I can’t quite believe it, but this is my 200th
column for the Metro. Please all let off your celebratory party poppers now…
wow that was quite a sight! Can’t believe you all managed to that
simultaneously. And the ticket inspector will be moving down the carriage in a
cuple of minutes with a complimentary glass of warm sparkling white wine.
It’s pretty much exactly four years since I started
writing these, in a job that I was told would last six weeks. But I kept
submitting them and the Metro keep publishing them, possibly due to some
clerical error, so I should probably keep quiet about that.
Back in 2012 I was preparing to marry my first wife
(we’re still married, I just like to l keep her on her toes). If you’d told me
back then that either the column or the marriage would have survived into 2016
I would have told you that you were insane, yet here we still are. I am taking
it week by week (in both cases) and hoping no one spots what a terrible
writer/human being I am. Slightly insultingly in all this time no other woman
or newspaper has tried to poach me, but maybe I should just shut up and be
grateful for small miracles and be thankful for my wife and the Metro for
staying true. Bookies are currently taking bets on which contract will last the
longest: work or marriage. It’s very difficult to call.
And my columns haven’t gone unnoticed by the public.
For the first time ever last week, after just 199 columns and over 120,000 blisteringly
funny words, a man on the tube recognised me as he was reading my column,
pointed at it and gave me the thumbs up. Though weirdly he used his middle
fingers, but I assume that’s some new cool way of saying well done. It’s little
gestures like that that make all these years of hard work worthwhile.
And
it’s a time of important landmarks as my daughter Phoebe approaches her first
birthday. She is an ever-increasing delight, but working from home does mean
it’s really hard to get everything done.
The
pram in the hall is supposedly the enemy of creativity, but it turns out that’s
not true. It’s actually the baby. And it doesn’t matter what room of the house
she’s in: completely disruptive. The pram is the patsy in this situation and is
entirely blameless. I don’t know why people have allowed the pram to take the
blame for so long.
“But
Rich,” I hear you say, “You’ve still got it. Look at the brilliant ‘pram in the
hall’ joke you just made.” Well you’re wrong. I stole that joke off of my much
funnier wife - having a funny wife is the friend of creativity, as long as you
don’t have any moral objection to just letting her come up with ideas and then
nicking them and passing them off as your own.
I’ve
found that if you put the baby in the pram in the hall then you can get quite a
lot of work done, as long as you’re in a part of the house where you can’t hear
it crying.
None
of the room-based sayings are true. Jerry Hall once said that for a woman the
secret to keeping their man was acting like a cook in the kitchen, a maid in
the parlour and a whore in the bedroom. That is a very sexist thing to say and
it’s completely erroneous. Better advice to women who want to keep their man is
to act like a whore in every room of the house. Most men won’t care what state
the parlour has got into…. I’m not entirely sure where the parlour is. Don’t
waste your time tidying up in the parlour, it will go unnoticed…. as you’re
whoring it up in the airing cupboard.
Rupert
Murdoch has realised the key to being happy (and possibly to creativity as
well) is having a Jerry Hall in the hall. And Jerry will surely be happy with
Rupert’s money in her bank account.
I don't usually get asked to act in things, but recently I have got parts in two short films. In one I play a sleezy man who uses female escorts who accidentally sleeps with a man and in the other I play a loser husband who makes a terrible self-defeating decision while his wife is away. To be honest it's quite insulting that I was their go-to guy for casting! Mosquito is out online today. Check out my serious acting!
