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.)

Unnecessary journeys

Following a decrease in wind speeds, a drop in flood water levels, and a press conference, the government has informed drivers that it’s now okay to make unnecessary journeys. Drivers are welcome to go up the M6 to check if Scotland still exists, or to chauffer crisp packets to the nearest recycling plant because they like the irony, or to drive to Croydon to tell a vague acquaintance about a dream they had the night before, where a man travelled back in time in an attempt to become his own uncle.

Postman Pat

Postman Pat. Postman Pat.
Postman Pat and his black and white cat.
Early in the morning, just as day is dawning,
He wakes up and remembers that the post-office has been dismantled, and he doesn’t have a job there anymore, and today will be a blur of episodes of Come Dine With Me and trying to work up the courage to leave the house, but then remembering that he only owns the one set of clothes (the postman’s uniform) and he can’t bring himself to put that on again, and he knows that if he wants to wear something different he’ll have to go to the shops, but that’d involve putting on the uniform to get there so he just sits, slumped in a pair of off-white boxers, listening to Dave Lamb mock a bricklayer called Darren from Surrey as he tries to fry an egg.