The Fry-Day Fallout

My brain had not loosened up from my two days in a Manchester studio but waking in my bed this morning, it was so reassuring to smell a fried breakfast. Delirious was my happiness as I rolled over and found Judy lying beside me, the morning paper in one hand, some kipper in the other.

‘I always think of home when I smell kipper,’ I said, moving the bottle of HP sauce my wife had wedged for safety between my buttocks. ‘Ah, Judy! It’s so good to be back in familiar surroundings... You’ve got tomato sauce on your chin, love.’

Judy did her duty by the errant sauce and then nodded to her newspaper. ‘You made a proper fool of yourself yesterday,’ she said. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’
She handed me the newspaper, a local rag distributed only in our undisclosed area of North London. ‘Madeley’s Record Attempt Humiliation!’ read the banner headline.

I sank back into my pillow and groaned. ‘It was a brave attempt,’ I protested, ‘but the world of Twitter hasn’t quite taken to my own particular form of genius. Up to about midday I was roaring away. People thought I really was Stephen Fry and my following was soaring. Then at some point, I began to feel hungry. It reminded me than I’m a man, not a deity. My self-confidence crumbled and instead of the pithy one-liners of a God, I was just a man insulting people and making gratuitous remarks about bodily parts.’ I frowned. ‘It was not hubris, Jude. Hubris! And it was far from pretty...’

Judy wiped the kipper grease from her mouth and turned her attention to her eggs, which she scooped up and polished off in a couple of moves. She was clearly choosing her words carefully and I had to wait until she’d had gulped down a lashing of hot coffee before she spoke.

‘Richard, I don’t know why you bother with the internet. Your blog is doing nothing for your career and Twitter is as pointless an interest as you’ve ever had. You need to do something to help promote yourself among the people that matter.’

‘My blog is doing nothing for me?’ I had to laugh. ‘Only through my blog do people see me for what I am: a witty, articulate man who is capable of a myriad of TV and radio assignments. My career is going to go stellar before long, Jude! I came close to landing that job on Countdown and you know how I’m going to apply for a job on Soccer AM at the end of the football season. Helen Chamberlain has a something, Judy. I’m telling you that my chemistry could work with hers.’

Judy scowled. ‘I’m sure it would, Richard,’ she said, squeezing her morning banger between a round of toast. ‘And all I’m saying is that before you start trying to impersonate Stephen Fry on Twitter, you might think about the consequences. Stephen has a loyal fans.’

I hummed myself a indignant hum. ‘Or, as I like to think of them: acolytes, zealots, or old fashioned obsessivers knitting Stephen Fry balaclavas. I was lucky to get away with my trousers and just a few bruises. I don’t know how Stephen can countenance such behaviour.’

‘The problem with Stephen is that he’s too busy swimming with sealions to think about the feelings of one of his oldest friends,’ said Judy.

I couldn’t disagree with her so I slid back under the sheets and closed my eyes. It felt so good to be home, in my own bed, with my wife lying beside me as she slid the bottle of sauce back between my cheeks where it would keep warm as I slept another couple of hours.

Do Squirrels Like Sudafed?

Having adopted the guise of the thirty seventh president of the United States, I have received a welcome boost in the form of the significant reduction in the number of people emailing to ask if I’m really me. Thankfully, there hasn’t been a subsequent rise in the number of people asking me if I’m really Richard Nixon, which just proves that the role of TV talk show host is really much more important than the top seat in the White House. The only thing that Judy and I lack is a nuclear deterrent but I hope to rectify that in the coming weeks. Stephen Fry has told me that he knows where to put his hands on some fissionable material and Bill Oddie says that the old incubator he uses to hatch eggs will make an excellent fuselage. Strapped to a couple of owls, we’ll have a weapon that can evade any radar system in the world. How the Red Chinese will react is our only real concern given their history for breeding terrain hugging bats. Yet it’s a price we think it’s worth paying if small UK satellite channels are to sleep soundly in their beds.

All of which reminds me to tell you that last night I had a dream in which I turned on Gloria Hunniford for stealing my Mint Imperials. It is a strange thing to be dreaming given that I’m largely indifferent to mints and consider Gloria to be the Queen of daytime TV.

Friends have suggested that the unusual nature of these dreams (bouncing eggs at Ted Danson from off an inflatable castle was one of the strangest) is related to my Nixon fixation, which I say isn’t a fixation as much as a means of concealing my true identity, which everybody doubts given that they can’t believe somebody with so much talent can write a blog which is so irrelevant. One person was good enough to email me this week to describe my blog as ‘piffle’. I couldn’t say that I agreed with him. I didn’t have time to agree. I’ve been in Manchester for the past two days on presidential duties.

During my half an hour break for lunch between book signings yesterday, I got trapped in Market Street. I was stuck behind a fat man carrying cushions. There’s nothing more inconveniencing that a fat man carrying cushions in a crowded city street. It’s a metaphor for my life. In each hand he held plastic bags stuffed with cushions in purple fabric. He must have measured fifteen feet across and not a person could get past him. All we could do was nestle up against his buttocks and wait for him to turn into Deansgate.

Today I’m home and wrapped up against the autumnal chill. My flu is now down a few DefCon levels. It’s now a heavy cold and the Sudafed is working in unexpected ways. I feel rather chatty and my mind can’t settle on any one topic. Does anybody know how many spoonfuls of Sudafed a man should take in an hour? I’ve always confused teaspoons with tablespoons. I think I might have overdone my morning dose.

Judy was very vex with me when she discovered that I’d deconstructed her new bamboo patio furniture. I had a mind to build myself a large water powered clock from the bamboo. I was then distracted by ‘Soccer’ AM on Sky One. Does anybody find those ‘comedy sketches’ funny? Helen Chamberlain and Max Rushden are personable enough but they don’t understand the physics of the sofa. Their body language was all wrong and I’d suggest they watch some of our old ‘This Morning’ shows from 1998 if they want to see how it’s done.

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I do enjoy liquorice but not when it’s shaped like a bear.

I’m going to sit down this afternoon a sketch out a plan for a new book. ‘Fathers & Sons’ is a huge hit but my tour of the nation’s bookshops has convinced me that people are crying out for a book about those little black power supplies that come with every electronic gadget but never seem to work on anything else. Judy has a Tesco’s carrier bag filled with the things. I know we’ll never need them but I can never bring myself to throw one away.

And why is the letter ‘Y’ in the middle of a keyboard but the ‘a’ is tucked away under the little finger of my left hand? Why are the important vowels on the left when I’d want on them on the right? And why do I have a key for the ‘¬’ symbol when I don’t even know what the ‘¬’ symbol is for.

Oh look! A squirrel in the garden! I wonder how a squirrel would react if I fed it Sudafed...