Strictly come on an all-escapologists canal trip
Including a genuinely great joke about a beaver that should probably win an award.
Hello. It is November. This is the eleventh monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter with a double-digit number of magnificent jokes and some wistful/livid thoughts by me, indoorsman and writer Mike Rampton. I’m him! Once young and dynamic, now ageing in a way that suggests there’s a painting in my attic that hasn’t changed at all. Represent!
1
"The chickens in this industrial hatchery are trying to come up with a title for their blog, but have an issue with their phones."
"Battery life?"
"Good one, they can use that when their network coverage improves."
2
“What was the best bit of your all-escapologists canal-boat holiday?”
“Opening locks.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to clarify.”
3
I asked a beaver if he'd witnessed a crime. He said, "I never saw anything." I said, "With teeth like that, you don't need to."
I’m sitting in the British Library writing this. The wifi is down, so I’m tethered to my phone, which feels oddly undignified. I was meant to be working on a book thing today, and this felt like a nice place to begin it — like, the main reason I’m here is that I’m going to a pub later which is far nearer King’s Cross than outer Cambridge, but it still seemed nice to begin a project somewhere this legit.
But instead I’m using this hallowed space to write some stuff that’s kind of… rubbish? I’m invoicing today and can just about get anything I do now onto there, so I’ll get paid for it in a month, whereas I’ll be paid for the exciting book stuff in, Christ, I have no idea. So I’ll start that on Monday in my rubbish house instead. Less special, but a bit more dosh floating about for Christmas.
I have two jobs, essentially, that pay in very different ways on very different schedules. With journalism/‘content’ you do some work, send in an invoice and get paid a month later. With books, you do — at my low, new level in the industry anyway — a bunch of work over a long period of time before money even gets mentioned, and then if you sign a contract, you get paid in three chunks: one on signing, one on delivery, one on publication.
Realistically, none of the three are huge, and the timescales are enormous, particularly when illustrators or multiple stakeholders (a word I read as ‘skateboarders’ every time) are involved. Every book I have written so far has been massively time- and labour-intensive in a way that nobody must ever be allowed to do the maths on. But eventually you get a day where, ideally, some money just arrives in your account for work you did ages earlier. In a super-ideal, borderline fantastical world people buy your books and you just keep getting paid for your work again and again, timelines tightening up all the while as you do more and more, until you get to the point where you’re Julia Donaldson or Michael Rosen, writing a book before lunch, not even needing to keep track of what’s coming out when, knowing that at any given point, one of your many publishers is getting a bank transfer ready.
I am a long, long way from anything approaching that, and spend way too much of my time trying to juggle the exciting and the imminent. Projects that would take a month if I could dedicate my whole time to them instead take six months with a third of my time assigned to them, the hours spent on them increasing due to momentum never getting a chance to build. It’s frustrating! Basically nobody has ever had a more difficult life than me, and nothing currently going on in the world is causing as much suffering as my small career. Why is the British Library’s wifi down? God, I’m so angry.
4
“I’m going to be doing some fancy dancing, so I need to make sure these high socks have sufficient thickness, elasticity and all the other necessary traits.”
“Ballroom?”
“They’re not quite high enough for that to be a concern, no.”
5
“I’m travelling to Hertfordshire in a way people don’t tend to do much these days.”
“Hitchin?”
“No, I am riding a penny-farthing to Letchworth Garden City.”
6
“I want to make sure I book the right kind of band for the day I wed Riverdale’s most lovelorn teen.”
“Marry Archie?”
“I love that type of music but worry it might come across as culturally appropriative given neither Archie nor myself have Mexican roots.”
I don’t watch a lot of telly. It’s pretty much University Challenge, Only Connect and Strictly Come Dancing. Every so often I’ll get drunk and watch every single episode of I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson — I want babies to know people can change — but otherwise it’s fairly limited.
Because quiz shows are all about putting yourself into them, doing your best to face the challenges the contestants are facing, I keep doing the same with Strictly, which I watch with my daughter — I miss at least three or four of the performances because she gets up and starts dancing and it’s awesome. Ten ten ten ten.
