Hello. It is August. This is the eighth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter by me, Mike Rampton. About five foot eight, unclean, usually quite tired. That’s the guy. I am him, me.
1
I watched a complicated film where Proust interacts with the monkey from Friends and a really terrific mime artist. It's part of the Marcel Cinematic Universe.
2
“I’m moving overseas, can I take the thing you use to shred cheese into small pieces please?”
“My grater?”
“I like to think of myself as an expatriate.”
3
The opposite of Wireless Festival is Leeds Festival.
It’s the summer holidays. Tomorrow I am heading to a static caravan in East Anglia with my daughter and parents. I’m excited. I want to play mini-golf in the wind and be slightly underwhelmed by a pier.
I had the holidays in mind as a deadline for passing my driving test, but it’s not happened. I’m not quite ready to take it yet — I’ll spend 95% of a lesson driving perfectly competently, and 5% of it falling off a psychological cliff, forgetting everything I’ve ever known, uncertain what a car even is. This always happens when going very fast towards a complicated roundabout — one second I have a clear plan, the next I don’t know what my name is or how many arms and legs are attached to my body. It’s a bit of an issue. But soon, soon, soon I will enter the world of people who can drive, and spend the weekends piling my daughter into the car to drive to odd small villages and look at medieval burial mounds and similarly exciting nonsense. When I pass I’ll do the hideous maths of working out how much it’s all cost, and then assure myself that every journey I make I’d be doing by limousine otherwise, so it’s all totally paying for itself.
I drove a lawnmower recently, extremely badly. Ruined a gazebo. Hit one of the legs of it in a way that suddenly lowered the roof by about 30 centimetres, to a kind of mid-head height. This wasn’t great for the people standing under it, who suddenly had a roof where their brains were. Currently I pretty much try to monetise anything that goes wrong for me, but there’s way anyone’s commissioning me to write about, like, not driving a lawnmower while slightly drunk. Shame really. I’d read that.
4
“My wife just read A Room With A View.”
“Forster?”
“No, she read it of her own accord.”
5
If Robin Hood's pal the miller's son ever tried to chat up Shania Twain I bet she'd have a great retort.
6
Following an acrimonious divorce the guy from Third Eye Blind married a nice woman who co-runs an agribusiness with a famous actor. He now has a Buscemi-farmed, kinder wife.
Fairly challenging, those last two, yes. Robin Hood had a friend called Much the Miller’s Son. I think that’s reasonably well known. I’m not sure. I’m slightly delicate as I write this, having won a pub quiz last night in a pub called the Burleigh Arms, which is named after one of the features people find most notable on my flawless body.
I was recently commissioned by the i paper to write about short attention spans and genuinely forgot to write the article because I got distracted. In an ideal world this would be seen as a whole extra level of incredible, impressive research, but we don’t inhabit that world, so actually people were slightly annoyed.
It came out quite well when I got round to writing it though. I also enjoyed writing about the phenomenon of men who don’t cook insisting on being in charge of barbecues, and was asked to try wearing a crop top to see how it felt. (Spoiler: it was comfortable but I looked appalling.)
I decided recently that if I ever get a hideous wasting disease and get the chance to write a memoir about it, I’m calling it Sick Ramps. I’ll try, anyway. I don’t see it getting through with that title, because it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just some words.
My daughter and I were playing a great board game called Outfoxed the other day when the Tesco delivery came. The man asked how the match was going and if England had scored. He assumed from our loud cheers that we were watching the World Cup, so I had to explain that we were actually excited because we’d just solved the mystery of which fox had stolen Mrs Plumpert’s delicious pie. About halfway through the sentence the adrenaline of victory ran out and I felt like a very, very sad man.
Did a speech at a wedding. The microphone wasn’t working so I bellowed it all. Great fun. It’s the last time I’ll be best man (well, co-best man), so I guess the next time I make a speech will be when I am inevitably awarded an honorary doctorate for being so damned attractive.
7
In the novelisation of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Michael Crawford types all his own stunts.
8
My weapon fired not fun foam darts, but eggs imported from France. I'd accidentally purchased an oeuf gun.
9
I am going to launch a new business selling lorries to skateboarders. They already spend plenty on trucks and Vans.
That’s it. I’m off on holiday for the next three weeks, but that fun kind of self-employed holiday where you spend every night working and are incredibly stressed at all times. Work, panic, nice swim, three tins, panic, work. Holidays!
Thanks for reading, if you did. If you liked this, please tell people about it so the numbers are less woeful. And tell me that I’m good! HAVE A LOVELY MONTH
10
WHAT I AM CURRENTLY READING
In Desperate Need Of Money by Selma Belongings
Midway Through Shearing This Flock Of Sheep by Shaun Several
The Geometry Of Tiles by Tessa Lation
Learning About Chickens Again by Henry Vision
The Great Fucking Gatsby by F. Word Fitzgerald