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 First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Two Roads
An Imprint of John Murray Press
An Hachette UK company

Copyright © House of Tomorrow Ltd.,

Charlie Brooker, Jason Hazeley and Joel
Morris 2018

Audiobook performed by Diane Morgan

Additional material by Charlie Brooker and Ben Caudell

The right of House of Tomorrow Ltd to be identified as the Author of

the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781473690394

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 CONTENTS

Foreword
Preface

A
Adam and Eve
Alexander the Great
Alfred of Great
Alphabet
Alt Right, The
Anglo-Saxons
Animals
Archaeology
Archie Medes
Architecture
Art
Astronomy
Atoms
‘Auld Lang Syne’
Australia

B
Bacon, Francis
Ballet
Battle of Hastings, The
Beatles, Them
Beeps
Belgium
Big Bang, The
Black Death, The
Black Holes
Books
Bottles
Bowie, David
Brexit
Brush Strokes

C
Cars
Chaos Theory
Children’s Television
China
Clapping
Climate Change
Colour
Computers
Corbyn, Jeremy
Crime
Cunk, Philomena

D
Dark Ages, The
Democracy
Digestion
Dinosaurs
Doctor Who
Domesday Book, The
Dressage
Dyer, Danny

E
Electricity
End of the World, The
Environment, The
Evolution
Evolutionary Psychology

F
Facebook
Fake News
Farridge, Nigel
Fashion
Films
Frankingstein
Fullosophy

G
Games of Throne
Game Theory
Gas
Genetics
Governments
Gravity
Great Exhibition, The

H
Hair
Heat Death of the Universe, The
Henry of Eight
Hiccups
Human Mind, The

I
Ice Cream
Industrial Revolution, The
iPhone, The
Iron Age, The

J
Jazz
Jesus

K
King Arthur
King Isambard of Brunel
L
Language
Large Hadron Colander
Lies
Light
Longitude

M
Medicine
Middle Ages
Money
Mozart
Mystery of Life, The

N
Nanotechnology
Newspapers
Nightmares

O
Oedipus Complex
Olympics

P
Pasta
Photocopiers
Polarisation
Pornography

Q
Quorn

R
Radio For
Roman Nempire, The
Rugby
Russian Revolution, The

S
Sausages
Senses
Shakespeare, William
Sir George
Skellingtons
Soup
Spotify
Stones Age, The

T
Taj Mahal, The
Television
Time
Top Gear
Triangles
Trump, Donald
Truth

U
United States of Americans, The

V
Victorians, The
Vikings
Virtual Reality

W
Wars of the Roses, The
Weather
Weeing in Public
Welfare State, The
Willis, Walliam
Windows
Wright Brothers, The
X
Xylophones

Y
Young People
Yuletide

Z
Zero
Zombies

About the Author

 FOREWORD
By Professor Rupert Delgado, MBE

I’m rather afraid to say that I do not know the author to whom you refer,
since I seldom look at the television, but these samples you have sent me
are an absolute disgrace. I shall not be contributing a foreword to this book
and I am happy for you to quote me on that.

Never contact me again.

 PREFACE
By Philomena Cunk

When I was asked to write this book, I remember thinking.

It was a good feeling. And writing this book, that feeling has happened
again and again. Thinking is one of the three best things you can do with
your brain. I hope that this book will provide ‘food for thought’, which is
the scientific word for mind sausages, and maybe go some way to answer
all the questions in the universe.
It’s hard to know everything, because the world is getting more
complicated every day. Maybe in olden times, a caveman would have been
able to know everything just by knowing the difference between rocks and
food. But someone with that level of knowledge today would be practically
unemployable, even in shoe retail.
So how can we know more about the world? One way is through books.
Books are like the internet but all in one order and they still work in a
tunnel. What you’re holding now is a book (unless you’ve put it down on a
table and are holding a cup of tea, in which case what you’re holding now is
a cup of tea). By reading books, the ideas someone else put in the book
travel up your eyes and join your own ideas in your head. It feels weird at
first, but I’m told you get used to it.
A lot of books are written by quite boring people you’ve never heard of,
and so never get opened. The best books are written by someone off the
television, as the bestseller charts clearly prove. People off the television
just write better books, and that’s why I’m doing this one. Because
otherwise some so-called author might do it instead, and nobody would buy
the books and they’d end up in landfill. It’s sobering to realise that writing a
book and not being off the television can do so much damage to our
precious planet.
Think of this book as a helpful guide to the universe, written by someone
you trust. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone take you by the hand.
Sometimes it’s not (e.g: if they haven’t used the dryer in the bogs for quite
long enough, or have been recently gutting a mackerel). But sometimes it’s
nice to know that someone is going to help you navigate life’s more
difficult and confusing bits.
You might ask, why me? Well, I’ve spent the last few years investigating
right up the most pressing issues of today and the past in my television
series and specials, and I like to think I’ve been successful at it because that
feels nice.
I hope you enjoy learning about everything. I know I have.

Philomena Cunk
Chessington World of Adventures, UK, May 2018
 A

Adam and Eve

The first human to evolve from God was Adam, who was the first man. In
those early days, there were no women at all, only men, like on the repeats
of Have I Got News? on Dave.
This was a problem because the only way to make more Adams was for
Adam to have sex with the only other person around: God. I’d imagine God
didn’t want to mate with Adam because he’d made him in his image, so
that’s just having sex with yourself, which is weird. Plus you can have sex
with yourself anyway, using a wank, and then you get to nod off afterwards
without any awkward conversation, so God wasn’t into that at all. Why
should he be? He’s God. He can probably have sex with himself a million
mysterious ways without needing anyone’s help at all. When it comes to
having sex with humans, that’s more the Holy Ghost’s sort of thing for
some reason. He’s intangible and smooth, like a newly washed duvet cover,
so it’s probably a ‘bit of rough’ sort of thing. I don’t really want to think
about it.
Anyway, in order that there could be sex, God made Eve, a woman, who
evolved from Adam. Eve came second, like women usually do, but was
more evolved. Unlike Adam, whose leaf was just for show, Eve could have
babies out her leaf, and so the whole population of Earth was invented.
Eve got in trouble straight away for eating an apple that belonged to God.
If he was that fussed about it, he should have put a post-it note on it, like
you do in an office fridge. Idiot.

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great was born in 356 in Ancient Greece and died at the age
of 32BC, having become one of the greatest soldiers of all times. He was
very much the Andy McNab of his day, only he wasn’t just silhouettes. He
was also statues.
 Alexander rose from nothing, as the son of a simple Greek king, to
become the ruler of all of Greece. Then, because that wasn’t enough, he
invaded literally everywhere that anyone had heard of. At the time, people
hadn’t heard of many places we take for granted now (America,
Chessington World of Adventures, Loompaland) but all the places that had
been heard of (basically Greece and the bits next to Greece) fell to
Alexander’s mighty armies.
Alexander conquered Syria, Persia, Babylonia, India, Turkia, Egyptia, all
the places. His soldiers were knackered. They kept falling off their horses,
which is why he built a big wooden one called the Trojan Horse that they
could ride inside, like a bus, and catch a nap or stare out the window and
see what’s on top of bus stops. Using this horse he won the Battle of Troy,
and beat the Minotaur, which was a bull with the mind of a wasp and the
teeth of a duck. To be frank, the Greek myths get a bit confusing here, but
he’s in most of them. He was so great at fighting that he stopped being a
Greek myth and turned into a real boy, like Pinocchio. And that’s why we
remember him today, if we do.
He was called ‘the Great’ because nobody had invented surnames and
they needed a way of telling him apart from the other Alexanders, like
Alexander the Drunk and and Alexander the Dog. It looks a bit like he
chose his own nickname, though, which is against the rules. He should have
let his mates pick one. Though he might just have ended up being called
Womble or Piehead or Dr Spunkwagon or something, and it’s harder to
conquer the world if you know you’re going to have to carve that on all
your plinths.
Alexander the Great’s was one of the largest empires there had ever been
in all of history, which wasn’t very long back then. There have been bigger
empires since, but that’s because things get bigger when they’re hot, so
there’s more world now, thanks to global warming.

Alfred of Great
Alfred of Great was the greatest king England ever had, and we know that
because he boasted about his own greatness in his name, like the Notorious
B.I.G. or Tom and Barbara Good.
 Alfred of Great was a much better king than Ethelred the Unready or
Harold The Shit. If we learn anything from this, it’s that you should read all
of a king’s name before giving him the job. Alfred basically invented
England. Before him, there had been loads of little kingdoms with lots of
little kings with Harry Potter names like Eadwig and Eric Bloodaxe. Alfred
made one big kingdom called England, from the word ‘and’, meaning
‘together’, and the word ‘ingle’ meaning ‘fireplace’. For some reason. (It’s
surprising Alfred didn’t call his kingdom Alfredland, after what a bighead
he’d been about his own name.)
Alfred was called Great because he ran away from his responsibilities and
hid in Somerset, stuffing his face and wondering what to do – a proud
English tradition that students at Bath University continue to this day.
Despite his bold Vrexit, and his restoration of the city of London, and his
legal reforms, and his beefing up the navy and all his many other
achievements, Alfred is most famous for not helping with some burnt cakes.
In that respect, he was very much the Sue Perkins of his day.

Alphabet
The alphabet is in that order because that’s the order the letters were
invented in. You can tell that because all the boring ones like B and A are at
the front and all the exciting futuristic space ones like X and Z are at the
back. Z is sort of the iPhone X of the alphabet.
Some countries have banned some of the alphabet. In Italy, the letter W is
illegal. And in Hawaii, they only have twelve letters, because it’s not a very
big place. This is why the word ‘Hawaii’ has such a funny ending – because
there’s no Y available to help get across that the name means ‘like a
Hawai’.
Some languages have different alphabets. Russia’s alphabet is all the
same letters but in a mirror. The Arabic alphabet is all beautiful eyebrows.
Chinese is mainly piles of sticks.
The only alphabet that’s in the right order is the alphabet of numbers,
which goes from one, which is the smallest, all the way up to 0, which is
smaller. And with those ten digits you can count almost anything, except
time, which is in twelves.
 Alt Right, The
There’s this group of people called the ‘alt right’, which is, like, a pun on
‘all right’, but because they’re really not all right, they’re called ‘alt right’.
They could have been called the ‘all wrong’ but that sounds LITERALLY
all wrong. They’re like if LBC wanted its own country.
Some people say the alt right are Neo-Nazis, but they’re not, because they
haven’t got uniforms or moustaches and don’t all walk at the same speed.
They’re as different from the Nazis as Starburst are to Opal Fruits.
The alt right are the alternative right. You’d think alternative meant
‘different’ but in this case it means ‘exactly the same but worse’. Like if
you asked for an alternative to sprouts and someone served you sprouts in
sick.
They say really outrageous things, like they’re drunk, but without the bit
the next day where they’ve got a headache and try to take it all back. They
want more space for themselves and people like them, which is why a lot of
them are fat. To claim more room. And they don’t like people who aren’t
like them. Black people. Muslim people. Hispanic people. Gay people.
Woman people. They fight for white rights and men’s rights, which is why
it was a big deal when they finally managed to get a white man to be
president.
They probably also got their name from that thing you do on a computer
to turn it off and turn it on again, which is what they want to do with the
planet.

Anglo-Saxons
One of the great mysteries of history is: who were the Anglo-Saxons? If
you ask a historian, they’ll tell you, but you probably won’t be listening.
The Anglo-Saxons seemed to come from nowhere, and disappear almost
straight away, yet still be all around us, like the band Texas. And they’re
famous for almost nothing, like the band Texas. They didn’t have togas or
longboats or the Battle of Hastings. They didn’t have mountain-top cities or
pyramids or gladiators. They were almost completely unmemorable and
ordinary and a bit boring, like the band Texas. You wouldn’t really know
they were there. And that’s why England is named after them.
What we do know about the Anglo-Saxons is that they were a very pissed
off lot, because they invented all the more interesting swearwords we still
use today, including sard, scitan and rastagr. But the Anglo-Saxons didn’t
write much down, because the Romans took all the pens with them when
they left Britain, and the Angles went a bit odd and starting making up
whatever rubbish came into their heads, and soon people were banging on
about monsters, and King Arthur, and wizards and dragons. In fact, the
only trustworthy written accounts we have of this time are the adventures of
Bilbo Baggins.
But add it all up and it sort of makes sense: the swearing, the making stuff
up, the short shelf life, not going out much, the love of stories about goblins
and dragons – it’s pretty clear that the Anglo-Saxons were the first ever
trolls. In fact, you can bet that if the Anglo-Saxons had been on Twitter
today, it would be exactly like it already is.

Animals
Animals is what we call anything that’s alive that isn’t a plant or a tree or a
person or a fire or a virus or a volcano or a bush. It’s a pretty big collection,
so we humans (I’m sort of assuming you, the reader, aren’t a dog or a robot)
have done the sensible thing and given each animal a different name. So a
bird is called a bird. Except then you have to get specific because not all
birds are the same. So a jay is different from a tit. Except not all tits are the
same. So a great tit is different from a blue tit. Except not all blue tits are
the same. So an African blue tit is different from an Eurasian blue tit. And it
all gets a bit too fiddly, and there’s too many of them, and they’ve all got
names in Latin or medicine or something, so let’s cut to the chase and just
concentrate on the important ones.

DUCKS

Ducks are the only fish who swim on the top part of the water. They are
also the only fish with feathers. You might think swans would count, but
swans are not fish, like ducks, they’re sort of big boil-washed pigeons.
Ducks can also be eaten by anyone, unlike swans who can only be eaten by
the Queen. If a normal human tries to eat a swan, they die, because swan
meat is too royal to be digested by commoners. But the Queen has a special
stomach for digesting swan, where the swan meat is tenderised using a load
of jewels she swallows every day for just this purpose – like reptiles and
birds do when they eat stones.
When a duck swims along the top of the water, there appears to be
another duck underneath it, upside down. But this isn’t an actual duck, it’s a
mirror of a duck. Even though everything in a mirror is backwards, the
mirror duck swims in the same direction as the actual duck. This is because
if a mirror duck went a different way to its actual duck, different ducks’
reflections could get mixed up, and a duck might be a mallard on top but a
coot underneath, which would make bird-watching almost impossible.
In winter, ducks fly south to where the weather is warmer. They know
which way is south by looking at the V-shape lots of them make when they
fly in the sky and following the pointy end. Ducks lay eggs, like all fish.

INSECTS

Insects are the smallest creatures in the world, and mainly look like
punctuation with legs. Humans don’t have much use for insects, unlike
other animals, because they’re too small to ride, and it’s hard to get enough
of them in one place to turn into a roast dinner.
All insects have four legs. They also have two arms. Some of them have
wings, usually an even number of them, to stop them flying round in circles,
although moths somehow manage it anyway. Maybe they’ve got something
heavy in one pocket.
Everyone agrees that the worst insects are flies, and the best ones are
butterflies. You can make most things better by adding butter (mashed
potato, fried bread, Wotsits, etc.). Flies walk around in animal shit and then
come into your kitchen and stand in your food. It’s as if Chris Packham
came round and lowered himself into your soup, boots-first. If Chris
Packham did that, he shouldn’t be surprised if you ran after him, trying to
smash his brains in with a plastic spatula, but flies get really cross about it.
They’re complete pricks.
Caterpillars are like insects, except they’re more like a haunted sleeping
bag. They eat constantly, mostly leaves, chocolate cake, ice-cream cones,
pickles, Swiss cheese, salami, lollipops, cherry pie, sausages, cupcakes and
watermelon. Then they turn into a beautiful chrysalis. Sadly, soon after, the
chrysalis is usually torn apart by a butterfly, the natural predator of the
chrysalis, before it can fly away or lay its eggs.
Moths are like the BBC4 version of butterflies – a bit more boring, and
mainly on at night. They sleep during the day, but once it is dark, they hunt
in packs for their chief food: light bulbs. The moths surround the light bulb,
and attack it, by flying repeatedly into it for hours on end until the light bulb
becomes exhausted and drops to the ground. One of the greatest sights in
nature is a pride of moths dragging a subdued light bulb back to their nest to
feed to their moth cubs. Unfortunately, because this happens at night,
nobody has ever seen it. Even David Attenborough has to get some kip in
now and again.
The smallest insect is the ant. Ants gather together in huge gangs and
build hills to make themselves appear bigger so they don’t get bullied by
bigger insects like beetles and octopuses. One ant can carry up to 5,000
times its own weight, but the webpage I found this fact on didn’t say which
ant.
The most magical and mysterious of all the insects is the bee. Bees turn
flowers into honey by rubbing their legs on the flowers and then going into
a little house. It’s not clear how they do it. It could be a trick, because it’s all
done behind closed doors, which is a bit suspicious.

Think about it
Is it possible that the bees just buy honey from the shops? Maybe they all swarm together
into a human shape and then get inside a long coat so nobody knows it’s them and go down
Asda. They then probably hide the honey in the little house, so no one can see the jars, and
bring some of it out when a human comes to see if they’ve turned the flowers into honey by
rubbing their legs on them (which is quite an unlikely story when you think about it).

There have been insects on Earth much longer than humans, but they’ve
not really done much. Sometimes you get the feeling they’re just wasting
their time. Scientists reckon that insects will be around long after humans
have gone, so maybe they could get off their arses then.

SNAILS

You can’t trust snails. They’re just slugs disguised as the seaside.
TIGERS

Tigers are the biggest of the big cats except for lions, who, it turns out,
because I stopped just then and looked it up, are slightly smaller, so tigers
are the biggest and I shouldn’t have said lions. But if I hadn’t said lions I
wouldn’t have looked it up and I wouldn’t know that fact about tigers,
whatever it was, so you live and learn.
Tigers are the ones who look like an orange barcode with teeth. They live
in India and Russia and Chessington World of Adventures and eat deer,
buffaloes and Frosties.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were around 100,000 tigers in
the wild, but that number has fallen to around 3,000, because tigers are
really dangerous and if you’ve got 100,000 of them wandering about,
something has to be done. It’s a real success story for the human race.
Nowadays, there are more tigers in zoos and rap videos and magic shows
than in the wild, which is safer, unless you’re whichever one of Siegfried
and Freud it was who got his face bitten off. In the wild, tigers tend to eat
more meat and less Frosties. It’s important to feed your tiger enough
Frosties to stop him biting your head off, a lesson that either Siegfried or
Freud learned tragically too late.
Tigers are intelligent. In captivity tigers can be taught to do tricks like
jumping through a hoop of fire or saying that certain products are
‘grrrreeat,’ like one of the most famous advertising tigers of all time, Tiger
Woods.

Archaeology
Archaeology is the science of finding things that people in the past hid in
the ground. Nobody knows why people in the past buried their stuff. Maybe
they were worried that burglars might steal it, but some of the stuff they
buried was rubbish, like loads of flint arrowheads and bits of shoe.
It’s possible that the stuff was buried in a hurry, so they didn’t really
check what it was, and buried everything they could get their hands on,
because someone up a castle had spotted that loads of burglars were
coming. What with pirates and highwaymen and Robin Hoods all over the
place, in them days you couldn’t trust anyone with anything unless it was
nailed down, and even then they might nick the nails and bury them.
Some people, like the Romans, even buried themselves in the ground
using volcanoes. Even though it remains a mystery why people buried
things (including themselves) under the ground, the fact that they did has
helped us understand what people were like in the past: a bit mad, and keen
on burying stuff. Without all the burying, history would only be words
people wrote down, and that would make it more boring, because you
would have to read about an old crown, rather than being able to put it on
your head and swan about in it, like I imagine archaeologists are doing all
the time.
The most famous archaeologists of all time are Tony Robinson and
Indiana Jones. The interesting thing about Tony Robinson and Indiana
Jones is that they both either wear that hat, or have a mate who wears that
hat. It’s one of the stand-out features of archaeology, that hat. It’s why if an
archaeologist loses his hat, he has to dive back into the collapsing temple to
rescue it, like Tony Robinson’s mate is doing all the time.
The only people who still bury stuff these days, really, are dogs. Maybe
this is proof that the people of the past used to be dogs. If we keep digging,
we may find that crucial piece of evidence that proves that everyone in the
past was a dog. Maybe somewhere, under the ground, are loads of bones.
But sadly, until someone digs up an old bone, this thing about everyone
being a dog in the olden days will have to stay nothing but a theory. Science
is a harsh mistress.

Archie Medes
Archie Medes was the cleanest of the Greek philosophers. He lived in a
bath, and showed off all the time about how much cleaner he was than Plato
and the other philosophers who just did a quick face, front and forks with a
Greek flannel, which was probably called a phlannel. He’d point at them
and say they smelled. ‘You reeker,’ he’d shout. Which became his
catchphrase.
Eventually (probably when he got out of the bath) Archie Medes noticed
that when he got out of the bath, the water went down. That was because
he’d pulled the plug out. Nobody had ever pulled the plug out of a bath
before, they’d just poured more hot water in, until it overflowed, and soon
Archie had become known as the father of bathematics, the science of
baths.
Archie Medes also discovered that water goes the other way out of a bath
in Australia (up out of the plughole and back into the bath, because the
country is upside down) and that if you stay too long in the bath, your toes
go weird.

Unanswered Questions about Baths

• If you stayed in a bath for weeks, would you go so wrinkly that you got old?
• Why didn’t the other things in the bathroom get the room named after them? Why isn’t it
‘the toiletroom’ or ‘the sinkroom’ or ‘the toothbrushroom’?

Architecture
For centuries of millennia, man lived outdoors, hunting deer and nuts. Then
one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. And it
was here he made his biggest discovery since he discovered indoors:
architecture.
Architecture is posh for ‘buildings’. And buildings are all around us,
expecially when we’re inside them. So why are buildings? Animals don’t
have buildings, except zoos or the top bit of a snail. But humans do.
Before architecture, there was caves. You didn’t build a cave, you just
found it. And sometimes it was full of bears, which made it hard to put up
wallpaper. So man needed somewhere else to live. He tried living in
clothes, but they weren’t thick enough. So he started building buildings
called buildings. Buildings don’t just grow out of the ground, like flowers
or lamp-posts. They have to be made by someone – and that someone is an
architect. Learning to turn into an architect takes seven years, which is even
longer than it takes to turn into a wizard.
Some of the oldest buildings were Stonehenge, the Pyramids and St Paul
Cathedral. St Paul Cathedral was architected by Sir Christopher Robin. It
was made to replace the old one which had been burned down in the Great
Fire, which was lucky or there wouldn’t have been room. It’s regarded as
significant by architects because it has the biggest tit of any building in the
world. You can even go up in the tit today, though you have to whisper so it
sounds like you’re taking it seriously.
There are all different words for the fashions in architecture. St Paul’s is
Brock. Another style is Goth. Goth architecture is all castles and is mainly
for Frankingsteins. It’s meant to frighten you. Even Notre Dame, France’s
most important church, is Goth. And that’s because French God is more
frightening than British God, because he smokes.
Art Deco came after Brock, and is the word for buildings off Batman, and
Cheese and Wooster. It’s all got round bits on it and looks like a boat, but a
concrete boat. When the Art Decos tried to sail a building, that was Titanic.
And literally millions died.
In War Two, Hitler dropped loads of bombs on Britain, killing lots of the
architecture and forcing cockneys to go and live in tubes. Britain needed
rebuilding, like a dropped Lego set, and architects decided to do it
differently. New styles were tried out, like high-rise buildings.
High-rise buildings were controversial at first, until it was decided that
they were a good way to pile poor people in the sky, out of the way. Some
of these buildings are considered ugly these days, but others are considered
to be hideous eyesores. The national National Theatre is one. It’s designed
to be so ugly that people are glad to be inside watching boring plays. It’s in
an architecture called Brutalism, which means punching, and is why it looks
like a skinhead.
For a long time, we built buildings you could see. But then buildings got
so ugly it was best they were see-through to stop people complaining, so we
made them just of glass. Then, in the year 9/11, two aeroplanes bumped into
some tall glass buildings because they couldn’t see them, and some people
started to wonder whether tall buildings were such a good idea at all. The
answer was yes. So we’ve built loads more.
The Shard is the biggest piece of glass in the world. It’s even bigger than
the windows at Debenhams, or the sea. It’s over a thousand feet tall, and
goes to a point. It can’t be any taller than that, because a thousand feet up is
where the sides meet. Any taller and it would start going out again, like a
big bow-tie, and then they’d have to build another London, upside down, at
the top, which would be too expensive. There’s some restaurant on the fifty-
second floor of the Shard. All the food has to be brought up here in lifts,
which means you can go there and eat the highest potato in Britain.
 Buildings used to have stuff all over them that made them interesting, and
be made of things you can see, like bricks, but now they’re like sort of
fishtanks made of graph paper and you can’t remember where they are, or if
you’re in one.
In the future, buildings might even be so advanced that they’re invisible,
and when people go up stairs they’ll look like they’re going to heaven. Who
knows, with skyscrapers all over the world getting taller and taller, one
might even reach heaven. And one day, we might be able to sit in the top
floor restaurant and eat our soup with an amazing view – of God.

