’t. It is what it is”, and then maybe they’d go and talk to a stray cat for a while.

It strikes me that you’d have to be a very singular person to do correct a typo in a mass-market paperback. What is the motivation? When I see a typo in a book, it may momentarily derail my reading but once I’ve acknowledged the typo, I just ignore it and move on.

By correcting the typo with a pen, all you’re doing is correcting the typo in one copy of a book, of which there are thousands, even millions, of other copies. There’s presumably no motivation on behalf of the corrector to fix all of the copies of the book. (Unless, of course, there is. Perhaps there’s a subculture of typographic bounty hunters travelling the libraries and bookshops of the world, patiently waiting to be discovered and interviewed by Louis Theroux).

Maybe this is the difference between typo correctors and people like me. If ever I find myself correcting typos, it’s as a professional editor and always in the master or proof copy of a book which has not yet been mass-printed.

This being said, I think the typo correctors should be praised for making this tiny difference in the world. I’ll miss this sort of thing when everything is digital and correctable at the source.

“Suppose you chomp down on an abscess and shatter your jaw,” says my dad in the cautionary tone of someone who knows about life or has at least been told a lot about it.

“Or suppose you get completely paralysed from the neck down. A proper superman job. How are you going to get home then?”

We are having a conversation about travel insurance. All I have asked for are the names of a few reputable brokers. Instead, my dad has opened my eyes to a seemingly endless score of terrifying “what ifs” that can happen around the globe.

“What if you put your foot down a rabbit hole and trip, cracking your head off a rock?”

I never knew this man had such a cool imagination. He lives in a world of “indemnity policies” and “negative equities” and “shadow cabinets”: things I had always assumed to be mind-picklingly officious. It turns out I might have been wrong. The field of insurance is as entertainingly grisly as a trip to the London Dungeon.

Come to think of it, the shadow cabinet sounds pretty spooky as well. Like something Lord Voldemort might be involved in.

“You hear about these kids,” he says, “who step on a jellyfish in Crete and spend the next forty years in a grubby Greek hospital, wriggling their eyebrows at nurses – once for yes, twice for no.”

After some more blood-curdling tales of potential holiday woe, my dad explains that my policy should include something called “repatriation”. Apparently, it is best to have a sort of escape plan built into your insurance policy: so that the company will charter a flight back to Old Blighty if you end up in a coma or a head in a jar.

“LastMinute.com isn’t much use if you’re in an Iron Lung in Baghdad with organ leggers asking suspicious questions about your teeth”, he warns me sagely.

I’m not going to Baghdad though. I’m going to nice places like Montreal, where there’s a really good socialist health service in place. A nice Canadian hospital is probably a good place to be in such an event. At least I wouldn’t have orange-skinned British nurses sponging me down with MRSA.

“And China? You don’t want to think about what you can catch in China. They invented SARS. And India? That’s where Delhi Belly comes from. And Poland? Whoa, Poland. Try pronouncing allergic to penicillin in that language.”

All this talk of jellyfish and eyebrows is putting me off going anywhere ever again. Who needs beaches and bad wax museums anyway? I might just stay at home.

“Home? Do you have any idea how many accidents happen in your own home? You’re scared of terrorism but you’ll twice as likely suffocate in your own bed.”

That’s it then. I’ll take one middleclass life of living in fear, sustantivo.

People sometimes ask me why I have such a stupid voice. “Why do you have such a stupid voice?” they ask. “Why, why, why, why, why?”

It is not an unreasonable question. My voice sounds like two Mancunian butchers trying to hold a conversation while crossing a corrugated bridge on a tandem. “Yah, yah, yah,” I say, “Blah, blur. Blur, bloh, Bleh?”

Arsevoiced and scatterfashion, my accent is untraceable and my odd turns of phrase have origins everywhere and nowhere. Some people suppose I am from Liverpool or thereabouts but they are as wrong as this analogy about a nailbomb in a crèche.

