The House of Writers (16 page)

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“Le baiseur va lire ses recueillies œuvres!”

. . . salt pemmican; violate a traffic code and face a £50 fine; crumble under interrogation; invite a retired postman to a soiree; complain about the lipstick smear on a new VCR; upset a Marxist with a misquotation from Engels; dream about strumming Graham Coxon’s Stratocaster; reach skyward and attempt to stroke a cumulus; count to one million while reciting the Phoenician alphabet; lend a neutral opinion to a friend and complain when the friend uses the neutral opinion in conversation; use the
vous
form when addressing a French musician about the benefits of the pentatonic scale in improvised samba numbers; collect used nappies or diapers for four decades and sell the loot to a collector on your deathbed; abolish the male skirt at funerals; invent a tricorne to be worn by bankers in board meetings; ululate during a meeting calling for the abolition of ululators; knit a picture of Jane McVeigh that looks more like Barbara McBride; transfer nine pounds into a savings account and set fire to each branch of that bank in the country; pencil in an appointment with a pen salesman; insult a kind-hearted chimp and pour cream on his knuckle; call for a ban on ideograms; encourage a priest to insult his congregation; erect a matchstick homage to Elton John outside the hospital; pretend to misunderstand a basic command for so long genuine incomprehension occurs; retaliate with a two-hour F15 missile strike when an old lady drops her contact lens into your soup; complain about the inadequate scansion in all rap albums to the British Poetry Council; diagnose a dragon with ADHD; yodel at such a volume your lungs are declared a public health hazard; complain vehemently when your anecdote about grandpa being slowly devoured by lung cancer isn’t declared a comic masterpiece; invent the perfect recipe for goulash and refuse to make a single bowl; appear on a TV chat show and discuss at length your genital warts and fondness for bestiality; confuse a genitive clause with a German Panzerkampfwagen IV; lick over three thousand ice lollies to prove an incoherent point; send a raunchy text message to your best friend’s grandmother; phone your ex-girlfriend to complain about the quality of her diction during intercourse; select from over one hundred hopefuls a person to play the lead role in
Badgers, Badgers! We Love Thee!: A Hexagrammic Musical;
invade an East European nation with nothing but a pogo stick and pluck; sign on the dole for sixty-five years, take a job in a supermarket for one day, then retire; beat a timid little girl at capture the castle viciously and unsportingly; stick your nose into a policeman’s helmet; point out to the groom that he has dandruff on his shoulder five seconds before the vicar pronounces man and wife; try out all the caskets at a funeral parlour for size, then tell the undertaker with a deadly sinister expression the selected casket is for him; have a baby with three noses named Anosmia; irrigate anything that needs irrigating in the general area; write to the heirs of Patrick Moore grousing that Cassiopeia is the most insipid constellation in all Polaris; misspell a word for over seventy years on purpose merely to spite a pedant; spoil someone’s birthday party by telling everyone it’s your birthday as well, and stage a rival birthday party in the corner of the room, trying to lure everyone to your side with free liquor; rent a marquee for nine years with nothing but a potted plant inside and charge £4,000 for entry; spend nine million dollars on a pea; kidnap Nicholas Parsons and force him to speak for a year without hesitation, repetition or deviation, or he dies; marry a woman and say absolutely nothing to her for the rest of your life; sit yawning in the theatre only when your actor friend is performing his soliloquy; invent a 24-hr webcam programme where active cameras are sent through the post to random recipients; found an organisation that pays literary writers vast fees to praise utterly fucking awful novels; lead a public campaign to have cactuses issued free on the NHS, and be very belligerent and defensive when people laugh at your campaign in the media; adopt a homeless child and raise her to be a mathematical wunderkind, and when she leaves home, blame her bitterly for eating all the kumquats; gyrate in a straight line for nine hours, snapping at anyone who argues that gyration cannot be performed vertically; noodle on the clavinet outside a wine bar to see if anyone cocks their necks and looks at you; turn up at the police station on a daily basis begging to be convicted of any unconvicted crime; be a really swell human being for ninety-nine years, and on your deathbed, call everyone a bunch of useless and disgusting cunts; be a really rancid human being for ninety-nine years, and on your deathbed, call everyone a bunch of beautiful and lovely free spirits; stay in a B&B and pester the owner to open a bowling lane and a sodomy room so he can change the acronym to B&B&B&B (Bed and Breakfast and Bowling and Buggery); photocopy a tedious story about a cravat salesman tripping in the Trossachs, and leave copies on the seats of every bus in Northern Ireland; strenuously deny the rumours that you have been urinating on a farmer’s lettuce, then sixteen years later send him a box of piss-covered lettuce with the note IT WAS ME, YOU FOOL!; boast about having scaled Ben Nevis with nothing but a cardigan and a toilet plunger; lie about everything your entire life except where you’ve hidden the bodies; make a really weak pun about people acting like “bumbling” bees while surrounded by extremely witty wits, then cry in the toilet after your humiliation; order a pizza by phone with no cheese, tomato sauce, or pizza base, and when the pizza delivery boy arrives, sue him for delivering an invisible pizza; become proficient at the xylophone simply because you are a human being and have the power to do so; remain in a permanent state of bewilderment as to the qualities of an augmented 7
