Robert Wringham - The Occasional Papers

Asteroids made by Neave Games

Depending on when you asked, his family had either died in a cult suicide or had been poisoned by exposure to radioactive material. On another occasion, they had been murdered by an angry milkman.

Whatever happened to Bladders' family, he now lived with his uncle in a damp-smelling semi-detached house. They lived in squalor. I once saw a pint glass filled with Branton Pickle on the side of the bathtub. When I asked him about it he denied that it was Branston Pickle. Apparently it was sweetcorn niblets and Marmite.

On another occasion, I was confronted by a perfectly intact turd the size of a swamp adder in the toilet bowl. As the toilet didn't seem to be working and I had to pee pretty bad, I was forced to hold my breath and close my eyes and tell myself that I wasn't urinating onto some dark god from H. P. Lovecraft.

I once noticed that a panel was missing from the window by the front door and that there was dried blood on the sill. Bladders explained that a passing carnival freak had broken the window in the night, but it was plain even to my eleven-year-old self that his uncle had come home drunk, without a key and had punched a hole in the glass to open the door from the inside.

By most social conventions, I shouldn't really have spent so much time with Bladders. He was unkempt, was probably abused by his alcoholic uncle, was two years older than me, smelled like something from Jeffrey Dahmer's kitchenette and would concoct increasingly bizarre legends about his possibly-dead/possibly-living-in-Wolverhampton family. One Sunday morning, I found him drinking fortified wine from an egg cup. Laughing.

Given all this, why were we friends? I think our initial bond had happened when he asked me in the school playground if I liked football. I'd never been asked before: at the Dudley School for Young Cannonfodder, it was taken for granted that all boys liked football and that they would support either the Wolverhampton Wonderers or West Bromwich Albion. I told Bladders that I did not like football. "Good," he said conspiratorially, "Me neither".

We also shared superficial but locally unusual tastes. And so our relationship mostly revolved around quoting Monty Python ("Run Away! Run Away!"), The Fast Show ("A little bit whoooa, a little bit weeee!") and Winding up Nathan ("You call that an Omelet?").

He was a huge Star Trek fan and his bedroom was a shrine to his favourite television show. He didn't have any money so he didn't have much in the way of the videos or toys (though I do remember a cool transporter unit, in which you could place a character's action figure and "beam him up" using a light-and-mirrors mechanism) so instead, he had covered the walls and ceiling of his room with Star Trek-related cuttings from the Radio Times.

I realise now that such behaviour is borderline psychotic. It is even akin to the behaviour of Eugene Tooms on The X Files, who would make nests out of newspaper and bile: a practice I believe is still popular with members of the Conservative Party.

At the time, however, I found such creativity the very height of it all and it wasn't long until I'd made my own bedroom nest of TV-related cuttings and junk. In fact, I'm still finding bits of stuff around my parents' house, almost fifteen years later.

I'm writing about Bladders because today, I found a photograph of me and Bladders, arms around each other and grinning like loons. We were wearing his homemade Starfleet uniforms (red ones, for Engineering and Security guys) and on the reverse of the photo, my handwriting says, "Best of Friends! 1995".

We truly were the best of friends! I scanned my memory for suggestions of why we ever fell out. There was the time Bladders got carried away in a tickling match and I'd fallen halfway down the stairs. But that wasn't it. There was also a time when he said he "kept me around" because I was "funny looking", which I remember being hurt by but had not mulched our friendship.

About two years after the "Best of friends! 1995" photograph was taken, Bladders made a move on one of my girlfriends. In return, I gave him a fat lip and we never spoke again. Dick.

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"Icecream Escape" by the almighty godownmatthew.

A reformatted edition of New Escapologist Issue One is back in print after a recent history of annoying problems.

It's a work of art to be honest, thanks to Tim Eyre's typography and little_dinosaur's illustrations.

The issue features lord_whimsy on affected profincialism, Judith Levine on consumerism, Neil Scott on self-control, Stan Cohen on escape attempts and essays on Freud and Houdini from myself.

You can get a copy for just £3 for a strictly limited period at www.new-escapologist.co.uk.

Issue Two is still available and we're taking preorders for the bumper Issue Three.

We're running a reader-lead feature on school truancy in Issue Three, so if anyone has fun truency stories to tell, leave them here! Free issues to the best three.

