Chundering up croissants on the Palaeolithic log flume
including several reminders than I have a book out this month and a great joke about a detective that doesn't work out loud
Hello. It is October 2024. This is the twenty-second monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of ha-ha-ha-ha-larious jokes and blah-blah-blah-blatherings about work written by me, inconsistently excited writer Mike Rampton.
A REMINDER OF BIG IMPORT: There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question, written by me and illustrated by Guilherme Karsten, is out on October 10th from Nosy Crow and the University of Cambridge. It is available from Amazon, and less cheaply but probably betterly (I am a professional writer) on Bookshop.org, Waterstones and more. Tell your friends! I’ve told both of mine repeatedly and they’re frankly over it.
Here’s an extract of it. It’s good! I read a bunch of it out loud recording some promo things and genuinely enjoyed it, which I didn’t necessarily expect. I got a heavy box in the post the other day containing two copies of it in Dutch, South American Spanish*, Italian and Bulgarian. It was really exciting, and hammered home the ambition the publishers have, and the huge global reach of the University of Cambridge name. But now I’m not sure what to do with them. Make some Bulgarian friends between now and Christmas I guess?
It’s also been sold in Basque, traditional Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Greek, Slovak and the Spanish they speak in Spain, so all the money I make from it is going to go on shelving.
(*I think, but am less than 100% certain, that there are slight linguistic differences between the Spanish spoken in Spain and that spoken in South America — like those between the UK and US I suppose. It’s interesting! I love stuff like this!)
Actually I said to someone the other day, “I’m going to wallow in the glory of my book being translated into a language spoken in the Pyrenees.”
They said, “Basque?”
I said, “Yes, that is what I’m going to do in the glory of my book being translated into Castilian Spanish.”
1
After years and years of looking after a vampire in its non-human form, it is time for me to abdicate my responsibility and let someone else take over. I’m passing the bat on.
2
“Someone’s trying to persuade me to give them money in exchange for a truly enormous amount of an organic compound that the human digestive system can’t handle.”
“Sell you loads?”
“That’s the stuff.”
3
“Let’s write down everything we know about the sharply tapered ends of kinetic projectiles.”
“Bullet points?”
“Sure, or a numbered list.”
Did some fun stuff in September, but the most fun was visiting Wicksteed Park, a Victorian-built theme park just outside Kettering. It’s only got about ten rides, but on the other hand, it only had about thirty visitors, so my daughter and I got to go on everything we wanted to go on as many times as we liked. There’s a log flume ride there that has absolutely nothing to it — it’s a boat at the top of a slope, and you get in it, slide down and get pulled up again. It’s the old park’s oldest ride, and if you queued up for it you’d feel absolutely ripped off. If you get to just sit on it and make the guy pull you up and drop you twelve times on the trot though, it’s fantastic. I am not as physically robust as once I was, so going on some of the more stomach-churny ones repeatedly left me feeling extremely sick. To feel that sick in Disneyland would have involved far more queuing and expense, so when I briefly thought I might chunder in a bin, I also felt like I was getting a really great deal and having a lot of fun.
We listened to a genuinely awful playlist on the way back, of pop-punk bands covering Disney songs (it was clear a few minutes in that it sucked, but I am not good enough at driving to change the music once we’re moving). There’s a bit in the song Part Of Your World from The Little Mermaid where Ariel sings, “I wanna be where the people are / I wanna see, wanna see them dancing / Walking around on those —what do you call them? — feet” that, perhaps due to having spent the day being flung around, I spent far too long thinking about. Ariel is fascinated by humans and collects anything of theirs that she can, maintaining a kind of museum/shrine to their antics, and yet she struggles to remember the word “feet”. I am, at best, ambivalent about horses. I don’t have to reach and flail at all when searching for the word “hooves”. It just goes to show, mermaids are thick.
4
“I have an imaginary pet tiger, like the one from that famous comic strip, and he and I enjoy using the cooker.”
“Hobbes?”
“Yeah, and the oven and the grill.”
5
I burst into the drawing-room at 221b Baker Street and bellowed to the great detective, “I HAVE A MYSTERY FOR YOU, MR. HOLMES!”
He looked at me and said “Lo, a case.”
