Butterflies

The problem with fixing people in your head

Is that they don’t want to stay fixed.

You can nail them down but they are not butterflies,

They always struggle free.

They shed their skin and gain another, or

They grow another limb, sprout another shoot.

Have you got their number, catalogued?

Don’t count on it, add this to your calculations:

Moving statues can’t be set in stone.

See instead a set of mirrors

Reflecting them reflecting you

Images placed on images of images, eternally.

Constantly off-balance, uncertain

Like a gyroscope, moving still.

It would be nice to get out of your head every so often.

Yet we mirror each other,

Distorting the reflections as ripples spread,

Always adding to what isn’t whole

As we fall into the deep.

It's About Shrimp

There was once a shrimp in Shrimptown

Who, whilst swimming along one day

Was savaged by a dogfish

That he met along the way.

And when the rest of Shrimptown

Came and saw him where he lay

Each immediately formed an opinion;

Here is what they had to say.

‘Ah, he was a good old shrimp,’

The first said to his wife;

Then he instantly forgot him

And got on with his life.

‘I never liked that bastard,’

Said the second with a grin.

‘I’m glad he’s dead, now let’s go find

A ditch to chuck him in.’

The third said ‘No, my man, that’s not

The way to speak of the dead.’

The second shrimp took umbrage

And then punched him in the head.

And while this brawl continued

A fourth shrimp shared her views:

‘This shrimp has never gone to church

And knelt between the pews.’

‘God rest his soul, of course,

May the Great Codfish spare us all,

But I fear that this unbaptised shrimp

Was always heading for a fall.’

And the congregation nodded

Some there knelt down and prayed;

And when their guilt was laid to rest

Swift exits they all made.

‘For me, I blame the government,’

One shrimp said to his neighbour.

‘They should have helped this poor shrimp out-

Wouldn’t have happened under Labour.’

‘Oh please-it’s not the Government’s fault

That he didn’t get a job

And hung around the streets all day

Behaving like a yob.’

Whilst their bickering continued

They continued to ignore

The body of the savaged shrimp

Which lay upon the floor.

Then a third joined in the argument:

‘It’s the immigrants I blame,

All those bloody cuttlefish

With their silly foreign names.’

A fourth joined in and then a fifth,

From left and right they came,

And their voices blended into one,

All sounding much the same.

Blaming immigrants and hobos,

The slackers and the gimps

And the government who did nothing for

The poor working-class shrimps.

Then one shrimp mentioned Hitler

And that was the final straw;

All the arguers walked from the scene,

Left him lying on the floor.

Just a single shrimp was left now

A wise old shrimp, it seems;

He said ‘Well, chum, I guess that this

Is the end of all your dreams.

No more swimming with the tides,

Or scuttling with your friends.

Although I guess, for all of us,

That’s how it always ends.

No relatives have come for you,

Nobody seems to care

About your life, or death, my friend.

They just leave you lying there,

And talk about your passing

Like one on the silver screen;

Ah friend, you are the saddest shrimp

That I have ever seen.’

With that the old shrimp turned away,

From the shrimp left on floor.

And the ocean’s tides kept sailing on

Just as they had before.

My Encounter with a Mould-Monster; or, Washing the Dishes

It had lain there undiscovered for three weeks, each day growing bigger and bigger, until it filled its lair, no more room to expand. Things had made their homes in it, a whole new ecosystem feeding off its waste. It had grown fat and strong with neglect and leftovers. But now it needed a new food source. It was hungry, and it was ready to move.

This is the story of the last time I washed up the dishes. It is a story of hubris, and bowel-clenching terror, and ultimately, of the human spirit’s ability to overcome any odds, no matter how icky. And it starts with a confession.