Unanswered Questions about Architecture

• Is the underneath of a floor always a ceiling? Could you have a floor with a wall on the
other side?
• How do you enter your street for a Postcode Lottery?
• Are bus stops the only buildings with one wall?

Art
Art is the scientific word for paintings. A painting is a way of making
castles and hills and kings and pineapples in bowls into a flat rectangle
that’s easier to hang on a wall than a real castle or pineapple.
The first art was paintings of cows in caves. The cows didn’t live in the
caves, so when cavemen wanted to look at a really good cow, and it was
cold outside or raining, they needed to do one on the wall, which was nearly
as good, but not quite. This is where the idea of art not being quite as good
as the real thing comes from, and you can see this to this day. For example,
if you try and eat the painting of an orange on the label of a jar of
marmalade, it doesn’t taste anywhere near as good as a real orange, it tastes
of paper, and that’s art.
The best artists are the ones who can nearly make you think the thing in
the painting is a real one. It’s a trick, like Dynamo might do, but it’s
basically a lie. People don’t like liars, which is why most artists earn no
money and eventually starve to death.

MICHAEL ANGELO
The first artist to work out how to do bums properly was Michael Angelo.
He did loads of bums and was even asked to paint bums on the roof of the
Pope’s house. That’s Catholics for you.

LEONARD DA VINCI

Leonard Da Vinci did the most famous painting that has ever been done, a
portrait of a lady called Mona Lisa. The painting now belongs to the
French, who keep it in the loo, where her enigmatic smile puts French
people at their ease when they’re shitting into the floor, like they do.
He also invented the helicopter, but nobody worked it out because he did
it in his famous code, which couldn’t be cracked by anyone until they
worked out it was backwards. Helicopters built without decoding the code
would not only have been made of old-fashioned stuff like turnips and
haystacks, but thanks to the Da Vinci Code, would also have been the
wrong way up, and would only fly tail-first, downwards, probably with the
twirly bits staying still and the cabin spinning round like mad. By the time
renowned author Dan Brown cracked the Da Vinci Code it was too late and
the helicopter had been invented already and even Noel Edmonds had one,
so it wasn’t such a big deal.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Vincent Van Gogh (pronounced ‘Van Guff’) was so bad at painting that he
cut off his own ear, which is hard with a paintbrush. He must have been
waving it about quite hard, and if you’ve seen some of his paintings that
does make a lot of sense. It was a mad thing to do because it wasn’t his
ear’s fault that he was shit at painting. It was his hands’. He never sold a
single painting to anyone in his lifetime, and they were never made into a
book or a tea towel, which is tragic, because even Prince Charles managed
that, and his are frankly appalling.

ANDY WARHOLE

Andy Warhole changed the world of art by painting with soup. This gave
him only five colours: tomato, chicken, oxtail, winter vegetable and carrot-
and-coriander. When he did a painting of the actor Marilyn Monroe, he
gave her a winter vegetable face, which was quite shocking for the time
because films were in black and white and nobody knew. David Bowie
wrote a song about Andy Warhole called ‘Scary Monsters and Souper
Creeps’, because of all the soup.

TONY HART

After Andy Warhole, the most important artist was probably Tony Hart,
who did paintings of harbours at sunset in chalk by enchanting a clay man
to help him. Tony Hart was sadly eventually destroyed by the dark magic
that had gained him his fame, and died, tragically, every year or so, on
Twitter.

GRAYSON PERRY

Most painters are dead, but one of the most modern painters still alive today
is the painter Grayson Perry. She won a famous art prize by painting using
pots. People had painted using pots before, but they’d usually just dipped
their brushes in them to get the paint out. Grayson revolutionised art by
putting the pots themselves on display, and soon had a television series
where she disguised herself as a man, which again, really turned eyebrows.

Astronomy
Our planet is not the only one in the universe. There are loads of others,
apparently.
There are planets we all know, like Earth, and the sandy one Darth
Vader’s from and the Moon. But there are millions of planets we’ve never
even seen, and are unlikely to ever visit, but which scientists won’t stop
banging on about.
Some of these planets may be able to support life, but we’ve already got
one of those and it’s much closer, so looking for other planets humans can
live on is a bit like being married to someone you get on with perfectly well
and then wasting all evening not talking to them and staring at Tinder.
The planets that orbit our sun are the closest ones, and these are known as
‘the solero system’ because some of them are freezing cold and look a bit
like ice cream.
There used to be nine planets in the solero system, but scientists recently
found out they’d made a cock-up and one of them, Pluto, was not a planet
after all, but Mickey Mouse’s dog.
It’s hard to know how scientists could make such a basic mistake, but
telescopes don’t just look into the sky, you can also use them to look
through a neighbour’s window, so maybe they’d pointed their telescopes at
a cartoon on next door’s TV
instead, and then they were too embarrassed to admit they’d not been
gazing into the sky but had been trying to spy on a lady in a bra. I imagine it
gets lonely in an observatory.
The smallest planet in the solero system is Mercury but nobody lives
there, so if you moved there it would feel surprisingly roomy, at least
compared to somewhere like Coventry. The biggest planet is Jupiter, which
is huge and swollen and blotchy, like it’s just had a full roast dinner with all
the trimmings, and mainly gas, like it went for the vegetarian option.
The best planet is probably Anus. Anus used to be called Uranus but so
many people made rude jokes about it that scientists gave up and just said
‘you go for it’, like when James Blunt finally accepted he had become
rhyming slang and would be better just laughing it off.

The Solero System

You might think our closest planet is the Moon. But you’d be wrong.
Because our closest planet is Earth. Earth is the science name for the world,
so it has two names, like Puff Daddy and everything in Wales.
It’s almost impossible to believe that the world that you live on isn’t just a
world, but also a planet, flying through space at enormous speed. It’s
enough to make you throw up. That’s probably why scientists wear white
coats – so they can keep their cardigans clean of vomit.
 No human has ever visited another planet, except the Moon, and even
then they did it on Earth using actors. And that’s because visiting another
planet is impossible.

Why it’s impossible to visit other planets

• easyJet don’t go there.
• Not enough gravity. You’d need to pack your own.
• Far awayness.
• There’s no food when you get there.
• Spain is nicer than Space.

Atoms
People used to think that the smallest things were stuff like peas and ants,
but inside even the smallest pea are literally dozens of smaller things called
atoms. Different atoms make different things, which is why a pea is
different than an ant, even if they might look the same from an aeroplane.
Inside everything in the world and space is atoms. The only thing that
isn’t made of atoms is space itself, which is made of nothing. Scientists
testimate that there is more nothing in the universe than there is stuff.
Which is why it’s so amazing that I can’t fit any more in my sock drawer.
Atoms are like little balls and sticks, like a sort of shit Lego they had in
the war that your granddad might bang on about. Atoms are too small to see
with the naked eye, so you need to make your eye not naked by wearing a
microscope on it like a hat. If you look down the microscope (hat) you can
see the balls and sticks (atoms), and that’s the simplest way to understand
how everything works.
Atoms are the smallest things that there are or can be, except for the
smaller things that are inside atoms, apparently. I mean, FFS.
The things inside the atoms are called nucleuses, electrions and protein.
They are so tiny you couldn’t even pick them up if you licked your finger
and dabbed at them like sherbet. The rest of the atom, which is most of it, is
more nothing. On average, when you think about it, that means every thing
is mainly nothing, so it’s surprising all the fuss that’s made about
shoplifting.
Scientists can’t leave well alone so some of them tried to break atoms
open to see what was inside. And what’s inside was a huge mushroom,
which nobody expected. The mushrooms can be used to destroy cities and
cause Godzillas, but can also run power stations that sometimes don’t even
explode.
Atoms-powered power stations don’t create as much mess as the old ones
that use coal, because atoms aren’t covered in that black stuff. It’s a hard
truth that if we want to keep our kettles and hair straighteners boiling hot,
we are going to have to make friends with atoms, and not mind the
occasional Godzilla. It is a small price to pay, when you think about it, not
much bigger than an atom itself. But much smaller than a Godzilla. They’re
massive.

‘Auld Lang Syne’

‘Auld Lang Syne’ is a nonsense rhyme we all sing on New Year’s Eve. By
the time it gets near to midnight, everybody’s so trolleyed that they can’t
remember the words to any real song, so it’s easier to just sing a load of
gibberish.
It’s also got a really easy dance, which involves crossing your arms and
doing really businessy handshakes with the people either side of you. You
don’t even have to move your legs. It’s easier than the conga. And there’s
less chance of someone going for your bum.

Australia
Australia is a country on the other side of the world where everything
happens upside down and back to front, so the whole place is topsy-turvy.
Unlike the rest of the world, they have Christmas in the summer, eat their
dinner outdoors and like talking to Australians.
Australia’s chief industry is spiders. Other countries have to import dangerous
animals, but Australia makes all its own, which is handy because it’s so far away that if
they had to order their poisonous snakes from Amazon, they’d be dead by the time the
package arrived.
Australia has invented loads of animals, like the kangaroo, the koala and
the barbecue, but none of them has caught on in other countries, except the
barbecue. Sadly all the wild barbecues were hunted to extinction hundreds
of years ago by hungry sailors, and now the only ones you see are robot
ones, made out of metal and bricks.
Australia was originally colonolised by thieves covered in soot from big
cities like London. They were sent there in big ships, in the hope that loads
of sunshine and beer would teach them a bloody good lesson. But as soon
as the criminals landed, they stole a whole country, which was a much
bigger crime than nicking a cabbage or whatever they’d gone down for,
proving that if you trap criminals with loads of other criminals, it only
makes them worse.
One place you always see Australians is everywhere. They travel a lot,
because the only thing they love more than being in Australia is telling
people how much they love being in Australia, and the best place to talk
about how much better Australia is than everywhere else is somewhere a
long way from Australia, so that the person you’re telling can’t pop into
Australia and check if it’s any good or whether you’re talking a load of
koalashit.
Australia is so far away that even the parts of Australia that are actually in
Australia are far away from each other. This is why Australians are amongst
the friendliest people on Earth: because they’ve never met each other.
Famous Australians include Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Dannii Minogue
and Adolf Hitler. Even though Hitler was king of Germany, he was actually
not born in Germany at all, but Australia, in a small town on the German-
Australian border. He said it was really important to know where people
come from, but that just proves that it isn’t.
 B

Bacon, Francis
Sir Francis Bacon was one of the most all-round clever people who has ever
lived. He did more different things than most of us can dream of.
He was an English statesman, philosopher and Irish painter, who lived at
the time of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. He not only became Lord
Chancellor in 1618, but still found time to write one of the first science
books in 1620, and, after a short rest, painted the painting Three Studies For
Figures At The Base Of The Crucifixion in 1944.
Some people believe he had a hand in writing Shakespeare’s plays, and
his portrait of Lucien Freud, painted in 1969, when he was 408 years old
and drunk, is one of the most expensive ever sold. He did so many things
that he is one of the few historical English/Irish figures to require two
completely different and contradictory Wikipedia pages.

Ballet
Ballet is like dancing, but you don’t do it yourself, someone else does it,
which is the main difference between ballet and The Hokey Cokey. There
are some other dances which are just watched rather than done yourself,
like Riverdance, but ballet is different because you not only don’t do it, you
don’t watch it either. Nobody does, except a few really posh people, and
they might be lying.
I don’t think even the Queen really watches ballet, because she gets worn
out watching dancing all day for work. Every time she visits a country, they
do a dance she has to sit through with a face like a bulldog watching ballet.
So the last thing she wants is to watch dances in her spare time. I don’t
blame her.
The women in ballet have their hair up in really tight scrunchies, and the
men wear tight leggings, so you can see their cobblers, which I think must
explain a lot of the appeal. It’s always nice to see a load of cobblers in a
row. Although, because ballet is dead posh, the men dancers don’t come on
dressed as firemen, put on a bit of Tom Jones, strip their leggings off and
throw them at hen parties. It’s a lot more boring than that.
Even though nobody likes ballet, it still exists, like yellow Quality Streets
and Antiques Roadshow. It’s paid for not by people wanting to see it, but
from money raised by scratchcards, so that ballerinas don’t die out, like the
snow leopard nearly did just because nobody wanted to see it. Often ballets
are about endangered creatures, like swans, so maybe they could do one
about snow leopards, and poor people could save the planet, through
scratchcards.

Battle of Hastings, The

The most famous battle in British history apart from the Battle of Britain
(which the town of Battle, near Hastings, is named after) is the Battle of
Hastings.

The year is 1066. (It isn’t any more, but you have to pretend it is to tell the
story, apparently.) Britain is invaded by William of Normandy and his huge
army, bringing their French cuisine and their Norman wisdom. William
thinks he should be king of England, even though he’s French. And King
Harold of England thinks William should be dead, even though he’s alive.
The two sides just can’t agree, so they agree to fight it out in a miniature
war called a battle.
On Saturday 14th October, they meet in a field and start smashing each
other to bits. The English are the home side, with all the advantages that
brings, but it soon becomes clear the French are much better at war.
They’ve got better weapons, and these sort of giant dog-monsters called
horses.
You can still visit the field where the battle happened today, although
these days it’s just a field. You can’t visit the battle, because it’s stopped
now, because the year isn’t 1066, as I explained earlier. Though I’d
completely understand if you’re confused, because I said it was 1066. I’m
with you there. I wish I hadn’t done it now. I’ll have to look at a calendar
now, or I’ll keep thinking it’s 1066 and I’ll go to all my 1066 appointments
rather than the ones I’ve actually got today. Bloody hell, it’s a minefield.
Not the one where the Battle of Hastings happened. That wasn’t a
minefield. Or it’d have been over quicker.
But anyway, back in 1066 (not now), Harold stages a comeback, and is
the first to win when he triumphantly catches an arrow in his eye, the kind
of fuck-you show-off act of soldiering that really rallies an army behind
someone. Sadly it isn’t enough, and he dies soon after. No one knows why.
The next person to win is William. At last his nickname, William the
Conqueror, makes sense. And William celebrates his victory by changing
everything into French, like you can do on Google these days without
battle-axing anyone to death, and that’s progress.
He renames all the meat after French. Cow becomes beef (boeuf), sheep
becomes mutton (mouton) and hen becomes chicken (chicane). He
introduces lots of new French ideas, like blouses, wealth and moustaches.
He bungs up lots of French churches and cathedrals that stand to this day,
amazingly all built by just one man, a genius called Norman Architecture.
In just a few decades, England has become a sort of giant exchange trip,
except without the fourteen hours on a coach eating nothing but Skips and
the clumsy kiss with some oniony boy called Philippe because your best
mate got Didier, the good-looking one.

THE BAYWATCH TAPESTRY

So how do we know all this detail about the Battle of Hastings? Well, we’ve
got an accurate visual record of the whole thing thanks to a quick-thinking
bystander, who took a tapestry of it.
Despite looking like a Games of Throne season finale drawn by an eight-
year-old, the Baywatch Tapestry captures the full force of the battle. It’s just
like being there, but in wool. You can see French archers steaming in on
their blue horses. You can see sort of stick fights. You can see some
chopped up people and goose monsters and a sort of lion thing eating its
own tail. It’s an amazing historical artefact, and it’s also one of the few
photographs made of string.

Beatles, Them
In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, everything and everyone and everything
was grey and had buttons on it. But all that was about to change thanks to
four boys from Liverpool: George, Ringo and their guitarists. A pop band
called Them Beatles.
These Beatles didn’t have six legs. They had eight legs, like on a spider.
Everywhere they went, girls screamed, like with a spider. But unlike
spiders, the Beatles never crawled into anyone’s mouth when they were
asleep. Instead they sang – which scientists still claim spiders don’t, in spite
of my findings.
Them Beatles started from humble beginnings. In the early days they
couldn’t afford individual haircuts, and had to copy and paste the same one
onto each of their heads. But their catchy jingles were so infectious, they
soon led to an epidemic called ‘Beatlemania’. And Them Beatles wanted to
hold your hand, which only made the disease spread faster. Soon it spread
across the Atlantic, to America, a country which was still there.
While Them Beatles were in the USA they started to become influenced
by the Hippies – who were sort of American wombles. They experimented
with a drug called LSD which made the user see and hear things that
weren’t really happening – a bit like Netflix or Derren Brown. As a result,
their music turned psychopathic.
Psychopathic drugs made Them Beatles stop singing simple songs about
love and cars, and start writing about things that went a lot deeper, like
submarines.
And Them Beatles discovered something that had long been lacking in
Britain: colour. They found yellow first, then the other ones. And almost
overnight (which means not overnight), Britain went from grey to groovy.
Suddenly it was cool to ignore society and just be whoever you wanted to
be, as long as you had long hair and flamboyant clothing like everybody
else. Ringo, George and their guitarists all grew long hair and beards, and
sort of sprouted, like it was spring and all Them Beatles were suddenly
coming into bloom.
Sadly, Them Beatles came to a sorry end. Far from their heyday,
performing for thousands of screaming fans in enormous stadiums, their last
gig was on a grotty rooftop, to an audience of just a handful of people. It
was 1969, and for some reason it really felt like the 60s was nearly over.
 Beeps
Beeps are the sound of the modern world. Everywhere you go today, there’s
beeps.
Your phone beeps to wake you up. The smoke alarm is beeping because
the battery needs changing. You make a cup of tea and the kettle beeps to
tell you the water’s boiled. The microwave beeps to tell you your Weetabix
has cooked. The burglar alarm beeps on the way out of the flat. Your phone
beeps to tell you you’ve got a WhatsApp notification. The cash machine
beeps. The doors on the bus beep. You go through the ticket barrier at the
railway station and it beeps. The train doors beep. Your phone beeps to tell
you someone’s left the WhatsApp group chat. The pedestrian crossing
beeps. A van beeps to tell you it’s turning right. Your pass beeps on the way
into the office. Your computer beeps when you start it up. Your phone beeps
to tell you you’ve got a Tinder notification. The coffee machine in the
kitchen beeps. The aircon remote beeps. You walk into a shop and it beeps.
You walk out of a shop with a shirt with the tag still on it and it beeps.
Someone swears on the news and they beep it. Beeps, beeps, beeps, all day
and everywhere.
Pretty much the only thing that doesn’t beep these days is shoes, and
beeping shoes can only be a few years off. As far as the next generation’s
concerned, they’ve already got lights on.
But beeps haven’t always been around. Before beeps, there was only
dings and booms, and even booms were rare. Every now and then, you’d
hear a nice little ding from a phone or a doorbell or something, but other
than that it was just birdsong and factories. We didn’t need to be constantly
notified that doors were opening and water was boiled and switches had
been switched and Greg from Basildon thinks you’re 1 PIECE OF
SMOKIN HOT ASS!!!
Whoever’s making all these beeps is making a fortune. Yet you never hear
about the world’s beep billionaires. Maybe they’re a shadowy group of
international beepspeople who meet in secret to discuss what else they can
add beeps to. What’ll it be this year? Taps that beep when you turn them
on? Sunglasses that beep to let you know you’re blinking? Sandwiches that
beep when you bite into them? Are they genetically engineering bees that
beep rather than buzz? It’s proper Frankingstein science.
 One day, we’re going to have to think seriously about the consequences of
all this beeping. What happens if they get into the sea and start threatening
marine life? Science must prioritise biodegradable beeps, or the planet
might be beeped to death.

Unanswered Questions about Beeps

• When was the first beep?
• Do the machines that make the things that go beep go beep?
• Why are there no really low beeps?
• What’s the difference between a beep and a bleep?

Belgium
You may not have heard of Belgium, but apparently it is the country
between Germany and France that invented the bun. Even though France
and Germany are more famous, Belgium still definitely exists, and
paperwork from Eurocrats in Brussels proves it. Even they believe in
Belgium.
The earliest evidence for Belgium came when the first Eurostar train
arrived at Waterloo, carrying people claiming to be from there. There are
also references to it in the French cartoon Tintin. Famous French people
who have visited Belgium include Adolphe O’Phone, inventor of the
saxophone, and the French karate champion Jean Claude Van Damme.
People in Belgium speak either Dutch or French but not Belgian, which is
a language that has never been invented. But there’s a good reason for that:
the Belgians invented chips. And once you’ve invented chips, you’ve
frankly peaked. Nothing will ever be invented that’s better than chips – not
even a language – so the Belgians stopped there. And had some chips.

Big Bang, The

Imagine a time before everything. Like when you wake up at 4 a.m for a
wee, but worse.
 In the beginning there was nothing. And not just a little bit of nothing.
Loads of it. All over the place. Which there wasn’t, because there wasn’t a
place. There wasn’t even time. Imagine a time before time. (Except it
wasn’t technically ‘before’, because it was before beforeness.)
Some people think it’s hard to imagine nothing, but I find it very easy.
Imagine an orange. Now imagine it’s not there. Now do that with
everything.
But before there was everything, there was nothing. Empty. Timeless.
Without motion. Or energy. Or hope. Like parts of Plymouth.
Then, finally, there was something, and it was called the Big Bang. It
might sound like a complicated scientific idea, but it comes from the word
‘Big’, meaning big, and the word ‘Bang’, meaning something that goes
bang.
The Big Bang was where everything started. And to be honest, it’s nice to
have something to blame. What was it like? Nobody knows. Because
nobody was there to see it. Like Top Gear when it went to Amazon. It was
probably deafening – although ears didn’t exist, so we can’t be sure – and
probably looked spectacular – although eyes didn’t exist, so it doesn’t
matter.
The Big Bang was an explosion, but instead of destroying stuff, it made
more stuff, like when you try and close a window on a mucky website and it
just makes loads more little windows and you can’t stop it.
The Big Bang, a bit like The Big Bang Theory, made stars of its main
players, except the main players in the Big Bang were atoms. Atoms that
would one day be understood by people like the clever men in The Big
Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory is named after the Big Bang theory,
which is named after the Big Bang. The theory (not the Theory) says that
there was a big bang, and was first proposed by a Catholic priest in the
1920s. Priests these days have to be careful about proposing any sort of
bangs because they might be misunderstood for perverts.
A lot of the work on the Big Bang theory was done by an astrologer
called Edwin Bubble, who noticed that galaxies were running away from
us, probably in case we all went bang again. The Bubble telescope is named
after him. But the term ‘Big Bang’ was first used by Fred Hoyle, a scientist
who didn’t believe in the Big Bang, which is a bit like R.E.M. not liking
‘Shiny Happy People’ even though it was their own stupid fault in the first
place.
 There are still people who don’t believe in the Big Bang, like people who
believe the Earth was made in six days by a bored God. But even then,
some religious people think God might have made the Big Bang. But if he
had, it would have been mentioned in the Bible. After all, it’s a much more
exciting opening than ‘Once upon a time there was the word,’ which is how
it kicks off now.
Boffins at the Large Hadron Colander have recently made a little Big
Bang called a primordial soup. If you ask me, making soup out of the most
expensive machine in the world is a waste of money. You can get a
soupmaker from Argos for £39.99. It’s probably because they’re boffins
that they have to overcomplicate things. And boffins are rubbish in the
kitchen. Everybody knows that. They have things like bread on toast.

Black Death, The

The Black Death wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as it sounds, and it
sounds like absolutely no fun at all. That’s how awful it was. Like, if you
had the word ‘death’ and you thought, ‘No, not nearly awful enough: how
can I make this much worse?’ you might put the word ‘black’ in front of it.
Same as if you had the word ‘leftovers’ and put the word ‘value’ in front of
it. It’d really ruin your sales.
The Black Death was a plague. Not a metaphorical plague like a
metaphorical plague, but an actual plague – made of plague. The symptoms
were disgusting: discoloured buboes grew in the groin and armpits, making
even a light workout next to impossible. And it cut through the population
like a deranged hairdresser.
Like Brexit, the Black Death split the country in two. One half of them
were moaning and despairing, lying on the floor, waiting to die; the other
half were getting on with it, facing the challenges, and refusing to talk the
country down just because of a plague. Statistically, the only way to protect
your partner from the Black Death was to die yourself. Tough choice, unless
you were in a truly loveless marriage, like the Prince of Wales was with
Lady Diana of the Princess of Wales and the other one in their marriage,
whoever it was. Fergie?
It’s hard to conceive of a Britain decimated like that: half of everyone
dead. Imagine every Christmas watching repeats of the And Wise Christmas
Special. Imagine The Proclaimer. Imagine Torville. Imagine Bake Off
without Sue, rather than without Mel and Sue. Imagine the Krankie.
Imagine Edward (Jedward without John). Imagine Gregg Wallace on his
own in a half empty kitchen with just the forks and none of the knives.
The Black Death really took the shine off the appeal of rats and fleas and
shit, and arguably put people off them for ever. And if there’s one thing to
take away from it, it’s that, when you have a medieval themed wedding,
half the guests should die. And that, even though you got the rest of your
life off work if you caught the Black Death (which is a result) the best idea
was to avoid it like the plague.