So I’ve given way too much thought to how I would fare if, next year, they did that thing that Celebrity Big Brother did in about 2006 when they put a non-famous person on, and I was that non-person.
Would I do well? No, because of dancing. I would be extremely bad at the dancing. I dance with my daughter a lot, but my main role in that is flinging her around, doing spins and stuff. I wouldn’t be paired with a six-year-old on the show, I’d be paired with an adult, so I wouldn’t be able to lift her up, and that’s pretty much my go-to, so on that front I’d be rubbish. I only really dance in public when my body is two-fifths Kronenbourg, and that is a lurching, arrhythmic grotesquery.
Would the Curse of Strictly turn me into a tabloid love-rat? No. I don’t find myself troubled with unwanted advances at the best of times, and I would be so, so stressed and sweaty all the time with the pressure of it all that I’d stink, I’d stink like a disease, the camera operators would be retching, Claudia Winkleman would recoil beneath her terrific fringe, and my dance partner would come up with inventive ways for us to remain quite far apart, like, “This tango is badminton-themed, so you have to stay over on the other side of the net.”
Would the nation take me to its heart and keep voting me through? No. I think I’d misjudge it all tonally, and say stuff in interviews that was meant to be charmingly self-effacing but was in fact strangely aggressive and alarming. “Ha ha, that’s right Tess, the judges were a little harsh, so I’m going to break into their homes under cover of night and wreak savage vengeance, ha ha!”
Would I keep saying it was the best experience of my life? No, I think the likelihood is that I’d void my bowels on television and cry, full-body shudders of horror and regret, a trickle of blood running worryingly from my eye, as my partner danced alone to Goldfinger and the entire production team decided to call it a day.
7
I wanted to know the weather forecast, but instead was given advice on how to care for my bladder by a muscular doctor. I'd accidentally asked a meaty urologist.
8
How do you cross an international border?
Intercept the tuck his mummy sent him from overseas.
9
“As a muay thai fighter from New England, I can’t stop wrenching hair from my head while misleading the lever used to control the rudder on a boat”
“Trick a tiller, Maine knee-er?”
“Yes.”
October was mostly spent on book stuff that might not be going anywhere (ha ha ha I will die of poverty in the gutter of a swamp) and industrial content generation (which is how my people will one day be referred to on GCSE syllabuses) so there’s not a lot of work to link to. Also I also went on holiday for a bit and visited castles and drank lots of cheap Spanish beer and stuff like that rather than working, which also had an effect.
I did a few bits for the i paper though, which (a) should possibly be called the me paper and (b) is the only newspaper with a logo that looks like the beginning of an exciting Spanish sentence. Here’s one about trying the hot new sport of walking around with a rucksack on! Here’s one about still not being able to drive! Here’s one about humour on dates not translating to romantic success, where they used an old picture of me to come up with probably the most depressing headline/image combo possible!
I’m not the biggest fan of first-person writing that I don’t have total control over (I have total control of this newsletter, and I’m sure all eight readers appreciate it), as (a) even minimal editing involves, pretty much, someone putting words in my mouth; and (b) I’m not anyone of import, so why care about what I do, right? But I do what I’m asked, as well as I can. I’m like a sort of medieval mercenary in that way, my lance uncommitted to any one cause — free, you might say. (“I asked Anna from Brookside if she was self-employed.” “Friel answer?” “…”)
(That really unwieldy one was ‘trichotillomania’, btw.)
Some books by me will come out at some point. Every month when I write this accursed missive I think I’ll have something to announce, but I don’t! Instead I moan about not having any money while writing this for no money! I am the architect of my own misery! I have constructed the prison of woe in which I live! How can the wifi be down in the British Library? I am going to break into Anton Du Beke’s house! Tell me I’m good! HAVE A LOVELY MONTH
10
WHAT I AM CURRENTLY READING
That’s A High Price by Armand Aleg
Mumbling Incoherently Getting Quieter All The Time by Peter Ringout
I’m So Sorry by Mya Pologies
What Lurks, And Where, According To The Bible? by Evelyn d’Heartsofmen
Present This Information In A Spreadsheet by Ingrid Form