Applying for immigration into another country is the bureaucratic equivalent of surrendering your bum for scrutiny by stormtroopers. Officiously they would examine the wrinkles of your poop hatch with a jeweller’s eyeglass, checking for traces of mortal turpitude with the careful precision of Dr. David Banner putting the finishing touches on a ship in a bottle.

It’s invasive, is basically what I’m saying.

Worryingly, this analogy may not even be an analogy. Once the paperwork part of my application is over, I’ll have to undergo a very real medical examination. I don’t know how intimate this procedure will be, but if it’s anything like the rest of the process it will probably be cellular.

Strewn across my desk today is my life-so-far in paperwork: birth certificate, passport, career history, school reports, travel history, financial details, Pog collection.

My favourite archival document so far is my birth certificate. What is this document actually for? Do I really need paper to demonstrate that I was born? The facts that I can play the saxophone and I’m not a zygote should be enough, no?

To the minimalist, the birth certificate is a vexing problem: get rid of all other Earthly possessions but you’ll still have this piece of paper – your oldest possession – to carry around. Cursed with ownership as soon as we plop out of our mums. It’s like the story of the bloke who almost succeeded in eating an entire airplane only to be stumped eventually by the indestructible – and indigestible – black box recorder.

Each significant stage of life generates admin. I hope I never die: the paperwork would be a nightmare.

Another thing I have to do is call on all of my past bosses to concoct an ‘attestation of employment’. So far, the process of acquiring such documents has gone like this:

Boss: Hello, Tastychickenbucket. How can we meet your poultry needs?
Me: Hi, Boss! It’s Rob!
Boss: Who?
Me: Robert Wringham, Boss! I used to extract the crud from the chickens so that the kitchen boys didn’t get covered in crud. Remember? The crud?
Boss: Well, well. Look who came crawling back. Couldn’t find your way in the crud industry?
Me: No, I’m not in the crud-extraction business any more. I’m a semi-successful writer and comedian. But I want to emigrate, you see, and I need an attestation document to… hello?… Boss? Hello?

The volume of data accrued about our lives is incredible: my school, for example, has recorded every last exam I sat, every forgotten module, every inconsequential PE lesson, merit award, every afterschool activity. It’s all there, documented in cold, hard ink, available at a phonecall.

Savings, outgoings, National Insurance contributions, medical history, allergies, family history, personal skills: every last element of life needs to be handed over to the authorities.

Like divining for clues about the future from the patterns in some tea, I wonder how much about a person’s character the authorities can derive from all this arse-gazing. Does my C in a French exam say much about my character? Will my afterschool badminton club woo them into allowing me over? Will my traces of Jewish DNA be a help or a hindrance? I don’t know what sort of racists they are!

In The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan famously shouts, “I’m not a number! I’m a free man!” The idea of a man being reduced to numbers seems frankly Utopian today, as I’m confronted with my own bodyweight in paperwork. Can’t there be some sort of Orwellian ID card from which they can determine everything? That would be brilliant. The government should look into that.

www.wringham.co.uk

"It’s not what it looks like!”

I’m on my fourth hit when my girlfriend catches me in the act. Agog, she wears a towel: hardly equipped to confront the sesame-sprinkled travesty hunched at the breakfast table.

“Four bagels?” she asks, “You ate four bagels? I was only in the shower for ten minutes.”

I also wear a towel, albeit a less well-fitting one. A few sesame seeds have skittled into my pubic hair. One has also found its way into my belly button and I momentarily wonder if, under the right conditions, I could nurture a Sesamum there.

It’s a real paparazzi shot, a difficult position from which to defend myself. All I can manage is the hopeless, “It’s not what it looks like!”

But it’s precisely what it looks like. A bagel relapse. I had scoffed them down untoasted, without a butter or spread in sight, accompanied only by coffee to facilitate efficient peristalsis.

It is time to admit publicly to my bagel dependency. To do so is Step 72 of the official bagel deviant’s reparation process.

They say that once you’re a bagel deviant, you’re always a bagel deviant. Even if you haven’t eaten a bagel in twenty years, you are still a bagel deviant. One sniff of the delicious egg-glazed snack and you fall right off the bagel wagon.

It’s been several weeks since the intervention. All of my friends gathered in a room and confronted me with the grim truth. They said there’s only so much starch a man can take and I had reached my limit. I’d either have to stop eating bagels or seek professional help from a psychiatrist or a baker.

“There’s nothing kinky about it,” I told them.

“Nobody said kinky,” they said, perhaps rightly suspicious.