When certain circumstances arise, I can be what is commonly known as a filthmonster. It’s not that I create more mess than other people, in fact considering I barely eat I probably create less; it’s more that I just leave things that I don’t want to do until tomorrow, a tomorrow which inevitably lasts for several days. And in this case, the thing I didn’t want to do was wash the plates up, because it is the second most boring job on the planet (right behind being the psychologist who is paid to listen to Paris Hilton’s problems for an hour a week). So they’d been left for a while in the sink, ready to be cleansed of baked bean sauce and chicken supernoodles (healthy diet); and my housemates had added their own debris, reasoning that if I wasn’t cleaning plates then why should they? And for a while, this seemed to be fine. I hadn’t gone into the kitchen, existing instead on a mix of crisps and MacDonalds, whilst the others had just stolen plates from the kitchen downstairs.

I only started to become concerned when, in my bed in the dead of night, I began to hear a kind of scraping sound coming from our kitchen. I knew my friends were stuck in their room watching movies (yes, that kind) so, fearing some oddly inept culinary burglary was afoot, I crept down the corridor to check it out. I peered through the small glass pane of the door; no shadows moving, no sound of heavy breathing, no shuffling of clothes to denote someone furiously masturbating over the cutlery. I opened the door and turned on the light.

I should have backed out there and then. I should have slowly shut the door, as quietly as possible, and called someone professional, someone who knew what they were doing, maybe an exterminator, or the Ghostbusters. I should have washed up about three weeks earlier.

But despite the horror of what lay in that kitchen, despite the Frankensteinian creation which I saw before me, and despite the fact that I began to cough because of the cloud of mould spores in the air, I walked into that kitchen and confronted my misdeeds.

In the sink, for a given value of “in”, was a fetid mass of stinking filth. Plates piled high on top of each other were joined together with mounds of green fur, hairs waving gently in the new air from the corridor. Glasses which on first glance looked like they were full of liquid turned out with a little closer inspection to be filled with some kind of purple-grey moss. One bowl, which had been used to mix eggs and flour, had a few baby maggots taking their first crawls towards freedom. And worse than all of this, covering the bottom of the sink and extending arms out towards the walls and floor, a brown sludge like solidified gravy was creeping towards me, glistening with unholy light as its tendrils crept out to take hold of my very soul.

I’ll admit that the mould spores in the air may have been starting to get to me at this point, the bottle of wine I’d drunk before bed not really helping me to resist its hallucinatory powers, but seriously, it was fucking grim.

But still, I did not run, though it was only with difficulty that I didn’t produce a brown mess of my own right there. I knew that this was my creation, my monster, and only I could defeat it. Also, if I didn’t clean it, the other two definitely wouldn’t. And after all, it was only a bit of mould (although that bowl was going in the bin, I mean, maggots?); how difficult could it be? So I donned a pair of rubber gloves, grabbed a scrubbing brush, and set to work.

As soon as I’d touched the first plate, however, I knew that I’d made a big mistake. Even through the rubber gloves I could feel a kind of pulsing, a regular rhythm which was making the whole putrid pile vibrate, almost like... a heartbeat. No, that couldn’t be right; it was just dirty crockery. No worries. Gritting my teeth and willing myself on, I ran some hot water, laboriously applied fairy liquid, and began work, levering the plates off each other one by one as if opening large, hideous-smelling mussels. Seven, eight, clean; the green mould had receded, beaten into submission by the power of my manly arms and scrubbing brush. It had put up a fight, the yellow of my gloves stained beyond saving; but I was winning.

I levered the ninth and final plate up, scrubbed, clean; now for the bowls. Maggot bowl was swiftly deposited in the bin, followed by a fair bit of bleach to kill the things in it; the others were covered in the same purply-grey stuff as the glasses, but again it was no match for my mighty scrubber. I thought, for a second, that I heard a low moaning sound come from the depths of the pile, a pile I was still only halfway down, but dismissed it; I would not be halted in my mission of cleanliness. Swiftly dispatching the last bowl, then the glasses, I knew that nothing could stop me.

But then I moved aside the chopping board, still stained red with what I hoped was tomato (because this wasn’t worth Hep B), and then I realised what I had done. I was only halfway down the pile, but I’d cleaned up all the crockery and cutlery we owned. The low moans and the strange heartbeat weren’t just figments of my imagination. This mound, this fetid hill... it wasn’t dirty washing.

