C: Are you having fun?
B: Trying to find a way to leave the gig without causing a diplomatic incident.
C: Tell them I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor and am already up to my knees. I need your help to pull me out.
[time passes]
B: I’m leaving in a bit. Will get kebabs from Old Street.
C: Feed mine to the snake and I’ll collect it from inside.
B: What’s my backstory?
HSG: Your childhood is a mystery. Little is known of your life before you arrived five years ago, carried across across the ocean by a giant octopus and deposited on the beach at Penzance.
B: And your backstory?
HSG: I used to be a dog, until I ate an enchanted can of Pedigree Chum.
1. Peter Jackson/Guillermo del Toro
2. Nick Clegg/David Cameron
3. Mark Kermode/Simon Mayo
4. Ben Goldacre/Simon Singh
5. Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama/Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury
BOFF: Hey McGruber!
HSG: Ah, Larry-Larry.
BOFF: How are all your bugs?
HSG: Today? Today I am 15% bugs.
BOFF: I thought you were 35% bugs?
HSG: Naw, 35% bugs is only for special occasions.
BOFF: they say there might be food shortages
BOFF: or is that just sensationalist media having some fun?
HSG: at this stage the only shortages seem to be exotic fruit and veg
HSG: and international mail is taking longer
BOFF: dragonfruit?
HSG: NO DRAGONFRUIT OMG WE’RE ALL FUCKED
BOFF: ok so it’s probably not too bad
HSG: yeah, i can live without kiwi fruit for a bit
HSG: i have not noticed any food shortages, myself
BOFF: any short people?
HSG: there is a midget shortage
HSG: normally they get parachuted in on thursdays
BOFF: fuck
HSG: i wait all week for those fucking midgets
BOFF: i’m so sorry
BOFF: i know i know
HSG: i’m gutted
HSG: Hey there, Mackleson. How’s your egg mcmuffin?
BOFF: Oh, the tube’s broken in my mcmuffin. It’s got a broken tube. I can’t change the channel.
HSG: Are you stuck on the Elephant Channel again?
BOFF: Yeah!
HSG: But there’s some pretty good stuff on the Elephant Channel.
BOFF: I guess so, but why is it so expensive?
HSG: Well, it’s so much heavier than the other channels.
And so on.
If someone were to release, say, homemade porn featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson from when they were romantically involved in 1993 during the shooting of Made In America, I would totally watch that.
Just saying.
I can hear your breakfast.
I sculpt my last anus at 6pm. See you then?
Vacav Havel.
So fussy.
Your miniature elephant has eaten all the peanuts.
Your face, my ass.
I bought you a helicopter with a wolf pilot. That’s how much I love you.
I put a slug on teacher’s chair.
I want to be Keith Richards when I grow up. Only without the heroin and coconuts.
That was an unacceptable display of textspeak. Please try harder.
I like facts.
Your figurines are exquisite.
I have listened to your message four times and still can’t understand it! But I still like you.
I’ve got Hitler in a bamboo cage. Want to poke him with a stick?
Slanty.
Lairy
Ok! (champagne charlie)
Hangin tuff obv.
How did edwyn slag off lloyd cole? Something about penguin classics?
I actually want a rabbnn pilot but thanks
I HAS MINI EGgs
Business
Yay! Wayne!
I’ve missed the first half of ghost busters 2. It hardly seems worth it now.
What about potato Mary?
Quit your jibber jabber sucker
I loom!
No a panda
There’s a big hayfield up near Buxton – one in particular. It’s got a long rock wall, a big oak tree at the north end. It’s like something out of a Robert Frost poem. It’s where I asked my wife to marry me: we went there for a picnic and made love under that oak and I asked and she said yes.
Promise me, Red: if you ever get out, find that spot. In the base of that wall, you’ll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A piece of black, volcanic glass. There’s something buried under it I want you to have.
This is my favourite example of old-school geocaching.
Yesterday – twenty-four years too late – I finally got around to watching Threads, the 1984 UK docudrama about the aftermath of nuclear war. Man alive; that was one harrowing televisual experience and no mistake. It put me in a deep funk that could not be assuaged even with chocolate biscuits. There are only so many charred accountants and melted housewives you can stomach on a Sunday afternoon.
Luckily for me, three hours later I had an appointment to see Wayne Coyne introduce his film Christmas on Mars at the Barbican. I was hoping for an antidote of sorts, but in fact it was suprisingly boring (imagine a student film aiming for “Plan 9 meets Dead Man meets Eraserhead” but ending up instead as a tedious semiotic montage of Nude Baby meets Giant Vagina meets Santa Claus).
Still: great nap. Best cinema nap ever! (Well, second best, after the one I had in 1997 during the re-released Return of the Jedi. That high-quality hour of REM sleep – accompanied as it was by the roaring surround sound of speeder bikes zooming through the forests of Endor – remains one of my life’s high points.)
It must be said, however, that Christmas on Mars’s dullness was tempered by Coyne introducing it in person. He’s such a jaunty, life-affirming presence I’ll forgive him almost any transgression.
So at least I wasn’t thinking about nuclear winter when I left.
Which was nice.
I Ate a Bee 