MDF

[SFX: An answerphone beep]

I thought about you this morning, as I nailed my hand to a piece of MDF. To clarify, the nailing of the hand to the piece of MDF wasn’t a statement about how I feel towards you – If I’m honest, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be - I hadn’t wanted, or, indeed, intended, to nail my hand to the piece of MDF at all. I had wanted (and intended) to nail the piece of MDF to another piece of MDF. And then to the wall, to make a nice set of shelves.

But as I stood there, with the hammer poised, a blur of movement outside the window caught my attention. It was an enormous plane, descending slowly to the ground in the distance (or a tiny plane, landing in my garden; but time has taught me that the latter option is significantly less likely). And this plane, this fusion of steel and engineering and optimism, it reminded me – reminded me that I was supposed to pick you up from the airport last Tuesday.

So, I guess I’m ringing you to apologise. The last time I checked, it was considered bad manners not to follow through on a promise to pick someone up from the airport. But, then, the last time I checked was probably about seven years ago. It wasn’t something that I saw as being particularly liable to change, and in many ways, the fact that I once checked is more remarkable than the fact that I haven’t checked recently.

When you get this message, can you please ring me back? I’d love to hear about your holiday, and would also welcome any distraction from the fact that my hand is currently nailed to a piece of MDF.

Cheers.

Jellyfish

Sorry to keep you waiting.
But, obviously, not sorry enough not to keep you waiting…

You probably think it was another patient that kept me busy. Actually, I was at a stag-do last night. They had one of those strippers which burst open to reveal a cake. It was horrific, actually – blood everywhere. Spent the entire night just trying to get the carpet clean, and in the end no-one felt like eating the cake. But that’s the great thing about being a doctor. You can walk into work covered in blood, and no-one bats an eyelid. They’re all too busy wondering whether anyone will notice whether they’re covered in blood, and wondering where they left the eyelids.

So, let me just take a quick look at your chart.

Ah. An appendectomy. Have you ever had your appendix removed before? Silly question. But, I don’t know, it might have crawled back in. The appendix has quite a strong homing instinct, and most people’s first thoughts upon seeing an appendix crawling towards them - like a fat, pink slug - is to scream, affording it an entrance.

Now looking at your chart, it says that your date of birth is 1993. Is that correct? Okay, so you’re young enough to believe that the world is still full of opportunities, old enough to realise that they probably won’t won’t be offered to you.

Now, I trust that you received the release form. And you signed that, yes? Good.

Now, I don’t want to scare you – because that would be an emotion, and I know your generation isn’t used to them - but as with any procedure, there is a chance of complications. Now, obviously, this will involve sedation, and as with any use of general anaesthetic, there is a risk that you won’t stay under for the length of time intended. You know, there’s a one in five or six million chance that you may stay under for three, maybe four, hundred years. And you’ll stumble out into the street, feeling over-exposed in just your surgical gown as the breeze dances over your shoulders, and the streets will be empty but for cockroaches and posters of Boris Johnson the sixth, and it’ll be like one of those films where Cilian Murphy runs away from things (only there aren’t any credits, and you look nothing like Cilian Murphy. Actually, I find it quite insulting that you would think to besmirch his name with such a comparison.)

Now, me and the guys were talking, and we reckon that your best bet is actually to sedate yourself again, and cross your fingers that by the time you wake up again, the fall-out from the nuclear war between Tesco and Ecuador will have died down to a sort of tolerable level.

Of course, there’s only a very remote possibility of that happening.

What’s more likely is that the operation might be disrupted at some point. A group of alien ambassadors might burst in here and take me captive before I can finish the operation. In the event of that happening, you’d probably just bleed to death here on the operating table, while I’m marched in front of their leader, and asked to speak on behalf of the human race.

But as I say, there’s only a very remote possibility of that happening. The last time I checked, weren’t any alien craft hovering in a geostationary orbit above earth. But, then, the last time I checked was seven years ago. It wasn’t something I’d foreseen as a pressing probability, and, in many ways, I think the fact that I did actually once check is more remarkable than the fact I haven’t checked recently.

Oh, come on now, there’s no need to look so panicked. You’re not the first person to ever have an operation! I’ve put hundreds of people to sleep – some of them patients – and if I’d taken a medical exam, I’m sure I would have done very well.

So you have nothing to fear.
Except jellyfish.
Jellyfish are terrifying.