It was breathing. It was alive. And, free of its protective crockery shell, it knew I was there.

Now I wanted to run; I wanted to get out of there while I still could, before this monster engulfed me as it had engulfed my dishes. But almost immediately I felt myself trapped in a battle of wills with the creature, its stench and putrefaction against my willpower and mounting nausea; and then it spoke to me.

You cannot hope to win, it said in a voice like worms crawling over bare skin. You made me, and now you will make me strong.

No, I whispered in what remained of my mind. No, I’m cleaning you, I’m cleaning...

You can’t defeat me. Your fairy liquid is no match for my decay. I will consume you, my creator, and then, the world.

I felt myself slipping under its influence, felt my hand drag off a rubber glove and, against my will, reaching out to touch the glistening brown surface. It will consume me, it will consume the world…

But my other hand had reached the bottle of bleach I’d used to kill the maggots, the lid still unscrewed because I’m lazy. With a last, desperate, Herculean effort I tipped the bottle six inches and the bleach flowed out over the thing in the sink. It screamed as the liquid cut a swathe through the sludge, screamed into my mind as it reached the centre of the mass; and deflated, collapsed into a pile of stinking, non-sentient matter.

Gasping for breath, shaking, I poured the rest of the bleach over this heap, and sure that the beast was dead, left the rest of the job to the cleaner. I had defeated the monster; it was up to others to take away the body. Also I was tired and I hate cleaning.

So what can we take away from my travails? Two things: one, don’t ever, ever leave the washing up for this long. Or, alternatively, if you are an evil supergenius who wants to take over the world and needs an army of slime-monsters for your evil plan, mix baked bean sauce and chicken flavoured supernoodles and just sit back and watch it grow. Preferably with some kind of gas mask on.

My Latest Haircut

I want to tell you about my experience with the best hairdresser in the world.

I can’t stress how much I hate having my hair cut. It’s not so much the despair I feel at the removal of part of me with every cut of the scissors, each snip a severing of another umbilical cord separating what I grew with my own body from my head, or even the fact that most hairdressers seem to be women, who excite and terrify me in almost equal measure. No; it’s the awkwardness, the horrible, soul-tearing difficulty of having a long conversation with someone you’ve never met and have nothing in common with except for the fact that they are massaging your head at this exact moment in time.

So I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this haircut, hence my putting it off for so long that I was beginning to look like the bastard child of Ringo Starr and an Ewok. But I finally pushed through my fear/apathy and went to Cillies on St Andrews St. Why there? Because I’d had one haircut there before, and it’d looked as good as it could on a Frodo body double, and because the only cheaper haircut available was from a woman on the market who moonlights as a fortune teller and suspected Death Eater.

On entry to Cillies I was greeted by a grunt from the intensely overweight figure behind the counter, who I immediately christened Jabba (I make no apologies). Conscious that he probably doesn’t see much human kindness in the pit of despair in which he worked (I really, really hate haircuts), I smiled at him, and appreciated the tears of sweaty gratitude which flowed from his face as I sat down. For some reason, I was the only one waiting, and with military precision all three of the hairdressers on duty were finishing up with their clients at the same time (NB: by “finishing up”, I mean they’d finished cutting their hair; I’d have enjoyed the other type of “hairdressing salon” much more, but no luck).

What this meant was I had a choice of three hairdressers, a choice which could define my chances of getting laid for the next few weeks (by “define” I here mean “not improve by even an iota”). To the left was a grey-haired woman with a lip piercing; I wasn’t that keen on her, as the former customer had looked close to crying after speaking to her for the duration of her haircut and blowdry. In the centre was a tallish guy with fair hair who looked as if he’d given up on life, and to the right was a tall, attractive redhead with pouting lips and emerald green eyes.

I had started to my right when I noticed she had a tattoo of a fairy on her shoulder. Immediately I veered towards the grumpy bloke, sensing a kindred spirit, and flashed him my best smile.