Black Holes
Black Holes are the bits of space that you can’t see because they’re black.
Most of space is quite black, but black holes are really black. Even though
nobody can see them because they’re black on a black background,
scientists know black holes are there because when they ask for money to
research them, nobody tells them to fuck off.
Nothing can escape from a black hole, not even David Blaine, which is
why they’re interesting. We had him trapped for a bit in that glass box, like
you might do a spider under a tumbler, but he still got out, so it’s important
for scientists to work out how to imprison him properly. The answer may be
a black hole.
Black holes are infinitely dense, which means they’re even tougher than
Dime bars. If you tried to eat a black hole, you might break a tooth, which
would be disastrous but an interesting story to put on Facebook.
Black holes in space may be a gateway to somewhere unexpected that we
could hardly imagine. We know this because black holes on Earth, in
skirting boards, lead to those weird little mouse houses where they sleep in
a matchbox and have a table made of a cotton reel, so it’s very likely that
black holes elsewhere follow the same rules.

Books
Books are a way of storing information and passing it on to anyone who can
read and isn’t put off by it being a book. You’re holding a book in your
hands right now, unless you’re not, in which case I’m sorry for making
assumptions about the sort of person you are.
In our culture, a book is read from front to back, with the eye travelling
along the line of text from the left to the right. The eye then travels back to
the left and down to the next line of text. And then from left to right again.
And then across to the phone, in case anyone’s said anything on Twitter.
And then back to the book for a line. Then back to the phone. And down the
screen on the phone for about ten minutes. And then back to the book, but
back up a line or two to remember where you were and what was
happening. Then to the phone again. And so on.
Before phones, books were the only thing people had to read, so they
could be a lot bigger. Nowadays big books are only read on long journeys
and holidays where the wi-fi coverage is patchy. Some books are good, but
they’re not about your friends and what they’re up to, so they can’t be as
interesting. And they don’t update all the time, so a lot of what happens in
books happened ages ago, so it’s not as good.
But books still get published, and some even become bestsellers. A really
big bestseller may be read by as many people as watch a ten-minute
YouTube video about a teenager unboxing mascara brushes, so books are
still a very important part of our culture.
The best-selling book of all time is The Bible, by God. Other big books
include 50 Shades of Great Expectations by C. L. Dickings and The
Complete Works of Shakespeare by Francis Bacon. Other important books
include Jamie Oliver’s Superfood Family Classics, My Story by Fern
Britton, Jamie Oliver’s Food Escapes, Jamie Oliver’s BBQ Book, Fungus
The Bogeyman and Jamie’s Ministry Of Food.
Some books were really popular in the past but nobody reads them today,
and probably the most famous of these lost classics is the book The Phone
Book. In the 1960s and 1990s, every home in Britain had a copy of this
book, and it’s not hard to see why. It wasn’t a boring story about a load of
made-up people, or even worse only one made-up person, it was this
colossal book about literally everybody in the country, with little bits of
information about them: exactly what people like to read. You could look
up your friends in it or, even better, you could look up yourself, and find out
where you lived. In a way, it was the ancestor of the social medias we all
look at today on our phones instead of reading books. It updated once a
year, like a really slow Facebook, and it didn’t have pictures, like your
phone doesn’t when the train goes through a tunnel or into fields. And it
was called The Phone Book because it was the closest a book came to being
as good as a phone in the olden days when nobody had proper phones.
Books are sometimes sold in bookshops, which are shops. Shops are like
the real-life version of the internet, but where you can buy less stuff, and
you have to leave your house to get there. It’s hard to work out why anyone
bothers.

Bottles
When we have stuff we put it in a box. But only if it’s dry. If it’s wet, we
put it in a special box called a bottle.
Bottles are tall, thin, see-through boxes with really small lids. You get the
wet stuff out of a bottle not by opening the lid, reaching in and taking it out,
like you would with dry stuff, but by opening the lid, tipping the bottle and
letting the wet stuff out on its own, like it was a pet being let out of a
carrier.
We used to know where we were with bottles and boxes. Everyone could
agree which was which. And then something new came along: a sinister
hybrid, a sort of Frankingstein’s storage monster – the carton.
Science can’t decide if a carton is a bottle or a box, because it looks like a
box but you treat it like a bottle. This sort of identity crisis is everywhere
when you start to think about it, which I wish I’d never done. What’s a fire
extinguisher? Is it a bottle? You can’t see into it, like you can with a bottle.
Are the ingredients a secret? Or is it like a giant perfume? It sprays like a
perfume, so maybe it’s a perfume with the superpower of putting out a fire
– a sort of superperfume.
The only dry thing you find in bottles is tiny ships. This is probably a sort
of a joke about how there should have been water in the bottle. But if it is, I
don’t get it.

Bowie, David
David Bowie was a series of different singers from between the years 1969
and 2016. Although it was the same person, like Doctor Who he
regenerated every album or so into a new Bowie.
He was defined by his constantly changing looks. He never went for the
obvious, like blacking up or pretending to be a hunchback: he always went
for the unexpected, like dressing as the stormy weather symbol off the old
weather map, or a big, flat Japanese cock and balls. Whether he was dressed
as Herr Flick or a skeleton pirate, or one of your mum’s friends from an old
Polaroid, he was, in many ways, the Fletch of pop. He had more updates
than the Adobe Flash Player.
David Bowie could not only sing, he could also not act, and appeared in
several films, playing the homesick alien title character in E.T., and a sort of
Duran Duran fairy king in the family film Muppets Vs The Goblin Crotch.
He even took over Christmas, singing a special carol with Bing Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young, who’d forgotten the words, and being at the start of
that cartoon about the snowman sometimes. Although he spoke movingly of
his adventures with the snowman, and even showing the scarf he stole off it
when it melted, no biography has ever talked about this period of Bowie’s
life, probably because it was too traumatic a memory.
In 2016, having peaked creatively by meeting Ricky Gervais, David
Bowie launched his last persona, the Dead White Dude, and retired from
showbusiness.

Brexit
In May 2016, there was this election called a referendum, but it wasn’t like
normal elections because what you voted for was actually going to happen.
But they didn’t say that, they kept it as a surprise, which was a nice twist.
Instead of voting for someone you’d never heard of, you got to vote for
this place you’d never heard of, called the European Communion.
Apparently all the time we thought we’d been the country of Britain, we
hadn’t been Britain at all, we’d been Europe all along. Like I said, a mad
twist. And we hadn’t been in charge of ourselves. It was a bit of a shocker.
Imagine finding out that the Queen was German or Prince Philip was
Greek. It was that crazy. So this was a chance to vote to choose to be Britain
again.
 There were lots of arguments on both sides, which made it hard to hear
what either of them was saying. Some people thought passports were the
big issue. With the European passports, you just walked straight through the
airport. No queue. That’s just not British. We want to queue, so getting rid
of European passports put us right at the front of the queue to get to the
back of a queue, so that’s better.
Other people thought that if we left, they’d make spaghetti illegal. And no
one wants to have to end up paying a fortune for spaghetti from some dealer
in a dodgy flat on a dodgy estate and then getting it home and finding out it
was drinking straws or Kerplunk sticks or something.
The leaders of the Remain side were serious people like the prime
minister and the chancellor, but the leaders of the Leave side were sort of
cartoons, like Nigel Farridge and Boris Johnson. And everyone loves a
cartoon, so it came as no surprise to anybody that they won.
The United Kingdom had voted for something called a Brexit. Sometimes
it’s good to vote for something you don’t understand, because it means
we’re all equal. Like it stops you being biased one way or the other. And
that’s fairer. But almost as soon as the votes were counted, people were
asking, ‘What is a Brexit?’ because they realised they didn’t know before
they said they wanted it. It was a bit like being told to close your eyes and
hold out your hands and then being given something you didn’t recognise,
like a weird thing off a posh menu or Scottish money.
The new prime minister (because the old one had wandered off humming
a little tune to himself, like Winnie-The-Pooh) came to the rescue with the
answer: ‘Brexit,’ she said, ‘means Brexit.’ She wasn’t wrong. Brexit does
mean Brexit. If she wrote that in an exam, you’d have to give her the mark.
It’s quite clever. I wish I’d done that in mine. ‘What is 9 x 9?’ ‘9 x 9 = 9 x 9
and you’ve got to give me the mark. Also, can I be prime minister?’
What was good about Theresa Maybelline’s answer was how clear it was.
Because sometimes, if you look up a word you don’t know in a dictionary,
the definition has like loads of words you don’t know, and you go from not
knowing one word, to not knowing loads, and you feel like a right twat. It
reminded me of that old advert: Beanz Meanz Beanz. Or that thing they say
about prison: life means life. That means you’re going to suffer for ages for
making a single stupid decision. And possibly means you’re going to die
inside. And it’s the same with Brexit.
 When the UK of GB was in Europe, there was all these words that meant
something else. Like ‘bonjour’ meant ‘hello’ and ‘chapeau’ meant ‘horse’
or ‘house’ or ‘hat’ or something. Now ‘hat’ just means ‘hat’. And Brexit
means Brexit. It’s simpler. And very hard to argue with. Like a steamroller.
But then, some busybodies started saying that ‘Brexit means Brexit’
wasn’t a good enough explanation. So Theresa Maybelline decided to
describe it better: Brexit, she said, would be a ‘red, white and blue Brexit’, a
reference to our flag, the Union Jacques. What could be more red, white and
blue than the British flag? Except perhaps the French flag and the Dutch
flag and the Bulgarian flag and the Croatian flag and the Icelandic flag and
the Norwegian flag and the Slovakian flag and the Slovenian flag and the
Czech flag? It’s nice to see what a pan-European Brexit it was going to be,
proving how much Britain has in common with its neighbours, if you start
with flags. An international brotherhood of Brexit.
The Brexit vote was very close. If it had been just as close but with a
different result, the Leave campaign would have demanded a rematch. But
the Remain campaign thought it was more polite to remain the losers.
The two sides both had good arguments in the campaign. Look:

WHAT REMAIN SAID

• We should stay in Europe because leaving is going to devastate the

makers of the blue channel at airports. That’s jobs that’ll probably go
overseas now, where blue channels are still allowed.
• Everything’ll be more expensive now. Except pounds. You’ll be able to get
them in second hand shops. Or poundshops. Two for a pound.
• We should stay in Europe because we get so much good food from there,
like omelettes and Nutella. We’ll have to give that back. And I haven’t
finished my jar.
• If Article 50 is that important, why isn’t it Article 1?

WHAT LEAVE SAID

• Leave is popular because it’s full of happy, rich people like Boris Johnson
and Nigel Farridge. And everybody likes happy, rich people.
• If the pound goes down in value, you’ll get more at Poundstretcher. Like,
instead of four Crunchies in a pack, it’ll be four Crunchies and a
Malteser.
• When we leave Europe, we’ll be able to go anywhere. Like, we’ll be able
to move Britain somewhere hotter, like next to Japan or something.
• We want immigration under control, so we don’t have people like Mark
Carney and Madonna and three quarters of Manchester United coming
over here.

You can see why Leave won: a hotter country, with no Madonna, full of
happy rich people and cut-price Maltesers.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The exciting answer is it’s like a cliffhanger, where they say ‘To Be
Continued . . .’ on the screen, except this time it’s a real cliff you’re hanging
off and not on the telly and there’s no words underneath you and this might
be the end. But think of that cut-price Malteser.

New words coined by the referendum

• Remoaner
• Bremoaner
• Re-bremoaner
• Bre-bremoaner
• Brarsehole
• Remonster
• Ridiot
• Brexcellent
• Brubbish
• Brollocks

Brush Strokes
Back in the 1980s, TV was in a shocking state. I had a look at an old
website about it, and TV back then was this great list of boring stuff nobody
remembers now, like Dallas, The Singing Detective, Cagney & Lacey, Edge
Of Darkness, Dynasty, Brideshead Revisited, Miami Vice, Boys From The
Blackstuff, Fame, Grange Hill, Reilly: Ace Of Spies, Hill Street Blues, The
Jewel In The Crown, The Box Of Delights and That’s Life! which was a
documentary about sausages, which sounds a lot better than it apparently
was.
What was needed was a bloody good laugh. And it came along in
September 1986, when Brush Strokes first aired on British TV.
Brush Strokes is about a painter, but we never see any of his pictures.
Instead we concentrate on his love life, which is much more interesting
because no one wants to look at boring pictures. That’s why art galleries are
always empty, I expect, if they are.
The main character, Jacko, was played by Karl Howman, who was, at the
time, medically the most beautiful man ever to appear on television. He had
a sidekick called Eric, who looked a bit like Wally from Where’s Wally?
Except you could spot him more easily because he wasn’t hidden under a
bobble hat.
And if you think the ending of The Sopranos, where they all sit in the
restaurant and nothing happens, is a big deal, wait until you see the ending
of Brush Strokes. I won’t do spoilers, because it’s only been on for about
forty years and lots of people haven’t seen it (like me, until I YouTubed it
just now) but Jacko has to choose between these two women who fancy
him, like everyone else (because Jacko is actually made of Karl Howman,
who is like a 1980s angel). So Jacko tosses a coin and smiles, but you don’t
find out which one he chose. Maybe he just decides to spend the coin on
chips and that’s why he smiles. Everyone likes chips. Anyway, it’s an
amazing ending, and definitely where The Sopranos nicked the idea from. I
wonder if they paid Karl Howman for using it.
 C
Cars
Cars are small buses that you can drive yourself. Inside every car is an
engine, which is a sort of oven for petrol, but set really high so it always
catches fire, like with pizzas. The burning petrol scares the wheels, which
try to escape. This makes the car go forwards. To make the car go
backwards, the car sets fire to the opposite of petrol, which is water. This
makes steam, which comes out of the exhaust pipe, as you can see on all
cars.
The car was invented in prehistoric times, but because nobody had
invented petrol, it worked by putting your feet through the bottom and
running while someone played a xylophone really fast and the driver
yodelled.
The next sort of car didn’t use petrol either – it used a horse at the front,
or some butlers in white wigs lifting you up in a chair. When petrol was
eventually invented in the 20th century times, all those horses and butlers
with wigs were out of work, and had to get jobs as high court judges or
supermarket basics lasagnes.
Petrol cars could drive further and faster than butler-powered chairs or
even horses, and soon roads had to be built everywhere to cope with
demand. Then places to visit were built at the end of the roads, to stop it
being a complete waste of time. This was the golden age of motoring,
which is what they used to call traffic.
Cars use a lot more of the environment than other forms of transport, and
also clog up the roads, so the government usually tries to make people go
on trains instead. Trains use up less resources than other forms of transport
because they tend to be cancelled, which is better for the planet. This means
people can get on buses instead, and take up space on the roads, which
encourages more people to leave their cars at home and get the train, which
they can’t, because there isn’t one.
People get really passionate about cars and go on and on about them.
There are car shows, which is hard to imagine, because cars can’t dance,
unless I’ve missed something. And there are car rallies, where people park
their really shiny cars in a field for everyone to stare at. Cars feature a lot on
TV. One of the most popular programmes of all time is the programme Top
Gear, but there are also programmes about cars, and they are popular too.
Roary the Racing Car is a good one, as is DinoTrucks and Brum. It’s a
shame there isn’t a programme about cars for grown-ups, because they’d
probably be dead into it.

Chaos Theory
Chaos theory is the idea that if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the
world, there could be a tornado on the other side of the world. It’s a neat
idea but I’m not sure it’s fair to blame butterflies for everything. That’s just
shifting the blame for all the bad stuff in the world onto something that
can’t fight back, because it’s only made of paper.
After all, by the same logic, a tornado could be caused by anything.
Opening a newspaper too fast. Burping. The Queen waving. Any of these
things could make a tornado, provided there were enough newspapers or
burps or waves. If you’re looking for a scapegoat, leave the butterflies
alone. Also, it’s definitely easier to make the Queen pay for the damage
than it is to ask a butterfly to cough up. She’s minted. And that way you’re
making a practical contribution to fixing the problem, rather than just
having a go at insects.

Children’s Television
Television comes in three types: stuff for normal people, like Storage Wars
and Bargain Hunt; stuff for old people, like Rip-Off Britain and Can’t Pay?
We’ll Take It Away; and stuff for kids. Kids’ TV (or ‘Children’s Television’,
to give it its medical term) is usually shorter, more colourful and shitloads
better than everything else on TV. Plus, it’s a hotbed of radical politics and
progressive issues, shaping the minds of tomorrow with animal antics and
stuff that looks like it belongs in one of them wonky dreams you have when
you’ve got flu.

ADVENTURE TIME
A boy and his animal struggle with the realities of everyday life. Kes,
basically.

THE AMAZING WORLD OF GUMBALL

Absolutely brilliant series about inclusivity. A cat called Gumball has a best
friend who’s a fish, showing kids that they can live in harmony with their
enemies. Presumably based on the teachings of Christ, which would explain
why the enemy is called Darwin. At last count, there are about a million
episodes.

BAGPUSS

A disabled cat who’s in charge of a sort of filthy junk shop overrun with
mice.

BOD

An absolutely revolutionary cartoon, the likes of which we still haven’t seen

today.
It was set in a futuristic place where there was hardly any things, and not
even a horizon, and sometimes not even the ground. It starred Bod, who
was the first gender non-binary cartoon character, long before this became
socially accepted. Bod shared his or her world with his or her aunt, a
postman, a farmer, a policeman and an off-screen piccolo player. It was, like
George Orwell’s Down On The Farm, a story about one thing which is
actually about another thing: the Soviet Union.
The policeman represents the state. The farmer represents the worker. The
postman represents the secret service. Aunt Flo represents someone called
the proletariat. Bod represents the dutiful citizen. And the piccolo player
represents the dreams of a bright Communist future. At least, that’s what
this essay by a film school student on radicalcartooninterpretations.com
says.
Still, the music was good, because it was short.

FIREMAN SAM

A show about how accident-prone the Welsh are.

GRANGE HILL
Bleak, gritty series meant to make kids unhappy, like greens or exams or the
dentist. And a sort of breeding-ground for EastEnders actors.

IN THE NIGHT GARDEN

A freezing cold punk goes to sleep on a tiny boat that’s obviously lost at
sea. The stars shine in the night sky and turn into flowers. The flowers are
actually blossom on a tree in a big garden with a bandstand in the middle of
it and a fucking great hedge all the way around it so people can’t see what
goes on in there. Understand it yet? Neither do I.
The punk’s got a girlfriend called Whoopsy or something, and a friend
who’s a sort of WALL•E made of cushions who collects stones as if that’s a
rational thing for a robot sofa to do. There’s a sort of Sugababes tribute act
called the Wombliboos, and one of them tourist trains you see at the seaside,
except it’s obviously being driven by a deranged maniac, and two Amish
families that live in a tree trunk.
Everyone in the show has had so much plastic surgery that their faces
hardly move, which I’m not sure sets a good example to young girls. But,
then, I’m not its audience and maybe kids these days are more relaxed about
trout pouts and designer vaginas.

OCTONAUTS

A white-knuckle adventure series, like a sort of underwater A-Team, made

up of three animals you always find living in the sea: a cat, a polar bear and
a penguin who is a qualified doctor. They have special vehicles like all
heroes do, except for Nelson Mandela who just had a nice family saloon.
He didn’t even have an ice-cream van, like the Pope does. I suppose that’s
what makes him a hero: battling against adversity (not having an ice-cream
van) to achieve great things (whatever it is he did).

PEPPA PIG

A family of giggling pigs live on a hill in a parallel universe where NO

ONE EVER MENTIONS SAUSAGES. They snort like pigs but talk like
humans except they NEVER MENTION SAUSAGES. The show is banned
in China, so it must be sending out secret messages. Though, obviously,
NOT ONES ABOUT SAUSAGES.

THE SIMPSONS
A heartwarming show about a nice little ordinary American town where
everyone has jaundice. It’s based on a true story. You can tell this because
Donald Trump gets made president in one episode, although that was
before he was president so it’s based on true events that haven’t happened
yet, which is the closest human beings have ever come to time travel. It’s no
wonder kids love it. They always want to know what happens next. They’re
rubbish with surprises.

China
China is the busiest country on Earth. This is because it’s got the most
people and because literally everything is made there, apart from cheese.
Cheese is made in France if it’s soft, Britain if it’s hard and Italy if it’s a sort
of yellow metal.
The Chinese make everything because they invented everything. They’re
the cleverest people in the world. They invented paper, gunpowder, the
compass, steel, printing – and sweet and sour sauce.
Sweet and sour sauce is the most amazing of all the sauces after ketchup.
And even ketchup is basically cold sweet and sour sauce. When you order
Chinese food, there’s always a variety of sauces, but they’re all sweet and
sour with different names. Satay is sweet and sour with peanuts. Kung Po is
sweet and sour with chilli and garlic. Sichuan is sweet and sour with soy
sauce. Curry sauce is curry. I don’t think that one’s from China, so you can
only have it on chips.
What’s so clever about sweet and sour sauce is the combination of sweet
and sour, which are almost opposites. Who’d have thought that combining
sweetness – the essence of toffee and marshmallow and Bailey’s – with
sourness – the essence of lemon and gooseberry and pickles – would
produce something that wasn’t as utterly sickening as pickled marshmallow
or lemon Bailey’s? And yet, because they’re so clever, the Chinese pulled it
off.
Now, sweet and sour sauce is the Chinese national dish – it’s their version
of the British national dish, the Meal Deal (sandwich, fizz, crisps, bar).
There are probably sweet and sour sauce machines on every street corner in
China. I don’t know. I haven’t been there. I don’t want to. It looks full.
 In fact, thanks to the ingenuity of the Chinese, we can combine many of
their inventions into what must be the most Chinese possible thing to do:
read a menu printed (invented in China) on paper (invented in China) and
order a sweet and sour dish (invented in China) from a takeaway (almost
certainly invented in China) using an iPhone (assembled in China) which
will be delivered by a man on a steel (invented in China) motorbike with an
L-plate on the back, finding your home using a compass (invented in China)
on his way to a fireworks display (invented in China) while you eat your
sweet and sour chicken off a plate (made of China).
Also, there’s noodles.

Clapping
For many years, the only sounds that came out of human beings came out of
their bums or their mouths. Then, one day in once upon a time, primitive
man discovered he had noise in his hands.
These days, clapping is taken for granted, like shoes and doors. And we
clap for all sorts of reasons: we clap to applaud a performance; we clap to
get attention; and, of course, everyone claps in the shower.
Since clapping was discovered, new forms of hand noise have been
coming thick and fast: there’s clicking the fingers, there’s doing that
rapper’s snap thing and there’s hand farting, which everyone goes through a
phase of. There’s also high-fiving, which is sort of social clapping – when
you high-five, instead of clapping with both your own hands, you clap one
of your hands with one of someone else’s – that way, no one can claim the
noise is theirs alone. This is particularly good for people whose hands,
through no fault of their own, make no noise at all. Tragically, some people
are afflicted by this, and silent hands is still something there is no cure for.
Musicians are snobs about clapping, and insist that you never clap on the
dot of one o’clock and three o’clock, but always on two and four. This is
why you should never have lunch with a musician. That and they’ve never
got their half of the bill.

Climate Change
Our planet is changing, and not in a good way, like into a butterfly or a
giant magic shoe. It’s changing into something called a climate change. And
we’re all to blame.
Climate change doesn’t just change the climate, it also changes its name.
All the time. It used to be global warming. Before that it was the Oz One
layer, then acid rain, and when I was small, it was just called the weather
forecast. Which is why it’s so hard for humans to make it stop. Because
nobody knows its name, and it doesn’t care. Like a tortoise. Or a boat.

Climate change is a big challenge for all of us. Like when it looks like it’s
going to rain, and you put on a big coat, and then it’s really hot and you
have to spend all day carrying your coat and sitting on it. But for the whole
planet.
Climate change has always been with us, except in the olden days, it was
natural, not man made. A bit like socks. Nineteen centuries ago, there was
an industrial revolution, which meant everything worked off coals. Coals
is a fossil fuel, which is basically setting fire to dinosaurs. All the gas inside
dinosaurs comes out when you burn them and stays in the sky. And it’s this
dirty dead dinosaur gas that’s to blame for climate change. And so many
dinosaurs were burned for steam trains that nowadays there is almost no
dinosaurs left, except the ones in the middle of the Earth, and a few in
Jurassic Parks.
Rising temperatures are a worldwide problem. I’m dictating this into my
phone and it’s eleven degrees outside. But if scientists are right, in fifty
years’ time, today will be thirteen degrees. Although I’ll have a better
phone.
Our industrial revolution is finished, but now China wants one. Which is
selfish of them. And that’s why people are worried, because China’s climate
change could blow anywhere, thanks to wind farms. As the Earth heats up,
both of the North Poles melt, and the sea goes up. Which is bad news for
anybody who doesn’t want to live in a sea. Like humans. Or the Little
Mermaid. She hated it. Wouldn’t stop going on about it.
Every one of us is responsible for climate change, and people in the olden
days too. The government says we need to cut our greenhouse gas
emissions by 2050. But if, like me, you don’t have a greenhouse, they say
you can still reduce something called your carbon footprint by not flying
and walking more. But my feet swell up when I walk, which is why I go to
Ibiza in a plane. Because the last thing the planet needs is my big, swollen
footprint, carboning everywhere.