I wish it was kinky. There are too few pleasures in life and if it were possible for a man to become aroused at the simple sight of the hoop-shaped Jewish bread product, one could get an entertaining game of bagel hoopla going.

To local bakeries, my friends delivered posters displaying my photograph and the words “Do not serve this man. He is a bagel deviant.” My supply is now cut off at the source.

My friends disposed of the several hundred bagels they found in my house and those secreted about my person: a Sesame in each jacket pocket, a marmalade-filled Cinnamon beneath my hat and a cheeky Poppyseed inside a swallowed prophylactic.

They even combed the town for anything resembling a bagel lest its ringed shape bring to my mind the salty taste of the forbidden Jewbread.

The spare tire was removed from my father’s garage (”From my cold dead hands!” he cried as they rolled it down the hill), my friend Dan's prize-winning collection of rubber valves and sphincters was confiscated and all lifebuoys were removed from the local quayside, resulting in several preventable drownings.

I daren’t get near a doughnut and I mustn’t so much as glance at a quoit.

Nontheless, ring-shaped objects would be my eventual undoing. If it weren’t for today’s unfortunate encounter with a box of multigrain Cheerios, I’d still be on the wagon.

“It’s not what it looks like!” I say to my girlfriend this morning but she knows only too well what’s happened. I’ve found and eaten her secret stash.

Together we go to the bakery. She will distract the guards with a dance while I use a broom handle to skewer us some sweet dough-oes.

"I’m going to fix myself a nice, hot cup of coffee,” I snicker childishly, “Would anyone else like one? Coffee is so tasty and warm and it’s such a pick me up on a chilly winter’s day.”

This was the Mormons’ fourth missionary visit to our flat. I had made a point of testing their faith whenever they came over. I’d start by offering them hard liquor and continue by asking moronic questions about their afterlife: apparently Dr Banner would be welcome in the Celestial Kingdom but the Hulk would have to be left at home.

Their first visit had been in my absence when flatmate, Spoons, who has a uncomplicated mind, had been coerced into letting them in. To this day I wonder what they had told him via the entry phone. Apparently their religion invests in them Derren Brown-like powers of persuasion and even picking up the phone to them is like looking into the eyes of the gorgon.

Bashfully, Spoons had told me of the Mormons’ first visit. Still more bashfully, he told me that they would join us every Wednesday evening until (a) we were converted or (b) they were converted. One second they had been wondering freaks taking pause on the doormat, the next they had become regular parts of our lives.

“What were you thinking, Spoons?” I ask, appealing to what approaches reason in him, “You’re a Catholic! Your god must be spinning in his grave.”

Spoons assured me that the Mormons’ regular attempts at conversion would be a good test of his Catholicism and my Atheism and besides, the Mormons were all women and they were really, really, hot.

“Hot Mormon women?”

“Yeah,” said Spoons, crossing his heart and hoping to die, sticking a needle in his eye, “One of them looked like Gillian Anderson. She was stunning”.

Four visits later, I have still not seen the Mormon that looks like Gillian Anderson. Either the Mormons save their best-looking Missionaries for inaugural visits or Spoons had lied to placate me.

The three women who regularly visited us, while not bad looking, had impossible-to-offend, glazed-over demeanours as though their souls had been laminated. They wore the same facial expression chosen by Cliff Richard and a few of the more attractive Autons. One of them, Sister Audrey, had a slightly squiffy eye and would often go on hysterical tangents about how great Joseph Smith was and she would have to be reigned in by the other two: Sister Winnie and Sister Kate. Yes, Sister Audrey was the hottest. If they were to convert me, Sister Audrey would surely be my Fanny Alger.

I had initially decided to sit out of their conversations with Spoons, opting instead to sit on the other side of the room, smoking cigars and drinking coffee and masturbating. The Mormons did not respond to this no matter how loudly I coughed to get their attention.

I don’t know if it was their Derren Brown Powers or if it had something to do with Sister Audrey’s squiffy eye, but as I earwigged their conversations, it became all too tempting to join in.

The ‘lesson’ I remember most fondly is the one about the various levels of Mormon afterlife. I remember them saying there is no Hell to worry about but there are levels of Heaven called ‘Degrees of Glory’. After you die, you become a ghost. The quality of your hauntings are judged by someone and then you are allowed into one of three classes of heaven.

The best class of heaven is called the Celestial Kingdom. They have everything there: extra legroom and sexier stewardesses. Your meals are all-inclusive and the toilets are clean. The two ‘coach’ classes of heaven, behind the curtain, are certainly not bad but if you’re in one of them you probably can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if only you had been a better ghost.

