Hello. It is February 2026. Everyone in the world is arguing with everyone else in the world. The stupidest people of all time keep saying really stupid things and thinking they’re clever, because they’re stupid. This is the thirty-eighth monthly issue of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of hilarity and admin by me, author and occasional beetroot enthusiast Mike Rampton. I eat a lot of eggs and sometimes that’s my main thing really.

"My friend from Narnia fell asleep on the bus and went past his stop."
"Tumnus?"
"No, luckily Mr Beaver woke up before the bus went that far, so he was only slightly inconvenienced."

Poo! What? Where? is now out in the world. People seem to really be enjoying it, which is great — everyone did a lovely job on it and it’s about the brown stuff that comes out of your bumhole, it’s a fun book. Please buy it!

(And, if you are buying it, please consider doing so from my Bookshop.org store, or Bookshop.org in general — in February 10% from all children’s book purchases is going to Booktrust.)

I never know what to do on a day a book comes out. I don’t have a proper job, so I can’t just do a “business as usual” kind of approach, because I won’t get anything done because I’m all twitchy. It’s all still new and exciting enough for me that it feels special, but I don’t really know what to do with that. It’s like a birthday — I know I need to do work, but it doesn’t happen, because nobody’s standing over me making me do it, so I sit there in a bit of a huff waiting for the world to tell me how great I am. On this occasion I arranged to go out in London in the evening for a hundred beers or so with some pals, and felt like it made sense to head in early and make a day of it.

Something that happened between the plan and it happening, however, was that a nerve became trapped between my second and third vertebrae, making a lot of very pedestrian tasks incredibly painful. There was a constant dull pain in my neck and arm, periodically joined by sharp jolts of extra hideousness. I took some really strong painkillers, but they slowed my brain to a crawl, so I couldn’t get anything done, so I went trudging round bookshops looking for the new book.

The thing is, only big launches are out there on the day of release. As exciting as it is for me, the staff of Waterstones aren’t frantically hurrying into work for the big inevitable rush for the new children’s non-fiction, you know? I think it’ll end up selling a decent amount — it’s a really fun book that people seem to be responding to — but it’s not the kind of thing where “release day” really means anything. The weather was also absolutely revolting. So nowhere I checked had it, and I was in a massive amount of pain, soaked through, with my right arm dangling uselessly from my body, feeling like it was only attached to me by a dental-floss-thin strand of sinew. My arm was too heavy and my bottom was too wet.

Then I got quite drunk in a Spoons with two friends, had some unnecessary bonus cans on the train home, and when I woke up the next day I didn’t have a trapped nerve anymore. I’d somehow lagered myself healthy. It was miraculous. So I think I’m going to pivot into being a Kronenbourg-endorsed wellness guru. My name: Dr Inktenbeers! I’ve lost my train of thought.

“A famous author taught me a very sincere manner of sewing a neat fabric edge.”
“Earnest hemming way?”
“Yes, that is what I was shown by William Faulkner.”

"No act has ever released two albums with words ending in -ight in their titles"
"This is The Band erasure"
"Ah yes, the band Erasure did, yes."
(Note: I am aware this just looks like a series of words. However, The Band released albums called Stage Fright and Northern Lights-Southern Cross, while Erasure did Nightbird and Light At The End Of The World, so this is actually incredibly clever and the sort of joke that gets four stars in Mojo.)

I’ve got a friend who makes reproduction-based 3D images for companies. At the end of the month he invoices for cervixes rendered.

Very little of the freelance writing I do comes from ideas I’ve pitched. I tend to pitch ideas fairly consistently, and they usually go nowhere because they’re not very good or several years out of date because I’m a middle-aged man who lives in a small village and doesn’t do much. I also don’t enjoy much. Other than goofing about with my daughter, I only like five things:

Okay, not five, three. So I’m not aware of, like, new trends among gym-goers or the hot new show everyone’s talking about or this amazingly cool influencer person. This means a lot of my pitches are along the lines of “I woke up in the night and read the Wikipedia entry for tuna and quite enjoyed it but am tired now, can I write about that?” or “My car is dirty, which got me wondering, are all cars dirty?” or “Pirates in cartoons are fun but pirates in real life are horrible, which is sad, am I the first person to notice this?” and obviously don’t get commissioned. But the editors will occasionally get in touch to get me to do something completely unrelated. It’s a really inefficient way of going about things, and I feel like other freelancers know something I don’t, but I’m too old and broke and manky to ever get better at anything, so shut up. So I thought I’d try just not pitching anything anymore — free up some time and energy, and probably still get the same amount of work.

So far it’s going quite badly! Just the one article came my way in January, and I was on such strong painkillers when I did it that it reads like I had a bin on my head while writing it. But I’ve had months where I spent multiple full days pitching stuff and ended up with just as little work to show for it, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions. There’s probably an argument to be made that “putting less effort in” wasn’t quite what my career needed, but I’m excited to see where it, er, doesn’t take me.

(I’ve been doing other work. Book stuff, ad treatments, all sorts. I don’t just sit calmly in my house waiting for offers of work to arrive. Sometimes I cook, or read about tuna on WIkipedia. It’s a full life, in that “no it isn’t” type of way.)

I’ve got a feeling someone’s going to send me a partial Quasimodo costume. Just a hunch.

“I’m analysing George C. Scott’s behaviour and am noticing one overall trend to which it tends to adhere. Well, ‘overall trend’ isn’t quite right.“
“General pattern?”
“That’s the guy.”

“I’m going to finish editing this Carla Lane sitcom to cut it to length, then sing a traditional American folk song.”
“Shortnin’ Bread?”
“No, it is Michael Row The Boat Ashore that I’ll sing once I finish editing Butterflies.”

On Halloween I went to the Museum of Cambridge and recorded an episode of my friend Ruth McPhee’s excellent podcast about the folklore of East Anglia, the excellently-titled Ruth Is Stranger Than Fiction, in front of a crowd of real actual people. The episode — Beast Anglia — is now available to listen to on your podcast platform of choice, or burn onto a CD-R and pop in your Discman.

Won £162 on a pub quiz. My best contribution was the answer “ziggurat”, which involved going on a complex mental journey that nearly made my brain fall out. I’m going to spend my share on, I don’t know, part of the water bill?

My daughter has got into drawing comics, and announced that she had an idea for one to do with her best mate, “about a T.rex with an enormous penis”. I talked her out of it, because I am a responsible parent, but I’m laden with regret because that sounds like a really incredible comic. She said it would be called Brian, and explained at length how that was a funny choice of name because it wasn’t clever or alliterative or anything. Cancel the paternity test!

I’ve been taking in edits on a few things lately and discovered I really overuse the phrase “a dance as old as time”. It gets edited out of everything, I think because it doesn’t really mean anything. I’m thinking of getting really into using the phrase “soup to nuts” instead, because that also doesn’t really mean anything but makes me laugh. Soup to nuts.

“Nice to see the future, to see the future… NICE!” — Bruce Foresight

Christopher Marlowe told 1970s singer Andrea True that there was going to be another conflict in South Africa, an unusual fabrication considering he died several centuries ago. Or, as she put it, “More Boer War? How do you lie, Kit? How do you lie, Kit?"

Jeff, the star of films including The Lawnmower Man and Darkman III, has been commended for his humanitarian work. Fahey’s a jolly good fellow.