The explanation for this wonky bumvoice probably lies in a childhood spent watching American cartoons. I have always been especially prone to American colloquialisms and to Canadian raising. My old friend Bladders, a real television junky, was similarly afflicted. In fact, our entire education probably came from American cartoons and the way we speak is just the tip of the iceberg:

In the early 90s, the Wringham household didn’t have satellite television. Just the usual shitty four channels for us. When Channel Five became a reality, my sister and I would sit dot-eyed with anticipation in front of the promotional Spice Girls “Power of Five” place-holder that aired for weeks before Five began their actual broadcasting. We did this for hours.

Bladders, however, despite being as poor as a Dostoevsky protagonist at the end of a tax year and smelling constantly as if his pockets were filled to the brims with haunted yoghurt, had been mercifully blessed with an illegal cable package. He had the poker channels and the weird documentary channels and everything: he even knew the number of the channels you had to flick to in order to catch the 60-second porno previews at midnight. So whenever I could, I used to go over to Bladders’ house specifically to watch new American imports like The Simpsons.

Together he and I developed a love for the character Hans Moleman. We had both spotted him in the early days of the series. I didn’t know the character’s name but Bladders was under the impression that he was called “Edgar Allen Poe”.

The source of Bladders’ confusion lies in an episode in which Hans Moleman is seen pootling along in his new car only to be driven off the road into into the front of a roadside house, which then burns to the ground. A signpost outside the now-destroyed house reads “Birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe”. The joke, obviously, is that this old man has inadvertently destroyed a piece of irreplaceable American heritage, but the young Bladders believed that the comedy arose from Hans Moleman/Edgar Allen Poe driving into his own house.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t know who the real Edgar Allen Poe was at this age. This must seem strange to the American readers of this blog, but in England we are not taught about Poe at school. Here, we’re taught proper literature like Shakespeare and Dickens and that story about the prosperous dung beetle.

Yet the words “Edgar Allen Poe” did seem familiar already, so I had an inkling that maybe this Simpsons character was not so named.

Oddly enough, it was a Simpsons Halloween Special that taught me who Poe actually was. The education I received from American television shows may have been slow but it got there in the end.

The guy with whom I share some office space often leaves his “silver bullet” pen behind. Apparently capable of writing both underwater and in outerspace, the bullet is a very silly and ostentatious piece of stationery, resembling a Cyberman suppository.

Never having a pen myself, I inevitably make use of the silver bullet in Steve’s absence. I’ve probably saved about 0.3p on ink so far. That’s cash in the bank, that is.

About to leave a local cafe today, I see a slightly manic-looking lady struggling with the electric door from the other side. She is seemingly played by Michelle Gomez from Green Wing and her stressed demeanour suggests, “Let me in! The vein in my head has stopped throbbing, which means I need coffee!”

The door is one of those wheelchair-accessible doors that requires you to hit a wall-mounted pad upon approaching. It causes much confusion, as I’ve seen in the past, partly because the pad will be significantly behind you by the time you reach the door and partly because there is an eye-level sign reading “Automatic Door”, which it isn’t.

I hit the pad on my side of the door to let the helpless lady in. The kooky door opens outwards and the woman, not seeing how I’d achieved such a miracle from so far away, shoots me an expression of gratitude and amazement. To her, I am a magical door-opening shaman. With a big cock, probably.

Needless to say, I decide to milk this for a bit

By way of explaining my door-opening powers, I produce the silver bullet from my suit pocket. “It’s easy with a Sonic Screwdriver!” I say, waving it back and forth.

People often say I would make a good Doctor Who. These people are correct. I would spend my twelfth incarnation TARDISing around, rescuing people from confusing electric doors all over the universe.

Instead of the “Oh, you dashing cad!” I had both expected and deserved, the lady’s expression of amazement melts into one of loathsome pity. Perhaps she doesn’t understand. I wave the silver bullet around in the air a little bit more. “Sonic Screwdriver?”

Her look is one of positive revulsion. Reflected in her eyes is a contemptible nerd with a pen.

I decide not to say “Sonic Screwdriver” for a third time or drop into a Doctor Who-themed breakdance, instead silently returning the pen to my pocket and leaving.

From the very periphery of my vision, I saw someone sit down at the table next to mine.

Reading a book, I was only dimly aware of his presence at first, but it soon occurred to me that the man was staring into the side of my head, like an off-duty phrenologist who doesn’t believe in a work/life balance.