What can we do about climate change?

There are simple things we can all do. We should all try and use less climate. So when it
rains, go inside. Make sure there’s some for everyone. Buckets can be used to catch rain, and
solar panels can catch sunshine, and then that weather can be flown quickly round the world,
to where it’s needed. Something as simple as that can make a big difference.

Climate change is directly linked to how much energy we use. Because

the more we leave things on, the hotter they get. Even proper light bulbs get
hot. Something as simple as leaving your lights on could affect the ice at the
North Poles. Look at your fridge. The light goes off when you close the
door. And the fridge is full of ice. Which just goes to show.
Global warming doesn’t just mean more hot days: it also means more
cold days. And more of both sorts of day must mean the year is getting
longer. So by the time I’m fifty, I’ll be seventy. And that’s serious. Because
old people stay indoors more with the radiators on, and that’s global
warming sped up right there.
But not everyone thinks climate change is real. This hot topic has split the
science community right down the middle, 90/10. Some scientists, like
Jeremy Clarkson and Donald Trump, say fossil fuels are the only way to
keep the economy going, so we should use them all up as quickly as
possible. But if they’re wrong and climate change is happening, we face the
nightmare scenario that our grandchildren may never see a rainbow. Except
in a zoo.
There’s a difference between thinking climate change is man made, and
thinking climate change is made up. But I can’t remember it. Because I’m
too hot. And that might be a warning to us all. A global warning.

Colour
Colour is the reflection or absorption of light or something on the
something length or something. That’s the science bit. But for most people,
colour is a way of understanding the world. Whether it’s traffic lights,
clothes or crisp flavours (but mostly crisp flavours), colours are our guides
to whether we should stop or go, show which team we’re on, or choose
cheese and onion over salt and vinegar (cheese and onion).
In olden times, there was only seven colours, one for each day of the
week. We know this, because of the rainbow. The first rainbow appeared on
p.26 of the Bible, when God put it there as a sort of ‘sorry about that, mate’
gift for Noah to make up for the colossal flood he’d chucked all over the
poor man’s zoo boat.
There’s been a lot of debate about which colour is which day. We know
the order of the rainbow: Red Orange Yellow Green Battle In Vain. But it’s
obvious that Red is the best day, so that can’t be Monday. Either it’s Friday
(which is drinks) or it’s Saturday (which is a lie-in). It can’t be Sunday,
because Antiques Roadshow is on, and that means the end of fun, and that
it’s time to get all serious and sad again about going back to work
tomorrow.
In 1958, boffins at crayon company Crayola discovered a whole load
more colours, including Brown, Lavender, Goldenrod, Maroon, Turquoise
and Silver. Suddenly it was possible to draw things like trees and lavender,
something which just hadn’t been possible until then unless you did them in
silhouette.
Which brings us to the difficult subject of black and white.
Black and white, which are obviously colours, aren’t. They’re sort of anti-
colours. We know they’ve been around for hundreds of years, because of
pianos. But we don’t know how they got in or why they got banned from
the rainbow. We know they were mortal enemies for many years, and
probably battled it out again and again (remembered today in chess), but
what they fell out over is lost to the mists of time. Mists which are grey, just
like black and white both are.
Some colours are shorthand for things. Red typically means danger,
which is why buses and lions are red. Blue is associated with water, which
is why school uniforms and the Co-Op is blue. And yellow is associated
with the glory of nature, which is why bulldozers and Primula are yellow.
Some people are colour-blind, which means they can’t see colour – so
everything to them looks old-fashioned, which must be amazing, because
imagine getting a Nintendo Switch and it looking old-fashioned. You’d feel
like a robot from the future.
 Computers
Computers are all around us. In offices, computer shops and computer
repair shops. It’s hard to think of anything that doesn’t have a computer in
it, except cows. And they’ve probably got computers in them now.
Computers have become part of our culture. People staring into their
phones instead of looking where they’re going have become commonplace.
But you have to ask the question: Are we looking at the computers or are
the computers looking at us? And even though the answer to that question is
obvious, it sounds spooky.
The computer was invented by Charles Babbage in 1822, but it didn’t
have a screen so no one knew what it was doing. Then Konrad Zoooooze
managed to invent a proper computer in Germany in 1936, but that one got
bombed up by the British. And that meant we in Britain could invent it first
again, thanks to a man named by the name of Alan Turing, at Bletchley
Parks, in War Two.
Unlike today’s computers, those early computers were made of transistors
and paper and pipes. And they were absolutely huge. They didn’t have
mouses, but if they did, they’d have been the size of cars and you’d have
had to sit in your mouse like a little bumper car, and drive them about to
make YouTube work. And each YouTube video would have been the size of
a car park, and if you were watching porn, someone over the road would
have easily been able to see, so it’s no wonder they had to make do with
What The Butler Saw machines and Linda Lusardi, and Britain never really
became a first-class porn-watching nation until the 21st Minnellium
century.
The invention of the computer was a primary benefit to one particular
group of people: video game players. Until computers, you could only play
Super Mario using a pen and paper or coloured bits of dough. And a game
of Pac-Man could take three days to set up, if the peas kept rolling off the
table. The computer changed all that.
Before computers, if you wanted to send an email, you had to print it out
and put it in an envelope. And if you wanted to pretend to steal a car or beat
up a prostitute, you couldn’t just power up Grand Theft Auto, you had to be
in The Bill.
 Now, there’s almost nothing a person can do that a computer can’t, except
ride a horse. So lots of jobs have been replaced by computers. Perhaps one
day we’ll have a computer Queen, with the real Queen just used for the bits
that are on a horse.
Even as sophisticated as they now are, computers are still basically
machines for doing fast sums. Like, if you’re trying to add up while being
chased by a shark, you need a computer. Inside a computer are lots of ones
and noughts. Computers use ones and noughts because you can fit more of
those in a small space, because they’re the smallest numbers. And
computers keep getting smaller. The time can’t be far off where you’ll be
able to get one the size of a phone. Or even smaller than that, like the size
of an old phone.
Computers can think even quicker than humans. Like, I’ve just thought
about crisps – but a computer could think about crisps even before I’d
written ‘I’ve just thought about’. It’s scary to think that one day, we won’t
need to think about crisps at all, and maybe that will be the day we
surrender to the robots once and for all.
Alan Turing, the weird man who discovered computers, is now a national
hero, and people queue for ages to touch the Turing Shroud. There are even
computers made of cloud now. What next? A computer you can eat? Or
fight? Computer music? Who knows? Maybe a computer does. Of, if it
doesn’t know, it will one day. That’s the magic of computers.

Unanswered Questions about Computers

• Will science ever invent a computer that can do half of what a kettle can do?
• What happens when computers take the jobs of all the people dressed as silver-faced
robots in town squares?
• When will there be digital crisps?

Corbyn, Jeremy
There used to be this programme on called The Amazing Adventures Of
Morph, about this brown naked man and his white naked friend who lived
in a box along with a brush and some tin foil in the shape of a girl. It was
sort of an example of interracial harmony among the Plasticine community.
And there was this other character in it called Grandmorph, a sort of
muttering, tetchy old man, who might have been an Orkney crofter or a
divorced librarian or something but was very much a side character who
most people would struggle to imagine as the centre of the story.
Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party.

Crime
One in twenty people have been a victim of crime. That means that nineteen
out of twenty people are criminals, which is a terrifying statistic. It’s no
wonder we need police.
In the olden days, before the police was discovered, if someone did
something wrong, there was nothing you could do except write to Robin
Hood or form a mob with your neighbours and hunt them down and kill
them, like they still do in bits of Croydon. But today, we’ve got one other
option, thanks to Sir Robert Peel who, in 1829, discovered the police.
Once the police had been discovered, victims of crime knew who to ask
for help, because of their special hats, designed to be visible at a distance by
people being murdered in the London fog.
Police try to stop crime – but couldn’t exist without it. If there was no
crime, what would they do all day, except putting addresses on bikes with
that hammer? If no one’s going to steal those bikes, that’s just decorating,
and much harder to justify as a reasonable spending of taxpayers’ money.
Of course, there’s no point fighting crime if you don’t know what crime
is. That’s why rules come in: rules called laws.
The first laws was the Ten Commandments, which was left on a hill by
God. And most of them – killing, gravity and the one about not interfering
with oxes – are still used today, even though God is dead. That’s because
they were carved in stone, and can never be forgotten, just like whatever it
was Ed Miliband wrote on that slab.
But other laws have changed. Taking it up the bum used to be against the
law, but now you’re a bit of a fridge if you don’t at least one week a month.
Who knows, one day the same might be true of burglary or racism.
These days there are laws for everything. Apparently it’s illegal to steal
music or clothes, even if you walk out of Topshop wearing them because
you sort of forgot you were trying them on.
 They say the punishment should fit the crime. But what if you’ve stolen a
train? They’d need to steal a train from you in return, and surely if you had
a train, you wouldn’t have stolen a train in the first place. Otherwise they’re
just taking their train back. And you go free. That doesn’t feel right.
When society decides that something is wrong, like stealing or murder,
and you disagree with society, you get put in prison, with a load of people
who agree with you. So everybody’s happy.
Think about it: if there wasn’t police, we’d be able to do what we liked,
which is great. But police wouldn’t be able to do what they liked, which is
be the police. And that would be against their human rights.

Unanswered Questions about Crime

• If a policeman broke the law, would he be able to arrest himself?
• Are those things on top of vodka bottles in supermarkets connected to the police station?
• Why don’t polices use their TARDIS any more?

Cunk, Philomena
It doesn’t matter how much so-called information you know, if you don’t
know yourself. So I have filled in a questionnaire. This won’t help you
understand yourself, because it’s me, but it did help me, so maybe it will
help you, particularly if you ignore my answers and imagine your own
instead. It really is that simple. I don’t know why Buddhists make such a
bloody fuss about it.

FIRST NAME? Cunk

LAST NAME? Philomena
BIRTHDAY? Yes. Every year
HEIGHT? 5m 10cm
WEIGHT? 5’10”
STAR SIGN? Aspel
FAVOURITE MEAL? Jelly and ice cream
WHEN WERE YOU HAPPIEST? Just then. Thinking about jelly and
ice cream.
IF YOU COULD LIVE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, WHERE
WOULD YOU LIVE? Stevenage or a volcano
WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GREW UP? Emlyn
Hughes
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE DESTINATION? Upstairs
WHAT ONE ITEM WOULD YOU SAVE IF YOUR HOUSE
WAS ON FIRE? My house
WHAT IS THE LAST FILM YOU SAW? Nutty Professor II: The
Klumps
FAVOURITE FILM OF ALL TIME? Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
CAN YOU SPEAK ANOTHER LANGUAGE? Why?
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? Nutty Professor II:
The Klumps
DO YOU SHARE YOUR HOME WITH ANY ANIMALS? Roast
chicken and spiders
WHAT ONE SONG MEANS THE MOST TO YOU? Elton John by
The Lion King
WHO WOULD BE YOUR DREAM DINNER PARTY
GUESTS, LIVING OR DEAD? Carol Vorderman and the
Abominable Snowman. Also someone who can cook (maybe one of the
Hairy Bikers) and someone who understands cutlery (not a Hairy Biker.
They look like they eat with their feet.)
WHEN AND WHERE WAS YOUR FIRST KISS? 1986. Armpit.
 D

Dark Ages, The

The Dark Ages are an era we don’t understand, with very little of it
recorded. They were very much the BBC4 of their day.
Hardly anything is known about the Dark Ages. We don’t even know if
they were dark, or if they lasted ages. They’re a mystery to us, which is why
it’s odd their name doesn’t reflect that. They were like a sort of historical
Airbnb where no one has written in the visitors’ book, or a place on
TripAdvisor with no reviews. Anything could have happened in the Dark
Ages, but probably didn’t, or we’d have heard about it.

Democracy
All of nature (apart from maybe daisies and waterfalls) is a brutal struggle
for power. Animals and monsters fight to decide who’s in charge. But
unlike animals and monsters, people don’t have to fight for power: instead,
we do a vote – a vote that would be as much of a waste of time as, say,
standing about in a primary school you don’t even go to, if it wasn’t for
something called democracy.
Britain is often called the oldest democracy in the world, because we’ve
had about twenty whole elections that everyone could vote in, going back
almost a hundred years. It’s hard to think back that far, so associated is the
land of Shakespeare and Stonehenge and Henry of Eight with that long,
proud century of democracy. It’s easy to imagine a country without modern
conveniences like the steam train and the computer, but not without British
democracy.
But, if the Keystage 2 history revision Bitesize quiz page is to be
believed, democracy dates back even more back than that. It was invented
in Greece, like thick yoghurt, sodomy and triangles, by the Romans. The
word ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek word ‘democratic,’ which means
it’s been around ages.
 Democracy probably came to Britain on rats, which is the usual way
things are spread in olden times. Maybe they’d eaten some. Rats eat
anything.
But what is democracy?
Democracy means that it doesn’t matter who you are, your vote matters
exactly the same: not very much.
Modern non-Greek democracy began 800 years ago, in knights-in-armour
times, at Runnymede (which sounds worse than it is). Britain used to be
ruled by a king or queen, just like now – except, back then, they were
treated like a god, rather than a slightly better-off version of someone off
Made In Chelsea. When you look at it, royal behaviour was a total
shithouse, until eventually the people rose up and made King John sign
something called Magma Carta.
According to Google Translate, ‘Magma Carta’ is Latin for ‘cardboard
volcano’. Nobody knows why, but it shook up Britain just like a cardboard
volcano would, if one erupted in Leicester, showering everyone in
corrugated rocks and devastating the region with a barrage of papercuts that
would leave emergency services struggling.
Magma Carta itself was less a cardboard volcano and more a sort of
menu, telling people what rights and lefts were available. It was signed
under a yew tree. Yew tree didn’t mean then what it does now. Then it was
just a tree, rather than a systematic round-up of radio perverts.
Soon Britain had its own parliament, which could stop the king doing
what he wanted, by a simple, formal process of cutting his head off. But by
1605, parliament had become so annoying that it was nearly blown up by
Guy Forks, inventor of the fork. But the British Parliament survived, in one
of the world’s most iconic buildings – the home of democracy: Hogwarts.
In the UK, people vote for people to represent people, like mascots. Each
of these mascots is called an MP, which stands for parliament. There are
100 MPs in an MPound. In the olden days, only men could vote, but one
day a lady called Sufferer Jet was run over by a king on a horse, and to
make up for this, women got the vote, and could at last decide which man
should be in charge. Since women got the vote, there have been eleven
Labour governments, ten Conservative governments and two collision
governments. Now, everyone in Britain can vote, unless they’re under
eighteen, in prison, or lost.
 Someone who didn’t agree with democracy was Adolf Hitler. He tried to
invade Britain and take it over as a dictator, though mainly he wanted his
ball back, which double agents posted in the nation’s music halls had
informed him was in the Albert Hall. It’s not clear how his ball had ended
up there – maybe he’d hit it too hard during a game of golf. Luckily Hitler
never managed to get to Britain and died, still playing golf, in a bunker.
Britain is a proper democracy, yet a third of the population still can’t be
arsed to vote, so instead, they exercise their democratic right to moan.
Moaning is a bit like voting, except you don’t have to go to a primary
school and stand in a cupboard to moan. You can do it wherever you want.
Which makes it more convenient for people with bad feet or a dog.
Democracy is a bit like a Harvester: you can choose whatever you want.
Or you can just have nothing. That’s the beauty of democracy: you don’t
have to have loads of salad to cover up the fact you’ve got five sausages in
your bowl. You don’t have to stand up and be counted. You can sit down
and be ignored if you like, because that’s your democratic right: you can
choose not to matter. And that matters. If you want it to. It’s up to you.

Why the X?
Nobody knows why we put a cross in the box on the ballot paper instead of a tick. Perhaps
it’s because a cross has two lines so takes longer to draw than a tick that only has one and a
half lines. That means you have a bit more time to think over the important decision of who
is going to be the most powerful person in your country.

Digestion
The human body, like any animal, needs a source of food to function. And
the source of food that the human body uses as a source of food is food.
Food is broken down into a form the body can use in a process called
digestion which is the scientific term for ‘lunch’.
Digestion starts in the mouth, which is a sort of tunnel in your face. If you
didn’t have a mouth, the rest of the digestive system would have trouble
getting to the food, which would be on a plate, much too far away for even
the strongest stomach to reach. In a way, you could say that digestion starts
with the hands, because they hold the knife and fork, but I’ve been out with
people who eat by just putting their faces straight into their dinner. I say
‘people’, but I did that only once, because I take that sort of behaviour as a
warning – still, science has to take those monsters into account.
In the mouth, food is chewed up with teeth (or, in the case of jelly,
swooshed through them) and mixed with spit. It’s funny that if someone
mixed your food with bodily fluids before serving it to you in a restaurant,
it would be seen as a grave insult (or normal if you were Michael Winner)
and lose them at least one star on their TripAdvisor rating, but your food
won’t work at all unless you splosh it about with a load of gob.
The spat-on-food then passes to the ostrophagus, named after the ostrich,
because of how they are always getting coconuts stuck in their necks, like
you see in cartoons. The ostrophagus is a pipe that goes all the way down to
your stomach, muscles pushing it all the way. It would be a lot less tiring if
the pipe was shorter and your stomach was in, say, your shoulders. But
luckily we get lots of energy from food which we can use to power the
muscles that are needed to eat the food that powers our muscles that eat the
food that we use to power the muscles that eat our food.
There are loads of pipes in our bodies, and not all of them are for food.
Some are for blood, some are for breathing and some are for broadband.
When we swallow our food, a flap blocks our windpipe to stop the food
going down the wrong pipe into our lungs, where it would be less useful.
Nobody wants that. Imagine a balloon full of vegetable soup, and how upset
you’d be if you got one of those when you finished all your ice cream at
Giraffe.
 The Digestive System

After the stomach, the food then goes somewhere else. It gets a bit
squashed up in the diagram and it’s hard to see what’s what. It’s a kind of
full English breakfast thing. There’s a bit that looks like fat worms, and
some cushion things that seem important. They’ve got labels on, but I can’t
quite see where the lines are pointing. There’s a liver, and a St Pancras, and
a dumdedumdedenum and the food goes through all of them doing
something or other. Finally, the food we have eaten simply disappears,
having done all it needs to. Nobody knows where it goes.
At the bottom of the digestive system is the best bit, the bottom, or as
scientists call it ‘the arsehole’. This is the bit round the corner where (milk
milk lemonade etc.) chocolate’s made. Nobody knows where the chocolate
comes from. It is one of the many mysteries of the human body, that it can
produce so much disgusting stuff for no good reason.

Dinosaurs
In the really olden days, long before even the olden days, the only people on
Earth was dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were sort of giant roaring monsters, like
that huge bloke in The Princess Bride.
 There are loads of sorts of dinosaurs, but the main ones are the across
ones and the up and down ones. The across ones ate grass, and the up and
down ones ate the across ones. It was just like lions and whatever those
stripey piano-horses are that lions eat.

Across

Up and Down

Dinosaurs ruled for ages and ages, very much like our own queen, until
they were replaced by shy, less interesting mouse-like creatures who spent
most of their time hiding amongst plants, like our own Prince Charles.
Something killed the dinosaurs. We don’t know what. Some experts think
they died because they crawled under the ground, into rocks, making it hard
for them to breathe. Monsters like that are too stupid to live. Whatever it
was that killed the dinosaurs, it turned them all to stone, like some horrible
creature from a film. We can only hope whatever did it never comes back.
Some scientists say that dinosaurs revolved into birds. But dinosaurs are
much too heavy to fly, because they’re made of stone. So that’s just one of
those crazy theories to file with the Earth being flat, and the Earth being
round.
You don’t need to go to Jurassic Park in America to see dinosaurs these
days. Like most things, we’ve got our own in Britain, but not as good. In
London, there’s a Victorian zoo called the National History Exhibition that
still has dinosaurs. But when you see the appalling conditions they are kept
in – starving, just bones, really – it’s surprising there are any left at all. The
sad story of the abuse of one such dinosaur by a vicious Victorian is
famously told in the film The Elephant Man.
 Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a television programme about this eccentric man who
worked for the BBC in the 60s and 70s.
The man, who is dressed in weird clothes, persuades teenagers to get into
a cupboard with him by offering them Jelly Babies and fixing it for them to
go on dream trips and meet famous and important people. He takes them
away from their families and the kids are in great danger while they’re with
him, so there’s a lot of screaming. Everything he does is aimed at children,
but it’s a bit peculiar, because kids get really scared, and the things they see
him do are seared into their memories, so they grow up a bit odd and can’t
really think about anything else.
It’s a total fantasy and very far fetched, which is part of the fun, because
it’s a bit frightening, so it’s good it could never happen.

Domesday Book, The

In 1086 a book was published which was the Fifty Shades Of Its Day of its
day. Except it had a more ominous name that made it sound like a survival
manual for when the zombies take over.
The Domesday Book isn’t as gloomy as that, although it must have
sounded it. ‘It’s fine, nothing to worry about – it’s just called the Domesday
Book. I just need to know everything about you . . .’ Because that’s what it
is: a very old and very long list of everybody in the country, where they
lived and what stuff they had. It was medieval Facebook. It knew
everything about everybody, and it was written by everybody about
everything.
King William I, who commissioned it, was a sort of Marcus Zuckerberg
The Elder. But unlike today’s Mark Zuckerberg, he was actually interested
in tax. That’s why he asked for the Domesday Book – although he didn’t
need a reason. There’s no point being king unless you can ask for stupid
shit.
Unlike Facebook, you couldn’t click on the Domesday Book, and it was
no good trying to use it to get off on your exes. ‘Seven cottages and three
men’s plough teams’ is a tough wank. Although, to be fair, it’s a start.
 There were two main jobs listed in the Domesday Book: peasant and
peasant counter. Peasants lived in thatched wooden huts full of chicken shit.
The water was filthy, so everyone drank beer, and the only thing to eat was
bread. It must have been a particularly challenging time for the gluten
intolerant; but luckily nobody was middle class yet, so they just put up with
it.
And this Great British Stock Take recorded everything: fields, sheep,
worms, even clouds. It was like Google Street View, in that it was probably
out of date by the time they finished it. Still, the unique technology of the
Domesday Book was single-handedly responsible for dragging Britain
kicking and screaming into the Middle Ages.
The Domesday Book is still in print today, which is mad because it’s
borderline unreadable and literally no one has ever finished it. It was very
much the internet of its day.

Dressage
Horses dancing. Well weird. They should do more sports like this. There
should be a sport where cows write novels, or one where they see which
donkeys can make the best cakes. I wonder if horses dance like this when
people aren’t on them. You’d have to go to a horse disco to find out, and
I’ve no idea where those are. They probably flyer them quite specifically to
other dancing horses, in case the police horses come and close them down.

