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Woke up early but somehow didn’t feel as exhausted as I should. RHLSTP is draining enough even after a good night’s sleep, so was expecting to be destroyed by a 6am start. But the drug of performance kept my buoyant for the morning at least. Why performers need to eat cocaines I have no idea. Performing is cocaines enough for me. If I had some actual cocaines on top of that I would probably have a very full tummy and need to go to the toilet. Or have to have some of the old arm heroin to calm down a bit.
Luckily we were taking a day off from the secret writer’s room, because after lunch it became fairly apparent that eight hours sleep in two nights was not enough.
So I mainly tried to publicise the book and see if I could catch up with Hugh Jassburn in the Books > Reference > Fun Facts & Trivia > Trivia chart. I couldn’t. He is too powerful. With Hugh Jassburn comes huge responsibility. Every time I tweet about him I seem to improve his performance in the charts rather than my own, as people realise they’d rather have one of his toilet books, rather than my own contribution to the world of literature.
Yesterday @baldygeezer has tweeted me to say "I wonder if you could do me a favour and marry someone with the surname "Bone", so you could have a double barrelled name. This would bring happiness to several slightly odd people on the internet, and so would be well worth the effort and expense.”
I had recognised that as a good new emergency question and tweeted
Adding the caveat "If anyone repeats a celebrity marriage joke that I have heard before, they will be BLOCKED. I am only interested in NEW jokes. And copying will be PUNISHED”
I was also wary that people would do the Whoopi Goldberg marrying Peter Cushing gag or the one about Beyonce and Roy Castle, which would not only be nicked, but not even follow the rules of the game, which is about funny double-barrelled names NOT funny married names. Also it’s the 21st century! What if Peter Cushing took Whoopi’s surname? Peter Goldberg is not a funny name. And if Beyonce married Roy Castle, by the rules of the game, she would become Beyonce Knowles-Castle.
It didn’t stop people suggesting these though.
So I had as much fun pretending not to understand and pulling down the people who misunderstood the rules or who told me ones I’d heard before and told them to leave Twitter and take their stuff with them.
But some people got it, Joe McNally suggested Heather Small and Stephen Fry, Richard Osman went for Liz Hurley and Craig Burley. Quite a few people (enough to make me suspect that it was already an established joke, but as I didn’t know it I allowed them to keep their desks uncleared) went for Desmond Tutu and Shania Twain.
It carried on today, going viral in a way that today’s self-penned suggestion of if there were 14 dwarves what would you call the other 7 completely failed to do so. Why are the general public so much cleverer than me? And why don’t they have their own toilet book that fails to beat Hugh Jassburn in the charts?
The public mood was so caught by the game that it even made a poorly written article in the Digital versions of the Sun (which wrongly included Beyonce Castle in its list) which received no comments from the Digital Sun readers at all and the writer of which clearly had no idea who I was and didn’t even mention my new book. But still, that’s the kind of mediocre level of fame that I have made my meat and potatoes. Well my potatoes. I can’t afford meat obviously. 