Too bashful (okay, frightened) to challenge his gaze immediately but too distracted to return to my book, I instead looked straight ahead for a second as if exchanging glances with the studio audience.

As I did so, I realised that the pub was relatively empty. He had selected the table next to mine above all the other tables to choose from. My one free moment in an otherwise hectic week was being tarnished by a staring nutter.

I decided to risk a glance in his direction. I did so with trepidation in case his eyes were mad, whirling pinwheels or ghoulish empty sockets in his head.

But no. Normal human eyes. And as I met his gaze, the man immediately stopped his staring and looked down into his pint instead. At least he wasn’t bonkers enough to think that staring at other people in such close proximity is normal behaviour. In fact, he didn’t look mad at all. He was a youngish man, conservatively dressed and drinking a pint of Ruddles County Ale.

A mad person wouldn’t drink Ruddles would he? Yet he had sat down next to me in an otherwise quiet pub and he had definitely been staring. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and return to my book.

But I couldn’t. I soon felt the tractor-beam tug of his horrible eyes.

Reading Dostoevsky while suspecting being stared at is like trying to urinate in the presence of an expectantly blinking kitten. Despite conscious efforts, it is impossible to relax the correct muscles.

I looked up at him again and he quickly returned his attention to the froth of his Ruddles. It was becoming a fairly silly game.

As if God in his Heaven was tiring of this silly game and had decided to throw in a plot device, I suddenly needed the toilet. I didn’t want to take my coat and bag with me and I had half a pint of my own Ruddles left to enjoy.

I decided to put the man’s staring powers to good use.

“Would you watch my pint while I go to the bathroom, mate?”

He responded with a cordial and perfectly un-insane affirmative gesture. Excellent. A good leader recognises the special skills of his followers and this man was good at staring. He could look at my things and prevent them from being captured by crows while I was micturating.

Upon returning, I was dismayed to find that my pint had gone. The staring man had watched my pint very well. He had watched it disappear into the hands of the glass collector.

I shot the man a “WTF” expression but he seemed too distracted to notice.

“Yes!” he said suddenly. I followed his gaze to a television screen mounted on the wall above my table, upon which a phosphurdot footballer was celebrating his goal.

The mad staring-eyes man had not been looking at me at all. He’d been looking at the screen above my head.

I had deduced from their behaviour that adults desired two things: money and small reusable bags.

One type of small reusable bag was the sort of airtight plastic bag in which you might store an uneaten sandwich in the refrigerator. This type of bag was not simply reusable but resealable, potentially making it the ultimate in small reusable bag technology.

Another sort of small reusable bag was the type of bag the bank might give you if you were to withdraw some money in the form of coins. The bag could hold £20 worth of pound coins, £40 worth of 50p coins and so on.

The sharp-minded among you will notice that this item combines the two main adult desires: small reusable bags and money. For this reason, these small reusable bags must be handled very carefully. If you were to use one to carry a mixture of pound coins and fifty-pence coins instead of the correct denomination/value, the bank would have to call the police and mummy and daddy would spend a night in the cells. Needless to say, this type of small reusable bag must always be taken very, very seriously.

The importance of small reusable bags is demonstrated in the following adventure:

At my primary school, there was a strange fad for collecting the springs from ballpoint pens. It seems curious now, but no more curious than the adult currency of small reusable bags. If there is enough room in the world for both the Sterling Pound and the American Dollar, there is surely also enough for small reusable bags and the springs from ballpoint pens.

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too hard but my collection of springs from ballpoint pens was of a championship level. It was the second best in the whole class, second only to the collection of Christopher Quigley whose access to his father’s Parker Pen cabinet was quite an advantage.

I kept my springs from ballpoint pens inside my lifting lid desk but one day I decided to take them home, perhaps to show to my family in a springs-from-ballpoint-pens cabaret show. Since I had no container in which to transport them, I borrowed a small reusable bag from none other than spring connoisseur Christopher Quigley. He generously emptied 75p (a combination of twenty, ten and five-pence pieces: something I would eventually learn was highly inappropriate use of such a bag) into his desk and allowed me to borrow the bag for the evening.

