Hello. It is October 2025. Autumn comes. The leaves are changing colour (unless they use Treecian 2000). This is the thirty-fourth monthly issue of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of light guffaws, explicit pleas for work and the ongoing suggestion that something internal is about to break, by me, international passport-owning author and cashflow issue enthusiast Mike Rampton.

With all that stamping he does, he should be called Michael Philately!

The biggest album in America is about to drop. I mean “album” in the French sense, of course, as in “colourful illustrated book”. Tintin, Les Stroumpfs etc. I’m doing a fun joke because a big pop star has a new record (or “album”) out. It’s not her best work! But, if she says she wants to have a curry with me, don’t tell her I said that! I went into a bicycle repair shop with gear trouble. The repairman said, "Your derailleur's whiffed." I said, "No. While I am also famous, talented and beautiful, so your error makes sense, I am actually children's non-fiction author Mike Rampton." Speaking of which, my original point is: Ask A Silly Question is out in the USA on October 14th. Please tell any rootin’-tootin’ cowpokes, liberal coastal elites or pleasant midwestern lumberjacks you know.

Sit down, there are pressing matters about to drop and be put down on paper. I got my advance author copy of Poo What Where? this week, my book about the exciting world of faecal matter. It’s out in January and is really fun. The illustrations by Gareth Edwards are incredible — they looked great on screen but are even better in book form. I was surprised, during the production process, to learn that “turd” is apparently a totally acceptable word. I thought it was quite rude! Everyday’s a schoolday (apart from, as my daughter points out every time I say that, the weekend)!

Bringing things up on stage. There are still a couple of tickets left for Comedy Club 4 Kidz in Finsbury Park on October 12th, where I’ll be talking about sick for a few minutes in between the proper acts. And on October 31st I will be at the Museum of Cambridge helping out with a talk about fenland monsters — an event that should clearly be called “Beast Anglia” — for my pal Ruth’s podcast Ruth Is Stranger Than Fiction. It’s sold out, but it’s a good museum, you could just visit it and learn things for fun.

I always wanted power of attorney, but when the opportunity came along, I lost the will.

"Someone predicted one day we'd build protective metal outfits with nose-holes."
"Nostrilled armours?"
"No, someone less famous and more recent than that."

What’s the difference between a Franco-English author specialising in cautionary tales and a mound Carlton Banks might dance on?
One’s a Bel-Air hillock…

I sometimes worry that a decade-plus of freelancing and a total lack of division between work and the rest of my life has ruined a lot of fun things for me. As soon as I start wanting to do something fun, my imagination runs away with me as to how I can monetise it. I realise that makes me sound like some kind of “never stop hustling”, “mind on my money and my money on my mind”-type entrepreneur figure, but I’m not — I’m broke as all hell and would like to be just un-broke enough to not have to think about money all the time.

So I’ll have a thought about something that seems fun, and then I’ll immediately wonder about how it might make me rich, and then it all gets silly and overambitious and I end up just not doing it, because somehow the fun idea I had seems either rubbish or difficult.

Like, where I live there are lots of village signs — a while ago I thought, “Hey, I like walking and running and cycling. What if I walked/ran/cycled to different villages and took a picture of the sign?” It seemed like a gently fun way of giving a bit of structure and direction to the idea of keeping fit. But then, far too quickly, it became a case of, “How can I monetise this? Does it need to be a TikTok thing? Does that mean I have to find out what TikTok is? What's my brand? What's my hook? How do I corral my inevitable fame into lucrative work?” which is just rubbish.

Once it would have been a fun little hobby, and maybe I'd have had a map that I marked things on or a fun little scrapbook. A nice little quite sad hobby, a silly tiny local project for my daughter to roll her eyes at. But now — and some of it is just my stupid life and stupid brain, but some of it is definitely a change in how I think the world views all leisure activity now, as something that has to somehow lead to numbers or money or fame, where it used to be a way of, I guess, having fun? But my mind immediately goes to what I could get from it, and then I conclude that being the internet’s best thing-looker-at is too much work, not what I want to be known for, unlikely to lead to a Christmas bestseller and/or BBC2 series and so on.

So what I’m saying is, I’ve not been for a run for ages and don’t want to and you can’t make me but it’s the internet’s fault.

"A famous football manager performed some music and I watched it on my tablet."
“Big Sam sung?”
“No, a medium-sized iPad is what I watched Sir Alex Ferguson play the harmonica on.”

"Whereabouts in Colorado do you live?"
"Boulder."
"Oh, okay. 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞?"

"My favourite singer's memoir is perfect for enjoying on the toilet."
"Loo read?"
"No. I don't like him at all."

I recently learned that the current keyboard player for The Offspring is Leonard Nimoy’s grandson. It feels like there’s a really great punk/Star Trek pun to be made there, but I started thinking about being “beamed up”, then was trying to connect it to the song title Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), and ended up looking up whether a bream was a white fish, but even if it were, that is absolutely no use for anything. Like, “I’ve heard the keyboard player for The Offspring is Leonard Nimoy’s grandson — I expect they’ve renamed their hit song Bream Me Up (For A White Fish)” couldn’t be less good. In fact, it’s a waste of everyone’s vulcan’ time. Maybe punk is just a phaser he’s going through.

I’m writing this newsletter late, so have no idea how I spent September. I think I was pretty much a hermit throughout it for financial reasons. I wanted to buy System Of A Down tickets but couldn’t afford them — I blame Serj pricing. Wrote a thing for the i paper about how everything costs a fortune (which was given a headline about being middle-class that seemed deliberately chosen to get people to slag me off on Facebook, which I wasn’t thrilled about as I didn’t mention class in the piece at all, and for some reason they chose to use a picture of me from several years ago) and another about The Rock. You hardly ever read news articles about which types of food contain the smallest amounts of energy: there needs to be more investment in lo-cal journalism.

I've just read a book about getting dental braces by author Don Tist. The person operating on the writer of A Scanner Darkly is the “author P. Dick surgeon”, and so on. I think my joke above about power of attorney contains at least one fundamental misunderstanding about what that position and process entail. I was sad to learn about Patricia Routledge’s death: the Lord giveth and taketh bouquet.

"I just popped out for a burger in an ill-fitting raincoat."
“Big Mac?”
“No, a too-small tam o’shanter is what I wore to Wendy’s.”

“Before naming the members of my favourite animated family I need to find a house for someone who rents a San Franciscan train filled with a butter substitute flavoured with a soy-like sauce made in Switzerland."
“Home a Maggi marge BART leaser?”
“Yep.”

My OXO cubes have got really used to being in their box, and don’t want to come out. They’ve developed etc etc…