His expression completely unchanging, he gestured towards the chair with a small jerk of his head. Chastened by my very un-British show of brevity with a stranger, I sat down and allowed him to put the weird black robe thing all hairdressers own around me, the ones which are always matted with other peoples’ disembodied hair and possibly bodily fluids and which are never, ever washed. He tucked it in tightly so my arms were pinioned at my sides, and accepting this as the norm, I stared directly forwards into the cracked mirror.

He then did something I’ve never seen before. Taking a roll of what looked like white surgical tape, he ripped off a long strip and approached me from behind with one end in each hand. I watched in the mirror as he lowered it around my neck, noting the savage delight on his face at the terror in my eyes as I struggled frantically to free my arms. It tightened around my neck... And then he attached the ends behind my head and I realised he’d basically just made it impossible for newly cut hair to fall down the back of my neck.

Still in shock, I barely registered him asking me “What do you want?”; my reply of “A haircut, please” did not seem to go down too well, for although his expression did not change he dropped a surprisingly strong hand onto my shoulder.

“What kind?” he asked. I noted his accent through my newly rising fear; my expertise in this field told me he was possibly Eastern European, possibly German, probably not French. I also noted that the look in his eyes had changed from savage delight to just savage; better make this reply good.

“I’d like it short, please.”

His hand tightened on my jacket, his eyes grew angrier. With a jolt I realised that this man had killed before and could well do so again; it wasn’t like Jabba would have risen from his chair in time to stop him.

“Like yours, short on the back and sides and slightly longer on the top,” I squeaked out, hoping that implied pathetic flattery and obvious lack of testicles would save me.

It seemed to do the trick; he removed his hand and instead took hold of a pair of scissors. Quite why I felt safer now he had a piece of sharp metal in his hands I cannot say, but there it is; hairdressing salons mess with your head.

Now, the etiquette at this point is for the person cutting the hair to say something innocuous to open a conversation, to act as if they give a shit about the person who, to them, is essentially a small pile of income with hair; but this hairdresser had no time for etiquette. He didn’t say a word, just stood staring at the back of my head, as if sizing up the best place to start carving open my head to remove my brain. This lasted for about thirty seconds before the awkwardness became too much and I felt I had to break the silence.

“I feel like a vicar dressed like this,” I feebled.

Not even a flicker of interest passed across his face. I was nothing more than an irritating fly to him, the kind that stays just on the outside of your windscreen while you’re stuck in traffic and occasionally, annoyingly, buzzes just to remind you it’s there, whilst you are powerless to do anything about the pest you’d so dearly like to eradicate. Another fifteen seconds passed, and deciding he’d discouraged any attempt to socialise, he bent forward and started to cut.

Things happened in total silence. When he wanted me to move my head, he would forcibly move it with his hand, the unholy strength of his fingers effortlessly overcoming my weak resistance. The scissors were a blur, hair flying off in a cloud so that all I could see in the mirror was a sandstorm localised around my head. I have no idea how he could even see my head after a while; I swear I saw a bit of hair hit his eye, and he didn’t even blink.

At one point, he stood back, looked over at Jabba for a while, then said, “Square back.” It wasn’t a question; he was stating the future, and I was powerless to resist.

The thunk of the scissors being returned to their place signalled the end of the cut; it had lasted about three minutes, though it felt like an eternity of awkward polite repression and inadequacy. The surgical tape was removed, a mirror produced showing my neck to which I could only nod, and I was ushered firmly towards the cash desk and Jabba. As I turned to leave, my hairdresser turned to Jabba and said “My break is now,”, then, turning to me, looked me in the eye.

“New hair, new life.” he said, and departed through a door into, I presume, the staff room. I looked at Jabba, and he looked at me. We both realised, in that moment, that we had been in the power of a man who understood more about the universe than we could ever discover. And who had wanted my haircut over as quickly as possible so he could go and have a fag.

