articles

I suppose English essays aside (“Themes in Ted Hughes’s The Stag”, “The eagerness of schoolboys to read the part of 2nd immigration officer in Arthur Miller’s ‘View From The Bridge’ is sarcasm – discuss”), the articles reprinted here were my first attempts at comedy writing. Or any writing at all really.

They came about – for those who care about this sort of thing (well you might?) – like this.

Ooooh way back when (got to be 1985-1989? Ish? Anyway) I was a member of a “youth club” in the Harrow area. Well, I say “youth club” it was a boys club. A churchy sort of youth club. Run by Opus Dei. (Yes, the weirdo self-flagellating murderous albinos in The Da Vinci Code). Anyway, it was larks and boffo hi-jinks, what with the camping and the film-making and the games and the rosary. (Hmm).

And one of the guys who ran it (a weird, self-flagellating murderous albino if I recall) got in contact a few years after we’d all grown out of clubs and film-making and the baby Jesus. He was living / working / murdering / self-flagellating in the Scotland area. Scotland, specifically. He remembered I was something of an artist and asked me to draw some political cartoons to accompany the articles in a magazine he was publishing. “Campus” it was called. Marketed for the students at Edinburgh and Glasgow universities.

With dreams of being spotted as the next Gerald Scarfe / Ralph Steadman / that bloke who wote “Gambols” for the Daily Express, I provided. (see “art” bit of the site up there at the top).

I “arksed” if I also might provide verbiage-based content and Dan Brown (or what e’er his name was) agreed. Or conceded. Or gave up trying to stop me. Whichever.

So here some of them are.

If you’re one of the many people at home playing “spot the shamelessly bare-faced plagiarism” then twenty points for noticing the undisguised Woody Allen-esque fiction and Stephen Fry-ish word play.

I hope to shake off these influences any day now.

This piece is taken from something called ICSF (not to be confused with ISEF). Blimey, that’s just occurred to me. Potentially confusing.

ICSF is the Imperial College Science Fiction Society. I worked with a chappie who was in

attendance at said college and I contributed a jotting for their fanzine.

ISEF, dull acronym fans, is the Intel Science & Engineering Fair. For reasons passing human and superhuman (but not meta-human, Forbidden Planet shoppers) understanding, I helped out the partner of a friend of a friend who needed a very inexperienced science journalist to fly to Indianapolis at very short notice and be overpaid to write about the smartest children in the whole bloody world. So I did that.

Ahh, self-promotion. Where would planet earth be without it? When Gagged was launched, the poor woman in charge of publicising the thing at the House they call “Random” got busy-ish getting my name out to all and sun-dried. Whether it was through luck, luck or just goddamned luck, I was put forward as a contributor to a li’l section in the Travel supplement called “Confessions Of A Tourist.” Like a good boy, I knocked out 800 words to delight the editor, with the promise of a plug at the end of the column.

Scott Pack. One time, ex-Waterstones employee, now something of a big-wig in the UK publishing biz. In all honesty, I don’t know why and nobody I’ve asked can shed any light on it either. A tendency to go “on the record” whenever The Guardian or The Bookseller wanted a spikey literary quote, he soon made something of a name for himself as bookselling’s “guy behind the guy behind the guy”. (Which obviously made Guy’s Richie, Pearce and Smiley rather paranoid). He currently works for something that calls itself “the Friday Project” (I’ve no clue as to what this is. A “web presence?” Shudder) and is a daily must-read for those in the book-business. Imagine of one of the “3a.m Girls” at an Ian McEwan reading and you’re halfway there. This is a guest blog I did to make some on-line noise for the publication of “Conman.”

If you read the “Me & My Big Mouth” blog above, then this will make sense. A fake website, given press coverage as a new London bookshop, as a faux viral mock spoof e-blog web marketing exercise to promote “Conman”. Realistic enough for me to get a flurry of emails from folks wanting to know where it was based, why I never answered the phone, who Neil Martin was and whether or not I wanted to advertise in the back of Total Film magazine. I didn’t.

Not quite an article, and seems a bit rude to file this under "stand-up."

Two matrimonial moments.

A speech written for the wedding service of my sister Caroline and her husband James. Not that he was her husband at the time, obviously. He was just her fiancée. He was her husband about 8 minutes after this speech was delivered. Not because the speech was delivered. I mean, it’s sweet n all, and quite touching, but it’s aphrodisical powers are limited by –

Oh look, you get the idea.

Plus, for the sake of completion (much like the purchase of Morrissey’s “Malajusted”) - the best man's speech written and performed for old school pal Paul Subbiah and his lovely wife Sheila.

A light hearted and charming interview for TheBeat website - a promotory bit of interweb tomfoolery linked to the Windsor Firestation Bookswap I guested at in November 2009. I come across as the usual verbose twit-knuckle which won;t come as a surprise to anyone frankly.