^th
; rewrite the entire canon of
Famous Five
novels, increasing the casual racism and upping the anal sex scenes between Julian and Timmy; find schoolboy humour extremely disagreeable your entire life, then on your deathbed collapse in hysterics at the word “cockshaft”; pepper pemmican; drive a milk float with the same determination as a Formula 1 car; sit on the dock of the bay badmouthing everything Otis Redding ever sang; walk a tightrope in stilettos and prohibit filming of the act; do something spontaneous for someone who hates surprises and grouse bitterly when they cry in your arms; open a shop selling only VCRs, cassettes, and Sega Mega Drives called
It’s the Early ’90s, You Morons!!;
open your mouth permanently in case someone one day flings in a slice of Parma ham; disassemble the British Monarchy and turn Buckingham Palace into the world’s largest bouncy castle; stand in the local election as the No Promises No Future party, and promise nothing to everyone who votes, and absolutely no prospects for anyone in the future, and when the No Promises No Future party is elected, go back on your promise of no promises and no future and give people absolutely everything they want and a brilliant future, and face a backlash from a disappointed and angrily fulfilled electorate; meet an Albanian man in Egypt and ask him what the hell he, an Albanian man, is doing in Egypt; create a fictional stockbroker who loves to read the novels of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and William Makepeace Thackeray; sinisterly insert completely innocuous pills into people’s drinks at parties; upset an upsilon; accuse Hungarians of being a nation of herbivores while taunting them with rancid meat; rev your engine noisily beside a sign saying “Please don’t rev your engine noisily beside this sign that reads ‘Please don’t rev your engine noisily’”; pressure a shy wolf into riding a unicycle for the amusement of your depressed teenage son; blame Jason for everything bad that has happened to Kylie, and blame Kylie for everything bad that has happened to you; make an error while writing in the second person while brushing my hair; take a stand on the abolition of chairs on trams; read every item on this list nine times, laughing even more hysterically at each entry until you wet the entire village with your chortled-up urine; telephone Bob Dylan praising his unpopular Christian records; telephone Daniel O’Donnell praising his sexy blues records; slip inside the eye of your mind, surprised when you find a better place to play; purchase a ridiculous amount of patio furniture even though you live in a one-bedroom flat on the fourth floor; read the novels of Hubert Selby and thank your lucky stars you are none of the poor bastards portrayed; axe a long-running American sitcom starring Norm MacDonald despite the ratings being larger than any programme in the known universe; sing a song of sixpence when you have no vocal chords and only threepence; dance a mazurka in the rain and cry tears of monumental happiness; braid the hair of the Scarlet Pimpernel; torment the number seventy by comparing it to the far more impressive eighty and ninety; erect a monument to the actor Alan Alda on a Drumchapel council estate; invent a traffic calming system involving acts of inhumane torture on prisoners performed on roadsides to distract drivers from their road rage; make a papier-mâché angel and call her Nellie R. Cauldron; pass a law prohibiting the illegal use of fireworks inside a whale; open a water stand dispensing free water on summer days; close a water stand dispensing free water on summer days and open a shop charging £4.50 for a bottle of lukewarm tap water; open a prawn-broker selling and purchasing a variety of prawns; write a novel exploiting a war or a tragedy with cheap emotional manipulation and appear on a talk show making earnest and faux-profound remarks about the power of love to transcend all evil and horror; assume that the thing Jeff said last night was a veiled reference to your alcohol problem and cold-shoulder him when you see him next; lure a barn owl to your bathroom using a dead rodent on a string and, once trapped, take a series of erotic snaps of its naked wings; barbecue in a barber’s queue; record a nine-hour tribute album to Barbra Streisand consisting of rambling descriptions of each of her songs; write a comment on
The Guardian
website expressing how, in your esteemed opinion, the Prime Minister is a useless fucker, and his cabinet are Cambridge tossers who know nothing about common people, and that all MPs can be dismissed due to being exactly the same in personality and motive, and fail to offer a workable solution to this state of affairs; hound Barbra Streisand until she reinstates the missing “a” from her forename; volunteer for nine weeks in a charity shop until you smell of old lady’s cupboards and damp cardboard; commit suicide by taking four million aspirin; blame Lisa Loeb for the rise in irritating pulchritudinous pixie singers who write about human relationships in a twee but quirky way, with a sideline in fashion modelling and sitcom appearances; work for a spell at the
West Lothian Courier
