Hello. It is September 2025. This is the thirty-third monthly issue of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of chuckles, chortles and absolute pulled-taut mental tension by me, Mike Rampton.

“I’ve got a plan to get hold of a bunch of ancient Egyptian coffins.”
“Sarcophagi?”
“No, I’m bidding for them in an auction.”

This newsletter used to be on Substack and is now on Beehiiv. Substack feel differently about Nazis to me, and I felt uncomfortable sharing my silly jokes, which are genuinely just meant to make people happy, on their platform. Nazis don’t make people happy at all! Quite the opposite! I don’t know a lot about Beehiiv and really hope it doesn’t turn out to have been co-founded by Stalin or something. That would be terrible beehiiviour. Hopefully for you, my eight beloved readers, it’ll just be slightly different-looking and no more. Still free, still monthly, still not read by enough people.

I am very much available for freelance writing. Or, in fact, almost anything else. Against all odds I am pretty much up to date on my books, which is really exciting, but I’ve not been doing much in the way of freelancing recently in a bid to get caught up, which has led to a really tiny enormously worrying cashflow issue. If you work for a publication that would benefit from my hilarious and excellent voice, or you’re working on a project aimed at depressed suburban fathers and can’t quite nail it, or the writers’ room on your sitcom is filled with attractive young people and you want to diversify it with a rotting git, please get in touch. Or if you’re vaguely near Cambridge and just need some stuff moved or washed or you want me to show you my bum or whatever.

Soon I’ll be “doing some turns”. On October 12th I will be doing a brief spot at Comedy Club 4 Kidz in Finsbury Park as part of a bill I have absolutely no business being on, telling a whimsical anecdote about sick between proper sets by incredible comics. And on October 31st I will be at the Museum of Cambridge talking about the monsters of East Anglia with my pal Ruth for her podcast Ruth Is Stranger Than Fiction. I’ll have come straight from trick-or-treating with my daughter so might be dressed a lion, which would sort of fit the theme I guess?

My books remain available and terrific. They are all available from my Bookshop page, big massive websites or actual bookshops.

I’ve bought a snooker rest. This could have far-reaching consequences.

"I have a deeply contemplative friend who enjoys yoghurts with fruity bits in compartments."
"Muller?"
"Yes, he's quite the excogitator."

"I went to see a Joe Dante film."
"Innerspace?"
"Yes. Specifically, in a kind of film-watching space with a large screen and a lot of chairs facing it. There are lights on when you walk in, but they turn them off when the film begins. The floors are sticky and the drinks cost more than gold. They call it a 'cinema'. It was a fun film about gremlins."

I made some lunch earlier and, walking back to my office, somehow managed to fall up the stairs and, to use the technical words, flang it whatsoeverywhere. The hallway looked like it had hosted the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards on a year when the main design motif was cheese. There was a big dollop of caramelised onion chutney — which we can all agree is a very cool food — in the middle of the carpet and it looked like a cat dump. I am fairly used to mishaps, and didn’t even stop moving: in one strikingly fluid movement I picked myself up, walked past the mess, sat down at my desk and pitched an idea for the worst, most depressing cookbook in the world.

It won’t happen and is a terrible idea, but every so often I become briefly convinced that I am a domestic god and should share my incredible running-a-house skills with the world. Nobody who has visited my house would endorse this thinking. I am genuinely quite a good cook, but in the same way as being a good driver: I get from A to B and nobody gets hurt. That doesn’t qualify me to write a book about it. The same impulse that makes people live-post about everything they do seems to manifest in me as “maybe this can end up in The Works in two years”. Not a great impulse. Should work on that. But in a similar vein, my main housekeeping tips are:

While I stick by all of that advice, it isn’t, you know, good. It all involves delegating some of the work to “the wind” or “local birds” rather than actually tidying anything up. It’s a useful reminder, though, that we share this world with nature or something. I’ve lost my train of thought. I dropped my lunch and am so hungry.

My wife was unimpressed when Sir Steve Redgrave served us a meal, twitching constantly. She'd wanted to go out for a different kind of “row man tic” dinner.

“Ive been asked to give a statement about how I feel regarding alkaline products used in soap-making but am not sure what to say.”
“Lye?”
“No, I insist on being honest, I just have complex feelings towards all these hydroxides that I find it hard to articulate succinctly.”

“Come on, fellow locksmiths, let’s come up with a great idea for a weekly promotion, and then we can relax and watch a Lindsay Lohan film.”
“Freaky Friday?”
“Excellent! Now let’s pop Herbie: Fully Loaded in the DVD player!”

I went to Hastings with my family, which was lovely. My daughter got a hole-in-one at the pirate mini golf and I made the loudest noise I’ve ever made. Then we got doughnuts and I got attacked by about forty seagulls and there was at least a second during it when I was 100% confident I was going to die. Yates’ Wine Lodge had a very good summer promotion where kids get a three-course meal for £1, so I thought about wearing two small trenchcoats and pretending to be multiple children to get a low-budget slap-up feed but not all scams are reversible. I just asked Freddie Mercury what “card manipulation” was, and he gave me a beautifully sung answer. Any time I see a free sample I grab it and eat it, but I did it in Lush the other day and think what I ate was part of a bath bomb. I wrote fun things about low-alcohol beer and alcopops for the i paper, and was contacted by companies asking to send me drinks, and they sent me two broken bottles of VK and one broken bottle of wine, which is about as poor a result as anyone’s ever managed.

"The very famous person Mr Pitt has eaten too much in a suburb of Milton Keynes."
"Bradwell?"
"No, Shenley Brook End is where William The Younger is being very, very sick."

“I know a chicken farmer with a temporary tattoo."
"Henna?"
"He refers to himself as a chicken farmer, and I don’t know enough about chicken farming to dispute that. He's got a transfer on his leg."

"I have a fun suit with a potato chips motif that I will wear to meet a former Governor of Hong Kong."
"Crisp pattern?"
"Yes, that is an accurate way of describing the suit I shall wear for my meeting with Lord David Wilson, who it turns out is still alive."