Dyer, Danny
Danny Dyer is probably the greatest actor of his generation.
Born Danial Dandy Dan D. Dyer on his birthday in 1977, he rose to fame.
His first big film appearance was as one half of the title role in Human
Traffic. But he is probably best known for his tear-breaking performance as
landlord Mick Carter in the never-ending TV drama EastEnders.
Dyer brings his tremendous sensitivity and range to his work. In the epic
romantic film Run For Your Wife, he brings everything you’d expect to the
character of John Smith. And when he appeared as Danny Dyer in Who Do
You Think You Are?, critics praised the moving scenes in which he
discovered that he had ancestors.
He is also known as a fiercely outspoken commentator, and has famously
suggested that cocaine is an excellent reward for a job well done, that
cutting your ex’s face is a good way of getting over her and that breaking
Mark Kermode’s nose is a good way of getting over him.
He should definitely be the next James Bond.
 E

Electricity
Electricity is a way of making things light up, or come on, or move, or stand
on end. The simplest way to understand electricity is to rub a balloon on
your jumper. If you put the balloon on your head, your hair stands on end.
That’s electricity.
In power stations, because balloons are expensive, they use atoms, which
are like little balloons, when you look up close. Because they’re smaller,
they’re cheaper and you can have more of them, so there’s more electricity.
Without electricity, your hair would just stay on your head all the time,
getting bored. If enough electricity gets together in one place, it turns into a
light bulb and can be put to use. Otherwise it’s mainly for moving hair. You
can tell this because if you put your finger in a plug socket, the first thing
that happens is your hair goes up on end, before you explode. Frankly, it’s
one of those experiments that’s probably better to hear about than to do.
Electricity is measured in Volts, Amps and Watts. Volts are how many
electricities there are; Amps are how fast they’re going and Watts is how
much you care.
The word electricity comes from the word ‘electric’, meaning ‘to do with
electricity’, and ‘city’, meaning ‘a place where there’s a lot of electricity’.
To get electricity to where it’s needed, there are wires. Wires are like metal
hair, and to stop all the wires standing on end, which would be useless,
they’re kept in the walls of your house, or stuck to big pylons in the
countryside. (Pylons are like big electrees.)
Of course, any scientist will tell you, there’s more to electricity than
balloons and hair standing on end. Other uses of electricity include those
glass balloon things with lightning in them that make your hair stand on end
– and hairdryers, which use electricity to dry your hair by blowing it, like
air coming out of a balloon, and make your hair stand on end.
There is a dark side to electricity though, because balloons are bad for the
environment because they strangle puffins and get caught inside tortoises.
It is possible to generate electricity in a more natural way. Wind turbines
can be used to make people’s hair stand on end without needing a balloon,
and maybe they are the future of electricity. One day we may have electric
cars and even electric televisions, thanks to the hair-moving power of wind.

End of the World, The

Some things feel like they’re going to go on for ever: love, life, the film
Eyes Wide Shut – but nothing does. Everything comes to an end. And the
world will come to an end one day.
A million years ago, a scientist called Nostradamus predicted the world
would come to an end in a huge mess called a pocalypse. The word
‘pocalypse’ is just posh dictionary code for ‘the end of days’, which is just
sunset, which happens all the time, which is why the world didn’t end just
like Nostradamus said it would.
But Nostradamus wasn’t the only one who reckoned the pocalypse was
coming. As well as inventing Minecraft, the ancient Mayan civilisation
predicted that the world as we knew it would end in 2012. Luckily, it turned
out just to be Ceefax that ended that year. And that was only the whole
world if you were over sixty and housebound.
In Victoria times, another pocalypse was predicted by Mother Shipton, a
mystic from Yorkshire who lived in a cave because at the time that was
better than living in Yorkshire, just like it also is now. She wrote, ‘The
world to an end will come, in eighteen hundred and eighty one,’ a claim
which has recently been debunked by experts, through a careful process of
looking around and seeing the world is still here.
Predicting the end of the world is tricky, and you’re best leaving it to the
experts. Probably the biggest experts are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have
predicted the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941,
1975, 1994 and 1997, so are getting really good at it. It is interesting to
notice that they didn’t predict any ends of the world between 1986 and
1991, which is when the BBC ran the painting and decorating sitcom Brush
Strokes.
The most famous pocalypse of all is in bestselling historical thriller The
Bible. Like the film Seven, The Bible ends with a sort of mass killing based
on the number seven. A lamb with seven horns and seven eyes opens seven
seals. The first one contains the four horsemen of the pocalypse. You
wouldn’t think seals would eat horses, but pocalypses are full of nasty
surprises. The second seal contains a red horse, the third seal contains a
black horse and the fourth seal contains a pale horse, so it turns out horses
are actually seals’ favourite food.
The seventh seal contains seven trumpets, and when they start tooting, the
Earth catches fire and things start falling out of the sky: not normal things
like snowflakes or birdshit, but huge things like a mountain and a star. And
on and on it goes, with more seven more things and seven more seven more
things. It’s more baffling than Golden Balls. It’s like Deal Or No Deal?
where each of the boxes contains deformed farmyard animals. Really scary
ones with wrong eyes. Creatures even more terrifying than the original
Bungle.
Perhaps the writers of The Bible were confusing the end of the world with
the end of The Bible, because that’s how The Bible ends.
To know how the world will really end, we have to turn to science. And
science says it won’t be a giant destructive seven times table after all. It
could be Artificial Intelligence – which is when the Speak & Spells and
Gameboys and Bluetooth speakers rise up and take over the Earth – or man-
made climate change (unless we decide to only use natural climates) – or a
nasteroid giving us a good clout – or a supervolcano. There’s a
supervolcano hiding under America, apparently. Let’s hope nobody finds it
or there’ll be hell to pay.
There have been times when it’s felt like the end of the world, but, at least
so far, we haven’t had the pocalypse. By the time this book comes out,
though, that may all have changed, and you might be reading this from a
fiery pit of shattered glass, eating each other’s scabs and fighting for the
benefit of a radioactive Tina Turner. If so, maybe all I can say is: take care –
and take one last look at our beautiful world.

Environment, The
The environment is everything around us, but not the interesting bits. It
includes the sky, mud, rainbows, hills, wasps and mushrooms. It’s the bits
you don’t really notice when you’re going past them in a car, but if they
were gone (like the sky) you’d soon want them back, in case you needed to
fly somewhere quickly on holiday.
 Before cities, there was no environment, because it was just where people
lived and so didn’t need a special long word or much looking after. But
once people moved into cities and had modern inventions like front doors,
the environment got left in a right state.
Poets were the first people to notice the environment. They were like an
olden days version of hippies, but more annoying. A bunch of them went
looking for new ideas for poems that weren’t just ‘Ode To A Front Door’,
and the place they went wandering, as lonely as a clown, in their own
words, was a place outside the city that we now call the environment. They
saw that whales and hedgehogs and cabbages and chalk were properly
getting the shitty end of the stick while humans all swanned about in those
chairs on poles carried by four butlers in wigs. Something had to be done,
and that something was poems. Which is why the environment is in an
absolute state to this day, because the only people who care are hippies.
In olden cities, for example, people would poo straight into the river,
which meant when you drank water, you had to slosh it through your teeth
like you do with jelly, to get the goodness out. Doctors soon found out that
all those river poos were giving people diseases like water polo, so the first
step towards the care for the environment we know today was probably
making people use a toilet that went down a pipe rather than just plopping
in a river. Even today it’s important to put as many bleaches and chemicals
down your loo as possible, to stop the sea getting infected with Victorian
diseases.
In the 1980s, everyone stopped using spray cans – graffiti artists, Sigue
Sigue Sputnik, the people who made custard pies for Roland Rat – to try
and help repair a hole in the Oz One layer. This was so successful that the
problem never reached the Oz Two layer, and today the environment is
completely fine and we can pretty much relax.
It’s horrible to think how bad things would be if we hadn’t found out
about the environment, just in time.

Evolution
The first people on Earth were animals that lived in the sea, until one of
them – we don’t know his name – invented legs.
 The way that one animal revolves into another explains why there are so
many different sorts of creature, but doesn’t explain it very well. Why don’t
monkeys turn into crabs? If a fish can decide to have legs, why can’t it
decide to have four extra faces or a propeller?
So who made the rules for how animals revolve? You might think the
answer is God. But, in fact, it’s another old man with a beard: Charles
Darling.
In 1859, in his garden in Kent, Darling saw an apple fall out of a tree and
wondered, just maybe, if there was a monkey up there. And where that
monkey might of come from. So Darling went on a cruise on a ship called
HMS Beatle and collected loads of tortoises. Unlike monkeys, tortoises are
really slow, so he could observe them as they evolved before his very beard.
Darling found a new hobby: thinking. You think of all sorts of weird stuff
on holiday, because it’s hard to get email, and your mind wanders. And
when he got back home, Darling had a big circle put in his garden so he
could walk round and round until he thought of something. Wandering in
circles, Darling said he lost himself. But, like, it’s only a circle, so you’d
have to be pretty thick to get lost. Maybe that’s why he was an animals
scientist, not a circles scientist.
Anyway, Darling was a naturist, which is people interested in getting their
bums out. And monkeys do that. And maybe that was his flash of
inspiration.
This is what Darling thought: man comes from monkeys; monkeys come
from fish; and fish . . . come from the seaside, with all seaweed and that.
And turning from one creature into another had kept everyone busy for
millions, even thousands of years. It was very much the internet of its day.
And this idea evolved into a book.
To begin with, Darling only showed his book to his wife. And you can see
why. It’s really boring. I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. And maybe
a high-stakes chase. On dinosaurs.
Because evolution can’t be seen, it’s hard to believe in, like electricity, or
skellingtons. And because it’s been around for hundreds of years, everyone
it happened to is dead. Even now, humans are no closer to understanding
evolution than monkeys are. But one day, maybe, we’ll evolve eyes that can
see evolution. And that will prove it. With our own eyes.
Until then, some people will always ask: where’s the proof? Like I did at
school when they made me stand by the bins. But in a way, we can see the
evidence all around us, in the eye of every monkey and every dinosaur we
meet. And when a caterpillar evolves into a butterfly, that’s one of the most
beautiful prooves there is.
Who knows what that butterfly might itself become in time? A man? A
hedgehog? A supercaterpillar? Even a rainbow. And that’s the miracle of
life.
One thing is clear: if it weren’t for evolution, none of us would be here
today. Or we would, but we’d be gibbons. And nobody wants to be gibbons.
Not even gibbons. You can tell by their bums.

Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is one of those important subjects that’s so
important that it gets professors writing books about it, but not so important
that it gets taught at school, like maths – or lunch.
What evolutionary psychology says is that it can explain why we do
things based on what we did in a previous life, when we were cavemen.
This sounds brilliant at first, but it is.
So, for instance, for example, why do we jump when there’s a sudden
loud noise? Noises aren’t scary in themselves. Noises don’t have big sharp
teeth or a taser or a parking ticket. But evolutionary psychology (which is
much easier to type now I’ve cut-and-pasted it from the internet) says that
we jump in case the loud noise is an exploding dinosaur. When we were
cavemen, dinosaurs were a real danger, expecially if they were primed to
blow.
We can apply this caveman-flavoured thinking to all sorts of behaviours.
For example, why do people run to work? You’d think it was to get in some
exercise first thing in the morning, but evolutionary psychology says you’re
a dick if you think that. It’s a tough science. People run to escape peril, so
it’s obvious why people run to work: because they’re afraid of their homes.
And why do we clap? Is it to make a noise that indicates approval? Of
course not. We clap because we like things, and we don’t like getting flies
on things we like, so clapping is the best way of killing or scaring away
any flies – hence the phrase ‘no flies on you’.
And why do we like Tizer? Is it because it’s the best drink? No it isn’t.
(And there’s no proof it is the best drink, even though it is.) It’s because it
reconnects us with our cavemen selves who must of drunk water from
bubbling streams they’d washed their bloody hands in after hunting and
killing monsters, getting a light red, bubbly liquid we associate with a job
well done. (I might go out and get some Tizer.)
Evolutionary psychology can even explain things like why we hate our
neighbours (in case they’ve moved in next door to kill us, making our
homes even more frightening) and why people have children (to become so
tired that death isn’t such a big surprise) and I could go on, but all I can
think about now is Tizer.
 F

Facebook
Facebook is a sort of pub in your computer, where your mates and you can
all meet and fall out with each other without having to pay for a drink or
some nuts or put up with a fucking pub quiz taking place.
People tell Facebook everything, but there’s one thing it can never know,
and that’s how someone smells. There isn’t a button for having a bath or
blowing off. So the people on Facebook you don’t really know – you can
imagine they smell like something nice, like almonds, or Glade Plug-Ins.
Which’ll make you like them more. But with people you’ve met in real life,
you already know how they smell: all human and ordinary. Which makes
them less mysterious.
When Facebook figures out how to do smell, everyone will be as
disappointing as they really are. And maybe that’ll be better.

Fake News
Fake news is a way of persuading people of things even though there’s no
evidence. Lying to you that the world is dangerous, or corrupt, or round.
Fake news used to only happen on April the first when the papers would
pretend something unfunny had happened, and the presenters would read it
on BBC Breakfast and pretend to laugh. But now it’s not just one day, it’s all
the time. It’s a worse mission creep than Christmas.
Fake news originally started on the internet. On the internet, you can lie,
and there’s no consequences, but if a newspaper lies on its front page, they
have to print a little tiny box that says ‘sorry’ inside a different paper weeks
or sometimes years later, so that acts as a big deterrent.
Donald Trump says the mainstream media is fake news, because it says
what he is doing. It’s quite persuasive because most of it does sound made
up, probably for a film where a bear gets to be president.
 Actually, fake news is all right, really, because real news is quite boring.
So nobody reads it. But fake news is better, because it’s stuff you already
think, so you don’t have to read it. Just the headlines. So you have time to
read more of it. Which you don’t.

Farridge, Nigel
In May 2010, Nigel Farridge fell out of the sky like a shit Thor. And the
world changed.
Farridge – who looks like a screaming Muppet ashtray and sounds like an
after-dinner Hitler – hates unelected European politicians, despite being
both a European politician and serially unelected. He’s honest about this,
though, and shows his contempt for his €100,000-a-year job by taking the
money and hardly turning up.
Farridge says he’s a man of the people. Maybe that’s because he’s a man,
and belongs to the human race, who are people. So it’s a bit of a low bar.
Which is, ironically, where you’ll often find him.
People like him because he’s the plucky underdog. He failed to get
elected to parliament in Eastleigh and Salisbury and Battle and Thanet and
Bromley and Buckingham and Thanet again. He used to be the leader of
UKIP, but quit in 2015, then went back, then resigned again, then stepped
back up again when the new leader resigned, then resigned again. He’s a bit
52/48 about remaining or leaving.
TV producers are constantly inviting Farridge to come and shout the good
news at people. And he loves the attention. It’s as if he’s completely
insecure without a platform, like a paranoid railway station.
His arch enemy is a shady group of people, a bit like the Illuminati, called
the Metropolitan Elite – which sounds like a video game where you fly tube
trains to distant planets to pick up artisan bread. Or a slightly tired hotel
that’s trying too hard but still has those little plastic thimbles of pretend
milk in the rooms.
Farridge wants to defeat the Metropolitan Elite, because, like so many
other ordinary decent hard-working ex-London public schoolboys who
worked for the London Metals Exchange before going to work as an elite
international politician and now live in West London, he can see beyond the
metropolitan bubble, and good luck to him.

Fashion
Fashion is what you should be wearing for now and what you shouldn’t. It’s
not about what you should never be wearing, like Crocs or mankinis – that’s
a different thing called taste. If you want to know the difference between
fashion and taste, fashion changes all the time, and taste never usually does,
except when they buggered up chocolate recently and made Double
Deckers taste like wool.
Fashion works by making all your clothes feel disappointing after a bit.
There’s probably chemicals they put in new clothes that’s the same
chemicals that’s in Turkish Delight, that makes you think you really want it,
and then, like, as soon as you have it, you don’t want it because Turkish
Delight’s rubbish. (To be honest, I’m surprised those kids stayed in Narnia
as long as they did. I’d have gone back to the wardrobe and spent the
afternoon trying on tops.)
Fashion these days moves pretty fast. Something you bought just a few
weeks ago might now make you look like a total dick if you wear it, which
is a shame, because it’s probably still in one piece and perfectly OK. Maybe
fashions should last longer, like tinned food or Land Rovers do.
Some things, though, never go out of fashion. Jeans is one. Everybody’s
got jeans except the Queen, and they haven’t changed since the dawn of
jeans, yet everybody’s still happy to wear them except the Queen. Probably
queens don’t wear anything that rhymes with them – which would be why
you don’t see queens wearing beans or machines. She should get with the
modern age and come out with her own range of Queenjeans. She could do
green ones. They could have a pocket for your crown, and a change pocket
that’s sewn up at the top, for not carrying money.

Films
Films are a sort of television that’s longer than one television programme
(say, Bargain Hunt) but not as long as watching all of, say, Bargain Hunt.
Unlike normal television, films don’t come to your house unless you’re
not interested in them any more. You have to go and visit films where they
live, which is this really big hot dog kiosk called a cinema. The hot dogs
here are bigger and not as nice as the ones you can make at home using real
sausages, so they take longer to eat. This means they have to give you
somewhere to sit down, but because nobody likes watching strangers eat,
they make all the seats face away from each other, and then, to give you
something to look at, they put on a film.
Here are some films that exist.

JAWS

Some men go to sea to chase after some barrels, probably because they
think there might be beer in them. The twist is that hiding under the barrels
is a shark who has learned that the men love barrels, and is using them as
bait. The clever shark tries to kill the men by exploding when they get near,
but the men hide under the water and die, which is a lucky escape for
everyone, except one of them, who luckily escapes.

FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL

Hard to follow drama about posh people who have lots of things to go to in
a row, but fortunately have loads of suits and frocks anyway, so nothing’s in
the cleaners, and it’s not really a problem. Looked it up and apparently it’s
actually three weddings and a funeral and then another wedding, which
makes it a bit easier to follow.

THE CANNONBALL RUN

Only seen the end. Which was brilliant. On one side of the screen is a poem
made out of people’s names, and on the other side of the screen is a sort of
You’ve Been Framed with sex offenders. I should make clear I don’t know
who any of them are in the clips, and they’re probably not sex offenders,
but it was the 1970s and we’ve learned not to make assumptions.

CITIZEN KANE

Black and white.

NUNS ON THE RUN

If you’ve seen The Sound of Music or Sister Act, you’ll know how annoying
it is when a nun starts singing in a film, because it holds up the story, and
the nun never gets to do a good bit like push Alan Rickman off a ledge or
fight dinosaurs. This is an interesting film because it has no singing in it,
but it also doesn’t have any good bits, so maybe it just proves that nuns and
films don’t mix. A warning from God.

STAR WARS 2: STAR WARS STRIKES BACK

If you’ve seen the first one, The Star Wars Menace, this probably makes
sense, but someone told me that one was hopeless, so fuck that, and I’ve
gone straight in at what they say is the best one, and it’s not. For a start,
Fozzie Bear is really old in this one, and doesn’t do any jokes, and they’ve
given him Kermit’s face by mistake. So someone really isn’t paying
attention. It ends really weird, with this Jeremy Kyle bit about who’s who’s
dad, and then he falls down a hole, and they catch him and that’s meant to
be the end, even though they don’t say what happens to any of them. They
should do one of those bits at the end they sometimes do with old photos
and some words that say which ones went to prison and who died. That or
outtakes, like in The Cannonball Run.

THE EXORCIST

Not seen it.

CANNONBALL RUN II

Not seen it.

MANON DES SOURCES

Foreign. Not seen it.

ICE AGE 3: THE NUT JOB

Cartoon. Not seen it.

THE BRAUN ELEGANCE HAIR STRAIGHTENERS DEMONSTRATION VIDEO

Seen this loads. Hard to talk about without spoilers, but well worth getting a
copy. It’s never on at the cinema, but I found mine on video cassette down
Barnardo’s. It’s my favourite film apart from Norbit.

NORBIT

No. Hang about. Not Norbit. I’m thinking of Big Momma’s House. Not seen
it.

BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE

Pretty good film.

EDWARD PENISHANDS

This is dead, dead good. Avoid the remake.

Frankingstein
Lots of people think that Frankingstein is the name of the monster, but it’s
not. It’s the name of the book.
The book Frankingstein was written by Mary Shelley in the early 1800th
century while on holiday. The weather was shit, so everyone she was on
holiday with had to stay in and write a book, probably because they’d
forgotten to pick one up at the airport.
Mary’s husband was the very famous writer Mr Shelley check name, and
because he was the best known, he got to decide what game they played
while they were stuck inside, even though most of them would have been
happy with Pictionary. He told everyone to write a ghost story, which was a
bit bossy, because Mary might have wanted to do a bonkbuster, but they all
went upstairs and got their typewriters out, and Mary’s was the best.
We can’t remember any of the other stories, even though they were by
quite famous people – plus, the others probably stuck to the brief and did
ghosts, while Mary failed completely, and did mainly electricity and
monsters. She was only a teenager at the time and if you tell a teenager to
go to her room, you’ve only got yourself to blame if she pisses about and
won’t do it properly.
 The book of Frankingstein is one of the first science fiction stories of all
time, even before the old Star Trek where they’re all in pyjamas. In it,
Victor Frankingstein, who’s based on Doc from Back to the Future but
travelled back to Mary Shelley times in his tin car, builds a meat robot out
of bits of dead people and brings it to life by plugging it into the mains,
which in those days was just a storm coming down a wire from the sky. It’s
amazing that a book would predict downloading stuff we needed from a
cloud, but that’s how good it was at science fiction.
If you don’t want to read the book of Frankingstein because it’s written in
Olde English, there is a very good film version made in black and white,
which is a great way to see how the monster might have looked. It’s on
YouTube. Just search for ‘Munsters’, because someone’s typed ‘Monster’
wrong when they uploaded it.

Fullosophy
A great fullosopher once wrote, ‘Naughty, naughty; very naughty.’ And he
knew what he was talking about because, like all good fullosophers, he
spent all his time thinking – but thinking about thinking.
Human beings are the only animals who ask questions, apart from owls,
who always want to know who’s there. Questions like, ‘Is there a meaning
to life?’ ‘What am I here for?’ ‘How did those shoes get in my fridge?’
And, most weird of all, ‘How am I thinking these things?’
When you think about it, thinking about thinking is the hardest sort of
thinking there is, which makes you think. It’s probably even harder than
poems or remembering the names of all the Smurfs. Luckily some people in
black-and-white photograph times spent their whole lives doing exactly that
sort of thinking thinking, and their brains became so full that they became
known as fullosophers. The minds of fullosophers are stronger than ours
because they do thinking all the time, like when you get a man to help you
move a fridge. But using only thought.
The first fullosophers were ancient and Greek, and had names like
Heraclitus, Petepaphides and Pythagoras. His big idea was that everything
in the world could be done with numbers, like in Argos. Though, ironically,
the Greek version of Argos only stocked noughts, an idea invented by some
bloke called Jason. Pythagoras is best known these days as the inventor of
the triangle, but a world without his ideas would be unthinkable. Because
there’d be no Dairylea. And you couldn’t start snooker.
Pythagoras died in 495BBC and, by then, fullosophy was all the rage.
Like One Direction but with better beards: Socrates; Aristotle; Plato. They
all kept their brains warm with a beard round their chin. If that’s where
brains is.
Plato invented Platonic relationships. Before him, men and women
couldn’t be just friends, they had to have sexual intercourse with each other.
Which is, of course what people in platonic relationships want to do really
anyway, whatever they tell you. Maybe Plato invented pretending not to
want sex so he could get more of it. That’d be just like him. The devious
bastard.
All that pretending not to want sex must have knackered everyone’s
brains, because there was no good fullosophy until Rene De Scarts was
born in the sixteen hundredth century. De Scarts is famous for saying
‘Cogito ergo sum’, which is Latin for ‘I think therefore I am’. It’s lucky he
said it in Latin, or everyone might have thought he was just Popeye. And
ignored him.
What De Scarts was trying to say was: if everything is in our brains, how
do we know we exist? And the answer, of course, is footprints. But how do
we know our footprints are really there? What if they’re somebody else’s
footprints? Or drawings of footprints, like at the airport? And how do we
know airports is real? Most flying is in dreams, so you never know.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a German fullosopher, even tried to explain reality
using the idea of Superman, which is stupid because humans can’t do laser
eyes or pick up skyscrapers with their bare hands. Or can they?
Trying to explain reality is so complicated that even the brainiest
fullosophers can’t do it in a way a normal person doesn’t find really boring.
Perhaps that’s because thinking about thinking is a bit like singing a song
about singing, or watching a TV programme about a TV programme, like
Extras. In other words, not as good as the one he did first about paper.
Perhaps fullosophers should think about exciting stuff instead, like being
burgled or Fireworks Night. But thinking about Fireworks Night doesn’t
help us understand reality. It just helps us understand fireworks. Perhaps De
Scarts was right, and we think because we are. Because, if you think about
it, we probably are. And if we aren’t, then maybe it doesn’t matter.
 Unanswered Questions About Fullosophy
• When people change their minds, where does the old one go?
• Why don’t more people just have two brains like Steve Martin?
• If you think about thinking, do you use your brain or your mind? Does the brain think
about the mind, so it’s not too busy? What happens if the brain thinks about the brain?
Does it get stuck like when you open too many windows on a cheap laptop?
• Do cows get embarrassed? Is it only humans who can get embarrassed? What emotions
do we think carrots are capable of? Can you shame a parsnip?
 G

Games of Throne
Games of Throne is an epic and exciting programme on the television and
computers and your phone which is based on the play King Lord of the
Rings by William Shakespeare. It’s set in sort of series one Black Adder
times, before dragons became extinct.
It’s weird watching it because most of the time it’s like medieval Made in
Chelsea or something, just all these people getting pissed off with each
other and looking serious saying loads of made up stuff in old language.
It’s so old-fashioned the script is probably given to them in the form of a
tapestry. Then, just as you’re getting bored with them talking and talking
and walking about and talking, they have a huge spectacular fight with
some zombie monsters, or a dragon monster flies down and starts having a
go at them and you think maybe it was worth sitting through all the talking
and then it all starts again.
You might think it’s for kids, like Harry Potter, because of the dragons,
but the thing is it’s also got loads of tits in it, so you know it’s grown-up. If
there’s one thing you can say about tits, it’s that they’re not for babies.
There’s so much tits in the programme it’s a bit like a hanging around in the
ladies’ changing room of some historical re-enactment society. Some people
say it’s gratuitous but I think it’s important to know women’s tits looked
roughly the same in fictional medieval times as they do now. They must
have spent ages researching it, but it’s good that someone was that
thorough. It shows.
One of the main characters is called Jon Snow, but before he did the
news. When he was younger he was this tortured soldier man with really
nice hair, which is quite an achievement when you think about how hard it
must be to maintain a half-decent male grooming regime by candlelight in a
violent fantasy realm when you’re constantly being distracted by dragons
and tits.
Games of Throne doesn’t just tell the story of Jon Snow off the news
when he was in medieval fantastic times, it does that for loads of people.
It’s mainly British actors you’ve seen in Midsomer Murders and Morse and
that, but what they were doing before, when there were dragons. So it’s
quite educational. If you were doing a history degree at University about
what the suspects in Midsomer Murders were doing when they were
goblins, it’d be a great way to revise. The show is so popular, that that’ll
probably be a round on University Challenge one day, or a one-off special,
with Jeremy Paxman in a smock.

