Hello. It is September 2026. The sky is white and wet, like a yoghurt. This is the forty-fifth monthly issue of Interesting Skull, a newsletter that, if I’m really honest, I wonder why I bother with. I wonder that about a lot of things. Sometimes I do activities that people really enjoy and find myself thinking, “Oh, this is what fun is, is it? Pathetic. Look at these idiots enjoying themselves. They should be clever and empty of pleasure like I am”. Then I go home and lie awake in silence until the morning, when it’s time to be really tired for ages. Still, you’ve got to laugh, and that’s where this hilarious newsletter by me, deadline-walloped author Mike Rampton, comes in.

"I'm taking my sister's kid to the south of France."
"Nice?"
"No, nephew. We're going to stay in an unimaginably fancy house there."
"Toulouse?"
"Even fancier than that. Three! Might celebrate with a drink."
"Cannes?"
"No, a bottle of wine I reckon."
etc

I am available in audio form. The audiobook of There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question is now available from wherever you get audiobooks. I recently listened to about twelve hours of Bunny Vs Monkey audiobooks on two long car journeys and am completely audiobooked out, but the bits of it I’ve heard sounded really great. I recorded some questions and answers for it ages ago, which made me realise how much more there is to these things than I thought - I felt like I was giving it my all, and then when stuff was played back I sounded like a dead man. I think one question I recorded in that session ended up being used (OH NONE TAKEN GUYS HA HA), so I guess I’m a pop star now?

Think Big: Brain Power is available for preorder. This has been really long-gestating - I originally pitched a children’s book about the brain around six years ago, and kicked some ideas around for a while before it ran out of steam. Then, ages later, it got folded into a really beautiful series of books by Nosy Crow called Think Big, done with my neighbourhood boffs the University of Cambridge. I’d pitched a kind of 150-word picture book, but this was a full-on science tome, so I had to learn a lot about the brain for it. I went and had an MRI, the ridiculousness of which is only just, several years later, sinking in - what did I expect to learn? I was also very tired at the time and fell asleep inside the big metal box. Plus I had to take my nose ring out for it because of the magnets, and the hole sealed up. Anyway, the book is absolutely gorgeous and will be released on April 8th next year.

"I thought about a celebrated vaudeville-adjacent comedian while at Glastonbury."
"W.C. Fields?"
"No, I was near the Pyramid Stage as I thought about Fatty Arbuckle."

"I'm reading a book by a notoriously cruel man, then going to see my favourite soul singer in a special French tent made for and named after her."
"Marquee de Sade?"
"No, after reading Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince I'm off to Le Big Top Du Anita Baker."

“Hi David Bowie! Before you sing your song, can you describe where I should look to find Czechoslovakia on a map produced in the 1920s?”
“Under Prussia.”
“I said not yet!”

There’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while that I am realistically never going to get round to doing, so if anyone else wants it, here you go. I want to write a sports film that fulfils all the tropes and cliches of a typical sports film - plucky underdogs, begrudging respect, off-pitch tension affecting on-pitch performance, a hero forgetting where they came from before falling back in love with the sport due in part to a new romance, and so on - but the sport would be hunting peasants for fun.

At no point would the monstrousness of this be addressed, and at no point would any of the peasants manage to say a word before being shot. It would all just be played completely straight: will our hero defy the odds and get to kill peasants at the national championships? The film would have all the same kind of inspirational messages and uplifting music as if it were about a conventional sport, but thousands of poor people would be brutally - yet casually - murdered.

I think the grammar of a sports film is so effective that you’d go along with it and really root for the hero even though they were by any standards appalling. Scenes like the hero’s best friend doing a heartfelt monologue reminding him about when they first started hunting peasants together as kids and asking if he even enjoys it anymore. A training montage showing how hard the hero is practicing that involves thousands of poor people being slaughtered without a thought. Standing up to a bully and winning the heart of his quirky love interest while surrounded by the corpses of unnamed characters with no agency at all. Nervously rehearsing a “will you go out with me?” speech while methodically slaughtering peasants to keep his eye in.

But, crucially, it also wouldn’t be making any sort of satirical point. It would just, all the way through, be a paper-thin, by-the-numbers underdog sports movie, pure Netflix filler standard. I just really, really think it’s an amazing idea, this incredibly lightweight film that involves more murder than any other film ever made. I’m in no position to make it a reality - anyone who is, please do. The world doesn’t need it, and that’s fun.

"People in the Czech city I visited struck me as very forthright. Know what I mean?"
"Frank Brno impression?"
"No, I was just using the phrase 'know what I mean?' in enquiry as to whether you knew what I meant about my experiences with the outspoken, brazen people of Ostrava."

“I saw an Olympic shot-putter in the airport earlier.”
“Heathrow?”
“No, although the way he carried his suitcases left nobody in any doubt as to his strength.”

“Today’s my weekly metal joinery class with one of the stars of Once Upon A Time In America.”
“Tuesday Weld?”
“Yes, that’s the name of the class I attend with Elizabeth McGovern.”

1,600: Approximate number of 2p coins my daughter and I put into the machines in Weymouth over the course of a week, leading to a collection of rubbish plastic toys which were immediately forgotten about and haven’t even been unpacked yet. Perfection.

0: Pints I was able to have in a pub there, Finn’s, that looked like the best pub in the world. One day I’ll go there and have so many pints.

3: The number of trees that aren’t outside my window anymore after the heatwave did for ‘em. A few of us turned the sliced-up trunk into a play trail, which has become a really lovely community thing and always has kids playing on it, but in an idea world we’d be able to have both. I’ve spent so long chuntering on about this, and the lack of play facilities in my village, and the charity I’m a trustee of which just faces obstacle after obstacle trying to get anything done, and can feel myself getting all livid just typing this, ha ha ha, they were nice trees ha ha ha oh god we’ve poured so many hundreds of hours into that doomed project trying to make the village a nicer place and it’ll probably never happen, absolute rotters, ABSOLUTE PIG ROTTERS

“Games Workshop are hiring a writer who’s really into Warhammer.”
“40,000?”
“I doubt it, in this economy.”

“I went to the place where those skewers with meat marinated in peanut sauce are made.”
“Satays factory?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”

“My friend, who is a B.O. fetishist, works for a mining company.”
“Digs pits?”
“He certainly does, and he is an accountant for a mining company.”