The Occasional Papers

A sign for an auction house promises “thousands of antiques” but it looks about thirty years old.

It’s either hubris (“our suppliers will never, ever let us down”) or defeatism (“no one will ever buy this shit.”)

I mention the eczema syncronicity to Samara.

“I was really going for it as well,” she says, “obliterating horseradish while cursing my enemies.”

Is that a tradition?

“Yes. I mean, not that I’ve heard of. But yes.”

I’m slowly but pleasurably editing Dickon Edwards’ Diary at the Centre of the Earth for print. You heard it here first.

I’m up to summer 2006 and Dickon is at Latitude Festival. “My feet are killing me.”

I was there for that!*

Truth be told, I remember being very excited by the prospect of meeting Dickon. On our way in to the festival, I spotted a ticket stub on the ground with the “Richard Edwards” and a London address printed on it. I wondered if it belonged to Dickon and I should retrieve it for him. I was with Neil though, who, better connected, knew it wasn’t the correct address and that the name was just coincidence. I was jumpy, looking for Dickon in all the wrong places.

I soon spot him in the comedy tent during Robin Ince’s Book Club, standing aloof and jotting feverishly. “I always carry a notebook,” he says somewhere in these Diaries. Even then, we don’t actually meet and I must wait a little longer.

When we finally cross paths in the mud, I’m lucky to be wearing my three-piece suit. “Well look at you,” says Dickon, seemingly impressed at my shambolic attempt at dandyism.

I go all shy.

Shortly after leaving Dickon, some teens ask for a selfie with me in my suit. It’s the sort of thing that more usually happens to Dickon than me. My teens are respectful. They say “It’s just not the sort of thing you expect to see at a festival.”

Later, backstage at the literary tent, I’m annoyed when Neil doesn’t introduce me to Martin White properly, or indeed at all. It’s a bad habit he has, which he would repeat years later when we meet Momus at the Glad Cafe in Glasgow. As it happens, I’m friends with Momus now, but in 2006* I lacked the confidence for a more assertive hello to Martin. As such, Martin spends the rest of the night wondering who I am and why I’m trailing him and his friends around the field.

When I try to break away from the group on pretence of seeing an unadvertised Buzzcocks performance in the woods, Neil challenges me to “name three Buzzcocks songs,” revealing that I can’t and that I’m making excuses. I trudge on, a despised junior, an outsider to the outsiders. Gervais kicks Ince, Ince kicks White, White does his best to ignore me.

I should have found Dickon’s “Well look at you” more nourishing at the time. It was perfect. Not too much, not too little. Exactly what I must have been looking for when putting on my suit in the first place. Thank you, Dickon. It took me almost 20 years to realise you made my day, but you did.

*Correction: Neil and I were at Latitude 2008, not 2006. I am an unstuck-in-time idiot.

Samara’s been running a blog since the start of the year, in semi-secret. She’s finally allowed me to mention it in public.

It’s called “Monster of the Week” (after the TV trope beginning with The X-Files) and its literally that. Every Thursday at 3pm, she’ll post a picture she’s drawn of a famous monster.

Highlights so far include the Cyclops from Jason and the Argonauts, the Bride of Frankenstein, Undersea Gal from The Nightmare Before Christmas (pictured above) and “dank and vile” Armus from Star Trek.

It’s great that she’s been quietly beavering away at this. Now, after a few months, the blog feels populated, towards encyclopaedic.

There are some real deep dives in there. Fiendish Feet yoghurts anyone? And what about Gritty, the mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers?

Each monster, if you give them a click, comes with an out-of-context description cribbed from Wikipedia or similar, usually with some entertaining links. The aforementioned Gritty’s description comes from a Philadelphia city council formal document in which they declare him “a fuzzy Eldrich horror.”

Awake late, my blurry eye is drawn to an illuminated window on the other side of the street.

What I take at first to be a man in a Star Wars mask with his dick out is just a laundry bag hanging on the back of a door.

I feel the pang of disapointment, but I also think “well, so what if it was?”

And that’s the sad thing.

Would I really not be delighted to have glimpsed such an odd thing so seredipitously? Would I not have been pleased as punch to have won such a lottery?

Am I become jaded?

Healthfucked, I’ve not been doing much of late. I mope mostly.

There’s a YouTube series I’ve taken to watching, about a couple who’ve escaped the inhospitable London “rental market” in favour of cruising around the country by narrowboat.

It consists mostly of idyllic b-roll of sleepy fields and ducks a-dabbling, but sometimes they moor up in one of those city centre waterfronts surrounded by All Bar Ones. When this happens, our heroes indulge in “porthole cinema,” watching the Muggles scatter back and forth between lunch engagements.

If that’s ever us, I vow, let’s make sure our sex time coincides with business lunch and that the salad eaters can see our bottoms going up and down through the porthole. Just perfectly aligned.