The bell tinkled as I left the salon and strode forward into my new life with my really, really shit new haircut. Watch out, ladies! 

Fiction Extract

And this is a more serious extract, again from Christabel. 

Breath. Life-giving, end-of-life fearing, ragged breath. The only sound that filled her ears as she crouched in the undergrowth, poised for flight. The only sound. But she knew from the shift in the silence that she was not alone. The breath leaving her body froze the instant it touched the air, like an eerie portent of a soul breaking free from its mortal prison. Not that she'd been in time to see this. Their souls were long at peace by the time she'd got back. No, not at peace. Their glassy stares and twisted expressions of pain and fear belied that. What soul could rest in peace once it had seen...

Movement. Before her senses could even acknowledge it, it was over. The thrown blade cut through the air in perfect kilter with the line of the horizon as the sun rose deep crimson, so that she never even saw it. But she felt it. Looking down, she almost lazily pulled her now scarlet hand away from her chest. Drops of scarlet pattered silently to white earth, glowing, the only form of colour against the snow covered landscape and the gray trees. The flow increased, the first few drops of rain giving way to the thunderstorm in summer. The blood was pouring now, her eyes rolled this way and that, frantic to catch sight of her attacker, desperate to intercept him before he...

Struck. A heavy blow caught her on the chin and she was down. She couldn't move at all now as the silent world became loud with the pounding in her head and her heart. How strange that her heart should pound so loud, right when it was about to cease from pounding all together. She didn't have this thought though. As the blood from her temple streamed down to mingle with the rest in the snow, she could think only one thing. She was not done. She needed to finish this. Raising her face with a dying man' s effort, every muscle trembling as its life source drained from it, finally she met the gaze of her attacker. The gaze of the being that had instilled those grotesque, transfixed affectations of horror on everyone she's known. And she smiled. A twisted little curve in the corner of her mouth that said one thing. I'm coming for you. I may be going now, but live in fear, wait for me, know this, one day I'll be...

Awakened. By what. A dream. No, the dream. Always the same one, though how she knew it was the same was beyond her, because she could never recall its words, its details, its events. Except the striking image of red on white. Blood on snow. She stretched the sleep away. There was no snow here. This was a land of sand, and heat, and, right now, drought. She reached out to pick up the empty water vessels as her muscles readied themselves for the ache of another day. With the uneasy feeling the dream always left still upon her, she walked backwards out of the hut, feeling almost like she had forgotten something...

'Duck!' A child's wooden frisbee whizzed past, missing her by inches. Her sharp intake of breath turned to the laughter of relief as one of the boys raced after it, his muttered apology flying back to her in the wake of his dash. Tolos, the man attached to the warning cry, followed swiftly after him, but gave it up as a bad job when he reached her, and, deciding his curses were quicker, sent them after the boy instead. 'I'm sorry my love, I've told him a thousand times...'

Silenced. But by her smile, not her words. He stood there with the punch-drunk look of a man in love. She smiled wider. 'Boys have to get rid of their energy somehow. At least he’s sticking to the new restrictions. It’s hard on them, now they've got nowhere to play.' She stopped talking, as his unchanged look of heady intoxication belied the fact he wasn't hearing a word. 'Are we still meeting for dinner later?'

'Dinner? Yes. Of course.' She smiled again and pushed past him playfully, as she went to start her work. Life was fine right now. She could hardly complain. There was always the threat of hunger and thirst but that was nothing new. Tolos was a new development and he was utterly devoted to her. Someone like him was all she could have hoped for. But the remnants of the dream tugged at her mind, and rather than fading, they expanded, like bread in a puddle, soaking up her thoughts, throwing her into a dull panic. Always the same dream. Always the same day following it, a day of sick unease. But everything was normal, better than normal even. Good. Then why should she feel this way. Why did she feel so...

Haunted.

Don't smoke, kids!

Another Christabel sketch-enjoy, people! 

Voiceover: And don't forget to join us tomorrow on channel 10 when we take a look at the effects of smoking, as part of the 'a healthier life is a longer life' week.

