E. M. Esq.

Some fellers are fixin’ to get some information out of me. NotRuairi is (n’t?) at it, as is this hirsute hombre. Six things they want, which is a bit annoying, since I gone and did 25 of them on Facebook a while ago. Seriously, those are all the things about me. I have nothing left.

But then I read Andrew’s facts, and it occurred to me that they were awful familiar. Awful familiar indeed… for you see, I know this man – or rather, I knew him. We were a team, Andrew and I, before an unpleasantness forced us apart. Then a while later we were a team again, before a misunderstanding put paid to our relationship. Then after a couple of years we were a team again, and then we kind of got really really drunk, and I guess there might have been some psychotropics in the mix, and basically we haven’t seen each other since.

Many fine histories of our exploits have been written¹, but here’s a few choice “behind the scenes” nuggets that tend to get left out:

1. While my favourite pen is a Bic biro, Andrew is a die-hard fan of Staedtlers. In order to minimise arguments and avoid needless destruction of property, we tend to write in pencil when in each other’s company.

2. You know where at the start of those Pepé le Pew cartoons the cat would squeeze under like a freshly-painted fence or something and then the skunk would chase her for ages looking to do the deed on her? Well, [excised at the request of the British Royal Family]

3. In the space of three minutes during a late-night/early-morning singalong in a Munich pub in the 1860s, we inadvertently invented the Eurovision, paracetamol and Cambodia.

4. Pork, as a meat, was much less delicious before we started hanging out together. We’re not sure why.

5. We wrote the preliminary code for Auto-Tune in 1971. It’s taken 38 years for someone to find a proper use for it.

6. The seven-day-week thing is one of Andrew’s most common boasts  but, as usual, he was only partly responsible. I recall it was a balmy Blurnsday evening back in the sixteenth century: myself and himself were pretty heavily into peyote at the time, as were the rest of the Tibetan aristocracy², and in the middle of one of our lengthier binges I happened to make an offhand comment about there being seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye. Well, things got somewhat hazy, but when we came to several days later Andrew was clutching a sheaf of paperwork from the US Patent Office³. After several months on the road, and some characteristic mountebankery, we’d convinced the rest of the world to adopt the new system.

1. q.v. particularly the following paragraph on Wikipedia: “In the course of history, men with facial hair have been ascribed various attributes such as wisdom and knowledge, sexual virility, or high social status; and, conversely, filthiness, crudeness, or an eccentric disposition, such as in the case of a bum, hobo or vagrant.” [↩]
2. Long story. [↩]
3. which office, ironically, we ourselves had founded less than two weeks earlier. [↩]