Authors: Danny Wallace
I flicked my computer on, made a cup of tea, and checked my e-mails. There was the now-usual array of spam messages, urging me to look at their Web site, or yelling at me about mortgage deals and low prices (thankfully, none of them had resorted to just
asking
me to buy their stuff). But then as I clicked onto the next one, I was startled and confused.
Because the next thing I read was a desperate call for help.
To: Danny
From: SULTAN QABOOS
Subject: URGENT BUSINESS TRANSACTION
THE PALACE-MUSCAT
P.O. BOX 632 MUSCAT PC 113 OMAN
ATTENTION PLEASE,
I TAKE THE PLEASURE TO GET ASSOCIATED WITH YOU AND DESIRE TO INTRODUCE MYSELF, REQUESTING FOR YOUR EXPERT ADVISES AND IMMEDIATE LINE OF ACTION.
I AM OMAR, SON OF THE MURDERED SULTAN, SULTAN OF THE SULTANATE OF OMAN.
Jesus! I had just received an e-mail from the son of a sultan! I didn’t know whether to curtsy or to bow! What was the son of a sultan doing, e-mailing me? How did that happen? And how did he hear of me?
I CAME TO KNOW YOUR EXPERTISE AND PROFESSIONALLISM IN BUSINESS FROM MY FATHER, AND AM THUS CONFIDENTLY WRITING, THAT YOU WILL ACCEPT MY REQUEST TO PROVIDE YOUR EXPERTISE PROFESSIONALLISM IN BUSINESS.
My professionallism in business?
What
professionallism in business? And is that really how you spell “professionalism”?
I ASK YOU TO KEEP THIS CONFIDENTIAL. I AM TO TRUST YOU WITH MY LIFE, AS MY FATHER DID.
What?
MY FATHER WAS LAST NIGHT MURDERED BY HIS POLITICAL ENEMIES.
What?!
NOW THOSE SAME ENEMIES ARE ATTEMPTING TO TAKE CONTROL OF HIS FINANCES. I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SECRETLY TAKE $40 MILLION AND INTEND TO FLEE THE COUNTRY.
How do you
secretly
take forty million dollars? Do you nick a dollar a week for forty million weeks?
I WILL LIKE YOU TO USE YOUR EXPERTISE AND PROFESSIONALLISM IN BUSINESS TO HELP ME ESCAPE MY MONEY AND INVEST FOR ME.
What professionalism in business?!
ON YOUR CONFIRMING ACCEPTING MY REQUEST IN TOTALITY YOU WILL RECEIVE 25% OF THE MONEY ($10 MILLION).
Okay, say no more; that’s fine, when do we do it?
PLEASE KEEP THIS TOTALLY CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE I HOPE YOU WILL SAY YOU WILL HELP ME. PLEASE ACT SOON, WE MUST PREPARE. IT IS GOD’S WILL.
OMAR
Good God!
But hang on … let’s put this into perspective.
The son of a murdered sultan was asking for my help. Me! And he was offering me ten million dollars. Ten million dollars if I said yes! That beats twenty-five thousand pounds any day! Already, Yes was planning to make me rich again!
Now, usually, of course, I’d be a little skeptical. This kind of thing rarely, if ever, happens to me. In fact now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I helped a sultan. Even a little. I’m not proud about that. It’s just that I’m not sure I’d even know how to do it or what they’d need help with. I’m ashamed to say I know very little about magic carpets as it is, and if you gave me a big curly sword, I’d probably give it straight back to you.
But here was a man in need, so I wrote back …
To: SULTAN QABOOS
From: Da6nny
Subject: Re: URGENT BUSINESS TRANSACTION
Dear Omar, son of the murdered sultan Qaboos, Yes, of course I will help you!
Danny
P.S. Sorry about your dad
* * *
And that was that.
So right now, somewhere in the middle of Cyberspace, my agreement and best wishes were winging their way to a troubled son of a sultan, a man probably cowering under a table in some ornate mansion somewhere with a chair forced up against the door and only a big bald genie for protection. Or maybe he was already on the run. Maybe he was sneaking from village to village, under the cover of darkness, dressed as a peasant woman and fearing for his life! How happy he would be when he read that I, Danny Wallace, a specky bloke with toothpaste round his mouth, would indeed lend him some of his professionalism in business!