Scottish woman in lab coat: Viewers of a sensitive nature are warned that this documentary contains distressing images of people's teeth yellowed to a sickening degree, as well as the repulsive effects smoking has on people’s hands and fingernails, when coupled with never washing your hands or fingernails.

Bearded earnest presenter: Smoking is very bad. Just look at the effect a few puffs of smoke has on this perfectly white fluffy cotton wool, which is pretty much exactly the same stuff as comprises the human lung and therefore a totally legitimate and relevant demonstration of the effects of smoking on a human lung.

Scientist: Statistics show that 99% of smokers will die, at some point in their lives. Those that haven't died yet are frequently followed around by disembodied letters in the air, often forming the names of critical diseases like 'lung cancer' and 'heart disease'. This can be disconcerting if not downright terrifying.

Presenter: Smoking harms those around you too. In fact you may as well stab people in the lungs and then proceed to repeatedly beat burning ashes into the open wound. Smoking is essentially murder. And suicide. But sneaky murder and suicide. It’s not like going into Homebase and asking for a chainsaw oh god oh god those neighbours are bloody annoying. It’s like going into Homebase and asking for cigarettes. And then getting sent to the corner shop down the road because Homebase don't sell cigarettes. And then purchasing cigarettes and smoking them. Around lots of innocent people.

Scientist: Smoking makes you infertile. But then again, that’s probably good, because if you could have children you'd be filling their lungs with smoke on a daily basis, which is basically the same as being a terrorist.

Presenter: Expect lots of people in white coats using medical terms for what is essentially the bleeding obvious, in order to make you think you're learning new information.

Scientist: If you walk down the street smoking, living beings all around you will drop down dead like flies.

Presenter: Despite all this, there is nothing we can do to stop smoking being 'cool'. It is an objective fact that smoking is cool. It may not be the coolest thing, it’s not as cool as being able to kite-surf, or a small child punching the Queen. But it’s definitely up there. That’s why NHS anti-smoking adverts show men beating up unrealistically sized cigarettes. These are actually other men in cigarette costumes. But the point is, if smoking is cool, but giving up smoking is essentially the same as beating up smoking, that makes you cooler. So go on, be cooler than smoking, and join us tomorrow evening, at 7pm to find out how you can live a healthier, longer life by quitting smoking today.

An Interview with Neil Armstrong

This is by an up-and-coming writer called Christabel who's joining me on the blog. As such, it's actually funny. Enjoy! 

Jenny Saunders: Hi and welcome, you're joining me, Jenny Saunders, tonight in the studio, interviewing Neil Armstrong. Hi Neil.

Neil: Hi Jenny Saunders.

Jenny: Please, call me Jenny.

Neil: Likewise.

Beat

Jenny: So although no one has heard from him in a while, the space race being rather 'old news' and all, we're here to celebrate the launch chuckles to herself over the awful pun of a new album, which I am told was written recorded and played all by himself: 'Space, not all its cracked up to be'. I'm joined here by the first man on the moon-

Neil: cutting in I wanted it to be 'elevated'.

Jenny: Excuse me?

Neil: Space, not all its elevated to be. So you'd get a nice word play. Double entendre. You know, elevated like the sky, and elevated like its really good.

Jenny: I don't...

Neil: But my publicity manager said that was misleading. 

Beat.

Jenny: So Neil, I'm fascinated in astrophysics myself, but I haven't made it out there myself yet.

Loud laugh abruptly cut off from Neil.

So I'd like to ask-

Neil: That was a question already, but you can ask me another one too. [grins winningly]

Jenny: I didn't ask you if I could ask you a question.

Neil: Oh.

Jenny: This is an interview.

Beat.

What was it like seeing the earth from so far away? Were you overwhelmed with a profound sense of meaning, or profundity, beauty perhaps?