Sister Audrey explained the three classes of heaven as three stars in the night sky, the Celestial Kingdom being the most brightly-burning. This metaphor confused me for ages: I genuinely thought for a number of weeks that Mormon heaven was a physical place in outer space, like something a Scientologist might believe. Interestingly, I find this less mad. I think L. Ron Hubbard would kick Joseph Smith’s ass in a fight.

I’ve since discovered that Mormon ghosts do not fly off into outer space. I have also discovered that the Sisters lied about there being no hell: the lower class of heaven - the Telestial Kingdom - is indeed a shithole for cunts.

As the weeks passed, I asked Spoons how the hell we were going to get rid of the Sisters.

“The same way I get rid of anyone I don’t like,” said Spoons, “I wait until one of us dies”.

Even then, I protested, you would not be free. You’d probably wind up sitting next to one of them in the Celestial Kingdom.

“Robert, I doubt you’d end up in the Celestial Kingdom,” said Spoons disturbingly truthfully.

In the end, Spoons and I did a far more heroic thing than wait for death. We eventually moved house.

“Coffee is so tasty and warm and it’s such a pick me up on a chilly winter’s day,” I say to the Mormons on that fourth visit, “Oh! But Mormons can’t have stimulants. How silly of me, I’m sorry. Slurp, yum”.

“Actually,” said Sister Kate, “We only abstain while we’re on Missionary duties.”

Interesting. I’ve since discovered that is a lie too. Those lying Mormons. If there is one thing I learned from their lessons, it is where liars go when they die. Burn in Narnia, you not-bad-looking lunatics.

"Suppose you chomp down on an abscess and shatter your jaw,” says my dad in the cautionary tone of someone who knows about life or has at least been told a lot about it.

“Or suppose you get completely paralysed from the neck down. A proper superman job. How are you going to get home then?”

We are having a conversation about travel insurance. All I have asked for are the names of a few reputable brokers. Instead, my dad has opened my eyes to a seemingly endless score of terrifying “what ifs” that can happen around the globe.

“What if you put your foot down a rabbit hole and trip, cracking your head off a rock?”

I never knew this man had such a cool imagination. He lives in a world of “indemnity policies” and “negative equities” and “shadow cabinets”: things I had always assumed to be mind-picklingly officious. It turns out I might have been wrong. The field of insurance is as entertainingly grisly as a trip to the London Dungeon.

Come to think of it, the shadow cabinet sounds pretty spooky as well. Like something Lord Voldemort might be involved in.

“You hear about these kids,” he says, “who step on a jellyfish in Crete and spend the next forty years in a grubby Greek hospital, wriggling their eyebrows at nurses - once for yes, twice for no.”

After some more blood-curdling tales of potential holiday woe, my dad explains that my policy should include something called “repatriation”. Apparently, it is best to have a sort of escape plan built into your insurance policy: so that the company will charter a flight back to Old Blighty if you end up in a coma or a head in a jar.

“LastMinute.com isn’t much use if you’re in an Iron Lung in Baghdad with organ leggers asking suspicious questions about your teeth”, he warns me sagely.

I’m not going to Baghdad though. I’m going to nice places like Montreal, where there’s a really good socialist health service in place. A nice Canadian hospital is probably a good place to be in such an event. At least I wouldn’t have orange-skinned British nurses sponging me down with MRSA.

“And China? You don’t want to think about what you can catch in China. They invented SARS. And India? That’s where Delhi Belly comes from. And Poland? Whoa, Poland. Try pronouncing allergic to penicillin in that language.”

All this talk of jellyfish and eyebrows is putting me off going anywhere ever again. Who needs beaches and bad wax museums anyway? I might just stay at home.

“Home? Do you have any idea how many accidents happen in your own home? You’re scared of terrorism but you’ll twice as likely suffocate in your own bed.”

That’s it then. I’ll take one middleclass life of living in fear, sustantivo.

"I’ve just got back from Transylvania!”

This was a lie. I had bought a new suitcase and now I was pulling it home. When a friend stops me to ask, “what’s with the luggage?”, I am unable able to resist concocting a flight of fancy.

“Yeah, Transylvania! It’s a beautiful town but you should see the bat problem they have there. Flapping about and getting in your hair. It’s a Chiroptophobe’s nightmare.”