The Agent

A lot of people have asked me how I got into the role of ‘Claire’. Well, one day my agent came to me with the script for the show, and I said ‘no’. And he said ‘yes’, and I said ‘no’. And he said ‘yes’, and I said ‘Dad’, and he said ‘don’t call me that when we’re working’ and I said ‘Daddy, we’re just sitting in the kitchen’, and he said ‘We’re having a working lunch’, and I said ‘I’m not eating anything’, and he said ‘Good, with a figure like that it’s no wonder you’re not getting any decent roles’, and I said ‘I think I should be in school’ and he said ‘You’re just a comic device, your school didn’t exist until you mentioned it until just then’ and I said ‘Well, since it does exist now, can I go?’, and he said ‘If I did permit you to go, that would somewhat undermine the callous father figure that I seem to represent’ and I said “Would that matter?” and he said “It’d be bad writing” and I said “Isn’t having a conversation descend into a discussion of whether it constitutes bad writing bad writing?” and he said “It depends how long it lasts” and I said nothing, because we suddenly both decided that the conversation had finished.

Darwin

Much of Darwin's later writing was on earthworms. Very few people read it, as it was quite difficult to get them to stop wriggling for long enough to read the words. Darwin could only fit a couple of words on each worm, so potential readers had to go to the book shop with a wheelbarrow, to bring a cubic metre of worms home. On the journey home, the worms would, rather inconsiderately, re-arrange themselves, meaning that it could take a good hour to find two consecutive worms, and the best part of a fortnight to read a sentence.

Reviewers widely agreed that they preferred his work on finches.

The battery-powered Luxembourg Army Knife

Unsure what to buy your friends, family, co-workers, or psychologist this Easter?

Why not treat them to a JML Battery-powered Luxembourg Army Knife? It’s like a Swiss Army Knife, but smaller, and with a constitutional monarchy. It also doesn’t contain a knife… but it does come with an attachment for getting horses’ hooves out of stones.

Buy the battery-powered Luxembourg Army Knife!
Please buy the battery-powered Luxembourg Army Knife!
Please, please, somebody, buy the battery-powered Luxembourg Army Knife…

Tell you what, buy one get one free.
Actually, buy one get ten free!
My wife is furious that the kitchen is filled with unsold boxes of Luxembourg Army Knives, and she can’t get to the toaster.

Buy one, get a free gift.
I’ll give you my wallet.
There’s nothing in it, as I spent all my money on 10, 000 Luxembourg Army Knives, but it has enormous sentimental value.

Please, buy one. Free postage and packaging. Well, free for you.
Please.
My wife says that if the kitchen isn’t clear by Tuesday, she’s going to stay at Keith’s. Keith has a granite-topped kitchenette with breakfast bar. I can’t compete with a granite-topped kitchenette with breakfast bar. She’ll never move back in.

She told me this was a bad idea. She took me to one side and said “Alan, this is a bad idea”.
But I thought, no, it’ll be fine. I thought it’d be more than fine. I thought ten thousand people would want a Luxembourg Army Knife. Ten thousand people. That’s the entire population of Leeds. If 740, 000 people suddenly died.

And that’s assuming that everyone in Leeds would want one to begin with.

I don’t even know if the knives work. They don’t come with the batteries included, and, as mentioned earlier, I didn’t have any money left to buy batteries.

I asked Sarah (the wife) if I could take the batteries out the remote and she just said no and went back to watching Emmerdale. I don’t know what she sees in Emmerdale.

I know what she sees in Keith, though. They have a laugh together at the office. Reading Buzzfeed articles at lunch. Sharing sandwiches, and lucozade, while reading about “Twelve car journeys with elderly strangers that remind you of the nineties”

I only went into the Luxembourg Army Knife business to impress her.
Well, that and I genuinely thought that people would want to buy them.

Buy one, get 9, 999 free?

Idioms

Rome wasn’t built in a day, it was built in Italy.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and also considerably cheaper.

There's no smoke without fire, unless you own a smoke machine.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left.

The early bird gets the worm, but the early worm gets killed, so it’s important to establish whether you see yourself as a bird or a worm before deciding how much time to leave for your journey.

Resolutions for 2014

This year, I resolve:
a) To wait until it’s half-way through January to make any resolutions
2) To be more consistent
c) To stop expressing everything as lists

I also resolve to spread fake conspiracy theories. I resolve to tell people that eating healthily does not make your life longer - it just makes it feel longer. I resolve to tell people that just to the north of York, there’s an enormous, cardboard bank where lottery winners can cash their enormous, cardboard cheques. I resolve to tell people that ‘The Matrix’ was an elaborate double-bluff by the machines that control us, and that ‘Groundhog Day’ is actually just multiple takes of the intended first scenes of a different film (the director was a perfectionist, who insisted on re-taking the scenes until it was perfect, and the production ran out of money. They dubbed all the voices on afterwards to make a coherent plot.)