Game Theory
Game Theory is a way of explaining and excusing behaving like a shit
because you’ve drawn it all out on graph paper.
The simplest way to understand it is through an idea called The Prisoner’s
Dilemma. First, imagine there are two prisoners. Now imagine that they
have been kept in isolated rooms. Then imagine that the police have offered
each prisoner the same deal: if you confess to the crime, you will get off,
and your partner will go to prison for longer. Now imagine you understood
any of that. That’s who you are if you care about game theory.
Weird, isn’t it? You’ve probably got a cardigan and those glasses
murderers wear in black-and-white films.
The problem with The Prisoner’s Dilemma is that it ignores real
prisoners’ dilemmas, which are mainly about clinging to your place in a
twisted hierarchy of human bums. Any theory that ignores the real world
like that probably isn’t worth understanding. Which is lucky, because I
don’t. Besides, it ignores the currency of snouts. The person with the snouts
inside is king.
(I think snouts is cigarettes, not pig face fronts. Otherwise prison is worse
than I ever imagined.)

Gas
Everything is either a gas or a liquid, or not a gas or a liquid. Liquid is easy
because that’s water and Prosecco and Yazoo. But gas is more mysterious
because you can’t see it, unless it’s the sort of gas with a colour, like the
stuff that knocks Batman out when one of the baddies squirts it in his face.
 The easiest way to explain gas is with Bovril. When it’s in the little pot,
Bovril is a solid, like on toast. But when you add liquid, in the form of
kettle water, it turns Bovril into a liquid, which you can drink, if you’re not
that fussed about drinking something that tastes like a McDonald’s grillpan
that’s been left in to soak. Now, if you drew a cartoon of the horrible Bovril
drink, then above the mug there would be wavy lines. These wavy lines is
Bovril gas.
Nobody drinks Bovril gas, and you can’t have it on toast, but that doesn’t
mean it isn’t there, even though it’s a bit hard to see and nobody really
wants it. It’s like Big Brother on Channel 5.
Gases like Bovril gas do have their uses. You can cook with them, and
you can fill up airships, if you’re in black and white. Most people use
electricity instead these days, which is harder to get out of Bovril. Bovril
also comes in dark brown jars, which only it and Marmite do, thanks to
some ancient custom like the one which says that Guinness is the only
black-and-white drink or the one that says After Eights are the only thin
square mint chocolates. Not that anyone’s asking for more of the above.
If you use enough gas, you get a bill, which is sometimes the only
evidence that the gas exists. Maybe if someone could work out how to send
a bill for the Loch Ness Monster, we’d get some answers.

Genetics
Every living thing has instructions inside it for how to build it, like an
IKEA Billy Bookcase. These instructions are called DNA, which is a sort of
code. It took boffins ages to crack the code, even though it’s fairly obvious
it’s just writing stuff backwards, and if you solve it, it spells ‘AND’. Not a
very hard code, but scientists sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees,
because they’re looking down a microscope.
The DNA code spells the word ‘and’ because genetics is all about putting
one thing ‘and’ another thing together. When one person ‘and’ another
person make a baby together, the baby’s genetics are a mixture of one
person ‘and’ another person, but stirred together, like when you make
strawberry ‘and’ banana Nesquik in the same cup ‘and’ it’s a whole new
flavour, like banawberry. That’s genetics.
 DNA was discovered by two men in their 1940s in the 50s, Francis Crick,
and Dr Watson, who had stopped working for Sherlock Holmes by that
time. They found that the shape of each DNA was a double helicopter,
exactly as Leonard Da Vinci had originally drawn in one of his drawings
hundreds of years before. When Crick and Dr Watson won the Nobel Peace
Prize for Science, Leonard Da Vinci did not get any credit, because he was
dead, which remains a controversy to this day. If Leonard Da Vinci had
started genetics all that time ago, we’d probably be able to not only clone a
sheep by now, but put a mouse’s ear on its back, and land it on the moon.
When scientists write down DNA, they do it using four letters, A, G, C
and T, for some reason, even though those aren’t the first letters of the
alphabet, and it looks a bit like they’ve got distracted and started thinking
about Gin and Tonic.
Every double helicopter of DNA is made of these letters in a big string.
It’s not clear how you get the letters into a human body. Maybe it’s like a
tapeworm, but made of that sticky plastic dymo stuff lonely granddads use
to label stuff in sheds. A dymotapeworm.
If you copy all the letters in some DNA exactly, you can copy a whole
person, which is called cloning. A clone person would be exactly the same
as the original person, because their AGCTs were the same, and if they
stood next to each other it would be impossible to tell the difference, like
Ant and Dec when they started, or The Proclaimers. Only when one did the
high bit and the other did the low bit would you be able to identify the clone
Proclaimer.
I don’t know why anyone would want to clone The Proclaimers, because
there’s already two of them. Cloning The Proclaimers is an experiment that
only a madman would attempt. I reckon they should make it illegal, just in
case. It would make more sense to clone someone there’s only one of, like
Seal, in case one of the Seals gets run over by a bus, or clubbed to death. In
the future, this will be so normal, you won’t even notice it, when there are
two of everybody, except The Proclaimers, who there are only two of.

Governments
Governments was invented in the olden days, to stop kings doing anything
they wanted, which was good because some of them did all sorts of daft
bollocks, like King Kong punching that aeroplane, and King Rollo climbing
that tree and getting all mud on his trousers.
Now, governments is typically enormous, and do everything that the
ordinary man or woman in the street can’t be arsed to do, from bailing out
banks when they overspend to making people homeless on purpose. Some
people say this is a good reason to have a small government, but that’d be
no use because it wouldn’t understand the needs of normal-sized people like
me, and they’d make the doors too small on buses, like they do in castles,
and all the coins would be like the 5p and you’d keep dropping them.
The government was a way of doing what ordinary people covered in
mud wanted in all the little villages in the country. Each group of filthy
yokels would choose one person, called an MP of parliament, who’d put the
ideas in a bag or something, and ride on a horse to a building in the biggest
village, usually London, where the ideas could be calmly debated in a
metropolitan bubble. This was, until the internet was invented, the best way
of having arguments about important stuff like housing, roads and who’s
racist.
Until you can take all the things people say under news stories on the
internet and really turn that into law, we will have to have governments. It’s
not ideal, but it’s better than still letting a king or queen into a position of
power, which would be unthinkable in a modern 20th century country like
Britain.

Unanswered Questions about Government

• Do dogs have governments?
• Is there a sort of government where every single person has their own Big Ben?
• Is Big Ben the name of the clock? Or the monster?
• Why has the word ‘governmental’ got the word ‘mental’ at the end? Is it a warning?

Gravity
Gravity is what makes things go down. Not go down like a balloon or go
down like someone on Pornhub, but go down as in go down, towards the
down bit of wherever the going is happening.
 Gravity means that if there weren’t walls in the way, and you dropped a
grapefruit in Doncaster, it would keep rolling downwards until it reached
Southampton. And if the grapefruit rolled onto a boat there, it would keep
going until it reached Australia, where, because there’s nowhere else for it
to roll down to, it would stop. It’s only lucky that we invented walls
otherwise everything we wanted would be in Australia, and that would be
really inconvenient, and some of the best things (ice cream, Maltesers)
would melt.
Gravity was discovered by Sir Isaac Neutron and accident. He was sitting
under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head. The blow to the head
made him really clever and posh, like sometimes happens in cartoons, and
he used that to work out what gravity was. By the time he’d had another
bonk on the head, and got back to being normal again, he’d solved most of
the universe. It’s one of the most inspiring stories in all of science.
Nobody knows where gravity comes from. It doesn’t seem to run out
ever, no matter how many things we drop, so it’s clearly still being made
somewhere. Maybe it’s best not to think about what it is or how it’s made
too much, and just enjoy it, like a kebab.

Great Exhibition, The

The Queen Victorians wanted to show off what they were good at, and what
they were good at was showing off. So, in 1851, they built a great
exhibition, and called it the Great Exhibition. (They’d had so many good
ideas for steam engines, they didn’t have any left for names.) It was sort of
a big launch, like they have for a new Playstation, except for everything.
The Victorian Empire was so technologically advanced that it made the
rest of the world look like a lump of wood. This was like the future, but a
Victorian future. Which is the past. And the Queen Victorians believed their
empire would last for ever – so to prove that, they showed it off in a
building made of the strongest substance known to man: glass.
The Great Exhibition was meant to get everyone excited about
manufactured goods. It was basically the Argos catalogue in a shed.
Imagine a Minnellium Dome, but one that people actually wanted to go and
see, and that they stored something interesting in it, rather than just the
national collection of disappointed children.
 The glass house and the empire are no longer there, but you can get a
sense of what they must have been like by imagining you’re a Victorian,
and then imagining you weren’t wrong about everything.
 H

Hair
Hair is the human body’s decoration. It’s basically body tinsel. Most hair
gathers on humans in the most important places: around the bits and coming
out of the brain.
Animals have hair, too, but because they have far more of it, it’s called
‘fur’, which is the old word for ‘far more’. (Horses have hair, because they
count as human, for obvious reasons.) It’s a pity fur isn’t called something
that reflects its nature as all-over hair, like ‘everywhair,’ but then animals
don’t have the same imagination as humans so they couldn’t think up
something as clever as that. The only animals clever enough to think of
something like this are crows and dolphins, and they don’t need a word for
all-over hair, because they haven’t got any.
Eventually, science will probably prove where hair ends and fur starts. A
bit like it’ll prove where sheds end and barns begin, or where mist ends and
fog begins, or where shoes end and skis begin.
Hair comes in different shapes and colours. Lots of the colours are named
after food, like ginger, strawberry blonde and potato brown, although I’ve
only ever seen that last one on a box of remaindered Estonian hair dye in
Poundland and they’d spelled potato with a ‘b’. And there are almost as
many hair shapes as there are hairs: perm, fade, Afro, lob, mullet – they all
sound like characters from a banned children’s programme.
The worst hairstyles are worn exclusively by white men you wouldn’t
want to be trapped in a stalled train carriage with: Donald Trump and his
golden candyfloss; Jimmy Savile and his dirty white bell; Noel Edmonds
and his Dutch cottage. Elaborate and frightening crests are nature’s way of
warning you to keep away.
When you look at them under a microscope, hairs are surprisingly
enormous, like everything. You don’t realise how enormous they are usually
because you take them for granted, like water and parents. Each hair has a
long bit, which is the hair, and a small fat end which lives inside you, called
the bollicle. Hairs drink sweat and skin oils, which is why we don’t keep
them as pets. Humans have up to 150,000 hairs on their head, which is
enough to stretch from Trafalgar Square to Woking (or St Albans if you’ve
had a choppy bob).
They say if you don’t wash your hair, it cleans itself. But this isn’t true:
what actually happens is it gets matted up and starts to smell of Wimpy, and
people start moving away from you on buses, and eventually you get forced
to wash it or you don’t get your clothing allowance. Just ask Mick
Hucknall.

Heat Death of the Universe, The

One day, experts reckon, the universe is going to just stop. The last drop of
energy will run out, every single point in the whole of space will be still and
lifeless and time itself will grind to a horrible halt. It’ll be like working in
JJB Sports in Basildon, but worse.
Apparently there’s only so much energy in the universe and we’re using it
up every time we boil a kettle or run for a bus or burp or use a fidget
spinner. There’s no way of avoiding it. Even if you lagged the universe, like
you do your loft, energy would leak out. It’s not clear where it’s leaking to,
because it’s the universe. Probably into a different universe, where they’re
absolutely cock-a-hoop, like when you can get your neighbour’s wi-fi.
But everything is sort of slowing down.
Imagine the start of the universe was a big Monday with loads to do, and
we’re heading towards an inevitable Sunday afternoon where everyone’s
full of roast and crumble and the Antiques Roadshow is on and you can’t
really be arsed to do a thing. That’s how it all ends. With every single atom
in the universe slumped half-watching pensioners in car coats queuing
outside Beaulieu Motor Museum to meet a man in a waistcoat who knows
everything in the world about Toby jugs. That’s what we’ve got to look
forward to. It’s enough to make you chuck it in.

Henry of Eight
After Henry of Seven came to the end of his reign in 1509, he regenerated
into Henry Of Eight – the big one. The Tom Baker of kings. He’s the one, if
you drew a king, you’d definitely do. Him or King Kong.
Henry Of Eight enjoyed standing with his legs apart, bellowing and
writing catchy but repetitive songs – a sort of Tudor Status Quo. If you’ve
ever rung a doorbell in Basildon, you’ll know his stuff.
He had eight wives, all called Catherine, so he wouldn’t shout the wrong
name in bed. He was a Catherine-aholic, sometimes shortened to ‘Catholic’.
His first wife was Catherine of Aragon. He returned her to the church
because she wasn’t working properly and couldn’t make a baby – just like
you’d return dodgy hair straighteners to Argos. His second wife, Catherine
of Anne Boleyn, worked a bit better, and nearly did a baby, but Henry fell
off a horse and the shock stopped her working. Henry lost his rag with her,
and started having it off with Catherine of Jane Seymour. And just so
Catherine of Anne Boleyn wouldn’t notice, he cut her head off.
Catherine of Jane Seymour was the first of his wives who worked
properly, and she gave birth to a son, Prince Edward, in the year 1537 and
her bed. Sadly, as soon as she became a mum, she stopped working properly
and died twelve days later. Henry was distraught, but had to find another
wife; and he found one in a painting of Catherine of Anne of Cleves. Her
name was Catherine of Anne of Cleves. She turned out to be a bit of a
Disprin, so the marriage was dissolved.
With Henry’s chronic wife addiction left untreated, he got another one:
Catherine Howard. She was too much like him – always having it off
elsewhere – so he had her head cut off to make her less attractive to other
men, and married Catherine Parr instead.
But all Henry’s flip-flopping between women had caused problems with
the Pope, who didn’t like Henry dumping his wife every time there was a
new bit of skirt in town. So Henry basically dumped the Catholic Church
and started seeing a new one: The Church of England. And, although he
never married the CofE (probably because it wasn’t called Catherine) he
had an affair with it for the rest of his life.
By the end of his life, Henry was almost completely spherical. Kings in
those days ate loads, and Henry’s kitchens at Hampton Court Palace were
the fucking nuts. Unfortunately, he eventually ate so much that he basically
burst.
So what was so great about Henry Of Eight? Why is he the king we all
know about, unlike, say, Richard V or King Crimson? Well, for a start he
was fat. And fat people are always more memorable than thin ones, because
they take up more room in the memory: that’s why we all still remember
Father Christmas even though he’s dead. And Henry was memorable
because he was randy. When he wasn’t eating himself massive, he was
having it off. He was a sort of cross between Augustus Gloop and Russell
Brand.
He also had a zany sense of humour. He ate peacocks for the hell of it and
once had a man boiled to death. And he left behind two amazing properties
– the biggest garden in Britain: Richmond Park, which is still full of the
ancestors of the deers that he was too fat to hunt properly – and Hampton
Court Palace, a theme park dedicated to himself, like Disneyworld with
harpsichord music.
Henry Of Eight was the kingiest king there has ever been. It’s hard to
imagine there being another Henry Of Eight, probably because we’d have to
call him Henry 8S or Henry 9 or Henry X or whatever.

Hiccups
One of the strangest things the human body can do is to hiccup (or, to use
the correct medical term, ‘do a hiccup’.)
Science has struggled to explain hiccups for many months. There are
theories, like that it’s the body’s alarm clock going off, or that it’s a small
internal organ left over from when we were frogs that sounds off now and
then, but doesn’t mean there’s anything to worry about, like a fire alarm
drill in an office that everybody ignores every Friday.
But if hiccups were like a fire alarm drill, how would you know when
they were a real fire alarm, and that you should run screaming from the
human body because it’s on fire? That’s another question that science hasn’t
got round to answering, along with ‘What’s the difference between a cold
and a chill?’ and ‘How do you clean cheese off the joints of a sandwich
toaster?’
Perhaps there’s a clue to what hiccups is in the word ‘hiccups’. The ‘hic’
bit is obviously the noise, but what’s the ‘cups’? Nobody knows. So
perhaps there’s not a clue to what hiccups is in the word ‘hiccups’. Perhaps
I’m wrong.
Perhaps I’ve been wrong about everything. Perhaps this whole book is a
waste of time. Maybe all the time I’ve been dictating this into my phone, I
could have been doing something worthwhile, like asking it to play songs
about doctors. Why aren’t there more songs about doctors? You’d think
people would want them, but I can only think of about one. Or maybe none.
You’d think there’d be more. The world’s amazing like that. Anyway, that’s
hiccups.

Human Mind, The

One of the most mysterious journeys that science has ever taken isn’t
through the sea, or into the Moon, but down behind the human face, into the
brain.
The brain makes up around 2 per cent of an average human’s body
weight, which means that if you are thinner than average, a bigger
proportion of your body is made up of brain. This is why we listen to what
famous people like actors say, because generally they are thinner, and
therefore cleverer than the rest of us.
The brain is the most complexated part of the body. Compared to the
brain, your hand might as well be your bum. That’s how complexated the
brain is.
To understand the brain, imagine a cauliflower. Which looks a bit like a
brain. Because you’re imagining a cauliflower, your brain is now, like, a
cauliflower, but with another cauliflower inside: a thought cauliflower.
How that thought cauliflower got there is amazing. The human brain
contains millions of small bits called neurons that store ideas, called ideas.
If you could take the top off your head without dying or getting leaves on
your brain, you’d see little bits of lightning all moving about on the
cauliflowery bit, which are what ideas look like, except to see in the top of
your own head you’d have to put your eyes on a sort of selfie-stick and that
might stop them working.
These tiny bits of lightning can join together, so that small, simple ideas
(pointing your finger, say) can become bigger, more complex, layered ideas
(let’s open a shop over there where I’m pointing that sells upcycled clocks
made out of old dialysis machines, because that’s the sort of hipster rubbish
that sells quite well these days, and it might make a little bit of money, but
hang on, where would we get a load of old dialysis machines, and it’s
probably really hard to make clock mechanisms and I don’t really have the
skills or the tools, and actually I’ve not really thought this through, maybe
I’ll just pretend I was pointing at the Chicken Cottage, so if I say let’s go to
Chicken Cottage, we could just go and get some dippers and I quite fancy
dippers, but haven’t I got that leftover macaroni cheese in the fridge I
opened when I was drunk and I should probably just eat that, so maybe
dippers is a bad idea, and now I’m just standing pointing, and I’m not sure I
can style this out, oh good, a pigeon, I’ll pretend I was pointing at the
pigeon and nobody has to get any dialysis machines or dippers and we’ve
made a lucky escape there, look, a pigeon) and that’s the brain doing what it
does best.
And the mystery doesn’t stop at the brain, because inside the brain is an
even bigger mystery: the human mind. You can’t see the mind, or touch it,
or taste it, though if you could taste it, it would probably taste like a cross
between a cauliflower and something magical, like Baked Alaska or I Can’t
Believe It’s Not Butter.
The mind is said to contain everything we are. Think about that for a
minute. Now stop, because it doesn’t make sense. Everything we are is a
big fucking deal. Some of what we are is in there: our memories, our
dreams, our PIN numbers.
But a lot of what we are isn’t in our minds. Our driving licences aren’t in
our minds. Our saucepans aren’t in our minds. Our hairdressers aren’t in our
minds. (Unless you’ve got an imaginary hairdresser, like kids have
imaginary friends. That’s not such a bad idea. It’d be someone to tell about
your holidays, if no one at work was interested, I suppose.)
Boffins who have studied the mind using their own minds have come to
some grim conclusions: either that the human mind isn’t capable of
understanding the human mind, or that understanding the human mind
causes a human’s mind to blow.
But how can the human mind be so confusing to the human mind? After
all, the human mind can understand some of the most absurdly complexated
things, like tennis and recipes and insurance. Perhaps it’s a shortcoming of
the human body – a bit like how you’ll never look yourself in the eyes, or
taste your own tongue, or rest your head gently on your own chest and cry
your heart out about how you’ll never taste your own tongue.
Plenty of people have wasted their time trying to understand the human
mind. And not just scientists and Einsteins, either. Fullosophers, who are
like scientists (but scientists who don’t bother actually doing anything) have
for centuries asked questions about what the mind is for, and never come up
with any proper answers, so maybe that answered their question: it’s for
thinking about proper things, like whether you want dippers, not all that
rubbish, which it can’t do at all.
A French fullosopher called Renny De Scarts came up with a famous
quote: ‘I think therefore I am,’ which, even though it’s not as good as ‘I’ll
be back’ or ‘Bazinga’, and so isn’t on as many stickers and mugs, has
remained quite popular even though he never finished it and said what he
therefore was. Maybe it’s popular because you can finish it yourself, with
whatever you like: ‘I think therefore I am hungry,’ or ‘I think therefore I am
Adam Woodyatt’. It leaves space for you to think your own thinks, which is
what the brain is for.
It’s amazing to think that a million years ago we couldn’t use our brains
to read or write, because we just thought about dinosaurs and grunting. So
in another million years, who knows what we’ll be able to do with our
brains? Maybe we’ll be able to tell what card someone’s thinking of, or
bend spoons, or saw a lady in half. Our brains might be so advanced that we
could actually imagine everything. Imagine that.
Perhaps one day, a mind will be grown big enough to understand the
human mind. Until then, it remains a beautiful cauliflowery mystery, like
the whereabouts of Lord Lucan or the success of Simon Cowell.
 I

Ice Cream
In the olden days, things was simpler. Ice cream came in one flavour: plain.
Then boffins discovered raspberry ripple, which at the time was like the
Large Hadron Colander discovering whatever it is it’s looking for. To be
honest they should set the Hadron thing looking for new ice cream flavours.
But then I suppose Switzerland’s mainly yoghurt, so they’ve not got the
heritage.
Plain ice cream came in two types: the one you got in the shops, which
was standard issue yellow, and the one you got on the street, which was
white. Ice cream is probably the only food to roam the streets in vans
looking for consumers. It’s weird that such a popular food should be so
needy. You’d think it’d be the unpopular foods that needed to be hawked
round the streets. Maybe if there was Brussels sprouts vans, we’d all like
them more.

Ice Cream Accessories

Most people like to pimp their ice cream with something. The most common accessory is the
Flake. If you add a Flake to an ice cream (though it’s only half a Flake, actually) it’s called a
99, because no matter how many problems you’ve got, the ice cream isn’t one of them. The
next most common is Sprinkles, which used to be called Hundreds And Thousands, before
the EU counted them and realised there were billions in existence, but only a few dozen on
every ice cream, so outlawed the term. Sauce is allowed, especially chocolate and strawberry,
but mainly strawberry. Things not to pimp your ice cream with include UV lights, go-faster
stripes and alloys.

