Likening Zidane to a pint of botflies
including a gameshow revelation and a great joke about a mountain range
Hello. It is August 2024. This is the twentieth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of great jokes and a borderline adequate career written by me, perspiring dismalist Mike Rampton. Are you relaxed? RELAX! RELAX AT ONCE!
IMPORTANT: My book There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question is out on October 10th from Nosy Crow and the University of Cambridge. Amazon! Bookshop.org! Waterstones! (Amazon is, sadly, cheapest.) It makes a great Christmas present, but also a great “one-third of the way through October” present. Please tell anyone who might like it or is famous and helpful or anything like that. Thanks!
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“I’ve been bitten by a parasitic insect, and my trousers are on back-to-front.”
“Botfly?”
“Yes, it’s not much use back there really. And I’ve been bitten by a louse.”
2
“I recently played football with an Irish MP who really exaggerated an injury to his lower leg.”
“Shin feign?”
“No, it was a representative of Fianna Fáil who faked a sore ankle.”
3
“Margaret, the beloved and trailblazing Canadian feminist author, has just been axe-throwing.”
“Atwood?”
“No, the targets Margaret Laurence, author of The Diviners, threw her axes at were made of cardboard.”
July somehow took a really long time. I worked, somehow, on four different books. I did a seventh birthday party and got really stressed when there was dissent from the children, which I hadn’t anticipated. I wrapped a great many presents. I painted a magnificent unicorn (the horn is absent for wholesome pinning-on-when-blindfolded reasons).
I’m in Spain at the moment, doing that freelance thing where I’m not fully on holiday, but I am drinking from about 3pm every day and perma-shirtless. I’ve been bitten by a lot of mosquitoes, built a lot of sandcastles and swam in a lot of sea. Yesterday I was offered a beer and had it and realised it was 10:15 in the morning. Good stuff.
I was watching one of the Euros with some neighbours, and one mentioned Zidane, and I casually mentioned that I wouldn’t have a house if not for him. It’s true, just about.
Twelve years ago I appeared on a short-lived game show, Breakaway. There was a question at a key moment about football. I pretty much dissociated during it — there seemed no way I was going to get it right. But then a few people buzzed in wrongly, and I began to wonder if my ignorance could work in my favour, and then the host said ‘Algeria’ and I buzzed immediately.
Six years earlier I had watched the World Cup final with some friends in a very slow-going attempt to get off with one of them, and seen Zidane headbutt another player. It was explained to me that the other guy had said something nasty about Zidane’s Algerian mother. This lingered somewhere in the back of my head as one of the only things I knew about football: Gordon Banks was the England goalkeeper in 1966, and Zidane’s mother was Algerian.
I was right, although I pronounced it so insanely (Zindenine Zindande!”) that they made me say it several more times. I went on to get pretty much every subsequent question wrong, shrugging in ignorance, muttering “Christ” and offering up completely nonsensical, unhelpful, gibberish-based guesses, but was carried through by a fellow contestant, splitting a £6,900 prize with him. £3,450 is both too much to not do anything with, and not enough to do anything with, so I opened a savings account and started paying into it, and eventually that became most of a house deposit. No Zidane, no knackered, falling-apart house in a pleasant village.
I was delighted to find someone had uploaded the episode to YouTube. It’s a rough watch to be honest — it’s a needlessly baffling format, I am clearly so anxious throughout it all that it’s uncomfortable to witness, and I made a very questionable facial hair decision at 2am the day of the taping after a few drinks.
My daughter likes The Weakest Link, so I told her there was a new quiz show I wanted to watch, and put it on. She is extremely bright, so it is testament to how brutal the ageing process has been over the last decade or so that it took her almost the entire running time to work out that the guy who sounded like me, and had my name, was in fact a youngish, semi-handsome incarnation of her dear old dad. Good, good times.
4
I can hold sugar in either hand. I’m ambidextrose.
5
“There’s some green stuff here that I could — what’s the word? — point out is similar to algae or moss.”
“Lichen?”
“Yes, that is what I could do, with this stuff, to algae or moss.”
6
“I learned how to dart nimbly and catch mice in a mountain range in New York.”
“Catskills?”
“I suppose so.”
7
“Give me a word that's been all jumbled up into another one.”
“Anagram?”
“Not for me, thanks. Please do your drugs elsewhere, I get high on wordplay.”
8
I've got a four-wheel-drive car that can easily cross coarse pâté-like substances. It's an all-terrine vehicle.
9
“A friend of mine who comes from one of the most populated autonomous communities in Spain has a wobbly eye.”
“Andalusia?”
“No, the wobbly eye is the only issue affecting the face of my friend from Catalonia.”
July in numbers: My heart rate peaked at about 750 beats per minute when a bunch of seven-year-old girls had a screaming competition in my house. I spent about twenty minutes thinking about the fact that Cradle of Filth has a lead singer called Dani Filth and a bassist called Daniel Firth, and whether there was any way of monetising that most gently whimsical of extreme metal facts. I did eight minutes of stand-up comedy about being a bank robber. I paid a bunch of tax and erroneously received someone else’s tax bill and felt really bad about how much they earned and how little I earn. Cambridge is sometimes said to be split into “town” (i.e. people who are from there) and “gown” (i.e. people there for the university), but I am neither, and I spent maybe nine hours wondering whether my second-to-none jokewriting skills put me in the category “clown”, my maudlin tendencies render me “down” or my overwhelming dullness makes me “brown”. Eventually I concluded that it was a reductive binary and I was “a person who lives in Cambridge”. What an absolute waste of several cognitive processes.
Project updates: Absurdly, I am currently up to date on all my book projects. There are two first drafts that are going to come back with lots of work to do, but until then, for the first time in several years, I am not behind on anything. I… should really try to get some more projects going so as not to have my house taken away! I had an idea the other day for the most chaotic book in the world, which I will absolutely have a massive breakdown doing if it gets commissioned, so that’s something we can all look forward to.
I am never sure what I am allowed/meant to talk about with future books — there’s no NDAs or anything, but I feel like the done thing is to keep fairly quiet until things are announced or orderable. But I saw the cover for a book I’m doing with Bloomsbury the other day (no idea when it’s coming out) and it’s awesome. And it’s illustrated by a guy who has illustrated some really popular books. Stuff! Stuff is happening! Kind of!
Please buy a million copies of the book I’m definitely allowed to talk about! I’m going for a swim! I was planning on doing loads of laps every day and returning home as a glistening hunk, but I’m eating SO MUCH BREAD and I’m SO SLEEPY. If you want to PayPal me £5.30 for a big pint, I’ll drink it with gratitude. Or, just tell me I’m good!
Next issue: September 6th. Lots of plans between then and now — the rest of this holiday, then a camping trip, then a visit to an Airbnb in which I’m fairly certain I’ll be savaged by a dog in a static caravan. LOVE YOU BYE!
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WHAT I AM CURRENTLY READING
Solaris, Cough Cough Cough by Stanislaw Phlegm
What A Duck Gets When It Pecks Sandpaper by Bill Scratches
Completely Flipping Wild by Anna Malistic
A Ball Of Crushed Lentil Stew by Roald Dahl
The Judge Is Dressed Too Sexily by Justice Pants