The addition of the proper word for the fear of bats drives the lie home like a stake through a vampire’s heart.

“Wow,” says my friend, “I had no idea.”

She really didn’t.

Next up, I meet local celebrity Jon Ransom. He’s wearing a big floppy cap made of yellow vinyl. In this cap, Jon reminds me of an old Vic Reeves character called Tom Fun. I let this pass.

He says “Where have you been? You owe me a call!”

In truth, I do not owe Jon a call: Jon owes me one. Jon took a lot of ecstasy in the early nineties and it has monkeyed around with his memory and attention span so I overlook this. Instead I gesture at the suitcase and say, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’ve been out of town. I had a gig in Geneva!”

“A gig in Geneva? I didn’t know you could speak Swiss.”

He was on unusual good form today. I wouldn’t be able to divert his attention by pointing at an invisible bee like I normally would.

“I don’t,” I say truthfully, “I’ve devised a mime. Works in any language. I’ll show you some time.”

He seems happy with this and continues on his way. As do I.

Finally, I see Dennis, the guy who rents the office unit next to mine. He is standing by his parked car on the other side of the road, gesturing for me to go over and speak to him. Just for fun, I want to see if I can make him come to me instead so I gesture at the empty suitcase and pull a helpless “what can you do?” face. He acquiesces and crosses the road to talk to me instead.

“Are you coming or going?” He asks, referring to the suitcase.

“Coming!” I say brightly, refreshed from the holiday I didn’t take in the Bahamas, “I just got back from the Bahamas! They have giant coconut crabs there. They live in palm trees and eat people’s garbage. They’re basically a public service.”

“The Bahamas? I thought coconut crabs were in Hawaii?”

“Oh, maybe they have them there too but they have them in the Bahamas for sure. Biiiiiiig muddafudders.” I extend my arms as if to say “this big!”. Dennis looks sceptical but shakes it off and tells me about a party he’s having next week if I’d like to go.

“I guess I could go,” I say, “But I don’t want to. I can’t be bothered with parties any more. I could make an excuse but I don’t want to lie to you, Dennis.”

My nerve is huge.

When I get home I realise that the suitcase has a bright red sash about it, displaying the word “Sale”. Several cardboard price tags rattle from the handle.

My next holiday will be in Hell and I’ll deserve it.

"Democracy just doesn’t work,” says my dental hygienist in the brief gap between scale and polish.

Today is the European Parliamentary Election. I had used this for chit-chat as I sank into the chair but now I was beginning to regret it. My hygienist is thoroughly disillusioned with our entire political system.

As if that isn’t enough to contend with, her pregnancy keeps rubbing against the side of my head.

“It’s always about power,” she says, “The political class will always exploit the common man. By the way, there’s some serious gum inflammation here.”

Well, now I’m depressed. I live in a corrupt political system and I have serious gum inflammation. As I gaze at the ceiling tiles, I mentally add “overthrow the government” and “floss” to the bottom of my to-do list.

I wonder absently if Winston Smith had good teeth. Did the Ministry of Truth offer a dental plan? It seems like the sort of thing a Totalitarian state would be good at.

“There’s too many people at the top, making lots of money and not caring about people like you and me.”

I don’t like that she lumped “you and me” in the same basket but it’s hard to protest when the water is pooling in the back of your throat. I offer a gargle of protest but it doesn’t really have the impact I intend.

“I’ve always felt this way but since all that stuff about duck islands, I’ve been determined to spoil my ballot in protest. Do you know what else that guy claimed for?”

A swan peninsula?

“A twenty-grand shrubbery. You have some plaque on the lower arch but it’s not too excessive.”

My right ear is now completely folded back against her pregnant belly. It is soft and turgid like a space-hopper.

“And Europe! It’s like an afterlife for British career politicians. Okay, rinse and spit for me”.

I rinse and spit. Minty. I ask: “If you hate Europe so much, why don’t you vote UKIP or something?”

She says, “No, that would really leave a bad taste in my mouth.” As a hygienist she would be the authority on that, I suppose.

“I will not be voting. I will go and spoil my ballot.”

I’m not entirely surprised. This is the only dental office in the land with Morning Star in the waiting room.

“So now that you’ve turned your back on democracy,” I say to the hygienist, “what system do you propose we replace it with?”

“Philosopher King,” she says without even pretending to think about it.

“And what would be your first motion in the office of Philosopher King?”