Then, in the 1980s, the world of ice cream went absolutely fucking
berserk. The Viennetta came out. No one had ever seen anything like it
before, not even in their dreams. It was what ice cream would look like on
its wedding day. Suddenly ice cream was big news. It made everyone forget
the IRA and AIDS and now if you look at the history pages on the internet,
they’re never about 1980s wars or politicians, they’re mainly about the
history of Viennetta!
* if you type ‘Viennetta’ in

Nowadays, anything is allowed in ice cream, the weirder, the better: salt,
tequila, even mustard – that maniac Charlton Heston Blumenthal made a
mustard ice cream, just in case anyone wanted to put the tin hat on a nice
dinner by being sick everywhere.

Industrial Revolution, The

The Victorians invented something that was to change the world, and that
something was something called steam. Steam is what you get when you
make water absolutely furious. It’s hot, unpredictable, powerful and lethal,
like Mel Gibson.
The Victorians used steam to power huge engines, which could be put in
factories, trains and the Science Museum. Before steam, all the hard work
had to be done by horses. But unlike horses, steam could be pumped along
pipes and stored in kettles without upsetting the RSPCA.
Now the Victorians had big engines, they could build big factories. Huge
places, full of noise and machinery and with only the most basic break-out
spaces and no wi-fi.
People worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days with no lunch break and had
to clean their own equipment and were sometimes even attacked by their
bosses – conditions unthinkable to anyone these days who doesn’t work for
the NHS. You could be fined for talking, whistling or leaving the room – it
was like one really big, super-serious GCSE. Workers were even punished
by having their ears nailed to the table: something unimaginable now, when
it’s only willies that are nailed to things – and not for punishment, but for
funishment.
The rise in industrialisation meant a rise in poverty too. Changes in the
way things were made – by machines, not people – put many out of work.
Say you used to make furniture for a living: well, now there were machines
that did that. So you were out of a job. And the only job you could get was
making a machine that made furniture. Except there aren’t any machines
that look like chairs or pouffes, so your skills were useless. You could try
getting a job as a machine, but machines were better qualified, and worked
longer hours. Even traditional trades like Jack the Ripping were threatened,
by newfangled person-killing machines like the train crash. In the end
everyone had to become a chimney sweep or a Scrooge or an urchin,
because there weren’t any machines that could do those jobs. It was
horrible.
Transport was upgraded during the Industrial Revolution. Roads were
improved so they didn’t get waterlogged, and special very waterlogged
roads called canals were built. And, of course, there was the railway. The
railway made moving things by train easier than before, when there were
trains but no railway.
Trains could take stuff huge distances, and they worked much harder and
faster than horses. Unlike horses, they had big smiling faces on the front,
and the voice of Ringo Starr. It might seem cruel to have worked them so
hard, but these jolly creatures didn’t mind it. You could say the train was the
most revolutionary animal that mankind had ever domesticated, until the
Furby.
One of the things the railway could move was people, into cities from out
in the countryside where they used to be farmers or horses or smallholders,
which is people that don’t have much. And once people moved into the
cities, they came face-to-face with the reality of the metropolitan elite
lifestyle: overcrowding, slums, workhouses, lack of sanitation, cholera and
enormous hats.
Industry took advantage of all the latest inventions: the telegraph, very
much the internet of its day, the telephone, very much the internet of its day,
and the typewriter and the postage stamp, which combined were very much
the internet of their day.
It didn’t last, of course. Soon the Industrial Revolution stopped
industrially revolving, and people rediscovered the joys of nature, by
moving all the industrial units into fields near main roads in the
countryside, where they were closer to the garden centre. These days, no
one works in these factories and mills except ghosts, and even then, they
only work night shifts.
But without the Industrial Revolution, we wouldn’t have bicycles and tins
of beans, and IKEA would be literally empty. We’d all be riding around in
handmade buses catching fish and making our own entertainment, and
instead of Twitter there’d be a scarecrow competition. It’d be completely
shithouse.
 iPhone, The
In the olden days, when phones were young, they were big things with bells
in them and a massive sort of Spirograph arrangement of numbers, and they
were actually part of a building: attached to the wall, or built into a cast iron
on-street toilet cubicle. Then, as they grew up, they left home, like people
do, and you could carry them in your pocket. And then, as they got old, they
got smaller, like people do. And then, like people do, they died.
When phones died was when a completely new phone was born. And that
phone was the iPhone. It had a small letter at the front, just like the word
‘phone’ always did, but a big letter next, signifying that this was something
important, like a famous person or a Volvo.
The iPhone wasn’t just a phone: it was also a camera and a diary and a
television and an address book and a notepad and an atlas and a radio and a
torch and a calculator and a clock and a hi-fi and a cupboard full of games
and a pile of remote controls and a minicab office and a bookshop and a
fitness instructor and a tour guide and a translator and a weather forecaster
and a travel agent and a genius. It was like a cross between the contents of a
school bag and everything else in the world.
This was a device which revolutionised our attention spans, crushing
them down smaller than ever before. Now we didn’t need to be drunk to
walk straight into lamp-posts. Now we didn’t need to pay attention to the
TV any more. Now we could have conversations with people miles away
from the comfort of the cinema. Now we could sharpen our reflexes by only
noticing the car in front had stopped at the last minute when we looked up
from Facebook.
But though the iPhone was the biggest new invention since, I don’t know,
wood or something, it couldn’t do everything – and even though I’ve
suggested it to the guy at Carphone Warehouse every time I’ve been in,
there still isn’t an app that can tell me how many crisps there are in a
packet.
Obviously, like everyone, I’ve memorised the important ones – 53 in a
packet of Hula Hoops, 25 in a packet of Quavers, 17 in a packet of Monster
Munch, 31 in a packet of Mini Cheddars and 42 in a packet of Wotsits – but
what happens when there’s only own brand crisps in the shop, or if I’m at
the pub and they’ve got those posh ones with pictures of fields and
ingredients on them? That’s when the app CunkCrispCount would come in
vitally handy. It could even save a life. Imagine someone was allergic to
more than ten Doritos and they didn’t know there are fifteen in a packet –
those last five could be the difference between a delicious mouthful of
Chilli Heatwave and death.

Iron Age, The

The Iron Age came about when primitive cave-boffins discovered new
materials. Early man dropped rocks like a stone, and got into metal, bronze
and then iron. Iron Man was born.
This Iron Man didn’t have superpowers like the Iron Man in films – he
couldn’t fly or tolerate Gwyneth Paltrow — so instead he had to go to
lengthy measures to defend himself. Luckily cave-boffins had also invented
the iron spike. And shortly after inventing the spike, they invented stabbing
each other.
To make sure they stabbed the right people, Britons formed into primitive
gangs, called tribes. It was war. But crap war. Iron Man didn’t just do
violence, he painted himself blue first, like a Millwall fan. He wasn’t a nice
blue man like the Blue Man Group or Avatar or Mr Bump, but angry and
blue, like a rabid Smurf.
But their faces weren’t the only things that were outrageous and blue.
There was also hills. Iron Age hills were just covered in huge drawings of
men with colossal prongs. You didn’t know where to look.
Before Snapchat, hills were the most efficient way to distribute cock pics
to a wide audience. The hill was very much the internet of its day. These
NSFW hills can still leave you open- mouthed. This one, the Cerne Abbas
Giant, would remain Britain’s biggest hillside dick, until 2009, when Chris
Moyles trained to climb Mount Kilimanjaro – and it remains the second
crudest Hill in British history, after Benny.
 The Cerne Abbas Giant

There’s disagreement about how old the Cerne Abbas giant actually is,
especially since he’s still young enough to get wood. What’s not in doubt is
that he represents the birth of British art, being the biggest example of a
noble visual tradition that’s echoed down the ages.

Traditional British art

 Fun fact: nobody knows where Iron Man found the iron. Maybe it was in
the cupboard under the stairs. That’s where mine usually is.
 J

Jazz
Jazz is sort of music, but clever. It’s not as clever as classical, which you
need exams to understand, but it’s a lot cleverer than, say, grime or
Coldplay.
Jazz was discovered in America in the early 20th century, hiding inside
the blues, which was sad songs sung by people who’d been made slaves.
Slaves are a sort of worker who’s only paid once, and the money’s given to
someone else. This arrangement made them so sad they played songs on a
guitar, because they couldn’t afford orchestras, on a porch, because they
couldn’t afford wherever it is orchestras live.
The main thing about jazz is that it’s made up. All music is made up, but
usually only once – you write the song, and then you sing it. Jazz is
different. It’s made up every time you play it, which must be exhausting and
is possibly a waste of notes. There are only so many notes in the world, and
one day they’re going to start to run out. Future generations might see jazz
in the same way we now see plastic – a terrible waste of resources, tipping
loads of notes into landfill, polluting the planet with saxophone solos and
trumpet noises. Hopefully science will one day work out a way to recycle
notes, perhaps into new music, hopefully not for Sting.
Saxophones and trumpets are very much the bread and spread of jazz.
Also common are the trombone (which looks like a cross between a trumpet
and a rocket launcher), the double bass (a violin for giants) and the piano
(you know what a piano is, so I’m not looking that one up). There are some
instruments that aren’t allowed to do jazz by law, like the harp, the
xylophone and the church organ. Jazz on any of these would sound frankly
ridiculous, and the jazz police would come down on them like a ton of
police.
Jazz even has its own language. It’s called scat, and you definitely
shouldn’t Google it. I don’t even want this millionaire’s shortbread now.
Famous jazz people include Ellie Fitzgerald, Dave Brewdog and HRH
The Duke of Ellington.
 Jesus
Jesus (full name Jesus Christ) is famous because he gave his name to two
separate things to shout when a bus drives straight past you at the stop
without stopping (his nearest competitor Gordon Bennett only got one). He
was also one of the most important men who ever lived, if he did, which he
did. In many countries, we even count our dates from when he was born,
and the ‘C’ in BC is for ‘Christ’, which shows how important he was.
Christ was born around 4BC, four years before the birth of Christ, in the
oh little town of Bethlehem, in what is now one of the countries they have
on that map on the news all the time. Jesus’s mother was Mary, a
professional virgin, and his two dads were Joseph, a carpenter, and God, an
all powerful mega-being. It’s amazing that Mary and him got on. They had
nothing in common, and the power dynamic would have been very one-
way. It’s a bit like when you go out with a teacher. It’s just wrong.
The Romans, who were in charge in BC times, said Joseph had to go to
do some paperwork. In those days there wasn’t much paper, so you had to
walk miles to find it. When Joseph and his little donkey got to the town
where the paper was, there was no room for Mary to lay her baby, but an
innkeeper shoved them all outside, and soon Jesus was eventually born in a
stable condition.
We know about Jesus’s life and what he said and what he was like
because it was written down in the Bible. And luckily for us, it wasn’t just
written down one time, but four times, contradicting each other, by some
people who met him (and some who didn’t) about thirty to seventy years
after he’d died, which is the best way to get the facts straight when you
write a book about anybody.
When I read Straight Up by Danny Dyer, I kept thinking to myself, this
would be much better if instead of Danny Dyer writing about stuff that was
happening to him and what he thought, four different people who weren’t
Danny Dyer didn’t write about Danny Dyer at all yet, but waited until about
the year 2060, and then tried to remember what Danny Dyer thought and
did and was like, and that was the book instead. I think that would be, if it’s
possible to believe such a thing, an even better book than Straight Up by
Danny Dyer. This is no disrespect to Danny Dyer. I’d like to stress that
Straight Up by Danny Dyer is one of my favourite books I’ve ever read,
and I’m looking forward to finishing it.
Unlike Danny Dyer, Jesus never appeared in the film Run For Your Wife,
or EastEnders. Instead he did the next best thing for the times. He stood on
hills and told people off. It’s hard to imagine, but centuries before the
invention of radio or the channel Dave Ja Vu, and nearly two thousand
years before the painting and decorating sitcom Brush Strokes, this was all
there was. People came from miles around and got well into it. In a way,
standing on hills and telling people off was very much the internet of its
day.
If you want to get an idea of what it would have been like to go and see
Jesus standing about and telling strangers off, you can go to any shopping
precinct, where his followers do the same to this day, often into
megaphones. What made Jesus different than someone shouting outside
Claire’s Accessories is that he was not probably a bit mad. Jesus proved he
wasn’t mad by saying he was the son of God, could walk on water, and
raise the dead. And over ten people heard him and followed him (twelve).
It’s easy to see why he changed the world.
He changed water into wine, rode a little donkey, chased some money out
of a temple, taught a blind man to see and fed five thousand loaves to some
fish, inventing the fish finger. He also cured some disabled people. He did
this by telling them their sins were forgiven, and once they had been
forgiven of these bad things that they had done, they could walk again.
Because to Jesus, who was meek and kind, not being able to walk was
definitely your own fault. By simply purging people of bad thoughts and
deeds, their illnesses and weaknesses were cured. Philosophically he was
very much somewhere between Katie Hopkins and Noel Edmonds.
Eventually, those over ten people following Jesus became a proper pain in
the arse to the Romans, who wanted everyone to believe in their gods –
Hercules, Asterix, Quasimodo – rather than the Father, Son and Holy Spirit:
the single god of the Christian religion.
The Romans tricked one of Jesus’s followers – Judas (whose name means
‘he who can do Judo’) – into doing exactly what Jesus wanted, and he
betrayed him by snogging him in a park, which brought the Romans down
on him like a ton of bricks. Judas is hated to this day by all Christians,
because if he hadn’t betrayed Jesus, Jesus would never have been nailed to
a cross by the Romans, and could have lived for ever. Instead of a cross,
Christians would have to wear a little model of a man being fine and just
getting on with stuff and getting old. It’s not as good a logo, so I think Judas
gets pretty shoddy treatment here. Christianity took the world by storm, and
Judas’s influence on the branding can’t be underestimated.
After Jesus was killed by the Romans, he [SPOILERS] came back from
the dead, like Freddy Krueger. But instead of cutting everybody up with
scissors fingers, he flew up into the sky, where he lives to this day, with his
dad. It’s unusual for a father to get custody, but that’s God for you.
Because of Jesus’s life and sacrifice, he saved every person on Earth.
Jesus was the only son of God, and it’s quite nice that he sent his only son
to this planet, rather than any of the other planets in the whole of his
creation, because there are billions, apparently. It’s nice to think that
wherever E.T. lives, and however much he cares for plants and opens the
hearts of little boys, that little alien will burn in hell for all eternity, because
he didn’t get a Jesus. There is only one. And we got him. Screw you,
squashy.
 K
King Arthur
King Arthur was the greatest king of England that never existed. At the age
of fifteen, he pulled a non-existent sword called Excalibur out of a made-up
stone and became king. In those days, you had to qualify.
He lived in a castle called Camelot, which he didn’t because it didn’t
exist, and had a wizard called Merlin except he didn’t and invented a round
table, which was a sort of lazy Susan, which meant his knights could get at
the snacks they wanted without having to move around in their armour,
except they and the table weren’t there either.
Some of the imaginary knights went off to look for a holy cup, which
isn’t a thing. One of them went mad and became a hermit crab, and one of
them died – even though they didn’t.
When he knew he was dying, which he wasn’t because he wasn’t real, he
gave his non-existent sword to Sir Bedevere, who wasn’t there, who threw
it into a lake someone thought of where a lady’s hand that was nothing of
the sort caught it.
It might be a load of bollocks, but it’s a cracking good story, and without
it we wouldn’t have Roxy Music’s Avalon or Monty Python’s Life Of Brian.
It’s hard to imagine Britain at all without the existence of King Arthur. But
because he didn’t exist, we have to. Which is maybe why we are where we
are today, wherever that is.

King Isambard of Brunel

King Isambard of Brunel was one of the best engineers of the Victorians
times. He constructed bridges, tunnels and boats as well as the largest
freestanding top hat in Britain. If anyone needed to get anywhere, Brunel
would change how they did it, whether it was to America by boat, across
the Thames by tunnel, into Bristol by bridge, or under a low doorway by top
hat.
 Brunel’s most famous boat was the Great Britain, so called because it
weighed as much as Great Britain. It wasn’t made of wood, that floats on
water, like a boat, but iron, that doesn’t. This was because Brunel had
worked out that the most famous boats are the ones that sink, and his name
would live for ever if he made one of those. He wasn’t wrong, and even
though his boat didn’t sink, we all still think it should of, and now everyone
knows the name King Isambard of Brunel.
Sadly he didn’t leave an heir, and a revolution in the kingdom of Brunel
meant he was its last ever king.
 L
Language
Human beings are, as far as we know, the only creatures to have evolved a
complex verbal language to communicate ideas, except Smurfs. But while
the Smurf language only has one word for everything (‘smurf’) the human
language has words for all different things, which has made it possible for
us to dominate the whole planet, not just a little cluster of toadstool houses.
Not only does human language have words for everything, it has loads of
different words for everything depending on where you live. For example,
what the English call ‘a chauffeur’ is called ‘un chauffeur’ in France, our
word ‘table’ is their word ‘table’ (but with a shrug and a cigarette), and if
you tried to order an Eau De Cologne in a French restaurant, you’d have a
great deal of trouble making yourself understood at all. Believe me, I’ve
tried.
The many different languages make it much easier for humans not to
understand each other, which is a great help to both arms manufacturers and
racists. Several idiots have tried to develop a universal language, but
everybody would have to learn it, and that seems a bit of a faff when most
foreign-language-speakers are quite happy putting up with British people
just talking a bit louder and pointing.
Scientists have studied whether humans learn language or are born with
it. But they haven’t studied it very hard because anyone who’s ever done a
long train journey knows babies only have one word and it’s screaming.
They’re like a little one-person hen party. That’s not language. If they were
born with language you wouldn’t have to keep saying words to them very
slowly in a head-injury voice and pointing at things, like a British tourist
trying to buy soap.
Scientists who study this sort of thing are called linguists and probably
feel a bit stupid at scientist parties when they have to make small talk with
people who look for black holes and cures for stuff. ‘What do you study?’
‘Words.’ ‘Isn’t that just reading slowly?’ Yes. Yes it is.
 Large Hadron Colander
The Large Hadron Colander is the most expensive colander ever built. It is
also the largest. If you want to colander some hadrons, there is no larger
place. The thing about hadrons is they’re quite large, hence the name, and
you need lots of room. Hadrons simply won’t fit into a smaller colander.
They’re not like peas.
The Large Hadron Colander was built in Switzerland, because they are
the world’s experts on colander holes, thanks to their longstanding work on
the holes in cheese. The holes in this colander are the best they can be. They
don’t let any of the hadrons out, to roll all over the floor and under
cupboards. The holes in the colander really are the Ferrari of holes. They
make the holes in the colander you might have in your kitchen look like a
horse and cart.
The Large Hadron Colander costs over £700m a year to keep running.
That might seem a lot, but once you understand what they’re doing it makes
more sense, I’d imagine. It must be important, or they wouldn’t do it.
Maybe the ordinary layman has trouble conceiving of how bad things
would be in the world if all those hadrons weren’t put in a colander, but that
doesn’t mean the boffins should stop. Good luck to them, I say. It’s not my
money.
Unless it is. In which case, stop.
Maybe it would help if we understood what a hadron was, but I’ve looked
it up, and it just made my head hot. I think we’re going to have to trust the
eggheads on this one. Unless it’s my money of course. Maybe we should all
check our bank statements. If you see a bill for colanders or science that
you weren’t expecting, have a word.

Unanswered Questions about the Large Hadron Colander

• If I paid for it, can I ride in it?
• Would it be a good idea to spend the same money again to build something else just as
good but something that ordinary people understand? Like a water slide? How good
would that be?
• Isn’t it time we left hadrons alone?
 Lies
Lies are meant to be bad, and in the Bible they’re one of the worst things
you can do that doesn’t involve an ox. Even though we all know lies are
wrong, lots of people tell lies for a living: magicians, actors, Donald
Trump.
Magicians tell nice lies, like ‘I can read your mind’. Actors do too: they
pretend to be other people. Adam Woodyatt isn’t really Ian Beale, even
though it’s literally the only thing he’s done his entire adult life. You could
say Adam Woodyatt’s whole life has been a nice lie, for him, and – in a
lesser sense – for us.
Donald Trump has a different definition of lying from most other people,
just like he has a different definition of sexual assault, or thinking, or hair.
When he lies, he points at other people and says they’re lying instead, to try
and draw attention away from what he’s doing, a bit like pointing at a really
fat person because you want to distract people from the fact that you’ve shat
your pants.
Maybe truth went out of fashion because so many liars got away with
ignoring it. Richard Nixon, Billary Clinton, Jeffrey Archer and maybe worst
of all, Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong had been an American hero. But
it turned out he’d been lying. It was hard to know what was worse: that he’d
taken shedloads of drugs, or that he’d never actually been to the Moon.
Maybe the worst liar ever was the wooden puppet Pinocchio. Every time
he lied, his film got longer. Or at least that’s how it felt when I had to watch
it with my niece.

Light
Light is the fastest animal in the world, even faster than a cheetah. Some
scientists say that light isn’t an animal, but ask them what light actually is,
and they can’t tell you. Believe me, I’ve tried. They haven’t got a Scooby.
They just start arguing about whether light is particular or waving or God
knows what and you glaze over and wished you’d asked something else.
 All things are either animal, vegetable or mineral. We know light is not a
vegetable, because it’s not green (except green lights, and even they change,
which vegetables don’t) and it’s not a mineral, because it’s not made of
rocks, so light is obviously an animal. This theory is mine, and if any
scientists would like to adopt it, they are welcome to as long as they
remember to name it after me and spell my name right.
Light is not only the fastest animal, it’s also one of the smallest. It can fit
into your eye, like a spider, and get under doors, like a mouse. But you can
tell it isn’t a spider or a mouse because it has a different number of legs
(none).
Light is so fast that a speed has been named after it: ‘the speed of light’.
The speed of light is what is known as a ‘constant’. This means it is the
same everywhere, like McDonald’s, and so light travels at exactly the same
speed anywhere you go in the whole universe, except underwater, where it’s
different.
To help understand light without worrying about if you’re underwater,
scientists measure it in a vacuum. Light isn’t the only animal that can be
measured in a vacuum. Hamsters, for example, are quite easy to measure in
a vacuum too. If you’ve got a load of hamsters running around in a room,
and you hoover them up, you can count them a lot easier once they’re in the
bag. It’s another bit of evidence for light being an animal. Copyright me.
Light turns out to be made up of lots of different colours, like Smarties. If
you want to see the colours, you need to get a special triangular wedge of
glass cheese called a prison. If you put light into the prison, it turns into a
rainbow, which is a lot cheerier than what happens to people when you put
them in a prison. But then most glass triangles aren’t full of 18-stone
psychopaths who’ve been secretly sharpening a toothbrush to use on
someone called Billy Eyeball in the laundry.
The seven colours that light breaks into are called red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, purple and purple again, making six colours in total. The easy
way to remember the order of these colours is to write it down somewhere.
The glass cheese light rainbow was discovered by the inventor of gravity,
Sir Isaac Neutron. He experimented on light by ramming a pointed stick
into his eye and found that he could see loads of colours, which was about
as surprising as his discovery that if you sit under an apple tree what
eventually falls on your head is an apple. When you think about it, it must
have been dead easy to discover stuff before all the stuff was discovered,
and it’s much harder now, which is why my theory about light being an
animal is even more amazing, because there’s less obvious stuff to just say
was your idea now, and you have to think outside the box a bit.

