A Bond woman playing the hurdy-gurdy
Including a joke about a king, an anecdote about a slide and a thought about a cat
Hello. It is February 2025. This is the twenty-sixth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of INTELLECT and HILARITY by me, chilly-eared author Mike Rampton.
NEW BOOK NEWS: Become A Genius In A Year, written by me and illustrated by Gareth Williams, will be out on May 22nd from HarperCollins Children’s Books and is available for preorder from the bad, bad website. It’s a kids’ bumper book of fun stuff to know, in the tradition of things I grew up reading like The Whizzkids’ Handbook, but with more animals and space stuff. Loads of fun! Plus, the little brains on the Genius-O-Meter were my daughter’s idea, so well done her!
These two fun little ones for the Big Cat reading scheme also came out the other week, and are hopefully already in some schools and libraries.
And, just to toot my own horn further — nobody else is going to toot it, I keep asking them to and they simply won’t — There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question is now Nosy Crow’s most translated non-fiction title ever, with 21 languages and counting, plus an American edition coming in October. That’s really exciting. TOOT MY HORN.
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“When they see me with the star of Nosferatu, everyone without pants on will stop in their tracks.”
“Nicholas Hoult?”
“That’s exactly what they’ll come to, yes, when they see me with Bill Skarsgård.”
2
“I’m a hands-off investor in a new project with Penn from Penn & Teller.”
“Silent partner?”
“No, the big loud one.”
3
The most agreeable British king was William the Concurrer.
I went down a water slide a few weeks ago and hit my head really hard. That happened to me once before. In 2006, the artist Carsten Höller installed a series of slides in the Tate Modern. I went to have go on them with a friend. We queued up, and he slid down, slightly knocking his head as he did so with a light ‘spang!’ I turned around and said, to the whole queue behind me, “Ha! What an idiot!”
Then I got on the slide and hit my head so, so hard. Way harder than he had, sending a giant cranial clang echoing through the Turbine Hall. I slid down the slide all disoriented and inelegant and sore, laughing in agony at my own clumsiness, and tumbled out at the bottom, slumping on the ground, clutching my head and stammer-shouting “ARGH, OH NO, I HIT MY HEAD ON THE SLIDE”. I looked up and realised I was lying at the feet of Die Another Day star Rosamund Pike.
I’ve not seen all of the James Bond films, but I don’t think he introduces himself to any of the Bond girls — or as I call them, Bond women — by rolling around on the floor next to a slide he’s biffed his noggin on, wearing an ill-fitting t-shirt with a picture of a robot and several ice-cream stains on, sounding a bit like he’s crying. Perhaps one to consider — your move, Hollywood!
Here is a thing I wrote for Starling Bank about winning a small sum on a quiz show. In an ideal world it would tie elegantly into the preceding paragraph, but we don’t live in one.
4
“I'm affixing a bust of my favourite Royal to the wall, and need a screwdriver.”
“Phillips-head?”
“No, it's a model of Richard III. I need a flat-head screwdriver. For the affixing.”
5
“I travelled into town to see a sculpture of a notable person's head and shoulders.”
“Bust?”
“No, I drove, the public transport around here is woefully underfunded.”
6
“A cat belonging to a famous TV presenter attacked my private parts, dude.”
“Clawed your winkle, man?”
“No, it was Holly Willoughby who owned the cat that bit my penis, mate.”
People are always talking about A.I. these days. I was on a bus recently and an old man sat down next to me and said, "A.I. sat on my testicles," and started to cry. Makes you think.
I’m out of a lot of loops — I live in a small village, work from home and primarily talk to a seven-year-old. I don’t know about the hot new trends affecting cool urbanites. But yesterday my daughter told me her classroom was haunted, and that you could see the ghosts hovering around the clock on the wall. Obviously we’re going to design a trap in order to remove the ghosts from school and release them safely elsewhere, but this isn’t a cool trendy thing to write about. How can I capture the zeitgeist while ensnaring a time-ghost?
(I’ve written those last few sentences about twelve times because I can’t quite make it all make sense, but there is an absolutely ingenious joke buried in there somewhere given that — I think — “capturing the zeitgeist” and “ensnaring the time-ghost” mean the same thing. It needs work, but you know what? So do I!)
There’s a constant battle between quite enjoying being out of the loop and panicking that I need to be in the loop so I can get work and my house isn’t taken away and inhumanely destroyed. I see headlines about awards ceremonies or festival lineups and generally don’t mind that I recognise hardly any of the names. But! One of my income streams has always been writing fun stuff about pop culture, and it’s impossible to do that if you don’t know who the hell anyone is, what’s going on, how anything works or why everyone looks so silly these days.
I used to get sent lots of press releases that let me feel like I vaguely knew what was going on, in rock music at least, but now I am, justifiably enough, off most of the lists. The one exception is, for some reason, the kind of weird European folk-metal band that wear tricorn hats and have about eight members, one of whom is really pretty and plays the hurdy-gurdy. I get sent, every day, about twelve press releases about these completely baffling and almost certainly terrible acts. I think I must have a name very similar to the editor of Hurdy-Gurdy Heavy Highwayman magazine.
I wrote a fun piece for Esquire this month about briefly feeling excited about a new thing taking place — in this instance, Bluey-themed LEGO. They, sensibly enough, opted to remove a lengthy passage about bottom cracks. One day someone will commission me to write 6,000 words about fathers’ bottom cracks — something I have given way too much thought to — and it’ll be incredible for absolutely everyone.
7
I've got some Chinese biscuits which can play Hot Cross Buns, Merrily We Roll Along, She Loves You and God Save The King. They are, of course, four tune cookies.
8
“I'll give you some of this delicious Malaysian fried rice if you tell me your favourite historical figure.”
“That nasi goreng?”
“What? Why do you like that guy? He was horrible!”
9
“I just told people about my new computer and they enthusiastically received the information.”
“Lapped up?”
“No, one of those ones that goes on a table.”
January in numbers: Joined a science museum. Bought a car. Fed some goats. Bought some discontinued lager for 36p per can. Saw a cat in the garden and considered saying, “LOOK, A CAT” but didn’t, then spent ages wondering about the idea that there are infinite universes and every possible decision gets played out in one, and how much difference there would be between the one where I said “LOOK, A CAT” and the one where I didn’t say “LOOK, A CAT” and didn’t reach any conclusions but ate a big bag of raisins and got a tummy ache, then wondered whether I wouldn’t have done that if I’d said “LOOK, A CAT”.
You know that famous quote, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”, said by Michael Corleone? “Just when I thought I was in, they pull me back out!” might be said by a rabbit belonging to a non-binary magician practicing the top hat trick. Full disclosure, I added the bit about the clock to the ghost thing to try and make that zeitgeist joke work — she just said there was an adult ghost and a child ghost, and the adult was mean while the child was nice, and they weren’t dead people, they’d been born as ghosts. I’ve not done much in January other than take that heavy blow to the head! Ha ha ha!
Buy my book / Pre-order my new book / PayPal me £5.30 for a pint of Kronenbourg / Follow me on Instagram / Enjoy my jokes on Blue Sky / Or just tell me I’m good!
Next issue: March 7th.
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CURRENTLY READING:
It’s Not All Doom And Gloom by Desiree O’Sunshine
What An Achievement by Yuri Lee Diddit
Mr Muscle by Dwayne Cleaner
I’m Hesitant To Name A La Liga Team by Ariel Madrid
This Whole Time by Orla Long