Removing my goggles and bib she laughs, “Oh, I wouldn’t be a Philosopher King! No, I’d be a right tyrant! Book another appointment on your way out. See you in three months.”

At a party, I select from a plate of desserts a slice of fruit cake.

I offer some to a friend. “Oh, no thanks. I can’t stand dried fruit.”

“Makes you contemplate your own mortality?” I offer, “All parched and wrinkled, like one day we’ll all be?”

“No,” she says, “I just don’t like the texture. Chewy”.

On this, another friend comes over to us and says: “Are you on about your mortality again?”

Aghast, I ask when she’s ever heard me talking about my mortality. She tells me I was “on about it” only last Tuesday in the cinema queue. Apparently I had likened the queuing system to life; that we wait and wait in the hope of a reward at the end of the waiting, only to be fobbed off with food we can’t taste and a fart-smelling chair.

I’d swear she was making that up but she did it in my voice and everything.


Be the coolest kid in school and buy the latest issue of New Escapologist. The perfect fashion accessory and it cures headaches. Edited by me, me, me. x

It is Monday morning. I stop at the usual place to buy a fried egg sandwich and find that the two women who run the kiosk are talking about organ donation.

“Morning, Rod,” the first woman begins, “What’s going to happen to all of your organs after you die?”

They think I am called Rod but I do not mind. They must speak to a hundred people every morning, so that they manage to attribute any one name to my face is pretty impressive. For five minutes of a morning, I am happy to be Rod for them.

What’s going to happen to my organs after I die? It’s a fair question and perfectly reasonable banter for 8:30 on a Monday morning over the spitting fats of the griddle. My priority, however, is breakfast. Breakfast before discussion of post-mortem requirements. It’s a personal policy.

“A fried egg sandwich please,” I say, all business. But then: “I’m an atheist so I don’t mind what happens to my body after I die. Do you want it?”

“See,” she says philosophically, “I couldn’t give up my organs to just anyone. I mean, maybe if it was my daughter or something and she really needed them, but I can’t have a stranger walking around with my liver inside them. Soft yolk?

She’s talking about the fried egg sandwich now.

“Please”.

“I mean, it might go to someone I don’t even like. I don’t want my ex-husband to get his hands on my bone marrow. He got the car and the weekend access to the kids and dog, he’s sure tae fuck not getting my bone marrow as well. Are you having salt and pepper?”

“Just pepper, thanks”.

The second woman makes a contribution: “I don’t mind giving my body away after I’m gone. But not above the shoulders. They can have anything they need except for my eyes and brain.”

A grim image of the second woman’s head preserved in brine swims up in my imagination. Suddenly its eyes open, revealing milky whites: “You want sauce with that, Rod?”

“No thanks.”

“I don’t think they can take the brain anyway,” says the first woman, “They don’t have the science for that yet.”

“No,” says the second woman, “not for a full transplant but they might be able to use it for tests.”

The first woman says she had never thought of that possibility and would I prefer a soft or crusty roll? I tell her I would like a crusty roll.

I ask the second woman why she’s so attached to her eyes if she’s happy to let everything else go. Apparently she just finds it icky. At 8:30 in the morning, I can’t argue with that.

Somehow my egg flies off the griddle and onto the kiosk floor with all the dust and hairs. After some laughter, the first woman gets to frying a second egg.

“Just like what happened to Walt Whitman’s brain,” I say, trying to appeal to their grim curiosity. “He was an American poet. Scientists wanted to get a good look at his brain after he died to see what made him tick. But a lab assistant bungled the job and the brain splattered all over the floor.”

They enjoy this story tremendously, the breakfast-cooking ghouls.

Bob Marley’s “Iron, Lion, Zion” starts up on the portable radio. The first of the kiosk women objects to it, “Och, no wonder his band are called the wailers.”

“I wonder what happened to his organs after he died?” asks the second kiosk woman.

“Oh, is he dead?” asked the first.

“Aye, drugs, I think,” said the second, “Hunnerds of drugs. I don’t know if his organs would have been worth much after all the drugs.”

As I begin to leave, the second woman is asking the first if she would ever accept a monkey’s liver as a donor organ if she needed a new one.

Another office worker approaches the kiosk. They greet him with, “Morning, Rod”.


Be a trooper and buy the latest issue of New Escapologist, kids. It's pretty amazing. 60 perfectly square pages and lots of great contributors. Edited by yours truly. x

Minimalism is Anorexia projected outwards.