Neil: Well, the funny thing is that before I went into space, I used to try and imagine all the billions of miles between all the stars, and how compared to the universe a person is smaller and more insignificant than the tiniest ant swimming in a massive puddle of jam, which lead to bouts of severe depression and significantly factored in the breakup of my third marriage. But the thing is, when you're actually up there, you're the first man ever to be standing on the moon, gazing down at the tiny planet which is home to your entire race... you realise actually there's not that much to it.

Jenny: To what?

Neil: To space. I mean, its mainly just. Space. You know, empty space.

Jenny: Right. But really its not just about that moment I suppose, I mean it represents the pinnacle of decades of technology, years of training, days of travelling.

Neil: Well, yeah. But I mean, you can actually get to the moon quite easily.

Jenny: Really, I was under the impression it was quite a difficult task, what with the space race and everything?

Neil: Oh yeah, no, that was because we originally miscalculated the size of the moon. We thought it had a circumference of 6790 miles, by which we estimated that it was pretty far away. In actual fact its 12 miles in circumference, so its only about 15 minutes away, and you can walk round the whole thing quite comfortably in a couple of hours, I mean there's not much to stop and look at on the way, its mainly just rocks, and the scenery is just, space, so you could probably powerwalk it in about an hour/hour fifteen, that sort of time scale.

Jenny: Right.

Neil: You can even make your own rocket fuel at home using a 3 to 1 ratio of sodium chloride and diesel.

Jenny: I did not know that.

Neil: No, not many people do. But can we stop talking about space please? That’s all anyone ever asks me about, I'm sick of space. That’s why I moved back to Earth. There’s no space there at all its lovely. I never have trouble sleeping at night.  I've got this really great knack of getting to sleep. I can get to sleep whenever I want to. Just like that clicks his fingers I guess you could say its like voluntary narcolepsy.

Jenny: Ok. Narcolepsy, did you mean that? Sorry, its just the thing with narcolepsy is that its just the same as sleeping, but its involuntary, you can't decide when you do it.

Neil: Yeah, that’s it, and I can. I can always just go to sleep when I want. Voluntary narcolepsy. He beams So can we talk about my album now?

Jenny: Ok, sure Neil.

Neil: Please?

Jenny: Yes, that’s fine.

Neil: Please?

Jenny: Yes, we'll move on.

Neil: Can I just say...

Jenny: What?

Neil: What?

Puzzled look

Jenny opens her mouth to speak, Niel goes to speak every time this happens, so she stops, waits for him to speak, he says nothing. This happens three times.

I hate to be racist, but I dislike you purely on the basis of your ethnic origin.

Jenny: I'm from London.

Neil: narrows eyes I know.

Beat

It just feels like you're not on my side Jenny.

Jenny: utterly wrong-footed No, no not at all, I'm a big fan of all your... space...

Neil: I just feel like no one cares about me, its all space this and black holes that, no one cares that I've home recorded three concept albums since then, two of which aren't even about space, and I did the cover artwork myself. But no one’s interested in that. They just want to know all about higgldybiggldy particles and black matter. You know I went in to NASA the other day just to say hi, and the security guard at the door didn't know who I was. He didn't recognise my face. Cos its all about the astronaut suit. (spoken fading away to a whisper) Just about the external suit, no one gives a shit about the man inside. He looks wistfully into the distance

Jenny: Well thanks Neil.

Neil: whispered Jenny...

Jenny: Yes?

Neil: No, I said you can call me Jenny earlier. I mean initially it was a slip of the tongue, but as I didn't acknowledge it at the time I thought it would be best to play along with it and just pretend my name was Jenny too. Otherwise you might have thought I was weird.

Jenny: completely at a loss I'm going to hand us back to the studio now Neil, any last words?

Neil: He looks petrified Why, what are you going to do to me?

Jenny: No, we're just finishing up the interview Ne.. Jen... Mr Armstrong.

Neil: looking around wildly Dad?

Jenny: And you can buy Neil’s latest album online now featuring the additional bonus tracks 'Space- you took my breath away' and 'One small step for man, one giant leap for a much smaller man'.