I sat by my computer, eagerly clicking the Get Mail button, hoping each time that the next click would bring a response from Omar. But time after time, all I heard was the mocking dull thud that whoever designed my computer decided would represent the sound of “no mail.” The dull thud of a punch in the paunch. The dull thud of “no messages, why do you bother? Not even
other
nerds want to write to you.”
But I wasn’t giving up on Omar. I made another cup of tea, found a biscuit at the back of my cupboard, and sat, staring intently at my screen, willing him to write back, willing him to know that it was all going to be okay, willing him to
just hang on
.
And then I got bored and got on with my day.
I was doing the washing-up when I heard a
bing-bong
. New mail!
I ran to my computer, fearing Omar was in danger.
It was Hanne.
Danny,
Just checking you’re not too depressed about losing that 25 grand.
Hanne
I replied.
Hanne,
Not to worry. I just agreed to help the son of a murdered sultan, and he said he’d give me ten million dollars.
Danny
I waited around for a bit, but Hanne didn’t reply. She was probably busy.
Aside from Omar, there didn’t seem to be too much happening today. Not much to say yes to. So I decided that today
would
be the day I’d go in to work, after all.
I was sure I’d find plenty to do.
The first of Australia’s Big Things, since you ask, was the Big Banana.
Erected in 1963 by an American immigrant named John Landi, it was a personal and heartfelt tribute to the banana and was intended to attract visitors from miles and miles around.
It worked.
From all over Australia, banana lovers flocked to the Big Banana to celebrate the world of bananas and immerse themselves in the adjoining banana plantation. It became a symbol of all that was right with the humble banana, somewhere for dedicated banana fans to centre their energies and focus their banana-based efforts.
And it also meant that from 1963 onward, John Landi sold a
lot
more bananas.
Perhaps for that reason the idea took off.
Almost immediately Australians of the north, south, east, and west realised that they could draw major national attention to their farms, their businesses, and even their hobbies just by building huge, colourful statues in honour of whatever was at the core of their obsession. From Sydney to the Sunshine Coast, just like Lizzie had told me, these Big Things began to line the highways and byways of Australia. Naturally some garnered more praise and plaudits than others … the Big Pineapple of 1972, experts agree, is probably the most successful of all the Big Things, and in the seventies and early eighties really brought pineapples and pineapple-related issues to the foreground. But the Big Oyster, a towering testament to the vast oyster beds of the Manning River region, is something that few Australians like to talk about. It plays, they will tell you with their eyes fixed to the floor, a sad second fiddle to the Big Prawn, only a few miles to the north.
I was beginning to really love Big Things. And right now, sitting in an office at the BBC, I was clicking my way around the Web, finding out all about them. I was fascinated. And I was slowly finding my favourites, too. The Big Rock, for example (imagine that!), or the Big Avocado, to be found at Duranbah’s popular theme park, Tropical Fruit World (formerly known as Avocado Adventureland, an experience which sounds only marginally more appealing than an afternoon at my very own Shelf Adventure).
“Dan, can I have a word?”
It was my boss’s voice, and I spun round in my chair, deftly quitting the Internet as I did so in order to hide the words
Tropical Fruit World
from my screen. Sadly all it did was bring up the game of Minesweeper I’d been playing earlier, but my boss politely ignored it.
“Listen, say no if you don’t want to, but there’s a meeting over at TV Centre later this week—some kind of development thing—and they want someone from radio to attend. Everyone I’ve asked seems very busy all of a sudden. Funny how everyone gets busy when there’s something they don’t want to say yes to. So how about you? Can you make it?”
“Yes!” I said, proud that I was bucking the trend. “Definitely. What kind of meeting is it again?”
“Development. The usual thing. People sitting around coming up with ideas. But you’re up for it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Great. I’ll tell them. Thanks, Dan. And enjoy Tropical Fruit World.”
He closed the door, and I decided I’d better get on and do some work.
Working from home is a great thing, but so is working from BBC Broadcasting House—home to a thousand scruffy, cardiganed radio producers. Part of my freelance contract demanded that I spend a couple of days a week sitting in one of the offices here, working up ideas, and that was just dandy by me.