“i have a mystery for you, mr holmes,” i replied.
6
“When working at a huge Japanese technology company, I would discuss my favourite constellation with a colleague.”
“Casio peer?”
“No, my favourite constellation is Andromeda, I was always telling my friend at Sony that.”
One of the other highlights of my month was going to Stourbridge Fair, the modern incarnation of what was once the largest medieval fair in Europe. We spent about ninety minutes in the grounds of a leper church talking to a curator from the Museum of Cambridge, who had a suitcase of ancient artefacts with them. There was a Palaeolithic hand axe from 10,000 years ago. I held it, thinking about how extraordinary it was that I got to do so, thinking how different my life was to that of the person who shaped it millennia ago, but also thinking about what we’d have in common. Then the curator put it back in a bag, but it was one of those half-paper, half-plastic bags you get if you buy a croissant from a newsagent. It had crumbs in. Shook me from my reverie. Made me want a croissant. Yeah, not a big month for anecdotes.
7
“I was told a mildly amusing joke in a town just north-west of Cambridge recently.”
“Lolworth?”
“No I didn’t react audibly — it didn’t warrant that — but I smiled.”
8
“Right, everything’s sorted for my wedding in Northamptonshire!”
“Kettering?”
“Oh no, I’d completely forgotten about providing food and drink for my guests… in Corby.”
9
“The educational institution where I learned what a many-sided shape is called has been renamed, rebranded and doesn’t really exist anymore.”
“Polygon?”
“Yeah, it's De Montford University now.”
September in numbers: Worked in libraries quite a lot. Drank zero beers in my house (trying something out) but a few in pubs. Lost several days to being overexcited about things. Possibly drove over one flowerpot. Petted one ferret. Tried to play the word “bunnet” in internet Scrabble and couldn’t work out why it wasn’t accepting it.
Project updates: So, madly, for the first time in my career, there is some semblance of momentum. Nobody remembers my plan to name all my books after foods from Futurama, but PROJECT SLURM is out next week (HA HA I MIGHT HAVE MENTIONED IT HA HA HA HA), and this week I’ve been checking proofs on PROJECT SOYLENT COLESLAW, two shorter ones that are going direct to schools in January — if you have kids in the UK and their school does the HarperCollins Big Cat reading scheme, they might one day bring home a book about Bigfoot or Greco-Roman mythical creatures that I wrote, so that’s fun.
But also! PROJECT BACHELOR CHOW is being taken to the Frankfurt Book Fair next week — it’s out in the UK in January 2026, and I think the purpose of the book fair is to sell it to other territories. And PROJECT POPPLERS, out in early 2027, is mostly written and awaiting feedback — I think the biggest delay is the very nice people who are feeding back googling synonyms for “rubbish” to go easier on me.
But, and here’s where it get really fun, there’s more. I’ve had between one and two offers for a kids’ non-fiction book (it doesn’t have a Futurama codename: let’s call it PROJECT NEPTUNIAN SLUG), so that’s definitely going to happen in some form. It’s very exciting, to me (Mike). And I wrote a kids’ chapter book, PROJECT SPACE HONEY, in the hope someone would like it — it’s currently with some people who might or might not. I’m trying not to think about it, while also going nuts every time my phone buzzes in case there’s news on it, but my phone buzzes a lot because I play so much flipping internet Scrabble.
(I have temporarily abandoned PROJECT LÖBRAU and PROJECT GUNDERSON’S NUTS, which is a shame as they have the funniest names.)
None of this involves much, you know, money, so feel free to PayPal me £5.30 for a lovely pint. Buying my book is great — please buy my book! — but ha ha ha so is just giving me actual money! Or telling me I’m good!
Next issue: November 1st. Will I have shifted a gazillion books? Will I have exciting news about my next big project? Will I see another frog? Find out, along with many massive laughs, in four short weeks! BYE BYE I LOVE YOU
10
WHAT I AM CURRENTLY READING
Tables and Chairs by Fern Itchure
The Letters After D by Ian Therest
Just Pop The Cans And Cardboard In There by Rhys I. Klingbin
Toilet Duck by Luke Leaner
A Special Kind Of Door For Felines by Kat Flap