Hello. It is June 2026. The air is hot, wet and thick, like an attractive mermaid who can’t read. This is the forty-second monthly issue of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of difficult laughs and occasional good times by me, crumb-covered author and hayfever victim Mike Rampton. Hello there.

I'm embarrassed about my emetophobia. I hate when people bring it up.

My book about living like a real person, vaguely looking after yourself and so on, is out now. I never saw a book like Adulting Made Easy coming, and crucially nobody involved in the making of it saw how I live or smelled my house, but I’m really chuffed with it. It costs £9.99, and contains loads of advice that will pay for itself a hundred times over just in terms of helping you lead an easier life: there’ll be something in there for almost everyone that sticks with you, changes how you approach certain tasks, and saves you loads of time, money and stress for the rest of your days. It’s a book about surviving, not thriving - it won’t make you rich, attractive or successful, but all those things are easier if there aren’t bailiffs taking your sofa away, your house isn’t ankle-deep in filth and you don’t have diarrhoea. It’s also really funny - there are some properly daft gags in there that really made me laugh, and I wrote them.

I’m not sure where it’ll be shelved in bookshops (other than mine) - it’s a fun, funny book of totally legitimate advice - but I like thinking of it as juuuust about counting as self-help. I was recently hospitalised for doing such a bad job of eating a sausage, so the idea of me giving advice to anyone really, really tickles me. Maybe this is the start of something, and soon everyone will be cleaning their houses the Mike Rampton way.

There’s about nine months until I next have a book out, so I’ll shut the hell up about them for a bit. Hooray!

"It’s a shame the charity shop is closing down, there’s something I was hoping to buy there.”
“End o’Scope?”
“No. I’d rather not get one of those second-hand to be honest.”

“I’ve got to deliver a data storage unit from London to Newcastle.”
“Hard drive?”
“No, it’s fairly straightforward, I just take the M1 most of the way to Leeds then join the A1(M).”

“When I retire I’m going to move to Devon and spend lots of time on my hobbies.”
“Dartmoor?”
“Yes, and play more billiards.”

I quite miss social media sometimes. I work from home all the time, have about three in-person meetings a year and can’t go out a lot for financial and parenting reasons, so used to get quite a lot out of Twitter when it was good. I left that when Elon Musk bought it, and while I gave Bluesky the old college try and still put one-liners and work stuff on there, it isn’t a lot of fun. Instagram doesn’t feel like a social/conversational thing to me - it’s “here’s a thing I did” “oh cool” “thanks”. LinkedIn is obviously awful, TikTok seems like a genuinely evil invention, Facebook doesn’t seem to work anymore and Threads has made no impact on anything at all ever. So that’s that for it really. I put self-promotional stuff on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram, to minimal effect, and that’s about it.

But it’s a shame. There were a lot of almost-friends and former colleagues and stuff who I wouldn’t phone or text or anything - gross! - but enjoyed being kept vaguely up to date with, writers whose work I enjoyed who I’ve lost track of now, and all sorts of interesting experts, enthusiasts, creators and curators who I learned a lot of cool stuff from. I got a lot of freelance work from Twitter, and my whole career as an author came indirectly from it (I was sent a tweet about doing some parenting writing, which is what led to being asked to write a book, and I asked an author I knew on there for advice, and she suggested I get in touch with an agent, and I followed one on Twitter so dropped her a line, and ten books of varying success later etc etc).

There was lots that sucked about it, of course. There were people I knew far too much about against my will, people I was desperate to impress but never managed to, and I lost an unbelievable amount of time to having arguments in my head with people on there. But as someone without colleagues, working on months-long projects on my own, it was quite nice to have an avenue for daft little thoughts, and to hear those of others. Oh god, I think I’ve just invented the idea of “having more friends”. Oh, Christ. This happens about every eighteen months. I think I’m thinking one thing, then on closer inspection it turns out to actually be “perhaps I should have tried to be more likeable in my twenties”.

“I wonder what would happen if we let a huge wild African river animal loose within a famous former music hall in London.”
“The hippo’d roam.”
“That’s probably what it would do, yes, within the Hammersmith Palais.”

“The Queen has put my worries about her fruit preserves to rest.”
“Ma’am allayed?”
“No, it was the raspberry jam she gave me which assuaged my doubts.”

“Sting’s being treated after hurting his back singing at a gig in Northumberland.”
“Massage in Harbottle?”
“No, he’s been given a muscle relaxant for the disc he herniated in Blyth while singing Roxanne.”

0: My memory of the non-half-term parts of the month. I did a notably bad job at half-term: the plan was to go out and do fun stuff with my daughter every day, tire her out and then do loads of work in the later afternoon and evening, but every day we overdid the fun, both got equally tired out and went to bed at the same time. Great fun but not what one could call ‘financially sustainable’.

2: The number of fun freelance interviews I’ve done recently, the first in ages. I used to do loads of press junkets and stuff so really enjoyed dipping back into that world. I don’t do a lot of freelance writing these days and would love to do more. I was doing a lot of fun stuff for a newspaper for a while, then I mentioned something personal to them and they want everything I write to be about that now. Like, it’s not “I got pooed on by a clown”, but if it was, it got to the point where I’d pitch an interesting idea about technology and they’d go “What if it was ‘As someone who got pooed on by a clown, here’s what I think of technology’?” I mentioned my books to them and they were like, “Can you write about how you only wrote these because you got pooed on by a clown?”

4: The number of guppies we have unfortunately buried in the back garden. I think one got a parasite or something and maybe the others… ate bits of him when he died? Pretty grim, particularly considering I got pooed on by a clown.

“List all the loud bands you ever saw at Brixton Academy on this 1980s computer.”
“A, koRn…”
“No, a BBC Micro.”

I had a fancy dress party and my friend came dressed as the author of The Murders In The Rue Morgue and The Masque Of The Red Death. I congratulated him on his great costume but he didn’t look happy at all. He looked really Poe-faced.

“A racist from the Midlands told me his favourite jockey.”
“Leicester bigot?”
“No, he likes Frankie Dettori.”