The next day, perhaps drunk on the success of my springs from ballpoint pens orchestra, I returned to school without Christopher’s small reusable bag. It had completely slipped my childish mind.

When Christopher’s 75p went missing from his desk, an enquiry was launched.

The 75p had been prey to an unscrupulous classmate who had recognised the opportunity to strike. Without the small reusable bag to protect it, the 75p was ripe for the picking.

“You mustn’t take other people’s money bags,” the teacher told me firmly. I was beginning to think he had misunderstood the situation and that he was of the opinion that I had stolen the money. It soon became evident, however, that he was fully informed of the situation and it was the theft of the bag which irked him more than anything.

The shame I felt was immense. “You mustn’t take other people’s money bags” sounded as though I had conducted a proper robbery. Only now did I fully appreciate the importance invested by adults upon small reusable bags.

Now I’m adult myself, I don’t know what the fuss was about. I have a whole box of small reusable food bags in my kitchen and it cost me approximately 40p from the Supermarket. I’ve also discovered that small reusable money bags are available for free from the bank. You only have to ask.

Depending on when you asked, his family had either died in a cult suicide or had been poisoned by exposure to radioactive material. On another occasion, they had been murdered by an angry milkman.

Whatever happened to Bladders’ family, he now lived with his uncle in a damp-smelling semi-detached house. They lived in squalor. I once saw a pint glass filled with Branton Pickle on the side of the bathtub. When I asked him about it he denied that it was Branston Pickle. Apparently it was sweetcorn niblets and Marmite.

On another occasion, I was confronted by a perfectly intact turd the size of a swamp adder in the toilet bowl. As the toilet didn’t seem to be working and I had to pee pretty bad, I was forced to hold my breath and close my eyes and tell myself that I wasn’t urinating onto some dark god from H. P. Lovecraft.

I once noticed that a panel was missing from the window by the front door and that there was dried blood on the sill. Bladders explained that a passing carnival freak had broken the window in the night, but it was plain even to my eleven-year-old self that his uncle had come home drunk, without a key and had punched a hole in the glass to open the door from the inside.

By most social conventions, I shouldn’t really have spent so much time with Bladders. He was unkempt, was probably abused by his alcoholic uncle, was two years older than me, smelled like something from Jeffrey Dahmer’s kitchenette and would concoct increasingly bizarre legends about his possibly-dead/possibly-living-in-Wolverhampton family. One Sunday morning, I found him drinking fortified wine from an egg cup. Laughing.

Given all this, why were we friends? I think our initial bond had happened when he asked me in the school playground if I liked football. I’d never been asked before: at the Dudley School for Young Cannonfodder, it was taken for granted that all boys liked football and that they would support either the Wolverhampton Wonderers or West Bromwich Albion. I told Bladders that I did not like football. “Good,” he said conspiratorially, “Me neither”.

We also shared superficial but locally unusual tastes. And so our relationship mostly revolved around quoting Monty Python (“Run Away! Run Away!”), The Fast Show (“A little bit whoooa, a little bit weeee!”) and Winding up Nathan (“You call that an Omelet?”).

He was a huge Star Trek fan and his bedroom was a shrine to his favourite television show. He didn’t have any money so he didn’t have much in the way of the videos or toys (though I do remember a cool transporter unit, in which you could place a character’s action figure and “beam him up” using a light-and-mirrors mechanism) so instead, he had covered the walls and ceiling of his room with Star Trek-related cuttings from the Radio Times.

I realise now that such behaviour is borderline psychotic. It is even akin to the behaviour of Eugene Tooms on The X Files, who would make nests out of newspaper and bile: a practice I believe is still popular with members of the Conservative Party.

At the time, however, I found such creativity the very height of it all and it wasn’t long until I’d made my own bedroom nest of TV-related cuttings and junk. In fact, I’m still finding bits of stuff around my parents’ house, almost fifteen years later.

I’m writing about Bladders because today, I found a photograph of me and Bladders, arms around each other and grinning like loons. We were wearing his homemade Starfleet uniforms (red ones, for Engineering and Security guys) and on the reverse of the photo, my handwriting says, “Best of Friends! 1995”.

