I was buying a paper and a diet coke in my local Sainsburys Local and standing at the self service machines (which I had once vowed to never use, as I didn't like the idea of robots replacing humans, but which I have now accepted - just a few more steps before they make us their slaves). There was a man at the machine next to me and a security guard behind me, but as I scanned my coke I heard something fall to the floor beside me. It felt very much like something had fallen out of my suit pocket or my manbag, but when I looked down I saw a mobile phone on the floor beside me. It was not my mobile phone. I assumed the man next to me must have dropped it, but when I asked him he said that it wasn't his and that he assumed that I had dropped it to. But I hadn't. Where had it come from?
The sound it had made was very much one of a short vertical fall. It couldn't have been thrown in from somewhere else as it would have made a different sound (and to be honest who would have done that anyway?). Had it somehow fallen off of the machine I was using. It was a remote possibility, but as I had been scanning I hadn't touched the machine and hadn't dislodged anything and in any case the machine was all flat surfaces - it wasn't as if a cuboid phone would be able to roll off it. Where had this phone come from?
My best explanation was that it had fallen through a worm hole in time or space or been dropped by a ghost from about 2005 (it wasn't that good a phone). Maybe God had dropped it there because he wanted to speak to me - wouldn't He have just rung my phone? Surely he knows the number. Or saved himself the expensive roaming charges and just used his voice to speak to me?
I was genuinely bamboozled. There seemed no explanation at all. The man at the next machine suggested I might have accidentally picked up the wrong phone at work, but I don't go to work. And I hadn't picked up anyone else's phone. And even if I had how would it have fallen out of my bag or pocket? It was super weird. But foolishly I was so bamboozled that I didn't think to check the phone and listen to the messages to see if God or a ghost or a man from 2005 was trying to contact me and just handed the phone to the security guard. The mystery will remain forever, due to my honesty. If it had been a better phone I might have kept it. So that's a little note to God or ghosts or people from the past/future trying to communicate with us- use an iPhone and there's a much better chance of pick up.
I was a little unnerved by the materialising phone though. It goes against all that I believe about physics and yet I still can't come up with a satisfactory reason for it falling on the floor in this way.
I was on my way to a photo shoot for Edinburgh, but the tubes were delayed and I was running late so I had to get out at Notting Hill and hail a cab. As we drove along the Euston Road traffic was pretty jam packed and I was going to be late. A car heading in the other direction was trying to push through the traffic on our side so he could turn right. But at the same time a cyclist on our side was quite legally passing the traffic on the inside. The man turning right didn't see him until the last minute and nearly drove into him, but managed to brake, but as he did so tooted his horn and furiously shouted, his face twisted in anger. I love to see people expressing such violent emotion when they are entirely in the wrong. He very nearly killed or injured a stranger and then had the audacity to blame the person he had come within a whisker of harming. Because presumably in his head, the world is a movie or video game of which he is the star and anyone impeding his progress is in the wrong.
It was funny and chilling in equal measure to see how angry the man who had no concept of the rights and wrongs of the highway had become. I felt sorry for the cyclist, being chastised at the moment where he had been forced to contemplate his own mortality. It added insult to near injury. The attempted murderer went free and may one day kill again. If he continues to believe that everyone must give way to him in all circumstance. Yet if I rang the police to warn them they wouldn't give me the time of day.
Ticking. Timebomb.
Later in the journey I almost became a victim of another careless road user as a lorry driver turning left into a petrol station did not see the taxi I was in turning into the bus lane. The lorry loomed in close and even with a beep of the horn still didn't spot us and we were millimetres from a low speed crash. Was this what the mysterious wormhole phone had been trying to warn me about? It seems unlikely. It would be a lot of effort to go to to foretell me that I was nearly, but not quite going to get into an accident.
The photo session was a lot of fun. The Sunday Times had gathered together some Edinburgh veterans and some Edinburgh newbies for an article. So I spent a good hour chatting about comedy with the likes of Barry Cryer, Dave Gorman, Tim Vine and Al Murray as well as some young whippersnappers who still had hope in their eyes. I refused to hold any whacky props or jump around or strangle anyone in the photos, so will look like the unfunny man in the suit I suspect. But there was a delightful camaraderie amongst the comics and it's always a pleasure to converse with Mr Cryer. We discussed comedy and the fact that the letter K is the funniest letter, making "Keith" a more satisfactory punchline name than "Simon". Stew and me used to insert Ks into names (eg Simon Quinlank) for this exact reason and we decided that "Dave Gorkman" "Richard Herking" and even "Barry Kryer" were all funnier names than the ones we'd got.
A few months ago I had sent Tim Vine a joke that I had come up with, which I didn't think I could use, but which he might be able to get mileage out of. He told me he hadn't tried it out yet. It was something along the lines of "My great-grandad was a fishmonger, my grandad was a fishmonger, my dad was a fishmonger. I have just opened my first fishmonger's. I guess I've inherited the sell fish gene."
I tried to tell this joke to Dave Gorman though didn't manage it quite as artfully as I could have done and Tim and Dave started dissecting the joke and trying to improve upon the wording. Tim felt it was a shame that the word "fish" appeared in the joke before the punchline, and it's true that the humour of a gag can be dented if such a word gets repeated (though perversely can also become funnier through repetition in some circumstances, though I think "fishmonger is a funny enough word to excuse the fish repetition), so they tried to come up with a version that didn't use the word "fish" which went something like "My great grandad had a trout shop, my grandad had a cod shop and my dad had a haddock shop. I've just opened a mackerel shop. I guess I've inherited the sell fish gene." There was something delightfully silly about all the ancestors deciding to set up fishmongers dedicated to a single type of fish, plus the fact that each generation had rebelled against the previous one and changed the fish. But Tim still felt that it was a shame that there was not an additional layer in which the teller of the joke was also selfish as well as selling fish. Dave suggested that maybe the teller should have selfishly taken over the previous generations' shops. But maybe if you wanted to go that way, the teller has opened a fishmonger as well, but is keeping all the fish to himself and refusing to sell them. It was fun to take this frankly rubbish joke and pull it apart and then stretch it to breaking point. I told Vine he should do a full hour just on this concept. I think he definitely will.