and decide drinking bleach is a more appealing alternative; spend a week reading the prison diaries of Harold Shipman and write a favourable review on Goodreads; shave a pineapple even if the raspberry protests; mount an expedition on John Cleese; confuse a smart person by lying about your favourite Louis Zukofsky poem; bribe a prison guard into smuggling a Garfield duvet into your cell; telephone a radio show and at a random moment in the conversation declare that
Kind Hearts and Coronets
is your favourite film, and when the host asks why you mentioned that film, pretend you never said anything; stalk the critic James Wood for a fortnight and write a 10,000-word review of his gait; devise a system of semaphore using pinkies only; learn how to pole-vault but refuse to demonstrate your skill to the wider world unless asked by Tom Robbins; zap something beginning with a “z” for the sake of alliteration; start a soccer team in Manchester, firing anyone who uses the word “football”; end an item in a list with a colon instead of a semicolon to confuse the reader: dunk your chocolate biscuit into an open coconut; stay up all night listening to the records of The Clash, complaining bitterly about “Wrong ’Em Boyo” on
London Calling;
ban the use of italics in swimming pools; enter a room with incredible self-confidence, but cower in fear and paranoia once you reach your desk; invite a snake handler out to dinner and refuse to pay your share of the bill; eat only Pot Noodles for sixty-six years, then have a slice of halibut; climb into an onion and lose the fight to remain unemotional; take your driving test in a pink mini while wearing a tutu; take your mother’s advice to never fart in a lift; break the sound and speed barrier in a milk float; place a thistle in a strategic place; ring the bells whenever a carrier pigeon successfully delivers a short missive about the Baba Vida fortifications; compose a haiku on the difference between albino chefs and Parisian chefs; compose a sonnet on the rarity of albino chefs from Paris; channel the spirit of Rayner Heppenstall; leap up and down like a teenage girl at a pop concert when the vicar is reading the last rites; ladle too much pumpkin soup into your bowl; pollinate a beehive using telekinesis; pollute a river with liquid sewage; ruin a small child’s birthday party sell-otaping his friends’ mouths shut; accentuate the negative; balance a piano on your knee; use the word “bacchanalian” while driving a forklift drunk; create a form of ponderous ellipsis consisting of twenty periods (i.e.....................); salt the universe; make a remark that nadir is the apotheosis of words meaning the lowest point; suggest a game of Twister as they are filling in your mother’s grave; oil the hinges with love; grease the monkey with hate; contact the Health and Safety department of your local hospital just to say hi; throw a temper tantrum when the tomato juice is destroyed; rewrite this sentence in a more jaunty manner; blow your wad at the least appropriate moment; conduct a year-long investigation into when is the least appropriate moment to blow one’s wad; question the nature of beekeepers; operate heavy machinery when drowsy with a plastic bag over your head while drunk; phlogisticate air; dream big and lower your expectations; change your diet to less healthy foods and blow your belly out your waistband; accuse your fiancée of stealing your money while walking down the aisle; abseil down a conifer; brood for hours on whether there is or is not a Godard; make the world seem brighter by dancing on a Ritz cracker; wear the tackiest socks in the world with pride; hire a dominatrix for the evening and simply watch TV and talk about the weather; create a Facebook profile for Roddy Occult, invite all his friends, and post sexually aggressive comments about his mother; employ a personal assistant to read your mail, paying him handsomely for this minimal amount of work, then one day sack him for being a lazy feckless sponger; punch a barista for making a love-heart in your coffee’s foam; punch a barista for having the job title “barista”; rap one of your pupils across the knuckles for not knowing how to spell “diuretically,” and at the tribunal rip off your clothes to reveal a tattoo across your chest: IT’S DIURETICALLY, YOU TURD!!; sing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” once inside Heaven to psyche the angels; dress like a tramp to attend a job interview for Head Programmer at KXS Electrics Affiliated; really hate yourself while drinking hot chocolate; really hate someone else while drinking a tiger’s urine; boil your underpants in a vat of gelatine; start an anti-fracking campaign and systematically block the government’s attempts to introduce fracking procedures in your or any country, while secretly thinking fracking is fucking awesome; put a chocolate bar in your lunchbox every day except Thursday; read a chimpanzee his rights in a colourful vest; appear bewildered when looking at an aquarium; demonstrate the difference between an octagon and a hexagon to a simpleton; wring the neck of a jazzy pheasant; pretend to be a lemur while affecting an irritating insouciance; debate the merits of breastfeeding while sucking on bottled milk and draining a bovine’s teat; quiz a questioner, question a quizzer, and delete my internet cache; bandy about but utterly refuse to caper; hustle but absolutely refuse to bustle; have a very intense game of Boggle while giving birth to triplets; conduct the London Philharmonic using a Curlywurly, surreptitiously nibbling down the confection until the orchestra collapses; abuse an adze; spend nine years duffing up old ladies, and when in the dock at the criminal court, pick your nose and make raspberry sounds with your armpits and generally appear immature and unbothered, and when sentenced to six months, rise with a shrug and say,