We truly were the best of friends! I scanned my memory for suggestions of why we ever fell out. There was the time Bladders got carried away in a tickling match and I’d fallen halfway down the stairs. But that wasn’t it. There was also a time when he said he “kept me around” because I was “funny looking”, which I remember being hurt by but had not mulched our friendship.

About two years after the “Best of friends! 1995” photograph was taken, Bladders made a move on one of my girlfriends. In return, I gave him a fat lip and we never spoke again. Dick.

Applying for immigration into another country is the bureaucratic equivalent of surrendering your bum for scrutiny by stormtroopers. Officiously they would examine the wrinkles of your poop hatch with a jeweller’s eyeglass, checking for traces of mortal turpitude with the careful precision of Dr. David Banner putting the finishing touches on a ship in a bottle.

It’s invasive, is basically what I’m saying.

Worryingly, this analogy may not even be an analogy. Once the paperwork part of my application is over, I’ll have to undergo a very real medical examination. I don’t know how intimate this procedure will be, but if it’s anything like the rest of the process it will probably be cellular.

Strewn across my desk today is my life-so-far in paperwork: birth certificate, passport, career history, school reports, travel history, financial details, Pog collection.

My favourite archival document so far is my birth certificate. What is this document actually for? Do I really need paper to demonstrate that I was born? The facts that I can play the saxophone and I’m not a zygote should be enough, no?

To the minimalist, the birth certificate is a vexing problem: get rid of all other Earthly possessions but you’ll still have this piece of paper – your oldest possession – to carry around. Cursed with ownership as soon as we plop out of our mums. It’s like the story of the bloke who almost succeeded in eating an entire airplane only to be stumped eventually by the indestructible – and indigestible – black box recorder.

Each significant stage of life generates admin. I hope I never die: the paperwork would be a nightmare.

Another thing I have to do is call on all of my past bosses to concoct an ‘attestation of employment’. So far, the process of acquiring such documents has gone like this:

Boss: Hello, Tastychickenbucket. How can we meet your poultry needs?
Me: Hi, Boss! It’s Rob!
Boss: Who?
Me: Robert Wringham, Boss! I used to extract the crud from the chickens so that the kitchen boys didn’t get covered in crud. Remember? The crud?
Boss: Well, well. Look who came crawling back. Couldn’t find your way in the crud industry?
Me: No, I’m not in the crud-extraction business any more. I’m a semi-successful writer and comedian. But I want to emigrate, you see, and I need an attestation document to… hello?… Boss? Hello?

The volume of data accrued about our lives is incredible: my school, for example, has recorded every last exam I sat, every forgotten module, every inconsequential PE lesson, merit award, every afterschool activity. It’s all there, documented in cold, hard ink, available at a phonecall.

Savings, outgoings, National Insurance contributions, medical history, allergies, family history, personal skills: every last element of life needs to be handed over to the authorities.

Like divining for clues about the future from the patterns in some tea, I wonder how much about a person’s character the authorities can derive from all this arse-gazing. Does my C in a French exam say much about my character? Will my afterschool badminton club woo them into allowing me over? Will my traces of Jewish DNA be a help or a hindrance? I don’t know what sort of racists they are!

In The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan famously shouts, “I’m not a number! I’m a free man!” The idea of a man being reduced to numbers seems frankly Utopian today, as I’m confronted with my own bodyweight in paperwork. Can’t there be some sort of Orwellian ID card from which they can determine everything? That would be brilliant. The government should look into that.

“I’m going to fix myself a nice, hot cup of coffee,” I snicker childishly, “Would anyone else like one? Coffee is so tasty and warm and it’s such a pick me up on a chilly winter’s day.”

This was the Mormons’ fourth missionary visit to our flat. I had made a point of testing their faith whenever they came over. I’d start by offering them hard liquor and continue by asking moronic questions about their afterlife: apparently Dr Banner would be welcome in the Celestial Kingdom but the Hulk would have to be left at home.

Their first visit had been in my absence when flatmate, Spoons, who has a uncomplicated mind, had been coerced into letting them in. To this day I wonder what they had told him via the entry phone. Apparently their religion invests in them Derrn Brown-like powers of persuasion and even picking up the phone to them was like looking into the eyes of the gorgon.

