The Occasional Papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I see.”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, I could drive you!”

“Oh! What luck!”

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

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

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

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

I’ve never mentally murdered anyone so brutally.

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

Does anyone know when they come to collect the bins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poor Claudette. She got such a Madamming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, composing himself for maximum vicarage.

“…cooperation.”

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

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

North Americans are awfully squeamish about maggots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tongue heat! Tongue heat was the winning variable!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“WHAT ABOUT HONEY?!” he comes back.

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

That got him.

“UM. OKAY THEN. CARRY ON.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” I squeak.

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

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

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

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

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

It is mainly used in moments that witness human ingenuity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s dangerous!” she definitely said.

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

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

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

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

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

My girlfriend mulled over the story.

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

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

It’s been a while since I wrote in my diary, dear reader, but I’ve been thoroughly occupied with my new hobby: psychic air traffic control for flies.

When a fly comes in through the window, I use my mind to take control of him. Nothing malicious. I simply extend my mind out to catch the fly and whiz him around the room a couple of times before slingshotting him safely out of the window.

Sometimes, if it strikes me to do so, I take him right up to the window but just before letting him leave, I’ll whiz him back into the room at an unpredictably bizarre angle, give him a lap of the bathroom or something and finally pop him out into the garden.

Sometimes I might make him pause on the skin of an apple. Sometimes on the toe of my slippers. Other times, I might let him rest upon the spine of a book about Norman Lamont. But every time, I make sure he leaves unharmed through the window.

I do not mean to suggest that bluebottles or other airborne creatures – gnats or bumble bees, for instance – need an air traffic control system. I do not maintain pretensions of public service or anything like that. Our winged pals are capable of flying around in the garden with minimal assistance and their flight paths do not impact upon the correct rotation of the Earth. It is just a little hobby I have. It is a way to idly pass the hours while exercising the psychic parts of my brain.

“He’s gone bananas,” you’re thinking. But don’t worry. What I do isn’t telekinesis or anything like that. Hahaha. The very thought. What I do is more like persuasion.

The bluebottle comes in through the window. I put my book to one side, get inside his mind and when he takes an unpredictable turn, I know it is through my subtle, psychic gestures that he does so.

When I return to my own mind, all is as normal. Except that I sometimes have a craving for some turds.

At the end of our little dance, the bluebottle is returned to the garden none the wiser.

I do wonder though, if somewhere down the line, the bluebottle will wake in the dead of night after a repressed memory dream. He will have a hankering for cheese on toast, the sweet memory of holding hands with Hannah Fellows near the teeter-tots in the school playground, and the vague recollection that he may once have missed the 18:26 train to Luton after falling asleep in the station.

And then he’ll go buzzing off into the world, to fill a discarded dog turd with thousands of tiny eggs, each egg spawning a tiny baby bluebottle WITH THE FACE OF YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR.

🪰

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

“Minimalism”, I once wrote in these very pages, “is anorexia projected outwards”. This suspicion that my ongoing dedication to asceticism might be a mental illness was further demonstrated this week.

“It’s pathological!” my girlfriend teases me after I decline a carrier bag at the pharmacy. As a result of doing so, I had been forced to walk around the rest of the shops with a box of condoms and a roll-on deodorant, repeatedly showing the receipt to security guards to demonstrate that I’d bought the goods elsewhere.

“Don’t you see? When your minimalism interferes with day-to-day activities, you’ve got a problem,” she said.

I refuted this because, to me, the mild inconvenience of walking around with a box of johnnies and a niff stick™ was preferable to the burden of being responsible for another fucking carrier bag. But was this the skewed perspective of a mentally unstable individual?

Later in the week, we went for dinner with our friend Shanti. Somehow we’d gotten onto the subject of whether or not you’re supposed to jam your wallet into the mouth of someone suffering an epileptic fit.

“That’s not for fits,” someone pointed out, “You’re thinking of spoons. You have to put a spoon in their mouth to stop them from swallowing their tongue. You do the wallet trick if you need to snap a broken bone back into position. They bight down on it to distract from the pain.”

I love discussing the strange idea that shoving a spoon into the mouth of an epileptic is supposed to be useful. Imagine recovering from a horrible fit only to find that someone had placed a spoon in your mouth. “What’s this?” you’d ask. “Oh, you know, it’s a spoon,” a well-meaning stranger would reply. And you’d say, “Right.”

I also like the idea that you might have to do the wallet trick one day only to enrage the patient who, a lifelong vegan, becomes offended that you’d forced a piece of cowhide into their gob.

On this occasion, however, I didn’t wax lyrical on the epileptic/spoon myth or the sudden idea of snapping the bone back into place in an angry vegan. Instead, I got my wallet out.

“My wallet wouldn’t be much use there!” I bragged, “It’s about as thick as a beermat.”

I never miss an opportunity to brag about the slenderness of my wallet. To the dedicated minimalist, a slim wallet acts as a sort of talisman: a symbol of minimalism carried around at all times. So proud am I of my super-slim wallet, I actually like to get it out and demonstrate the contents at dinner parties, much as I was doing now, oblivious to the fact that nobody is really interested. The way I see it though, is that since I’ll never have children, I should be able to use the time normally allotted to showing photographs of my children in any way I like. People at dinner parties have no choice but to listen.

“Look, here are my cash cards, a health insurance card, a few bank notes, my casino membership card, my press ID card AND THAT’S ALL,” I conclude proudly. “No receipts, no business cards, no loyalty cards, no photographs of my mewling spawn. Just the essentials.”

Our friend, to her credit, seemed genuinely impressed.

Upon demonstrating the handful of essential plastic cards, I saw that my library card from Glasgow was still in there. I have no plans to go back to a Glaswegian public library and by the time I’m in one again the card would have surely expired. I had a rare opportunity to permanently remove something from my wallet.

Naturally, I made a big show of this by removing the card and stuffing it ceremonially into the milk jug.

My girlfriend, presumably recognising the signs of my “pathological” malaise, extracted the from the milk jug, cleaned it off and popped it into her handbag.

At first I shrugged this off. If she wanted to harbour this burden out of the extreme off-chance that we’ll want to borrow something from a Glaswegian library, she was welcome to do so. But now it’s slightly starting to bother me that the card continues to exist in my material sphere. I don’t want it any more! The fact that it exists outside of a garbage can is starting to pull at my attention. Even though my girlfriend has ostensibly taken responsibility for it, I still know that it’s there and still mentally account for it.

The worst thing about all this is that I can’t possibly tell my girlfriend about this and ask her to throw it away because then she’ll have the final confirmation that I’m mental.

Suicide is the only way out of this.

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”.