I’d worked for the BBC ever since leaving university, when I’d somehow talked my way into a six-month traineeship in the Light Entertainment department, and now here I was, a bona-fide Light Entertainment producer, a few years shy of thirty and my first-ever cardigan. What qualifies as Light Entertainment I’ve never been sure, though you and I both now know that cardigans are involved, and I’m fairly sure it also has something to do with Nicholas Parsons.
But Broadcasting House is a fantastic place to work, steeped as it is in glorious radio history—from Churchill’s wartime addresses to the comedy of The Goons—and it was always with a sense of genuine pride that I walked through the huge, brass doors with my special BBC pass clipped to my jeans. Fair enough, it’s not as if I was the man charged with making the type of quality journalism that the world has come to rely on as the most trustworthy and respected on the planet. It’s not as if I was one of those who were bringing down governments or exposing corruption or staying up all night poring through secret dossiers and
turning them into the next day’s global headlines. But I
was
one of the ones making silly and obscure little programmes that might pass the time on the commute home or be heard by a lonely shepherd tuning in to the World Service somewhere on the Savannah Plains or confuse a prisoner in some jail somewhere with a topical joke they blatantly wouldn’t understand, because they’d been inside on arson charges since 1987. It’s a strange job, but the way I think of it is
someone
has to be heard by the shepherds and confuse the prisoners.
So anyway, I was trying to get some work done. I really was. But there were a couple of things against me. The first was the growing realisation and excitement that my life was in the hands of just about everyone else in the world, but not me, and that just one well-placed yes to one well-placed opportunity could change or improve, or if Ian was to be believed, destroy my life forever. And the second thing that was against me getting any work done today was that there was very little work to be done. I was between projects. Sure I could start a new one. But that would just be making work for myself. Who does that? And anyway, who wanted to work when they could dance and play outside in the sunshine, saying yes to people willy-nilly, instead? I started to stride out of the office, looking at all the world like someone who was on his way to a meeting at which he’d say lots of important things, involving words like “merger” or “hierarchy”; the kind of meeting normal men would faint in, and women would avoid for fear of leaving the room impregnated by the sheer weight of the testosterone in the air. Testosterone that probably smellt like quality aftershave. Real men sweat that stuff.
“Hi, Danny,” said a voice to my left, all of a sudden.
“Hello!” I boomed, still imagining myself to be quite important.
“How are you?”
It was Robert, a technician I’d worked with on a rather intense weeklong edit. An edit which had actually seemed like it was closer to a month, mainly because Robert was cramming for a pub-quiz final and kept stopping every five minutes to tell me a little-known fact about the animal kingdom or to ask me to test him on what was number one in the charts in specific weeks during the 1990s.
“I’m fine, thanks, Robert.”
“Waiting for the lift?”
“Yep. Are you?”
“Nope,” he said.
And then the lift arrived, and he got in with me.
“I’m going to have a little party next week, Danny. Nothing fancy, just a few friends from ‘the industry.’”
He used his hands to signify the quotation marks, and then laughed and shook his head as he enjoyed what he’d done.
“I was wondering whether you might like to come along?”
Ordinarily this would have been a tricky one to answer. It’s not because Robert is a boring man—he’s not, and I’ll always defend him on that—it’s just that he’s terribly dull.
“Of course I would, Robert,” I said, pleased at least that I’d have another thing to pop in the diary. “I’d be delighted, in fact.”
“Oh, cool. Ace. You’re the only one from the BBC who can make it! Everyone else is really busy at the moment.”
“I’ve been hearing that, yes.”
“Okay. Well. I’ll e-mail the details to you, okay?”
“Great.”
And with that, Robert and I stepped out of the lift, we shook hands, and he stepped back in and went all the way back up.
It was still sunny as I walked down Regent Street, and I was smiling. Since my scratch card win, I’d started to wonder something: What if, potentially, every single moment I was awake could lead to somewhere wonderful? What if all I had to do was keep my eyes wide open and welcoming? After all, the man on the bus had made me realise that sometimes the little negatives of daily life don’t have to be negatives at all. The crush of the Tube, or the bus that doesn’t stop for you, or the nightclub that won’t let you in … Before I’d thought of those as self-contained little moments. I’d never really considered that they might be beginnings, that they might lead somewhere, that they might be for the best. And this was precisely the attitude I needed when I headed for the underground and saw something that, only days before, would have made my heart sink and my body weary: a huge, seven-wide queue of people, spilling out of Oxford Circus station and onto the street.