That’s an entry for The Quotable Wringham, I reckon. Here’s another, which I plagiarised from a tee shirt my girlfriend saw in a mall:

I love Asceticism. I can’t get enough of it.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: Stop, our sides are splitting.

But seriously. What if my silly quip - Anorexia projected outwards - is true? What if my ongoing career in simplification is a form of mental illness?

If sanity is statistical, then I am a raving loon. Most other human beings tend to snowball through life, accumulating more and more and more. I do not. The only thing about me that expands, is my definition of “enough”, and so I constantly offload things from those days when I occasionally acquired.

When I tell people that I didn’t watch The Apprentice because I have no television; or that they cannot “text me” because I have no mobile phone, they either think I’m insane or lying. The BBC constantly warns me that “officers may call” unless I pay my television licence. They find it very difficult to accept that someone today wouldn’t own a television.

Perhaps eventually, I will live in a Japanese capsule hotel, owning just a handheld computer and an all-in-one bodysock, each day burning but a single calorie.

You might see such a vision as some kind of satire but for me it is a perfectly feasible future.

Where does it end? Cut to a future in which I’m soliciting for illegal medical operations: “I’ll keep one arm for now, to see how it goes.”

Sane minimalism stops at Body Bonsai.

But it might be an ever-advancing rationale. Perhaps when I am armless (”But I can give you a nasty suck”) and legless (”How dare you? I’m as sober as a judge!”) and shaved bald; and my spleen and appendix have been removed on account of their superfluity I will still insist that I am sane. Perhaps I will say, “Only when I’m a brain in a jar, will I accept the diagnosis of my mania”.

And then when I am a brain in a jar (”Is this spinal chord strictly necessary?”) I will still refute the possibility that I’m mad, drawing the line only at the point of voluntarily downloading my consciousness into a computer.

And then when I am but a digital soul on a server somewhere, tutting at the surplus data in the world recycling bin, I will accept that maybe I have gone too far and would there be any chance of downloading my girlfriend for some cyberloving?

Will it ever be possible to reduce oneself to an odour?

An evaluation: Minimalism is not Anorexia projected outwards. To have modest surroundings will only nourish, never starve: a maxim that won’t make it into The Quotable Wringham on account of it being true and not a stupid verbal handstand.

www.wringham.co.uk

"Home baking!” she chimed.

The cakes were a bit sweaty-looking and the dye from the hundreds-and-thousands had begun to diffuse into the icing. I decided to have one out of politeness.

“Mm, lovely,” I said, selecting a small one.

Listen:

In my time, I have put some pretty questionable things into my mouth. I speak with authority when I say that this unassuming fairy cake was pretty bad.

The putrid morsel still in my mouth, my inner writer questioned whether “the worst thing I’ve ever eaten” would be hyperbole, but couldn’t think of anything comparably bad. At least not in this lifetime.

Flashback to a disturbingly alive smoked mackerel. Not as bad as the cake. Flashback to octopus sushi, to jellied eel, to various schoolboy dares. None were as bad as this cake. This was noteworthy.

It wasn’t just a bad attempt at a cake, but a thoroughly obnoxious perversion of food. This wasn’t food. It was some sort of military experiment.

The first thing I noticed was the texture. It may have mystified a less orally-fixated man but I knew precisely how this texture compared: it was exactly like Silly Putty.

It didn’t have the resistance of blue tack and at the same time, it was a lot less edible than bubble gum. Silly Putty was this cake’s textural twin.

The taste came in right after texture, in something of a photo finish. The almighty taste of it. A dirty slap of citrus akin to drinking the sweat from the wellington boot of a lemon who was down on his luck.

The experience of eating this cake transcended the culinary and into the existential. H. P. Lovecraft would write a book about this cake.

“They’re weight watchers!” she said, not so much as an explanation, but with pride.

The ingredients were carrot and orange. I had no need to worry, apparently, as each foot-tasting mouthful had a Weight-Watchers sin-value of less than a point each. I’m a living skeleton: I do not need to worry about “points” other, perhaps, than how to increase them.

How the hell was I going to get out of this one? It was too putrid a thing to finish but I was too polite not to eat at least half of it. I had only just managed a quarter and I was already gagging.

The tea would be my saviour. After fortifying my consciousness, I would put the next quarter in my mouth (any more in one go would be suicide) and saturate it with tea.

No good. It was still disgusting. The next piece, I tried to swallow whole, to trick my tongue into not sensing it. Who knew taste buds went back so far?

