I was whisked away from the glamour of the actor's life of being soaked with freezing water and back on the Andrew Collings's show this afternoon. At no point was I wetted at all. In fact the only ice cold water I came into contact with was in a plastic cup and brought to me to drink. No caterers though, just some of Collings's ridiculous wheat-free biscuits. But unlike the acting world Collings is always there for me. It is enjoyable meeting up with him once a week to discuss some things that have been in the paper for half an hour. This is the relationship we have. He doesn't even mind if I discuss things in the paper with anyone else. We have an open relationship.
We very much adlib our chats. Andrew selects a few stories, I read through them and maybe think of a couple of things to say, but the best stuff just comes from nowhere as we chat. I like it when an unpromising story suddenly throws up something funny.
Today there was a tiny story about a massive squid that some fishermen had caught. I hadn't thought it looked very promising as material, but Andrew wanted to talk about it. It was 35ft long and this was meant to impress me. But I argued that it was hard to be impressed as the article gave me no idea of what size a regular squid is. What if the average squid is 34 feet long? A 35 foot one is not that great then is it. The Mirror told us that if the squid was made into calamari the pieces would be bigger than tractor tyres, but again I said that this did not impress me. It wasn't even an accurate assessment. If they were going to compare it to something then it should be the same size as the thing. Bigger than a tractor tyre could be any kind of size and what kind of tractor were they talking about? And which tractor wheel? Because the front tyres of a tractor are smaller than the ones at the back and the tyres on a big tractor are much bigger than those on a small one. The tractor tyre is a useless system of measurement and it the calamari wouldn't even be the same size as a tractor tyre anyway.
The squid, said the Mirror, had eyes the size of dinner-plates. Andrew thought this would impress me, but again dinner plates come in all kinds of sizes and I still didn't know what size the eyes of a regular squid were. The whole thing made me very angry.
You can hear our argument about the squid in full by using the listen again facility on
on this site (for the next week only). I really enjoyed our chat. It made a nice change from pretending to be someone else who was essentially the same as me and wore my clothes. And from being cold and wet.