AJ sends me this picture he’s seen online because it looks like the character from my novel, especially in the book’s second act.

“The dude,” says a comment, “looks unbothered, moisturized, happy, in his lane. Thriving.”

“hot” says another.

“+1 on that dude,” says a third, “like, goddamn, hot.”

They’re not wrong. The artwork is a self portrait, so the praise leaves the artist blushing. The thread is nothing but a delight.

As it happens, Mac, the my novel’s cover artist based the canonical Mister Bob on himself too.

The overwhelming reaction to this artist’s sexiness made me think of that crappy review someone left about the book. How could anyone not love Mister Bob? Look at him. Clearly they didn’t stick around for the arc.

“Shimmering” is the word I used in the book trailer. Mister Bob is shimmering.

I’ve been expecting a delivery of nice envelopes, so I can improve my posting-things game. It’s all go around here.

I thought they came today, but when I tore into the packet a bra came out.

I’d opened my wife’s mail by mistake.

Ordering bras on the internet though. What a pervert she is.

Meanwhile, at the Idler website…

“It’s drugs and bubble gum for me till July, says Robert Wringham.”

The Good Life for Wage Slaves is also their Book of the Week, and I’ll be doing a live “in conversation” on Zoom with Tom Hodgkinson on Thursday 16th. It’s practically a takeover.

Young people are so charmingly earnest.

I was watching Buffy last night with some new friends who are a bit younger than me. It was the musical episode.

I like the bit where Anya sings about bunnies, so I joined in:

🎵 They aren’t just cute
Like everybody supposes
They got them hoppy legs
And twitchy little noses
And what’s with all the carrots?
What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
Bunnies, bunnies,
it must be bunnies!! 🎵

I hadn’t been singing along until that point, so the suddenness of my 30-second rock ballad must have seemed like Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot.

Friends my own age would have either laughed sarcastically or thumped me into jam, but the younglings said “wow, yeah, great singing voice,” and (I kid you not) “wow, thank you for that.”

Ridiculous.

And yet, I feel really good about myself now. I left the party feeling like I really might be the next Celine Dion.

The judgy young host of an interior design channel: “the previous owner lived here for eighty years and they smoked throughout.”

Yes, terrible. And yet my prevailing thought is: people used to have such wonderful, wonderful, wonderful lives!

Samara is drawing a penanggalan, a flying human head with guts hanging out of the neck hole.

“I can’t get the nose right,” she says.

Samara: what’s in the laundy?

Me: the laundry.

This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called Hypocrite Minimalist.

Object Number 4 in our inventory is a velvet jacket.

Full article here.

Samara’s mum reads Internet funnies to us as we watch the hockey.

“You got the dough,” she says, “We got the ho.” It’s the sign on a whorehouse door.

Well, I can do better than that, I think.

“You got the scratch,” I say brightly, “We got the snatch.”

I worry I’ve gone too far, but I’m disappointed by the positive and unscandalised reaction.

So here’s another one in case she’s reading:

You bring the green, we’ll bring the pink.

Doesn’t even have to rhyme. The secret is being vile.

Reunited with family in Montreal, a younger sister-in-law helps to juggle our schedule. It’s important to see everyone.

“The only way to do it all,” she says, “is a triple header.”

“I’m 42, Lisa,” I moan, “I can’t do triple headers any more.”

And we all laugh because I am old now.

Once the hilarity has died down after a full twenty minutes or so, I realise I’ve misunderstood. By “triple header,” she meant three parties over three nights.

I thought she meant three parties in a day.

God, I’m smashing.

I didn’t let on about the confusion though, in case it looked “old” baffled.

Spite is an underappreciated energy resource. It’s infinitely renewable.

A final act of spite, I’ve been thinking, might be to leave my organs to a local dogs’ home.

My wife — she knows about these things — tells me that would not be legal.

Could I leave my body to a cannibal?

“No,” she says.

You can legally put these things in your will if you want to, but anyone acting on such a beautiful bequest would be face criminal prosecution.

“Only technically,” I protest.

“Only actually,” she says.

Back to the drawing board then. The drawing board of spite.

Sometimes, I have an idea that will only ever amuse myself.

Overhearing the word “Argentina” this morning put me in the mood to sing “Don’t Cry for me Agentina” from Evita. It quickly became an earworm and, by the afternoon for some reason, I’d semi-consciously changed “Argentina” in the song to “Wolverhampton.”

Soon, I imagined a Wringham & Godsil live show in Wolverhampton, in which I slag off the Midlands for an hour — hopefully being booed and heckled the whole time — while Dan defends it. At the end, I tear off my suit to reveal a Wolves strip and sing my breakout song.

All I have to do to make this happen is convince Dan to come out of his well-deserved retirement from showbiz, build up enough of an audience in the Midlands for us to sell more than half a room, find a way not to throw up when debasing my body with sportswear, and learn (a) the lyrics and (b) to sing.

Other than that, it’s an obvious goer.