Bashfully, Spoons had told me of the Mormons’ first visit. Still more bashfully, he told me that they would join us every Wednesday evening until (a) we were converted or (b) they were converted. One second they had been wondering freaks taking pause on the doormat, the next they had become regular parts of our lives.

“What were you thinking, Spoons?” I ask, appealing to what approaches reason in him, “You’re a Catholic! Your god must be spinning in his grave.”

Spoons assured me that the Mormons’ regular attempts at conversion would be a good test of his Catholicism and my Atheism and besides, the Mormons were all women and they were really, really, hot.

“Hot Mormon women?”

“Yeah,” said Spoons, crossing his heart and hoping to die, sticking a needle in his eye, “One of them looked like Gillian Anderson. She was stunning”.

Four visits later, I have still not seen the Mormon that looks like Gillian Anderson. Either the Mormons save their best-looking Missionaries for inaugural visits or Spoons had lied to placate me.

The three women who regularly visited us, while not bad looking, had impossible-to-offend, glazed-over demeanours as though their souls had been laminated. They wore the same facial expression chosen by Cliff Richard an a few of the more attractive Autons. One of them, Sister Audrey, had a slightly squiffy eye and would often go on hysterical tangents about how great Joseph Smith was and she would have to be reigned in by the other two: Sister Winnie and Sister Kate. Yes, Sister Audrey was the hottest. If they were to convert me, Sister Audrey would surely be my Fanny Alger.

I had initially decided to sit out of their conversations with Spoons, opting instead to sit on the other side of the room, smoking cigars and drinking coffee and masturbating. The Mormons did not respond to this no matter how loudly I coughed to get their attention.

I don’t know if it was their Derren Brown Powers or if it had something to do with Sister Audrey’s squiffy eye, but as I earwigged their conversations, it became all too tempting to join in.

The ‘lesson’ I remember most fondly is the one about the various levels of Mormon afterlife. I remember them saying there is no Hell to worry about but there are levels of Heaven called ‘Degrees of Glory’. After you die, you become a ghost. The quality of your hauntings are judged by someone and then you are allowed into one of three classes of heaven.

The best class of heaven is called the Celestial Kingdom. They have everything there: extra legroom and sexier stewardesses. Your meals are all-inclusive and the toilets are clean. The two ‘coach’ classes of heaven, behind the curtain, are certainly not bad but if you’re in one of them you probably can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if only you had been a better ghost.

Sister Audrey explained the three classes of heaven as three stars in the night sky, the Celestial Kingdom being the most brightly-burning. This metaphor confused me for ages: I genuinely thought for a number of weeks that Mormon heaven was a physical place in outer space, like something a Scientologist might believe. Interestingly, I find this less mad. I think L. Ron Hubbard would kick Joseph Smith’s ass in a fight.

I’ve since discovered that Mormon ghosts do not fly off into outer space. I have also discovered that the Sisters lied about there being no hell: the lower class of heaven – the Telestial Kingdom – is indeed a shithole for cunts.

As the weeks passed, I asked Spoons how the hell we were going to get rid of the Sisters.

“The same way I get rid of anyone I don’t like,” said Spoons, “I wait until one of us dies”.

Even then, I protested, you would not be free. You’d probably end up sitting next to one of them in the Celestial Kingdom.

“Robert, I doubt you’d end up in the Celestial Kingdom,” said Spoons.

He is wrong. I’l be there. Life is cruel that way.

In the end, Spoons and I did a far more heroic thing than wait for death. We eventually moved house.

“Coffee is so tasty and warm and it’s such a pick me up on a chilly winter’s day,” I say to the Mormons on that fourth visit, “Oh! But Mormons can’t have stimulants. How silly of me, I’m sorry. Slurp, yum”.

“Actually,” said Sister Kate, “We only abstain while we’re on Missionary duties.”

I’ve since discovered that is a lie too. Those lying Mormons. If there is one thing I learned from their lessons, it is where liars go when they die. Burn in Narnia, you not-bad-looking lunatics.

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).