The final quarter was not going in my mouth. I mashed it up up with my fingers and folded the paper case around it, hoping that it wouldn’t be spotted as leftovers. When I left the meeting room an hour later, the mashed-up quarter cake remained behind, next to a centilitre of tepid tea.

I didn’t look back.

My dad has a maxim for every occasion. The same man who said "Education is no carriage" in a pub called The Kangaroo in 1990 also said "Nobody likes a smart arse" over breakfast in our kitchen in 1991.

I pointed out over cornflakes and half a Florida cantaloup that Aristotle said it was unbecoming for young men to utter maxims, which is why my dad could get away with it.

"Again," said my dad, "Nobody likes a smart arse".

It was shortly after this breakfast that I decided to cultivate the smartest arse of all.

This diary entry relates in reverse chronological order the four most clever things I can remember saying or doing.

In a physics class in 1998, our teacher asks me to identify the strongest force in the universe. I tell him, "Peer Pressure".

In a sex education class in 1996, my teacher asks how one could catch an STD. I tell her, "In a clap trap".

When the National Lottery began in Britain in 1994, my parents were excited to buy tickets. I told them it was all well and good but they could only defy the odds so many times.

In a department store cafe in 1992, I proposed that if the non-smokers were so upset by smokers, they should all move to the tables in the smoking section. That way, there wouldn't be anywhere for smokers to sit.

Perhaps not the wittiest things ever said, but my legacy none the less. If you're not impressed, see my assistant and she'll see that you'll get a full refund.

I am never sure which is the worst part of a haircut: the verb or the noun.

The verb, the actual process of the haircut, is always terrible. “What would you like done?” is always, not unfairly, their first question. Immediately, your hair naivety clashes with the knowledge of the hair expert. I once heard my dad laugh this off and say, “Reduce the volume”. Try that in certain quarters and end up bald.

The noun, the stylised thing that adorns your head, will attract remarks and opinions for at least the next fortnight. Cries of “Happy New Haircut” will be hurled at you from the mouths friends, from passing cars and from the insides of wheelie bins.

You could eliminate the agony of “Happy New Haircut” by having a covert trim every week so that nobody notices. But that would increase your exposure to “What would you like done?” more than is strictly healthy. It truly is a matter of noun versus verb.

Since my verb last Friday, I have had the shortest noun of my adult life. It’s a tufty little Mohawk like what someone’s receptionist or a trendy stockbroker might have. At first I thought that it made me look a bit gay but, after a few hours of mirror torment, I realised it’s my clothes, face, voice and latent homosexuality that make me look a bit gay and not the haircut at all. It’s a perfectly good haircut.

I choose my hairdressers very carefully. Since last July, I have used a Turkish barber. His English isn’t very good, which is precisely why I use him. The worst thing about getting a haircut is that you have to make smalltalk for the duration. I don’t know anything about sport or current television or celebrities and have difficulty faking it while someone is cutting small parts off my body. I have nothing to say so I choose a barber who also has nothing to say. It’s ace.

On Friday, looking forward to forty minutes of silently staring at my own face and occasionally saying “shorter”, I was surprised to see that Mr. Barber has employed a young blonde lady assistant. Lucky Mr. Barber. My heart sank as she patted my shoulders and asked in perfect Glaswegian what I would like done.

“Reduce the volume?” I suggested pathetically.

I think this quote should be added to the pull chord doll they will eventually make of my dad. It’s not as oft said as “use your bloody indicators” and “it’s not racist, it’s an observation” but it is similarly ineffective.

The new non-Turkish ladybarber suggested I get rid of my Adolph Hitler side parting and that she “cut it forward” instead so I would like a bit like that David Tennant.

Two years ago, I had long and unkempt hair like some kind of hoodlum. When I first had it all cut off, a colleague said on the cusp of sadness, “You just don’t look like Rob any more”.

Well, now I really don’t. But my girlfriend prefers short hair to long. When you start doing that thing she does, we can talk haircuts.

The gradual reduction of hair from that to this, however, has generated many comments along the lines of “you’ll be bald next time, hahaha, hur-hur-hur”.

But I won’t. Because I’m never getting a haircut again. I can’t face it any more. Either that or I’ll become one of those people who cuts their own hair and ends up looking like Keith Flint. Not that there’s anything wrong with looking like Keith Flint.

Take a look at my new website: wringham.co.uk
Design by Neil Scott. Illustration by Samara Leibner.