Hello. It is May 2026. It’s bright but windy, like a genius after some beans. This is the forty-first Interesting Skull, a monthly newsletter of high-quality self-promotion, medium-level jokes and fairly underwhelming “and then I went home because I was sleepy” type anecdotes.

The proper name for joined-up handwritten hieroglyphics is “the cursive Tutankhamun”.

Solve The World’s Greatest Mysteries is out next Thursday (May 7th). It’s a really fun book for kids looking at twelve enduring enigmas - the curse of Tutankhamun, the ultimate fate of Amelia Earhart, the quest for El Dorado, whether Malory made it to the summit of Everest, and more. It’s book two of my two-book contract with Harper Collins Children’s Books, who did Become A Genius In A Year, and is illustrated by Gareth Conway who did Poo! What? Where?, so it’s been really nice working with the same team a second time. I really hope it finds an audience - I like that, even in futuristic 2026 when there’s more information than anyone could ever need, there are still things where the only sensible conclusion is “Wow, nope, absolutely no idea”.

And on May 21st, So Bad It’s Good: The Art Of The Terrible Joke. This is a fun collection of cheerfully rubbish gags - some in the kind of public-domain joke canon, some ridiculous creations of my own - along with chapters on things like the history of different joke formats, how to write your own terrible jokes, the fatherhood-joke connection and why jokes work the way they do. I made it a lot harder for myself than I needed to (I was only asked to write a joke book) and got to immortalise in print some of the terrible gags I wrote for this very newsletter, so that’s very exciting to me. Nobody reads this, and I often question why I continue to write it because it’s quite hard work for usually nothing, but it led to a book. So I suppose I’m cursed to continue.

But then madly on June 4th, Adulting For Beginners is out. It’s another fun one! This is a dimwit’s guide to surviving in a world where everyone is expected to pay bills, cook meals and keep a house clean. How do you clean a toilet? Can you go to prison if you don’t pay for Netflix?

That’s three books in four weeks, which I think everyone can agree is a jolly silly life.

Why did the bamboo get stabbed in jail?

For being a grass.

“I wonder who’ll get Formula 1 legend Jos Verstappen’s shoes when he dies.”
“His heir, Max?”
“His whole collection.”

“I wish a clever TV character was here to help me operate his hoist belonging to my favourite member of One Direction.”
“Niall’s crane?”
“I’m not sure, he’s clearly very intelligent but in more of a book-learning way than an engineering one.”

A long time ago - well over a decade - I lent £280 to my then-girlfriend’s flatmate because she couldn’t pay the rent on her awful flat and was going to have to move home to Ireland. About a week later we broke up. We never spoke again and I never got the money back. I’ve thought about that £280 so, so much. It’s such a frustrating amount to lose, and such a silly way to lose it. I’ve definitely spent long enough thinking about that money that, if I were paid minimum wage for thinking about it, I’d have earned it back.

If it had been £300 I could have demanded it back, but somehow being just below it meant I couldn’t - not when the consequences involved someone giving up their (really rubbish) London dream. At £300 you can say to someone, “Look, this is a lot of money and I need it back, let’s just be grown-up about it”. At £280 they can respond, “Oh come on, it’s pretty much £250, which is sort of £200 really, and that’s barely more than £100: are you really going to insist someone changes the course of their life for, basically, a hundred quid?”

So I lost that money and it haunts me. One of my goals in life is to have an Adrian Chiles type column where every week I have 500 words of thoughts and get paid handsomely for it, then every two years or so they get printed in a book and I get paid handsomely again. Then I’ll get my £280 back! Or there’s the David Sedaris thing where you tell an anecdote, then write it down, then read it on the radio, then read it on the telly, then read it in front of international audiences and somehow get paid hundreds of times for one whimsical incident. (If I lived near him I’d propose some sort of scam where I could stand behind him in a queue and behave unusually, and then he could point out the absurdity of it in an anecdote that somehow, over the course of several years, made him eighty grand.) Or there’s a comedian who the internet seems to adore whose entire career output seems to be one anecdote that happened to him thirty years ago, and he just… tells it again and again without a shirt on.

“I lent someone some money and never got it back,” isn’t a good anecdote, though. She needs to have gone off and achieved something amazing that she would never have managed if I hadn’t helped her out and let her stay in London. So I live in hope that I’ll read the paper one day and see her grinning next to Sadiq Khan, having been granted the Freedom of the City of London or something. Then I get to write about how I’m the real hero, and I get paid handsomely and everyone thinks I’m terrific.

It’s not the best career plan ever, I absolutely understand that, but it’s all I’ve got. I wish I had £280. Can someone send me £280?

“The star of Titanic is about to announce that one of Mr Ferdinand’s games for England didn’t count.”
“De-cap Rio?”
“No, it’s Kate Winslet who’ll be telling Les the news.”

Who decides what university you can go to in a galaxy far, far away?

George UCAS.

I asked Will Smith whether a straw model of Olivia, the director of Booksmart, had annoyed anyone. Then I asked if Ms Michelle from Allo Allo - a convert to neopaganism - had managed to kill some time. Then I asked him what to type into Google to find an encyclopedia entry on small vessels of medication. Then I asked what Reneé Elise Goldsberry’s character from Girls5Eva would be called if she became a priest. Then I asked what his rubbishest, most waste-of-time film was.
He said, “Wicker Wilde riled. Wicca Vicki whiled. Wiki vial. Vicar Wickie. Wild Wild West.”

10: The score, out of ten, I would give to the pineapple upside-down cake my daughter and I made the other day. It was hella lush. We used frozen cherries instead of glacé cherries, because glacé cherries are el ranko diablo, and it came out incredibly. If I ever go on the Great British Bake-Off I’m making a pineapple upside-down cake regardless of what the challenge is (I don’t know the format, I’ve not watched it) and they’ll be like, “This is better than the dull bread we asked for, you are a champion.”

1: The number of old men asleep in the front row of my talk at the Cambridge Literary Festival. I was on from 4-5 on a really hot afternoon, so despite a sold-out crowd it was only two-thirds full, half the kids were incredibly red and there was the feeling that a lot of the grown-ups had enjoyed big lunches.

2: The number of exciting contracts I’m hoping to sign in the next three hours or so. And then I’m buying a new computer. Imagine if I had £280. That would make buying my new computer so much easier. OH NO I’M THINKING ABOUT IT AGAIN.

I have a grape that refuses to dry out. It’s being really unraisinable.

“You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, while I was a hardwood tree in the genus Quercus” said Phil, oaky.

Did you hear about the contemptuous piano? It has a disdain pedal.