Join the mailing list. It's free and you may live an extra 30 years.
Tomorrow I hope to bounce my way into the record books by trampolining higher than anyone in history. My target height is 200 feet.
In order to gain sufficient momentum to achieve this amazing feat I shall be leaping out of a hot air balloon half a mile up. The key to success will be actually landing on the trampoline.
I have taken safety precautions. Should strong winds blow me off target Uncle Patrick will be on hand to throw grandmother underneath me to break my fall.
The current world record trampoline bounce is held by Hilda Wilcox, a 96 year old from Hull. She inadvertently smashed the previous record when she tumbled drunkenly from her fifth floor balcony whilst demonstrating the Lambada.
Her landing on a neighbour’s trampoline was fortuitous to say the least, and breaking the previous record even more so. Sadly her luck ran out as she was bounced into a sewage reprocessing plant where she drowned in vat of excrement.
Fingers crossed the same doesn’t happen to me.
There are four levels of employee in any organisation:
Juniors
The lowest rung of the corporate ladder is populated by hordes of graduates who get paid a pittance but do all the work. What they lack in work status they more than make up for in parties and shagging opportunities. Thus they are simultaneously despised and envied by everyone else.
Supervisors
These are ambitious juniors who can’t get laid and who live under the naïve delusion that they are building a career. They tend to take themselves very seriously and are extra hard on the juniors, especially the good looking ones who get a lot of sex.
Middle managers
These grey-faced depressives alternate their time between pointless meetings and hiding in toilets. They are going through a divorce/mental breakdown/midlife crisis and wear the pained expression of a wounded gazelle who knows the game is up. On rare moments of glory they might get lucky with a junior at the Christmas party.
Directors
Directors are the least competent people in any organisation, who through a series of promotions given to them ‘just to stop them from ruining everything’, find themselves being in charge of things that they don’t understand. They get paid the most and have the most benefits, but are the least productive or accountable. Directors are the most likely to die suddenly and don’t get any sex at all.
They say a dog is man’s best friend. Nonsense. Who wants a best friend who shits on your carpet and then bites you?
Cats are no better. I don’t want to be brought gifts of half digested rodents. Expensive hi-fi equipment yes; mauled animal corpses no.
Those seeking intellectual stimulation might consider one of the higher functioning primates. But beware: befriending an ape who turns out to be more intelligent than oneself will almost certainly lead you to resentment, bitterness and ultimately murder.
Unfortunately this principle applies both ways; there’s nothing an ape hates more than a smart-arse human. So one way or another it’s a relationship doomed to end in murder. You have been warned.
Ideally a soul mate should be selected from within one’s own species. However, if I was compelled to select a companion from the animal kingdom I would chose one that was kindly, undemanding, emotionally stable and short-lived. A butterfly would be ideal.
Indeed I had one such friend a few years ago. Barry was a lovely little fellow and surprisingly intelligent for an insect. Obviously he couldn’t operate complex machinery like a fork-lift truck (that would be ridiculous). But he could count to eleven in German.
Tragically his life was cut short after he fell in with a mean crowd of monkeys and was crushed to death under the wheels of fork lift truck driven by a jealous chimpanzee who struggled to count to nine in Spanish.
See what I mean about primates?
I’ve always wanted to be in the movies and it’s finally coming true. For the last three weeks I’ve been starring in my own film, The Life And Death of Billy The Lemon.
Billy is a brilliant scientist who discovers the secrets of time travel, but is ignored by a scientific community more fascinated by the fact that his body resembles an enormous citrus fruit.
I shan’t give too much of the plot away but suffice it to say that it ends tragically when he is chopped to pieces by a malevolent gang of physicists and squeezed over an enormous pancake.
Obviously I have cast myself in the lead role and I have drafted in friends and my plumber to play the other parts.
As I have no budget, crew or cameras, I’ve been relying on Britain’s sinister network of surveillance cameras to do all the filming. I have already written to the police, the council, and my dentist to demand copies of all surveillance footage featuring a human lemon behaving strangely. It should arrive any day now.
Then all I’ll have to do is splice all the footage together, stick a bit of narrative over the top and hey presto, the movie’s in the bag.
See you at the Oscars.
Is your glass is always half empty? Maybe you should get a smaller glass. If life’s worries weigh heavily on your shoulders try standing on your head and remember, you’re not alone.
Yesterday I was feeling low. I’d just been turned down for the part of Jabba the Hut in our village play. I felt crushed. It was my last chance to break into showbiz and I’d spent all my savings on 300 tins of lard to make the outfit as convincing as possible. But the Director explained that Jabba doesn’t appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now I was unemployed, broke and covered in lard.
When I’m a bit down I find a good movie really cheers me up. I was really down, so I went for the movie marathon: I started with Schindler’s List, moved on to Das Boot, and ended with Downfall. By the end of it I had forgotten all about my petty worries and had completely eliminated any lingering desire to join the German armed forces.That’s the title of my new TV game show concept. Catchy isn’t it?
Like all great game shows the format is simple. Each week a different celebrity guest wheels a portable freezer onto the stage and answers questions from a panel who try to establish Whose Head Is In Your Freezer?
When every panel member has made a guess, the celebrity is invited to open the freezer to reveal whose head they chose. It could be anyone, from Admiral Lord Nelson to Delia Smith. But because of legal reasons we will probably have to substitute lifelike papier-mâché replicas instead of actual heads, especially if the subject is still living.
The celebrity is then invited to explain why they chose that particular head and everyone applauds.
Finally any panelists who guessed correctly get to determine whether the head is put on a spike in the Whose Head Hall of Fame - which will be in the Blue Peter studio - or flung into a ditch. If none of the panelists guessed correctly, everyone signs the head and it’s donated to charity.
I think the show would work well on Channel 4 (just after the news) and ideally would be co-hosted by Lesley Grantham and Anne Widdicombe.