Longitude
All maps of the world are drawn on big graph paper, with squares, because
squares is the best way to divide up a round thing like a globe.
To help sailors and aeroplane drivers know which square they are on, the
lines have numbers. The ones from top to bottom are called latititude, and
it’s easy to tell which square you are on just by looking around you, because
the countries change a lot as you move from the top to the bottom of the
world. Spain is different from the North Pole, for instance, and has a totally
different number of penguins.
But working out where you are side to side – longitude – is harder,
because those countries are sort of the same, and nobody can really tell
which one’s Denmark and which one’s Holland without asking, and when
you do ask, the answer just sounds like the Swedish chef from the Muppets,
which is hopeless.
In Pirate Ship times this was a big problem. Also you couldn’t tell where
you were on the map because nobody had mobile phones that could just
ring up a stalactite navigation system in orbit and ask it what was your GPS.
In those days, phones were huge like they used to have on Saturday
Superstore, with those curly wires, and they were nailed to the wall of your
house, so it was no use if you were in a different country or the sea.
Eventually someone did work it out, using a clock. They’d set the clock
when they left the harbour to show breakfast time. Then they would know
which country they were in by looking at when people had breakfast. In
London, it would be quite early, because the trains are shit and you have to
leave a bit before you want to in case there’s signalling problems. But in
France, they’d loaf around in bed with strangers, having sex and smoking
until about eleven, so breakfast would be later. By checking when local
toasters popped up, sailors would know where they were. And that’s the
magnificent story of longitude.
 M

Medicine
For thousands of years, man has been getting better, thanks to one single
thing: medicines. Medicines means we can treat everything from made-up
diseases like the plague, to modern epidemics like allergicness to bread.
The word ‘medicine’ comes from the Latin word ‘medicina’, which
means ‘medicine A’, or ‘first medicine’. Before this first medicine, people
believed that sickness was caused by evil spirits, like Freddy Krueger, so it
was a relief to find that what caused people to be ill could be killed without
requiring sequels. The ancient Egyptians thought that onions were
medicine, but they’re not. They’re onions.
In the olden days, one way of medicine was to release the bad ghosts by
drilling a hole in someone’s head. This is why people today have nostrils.
To let the ghosts out, in the form of a sneeze. And that’s why it’s important
to say ‘bless you’. Otherwise you might go to hell.
Medicine comes in many forms. Some go inside, like tablets and
injections, and some go outside, like bandages and oinkment. There’s also
surgery, where they take what was inside and make it outside. And no
matter how much you want to, you’re not allowed to do that one yourself.
Most medicines have a scientific name, like Domestos, and a short
nickname that’s easy to remember, like E. The people who do medicine are
doctors. Doctors live in big houses called Bedside Manors. In a place called
Medical Essex.
In other countries and the past, only rich people can afford to get better,
but in this country, there is the National Health Surface, which means
everyone can get better if they don’t mind mashed potato and smells.
The National Health Surface was the invention of Doctor Beverage, the
inventor of drinks, who later became Doctor Pepper, and he promised he
would put everyone from a cradle into a grave. And that’s a promise they
keep to this day. Thanks to the NHS, you can just walk into your doctor’s
and get an appointment for any illness you’re expecting to have in about
two weeks.
 And it’s not just doctors. There are nurses, who are sort of miniature
doctors. They look after less serious things, like children. And there are
surgeons. Surgeons do years of training to learn which bits are which, how
to take them out if that’ll help and how to turn on taps with their elbows.
Skills.
These days surgeons can get inside you using your keyhole, but in the
olden days, even simple operations like sawing a lady in half used to be
brutal, and the only way to make it more bearable was to put a bit of wood
in someone’s mouth to stop all the complaints coming out. But now we
have anaesthetic, which made the process easier because instead of
blocking the mouth, it actually blocked the pain, using a bit of wood so tiny
it could fit inside a needle. I mean, I assume it’s still a bit of wood. Like a
sort of wondersplinter.
Giving someone an anaesthetic is a bit like putting a TV on standby. It’s
not on, but it’s not off. There’s not a little red light, instead the human body
goes ‘ping . . . ping . . . ping . . .’ so you know it’s still working. That’s
when the surgeons can go in and try to remove bits of you without your
nose buzzing.
Medicine and medical treatment have come a long way, baby. Only a few
years ago, we thought chewing gum would turn into a tree in your stomach.
Now, techniques like stem cell research mean that we’re only decades away
from building an entire person without having to wait nine months for a
baby.
And, as we all get healthier, doctors will have less and less to do, and will
die out like dinosaurs. Maybe one day the only way to see a doctor will be
in a museum, and our children’s children will ask us, ‘Granny, what was
doctors?’ And we’ll say, ‘They were like shops where you could get free
better.’ And they’ll think we’re delusional. Which we will be. Because
grannies mainly are.

Unanswered Questions About Medicine

• Why aren’t there more songs about doctors?
• Why can’t you get medicine on crisps? That’d be much nicer.
• Can you fix people by turning them off and turning them on again?
 Middle Ages
The Middle Ages came, as the name suggests, in the middle of time – just
4,539,998,400 years after the Earth was discovered and 1,600 years before
now – which means we know the Earth will end in the year 4,539,999,400,
which is handy for planning, although, as I found out during a very boring
fortnight in Lowestoft, the calendar on my phone goes up to the year
292,471,210,647 – and that’s 288 billion years after the Earth ends. And
probably, by then, we’ll all living be on Mars. Or Bounty. Whatever’s left,
really.

KNIGHTS AND CASTLES

Just as the British people had revolved from primitive grunting cavemen to
people wearing sacks and living in huts, in the Middle Ages they revolved
again. This new SuperBrit wore metal clothes and lived in a giant fortified
house. He was called a knight. And his home was called a castle.
In the time of knights, everything went totally Robocop. It was a bit like
the difference between when policemen had soft jackets and jolly helmets
and now, when they’ve got stab vests and semi-automatic submachine guns.
This was known as the Age of Shivery, because it gets dead cold if you’re
only wearing tins.
Castles were built by kings. They were big, which made them posh, and
hard to get in to, which made them even posher, like fashion shows or
restaurants where all the menus are in foreign and you have to talk quietly.
The knights’ job was to defend the king. They were the olden days
equivalent of those people with earpieces that hang around VIPs. And a
knight was expected to do his duty, which included championing good over
evil, protecting the weak and being kind to women. Which is why Sir
Jimmy Savile was never knighted.

MEDIEVAL ENTERTAINMENT

In the Middle Ages, the country was taken over yet again, but this time the
invader was not a foreign army or a plague of mosquitoes: it was fun.
 There hadn’t been any fun in Britain before – just wars and stones and
going to church. Suddenly, everyone was dressed as playing cards, and it
was permanently like being at Glastonbury – with jugglers, jesters, a chill-
out tent where you can play chess and something called minstrels, which
wasn’t chocolate buttons, but a sort of olden days Mumford and Sons, but
worse.
This was the Age Of Entertainment. Suddenly there were songs you could
sing along to, instead of just monks going ommmmm. There were plays,
and games, and there were stories, too, instead of just the Bible.
Some of the best stories were written by a lecherous old cork called
Geoffrey Chaucer. Although he might sound like a smelly maths teacher,
Chaucer was the raciest writer of his day. His stories, like parks at night, are
full of sex and poo.
The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer’s attempt to do a Confessions Of . . .
series: Confessions Of A Knight, Confessions Of The Wife Of Bath and The
Confessions of General Prologue. The bawdiest (which is posh code for
‘muckiest’) of all was The Miller’s Tale, in which a woman sticks her arse
out of a window in the dark and a priest kisses it and then a man sticks his
arse out of the window and farts in the priest’s face, and he puts a red-hot
rod up the bloke’s brown eye. It’s all so rude that it’s written in a secret
foreign language, so the police don’t find out, with words like ‘whilom’ and
‘yclept,’ which are probably anagrams of something so filthy it would make
a sailor spit.
Chaucer’s saucy stories started by being told out loud. Most people
couldn’t read, so they went round someone’s house who knew some stories,
or could read, like when people go to the pub to watch Sky Sports, because
they can’t read.
But The Canterbury Tales were so popular that they weren’t left just as
sound coming out of a peasant’s horrible mouth: they were remastered in
pin-sharp book format. Books weren’t pointless like they are today. They
were full of stuff for educated people, like BBC4 or museums. And, now
Chaucer’s smut was written down, other people could read it. Which
probably made them wonder what the bloody world was coming to.
Most other popular pastimes were based on the madcap fun of cruelty.
Public executions were popular – and they weren’t just quick deaths like the
electric chair (which was probably the acoustic chair back then) – they were
long, complicated occasions that involved people being choked and having
bits cut off or ripped out and dragging them around. It makes ISIS look like
Crowded House. There was also bear-baiting, shin-kicking and cockfighting
– which isn’t what it sounds like, even though I checked. Twice.
There were also lots of games invented we still play today, like Hazard,
Alquerque and Knucklebones, none of which you’ve ever heard of.

Money
Money is at the heart of the UK economy, and many others. People fight for
it, die for it and put it in china pigs. Money makes the world go round,
thanks to that slot at the North Pole.
So what is money? Put simply, money is the best way we have of telling
how much money you’ve got.
Over the centuries, lots of things have been used as money, including
amber, wheat, eggs, travellers’ cheques, feathers, book vouchers, lobsters,
beads, gold, leather, Nectar points, rice, peas, mugs and sheep. But carrying
loads of sheep around in your pockets isn’t easy, and olden days people
didn’t even have trousers, so you had to stuff the animals in your tights,
which is why rich men like Henry of Eight stood with their legs so far
apart.
Some people ask: Is money real? The answer might surprise you: Yes.
I’ve got some ten pees in my purse, so I can prove it. On one side it’s got a
lady, to show it’s money for humans, and on the other side it’s got a lion in
a crown, to remind people not to give money to animals, because they’ll
only spend it on stupid shit.
People get paid different amounts of money so they can buy the things
they need. A cleaner doesn’t get paid as much as a millionaire, because
millionaires’ stuff is much more expensive. So the system is rigorously fair.
Money started off as metal, then it was paper, but increasingly these days
money isn’t something you can hold in your hand or bite like a pirate: it’s
stored in the imagination of computers. You might think that means
money’s getting lighter, but if you carry a computer full of money in a
shoulder bag, you know it’s even heavier than coins. And there’s another
problem: it turns out computer money is vulnerable, which means it can
easily be vulned. And that’s bad news for ordinary people like you, and
even me.
 In the year 208, there was a global financial crunch, when it turned out
the banks’ computers had been lying about how much money they had. The
clever solution to this was Quantity Deveasing or QE, which is where you
make more money out of thin air. Air is a good thing to make money out of
because everyone needs it to breathe, so it’s more valuable than gold, which
nobody needs.
All the money that disappeared in the crunch was only made up, so it’s a
shame that everyone had such a horrible time because of it. It’s like going to
prison for murdering your imaginary friend. But one thing leads to another.
And – like that thing where a fish gets eaten by a bigger fish, which gets
eaten by a really big fish – the financial crisis was very much a ‘fish’s
circle’.
It may be that no one really knows what money is. It may always be an
unsolvable problem, like a crossword or a Rubik’s cube. Perhaps the only
thing we really know for sure about money is that, without it, we’d all be a
lot worse off.

Unanswered questions about Money

• When you put a coin in a chocolate machine, how does it get to the bank. Is there a tube?
• Where is the money stored in a coin?
• If I forgot my PIN number, could I split the card open with a knife and get the money
out?

Mozart
Of all the composers who have ever lived, none has written quite as many
tunes as Wolfgang Rock Me ‘Amadeus’ Mozart.
Mozart was born in 1756 in Austria, though it wasn’t called Austria then.
By the age of three, he was playing the piano, though it wasn’t called the
piano then. People thought he was The Prodigy, but The Prodigy wouldn’t
be born for over 200 years, so he could go about his everyday composing
business without people mistaking him for the angry one and asking him to
play ‘Firestarter’ on the harpsichord, which left him more time to invent hit
songs like ‘The Marriage Of Fig Roll’ and ‘Concerto No.21’, which he did.
 Little Tiny Mozart wrote his first tunes aged five, and his first symphony
aged eight. This is amazing, because he could have been out on his bike or
climbing a tree like a normal kid. His parents sent Mozart and his sister out
on tour around Europe performing their hits before the courts of Prague,
Vienna, Paris, Munich and London. Why they did their tunes in court is a
mystery, but probably because there were judges there, and they were
hoping to get through to the judges’ houses, where they’d have a better
chance of a record deal.
By the time Mozart wrote his first opera at the age of fourteen, it was
clear he wasn’t normal at all. For a start, he was fourteen and could sit
through an opera. Something had to be done. So he got a job as an organist.
But that didn’t stop his compulsive tune-writing, and he just kept forcing
more and more music out of himself, like he had the shits, but with notes.
Eventually, poor and exhausted, he took to his bed to die. Even then, he
couldn’t do it without music, so he wrote his most famous last work, the
Requiem, which is a very long song in Latin about dying. It’s very much the
East 17’s ‘Stay Another Day’ of its day, and would have been on a John
Lewis ad if Christmas had been invented back then. But he didn’t finish it,
and it died along with him in 1791. He was thirty-three, the same age as
Guy Fawkes was when he died, leaving his greatest work – blowing up
parliament – also unfinished.

Mystery of Life, The

Life is a mystery, if you believe the people who say that ‘life is a mystery’. I
don’t. I think it’s hundreds of bloody mysteries. There’s so much we don’t
know. When is science going to stop mucking about with 5G and driverless
cars and answer the really difficult questions?
Things like:
• Where does your lap go when you stand up?
• Is wind just angry air?
• What’s the heaviest day of the week?
What happens down holes?
•
• Is a computer actually a slave?
• Where do they hide the music in a piano?
• If I kept a monkey long enough, would it evolve into a boyfriend?
• Where do clouds go at night?
• What’s the most political thing that’s ever happened?
• Are buses ticklish?
• What’s it like not to be here?
• Who discovered the one times table?
• Why don’t boats go soft when they get wet, like biscuits do?
• Why are hot days blue, but hot taps red?
• How many places are there in the world?
• What is noise made of?
• Why is the word ‘big’ small and the word ‘small’ bigger?
 N

Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the word for machines that are so small and fiddly that
you can’t even see them. Imagine the keyboard off a Blackberry, but worse.
Nanotechnology is to normal technology what Miniature Heroes are to
full-sized chocolate. Imagine a Miniature Heroes version of a lawnmower
or a clock. Then forget that and think of something smaller. And then halve
it. And imagine a magnifying glass, and imagine you’re looking through it,
and imagine you can’t see anything. That.
Scientists say that if nanotechnology keeps advancing at the current rate,
eventually we’ll have machines so small that we won’t be able to even use
them or find them. Machines so small they could be injected up your arse, if
that seemed like a good idea. People of the future might breathe nano-
machines in, or fart a cloud of tiny, tiny, tiny lifts and jet skis and
hairdryers.
When machines are that small, you have to ask what’s the point. It’s all
very well having a bus the size of an ant, but people need to get smaller too
or they’ll just squash all the buses. The future, once again, hasn’t been
thought through. Nanotechnology needs nanopeople. But to those
nanopeople, the nanotechnology just looks normal sized. So probably let’s
not bother.

Newspapers
Newspapers are a sort of paper version of Twitter for your nan. Apparently
they still exist, but only outside petrol stations near the briquettes, behind
little plastic windows, like a little news zoo.
Newspapers were how people in olden times found out what was going
on the day before. The words in the newspaper would be made up by people
called journalists. A ‘journalist’ is what we nowadays call a ‘content
provider’, someone who copies and pastes what people are saying on
Twitter and puts it into sentences, and it’s those sentences that make Twitter
into news. But in newspaper times, people in the news didn’t just type up
what they were thinking and doing, journalists had to actually go out and
find out what was going on themselves, usually by hacking people’s phone
messages. It was a different world.
Newspapers had different sections you didn’t want to read, like sport or
overseas news, and stuff you did, like the word ‘jumble’ and Fred Basset.
You ‘scrolled’ to the bit you wanted by putting the bits you didn’t want in
the bin, which is bad for the planet. Luckily now we can get exactly the
parts of a newspaper that we want delivered straight to our phone, though it
has made painting a shelf harder because you can’t put the Daily Mail
Sidebar Of Shame underneath to stop your table getting painty like you
could with the family supplement. And it’s impossible to start a fire using
the Guardian app. Which is good for the planet too.
Some of the most famous newspapers such as The Times and TV Quick
started in coffee shops in the 1800th century and by Victorian times they
could be seen everywhere. Holding that day’s newspaper was a sign that
you were keeping up with events. Either that or you were helping your
kidnapper prove to the police that you weren’t dead yet.
Newspapers made ordinary people feel part of big events, whether it was
the sinking of the Titanic, men pretending to land on the Moon, the death of
Lady Diana or Kinga off Big Brother sticking a wine bottle up her growler.
Without newspapers we would never have heard of Piers Morgan, Rupert
Murdoch or Jeremy Clarkson, so it’s understandable that in the 21st century
the average person no longer buys a daily paper, in an attempt to stop it
happening again.

Nightmares
Your brain is very much like a TV. During the day, you see all sorts of stuff
that basically makes sense, even if a lot of it’s boring: road signs, grass, the
news. But then, just like TV, at night, all the weird stuff comes on: Life
Below Zero, The House Of Lords, Russell Howard Live. This is called
dreaming. And when it’s a horror or something with subtitles, it’s called a
nightmare.
 A basic nightmare involves running out of crisps. This has all the
elements: primal panic, the possibility of starvation and monsters. A more
sophisticated nightmare might be thinking you’re being chased round a
spooky old house by a six-headed giraffe that wants to know what 13 x 12
is. Or that you’re the last sandwich in a Boots meal deal and you’re headed
for the compacter, except the compacter has the face of Radzi from Blue
Peter, who should be a nice guy but is now a giant chewing shipping
container that wants to eat you, and anyway you’re a pathetic combination
of tuna and cucumber and look how disappointing you are to one of the
nicest people, who you’ve turned into a killing machine.
Some therapists like to analyse dreams, as if they could possibly mean
anything.
 O

Oedipus Complex
This is an idea come up with by the psychopath Sigmund Freud to explain
why men are mental and cross all the time, and won’t calm down at traffic
lights. His excuse was that when they were babies, all men wanted to kill
their dad and do their mum. It’s one of those excuses that doesn’t really
help, because that’s worse than the thing it’s explaining.
This complex is quite simple. It’s named after the Greek character
Oedipus. Oedipus murdered his dad and married his mum, by accident,
which is how you can tell the difference between him and Bagpuss, who
didn’t.
Freud eventually realised his brilliant theory only explained men, and was
therefore missing half of humans, so was about as useful as a theory that
explains why everybody is Chinese. To make up for this, he invented an
explanation for why women are mental, which he called penis envy. This
was even worse than the Oedipus one, because it was based on the idea that
women dig around in their pants at some point and get cross that someone’s
nicked their wanger. It’s the sort of idea that tells you more about Freud
than anybody else, but what can you expect from a man who wanted to
hump his mum?

Olympics
The Olympics are an international sports contest that take place every time
we have one. It’s a chance for all nations to gather together and find out
who’s the best at running, jumping, throwing, horses and corruption.
In 2012, Britain won the Olympics for the first time in ages. It was a
wonderful time, when the whole country came together, rich and poor,
black and white, able-bodied and disabled, with a single aim: to boo George
Osborne. It was bloody brilliant. I don’t think we’ve been quite that happy
since.
 Some of the sports they do at the Olympics are sensible (running as fast
as you can, getting rid of an unwanted hammer you can’t be arsed to eBay)
and some are stupid (horse disco, running as fast as you can but also a bit
slowly at the same time, waving a ribbon in a foundation garment). The
most important event is usually the competition to see who can run the
fastest for not very long, because this is the only Olympic skill that has an
everyday application, because of buses.
Every so often the Olympics is snowed in, but they do their best. That, for
me, is the true Olympics Spirit.
 P

Pasta
In the olden days, there used to be two types of pasta: spaghetti and
spaghetti hoops. Then a new pasta was discovered — tinned pillows called
ravioli. Since then, science has had pasta breakthrough after pasta
breakthrough, and loads of new pastas have been found.
There’s lasagne, which is sort of postcards; there’s farfalle, which is
moths; there’s rigatoni, which is sewers; there’s conchiglie, which is fists;
and, of course, there’s alphabetti, which is a sort of spaghetti, but more
alphabetty.
Who knows what future pastas will be discovered. Pasta that can be
downloaded to your microwave without needing to open a tin. Hover-pasta,
perhaps. Or pasta that can turn back time. Maybe a probe will discover
pasta on Mars, the first alien pasta, and the world will come together in
peace to welcome it at a ceremony where the cleverest person on Earth,
maybe the ghost of Stephen Hawkings, or her who does the numbers on
Countdown, gets to eat the Mars pasta and tell us what it tastes like. It
would be beautiful. I, for one, can’t wait. Pasta’s brilliant.

Photocopiers
A photocopier is a machine that makes copies of flat things on paper. They
used to have one in the office at my old school for doing forms for trips.
Nobody knows how photocopiers work. Even the man who invented them,
the Earl of Photocopier, didn’t ever open one up to find out, for fear that it
contained the devil.
Basically, you put the paper on the top that you want more of, and press
the green button, then more comes out. Nobody knows where from.
Legend has it that people used to sit on photocopiers at office parties, but
this doesn’t make sense, because it’s not like there aren’t plenty of chairs in
offices. Besides, you’d be up so high you’d be looking down at your
manager’s bald patch, which is a tough one to style out.
Nowadays everyone has a printer instead, which works by computers, so
that makes some sort of sense. But photocopiers are basically magic, which
is why they were got rid of, in case someone used one for evil, maybe
photocopying Hitler.

Polarisation
Magnets are proper fucking weird. They’re either facing one way or the
other. They’re like the Brexit vote, but with somewhere to go, instead of
nowhere to go and no idea of how to get there.
If you take two magnets and place their identical faces against each other,
they’ll try to hate each other, like two people of the same political or
religious position do. But if you take two magnets and face their bums and
mouths at each other, they’ll try to co-operate, like a sort of scientific
human centipede.
There’s this theory that, if the magnetic poles of the Earth ever decide to
change their minds, everything will go to shit. But it might be quite
exciting. You’d have to hold maps upside down. Right-handed people
would be the new minority. We’d have to rewire all our plugs – electricians
would be millionaires overnight. There’d be T-shirts reading ‘East Is The
New West’. Maybe we’d have to drive on the wrong side of the road.
Clocks might start running backwards. Take that, boffins.

Pornography
A niche hobby, basically extreme people-watching, that used to be restricted
to the top shelf of the newsagent, but which has really caught on and now
forms about 110 per cent of the internet.
 Q

Quorn
Once upon a time, no one needed to be vegetarian, because that would have
been insane and you’d have been rightly chained to the wall of a very
welcoming asylum for it. Then it became OK. And that’s when the rot set
in. Or, as it’s now called, Quorn.
Quorn is what scientists call ‘matter’, which is also what they call the
stuff between your toes and the stuff that gets scraped out of U-bends and
the gutter of the washing machine – basically, anything grey that isn’t
papier maché but looks and tastes a lot like it.
Yet Quorn, which is made out of recycled takeaways or something, is
actually not bad. The sausages are quite good, even though they look like
they’re made of dead people’s thumbs (though they can’t be, because that
wouldn’t be vegetarian, even if the thumb owners were – actually, that’s a
problem, isn’t it? Vegetarians are made of meat. How can someone made of
meat be a vegetarian? Has anyone done this yet?)
Quorn does its best to look like food, even though it isn’t. It assumes the
form of sausages and burgers and mince, even though it’s just matter. It’s a
bit like that bit in Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them where all the
stuff assembles itself into the shape of an Obscurus. So, if you eat Quorn,
you’re eating an Obscurus, but with added salt, so it’s OK.
 R

Radio For
Most radio is designed to attract minicab drivers, with its combination of
catchy tunes from when the minicab driver was young and had anything at
all to look forward to, blended with the sound of other minicab drivers
calling in on their breaks to complain about how it’s not like it was when
they were younger and all this music was on.
But one radio station is different from all the others – Radio For. Radio
For is short for Radio For Clever People. It’s almost completely full of
people talking, but not one of them is a minicab driver in a Morrison’s car
park. They’re all full of facts and stuff they’ve read instead of just stuff
they’ve heard on the radio from other minicab drivers.
The clever people on Radio For can tell you about gardening, politics,
current affairs, history, what it’s like to be stranded on an island with only
music to eat, the weather if you’re on a boat – you can even hear spy
recordings of cow-owners having affairs near teapots in the countryside.
But it does show off. There’s one programme where people have to
explain something in only sixty seconds without saying anything twice or
repeating themselves. I can’t remember what it’s called. And another
programme where a really tetchy man called Mervyn or something is rude
to people who are cleverer than him. He sounds like he’s about to draw a
sword, but he never does.
It’s all very well being a radio station for clever people, run by clever
people, but it’s very alienating when there’s no one on any of the
programmes who is normal. Maybe they should give someone like Paddy
McGuinness a show where he just tries sandwiches while humming the
charts or something. I’m just saying, it might make Radio For popular at
last. Then it could be Radio For Everyone, or Radio For All Four Corners
Of The Country, and change its name to reflect that, maybe, to something
catchy, like Radio Four.
 Roman Nempire, The
Some time in AD, the first tourists arrived in Britain. They came from Italy,
but to preserve the element of surprise, they didn’t call themselves Italians.
They called themselves Romans.
The Romans were like the Britons, but from the future. They had roads
and central heating and brooms on their heads. They took over the places
they arrived in and made them all the same – something that wouldn’t
happen again until Pret A Manger. And they planned to make Britain a part
of their big scheme, which they called The Roman Nempire.
The Roman Nempire was spreading all over the known world, which at
the time was much smaller, because it was younger, like a kitten is smaller
than a cat. The Romans were civilised, which meant that when a pile of
people just started having sex, or eating so much that they threw up, they
did it in Latin.
The Romans were so advanced they came with Latin pre-installed, like
doctors or Boris Johnson. But unlike Boris Johnson they could speak in
public, and use combs. They had a huge civilising influence on primitive
Brits, teaching us to wash and walk on our hind legs and to not just bite
cows but to use a fork. They basically gentrified a primitive Britain. It was a
bit like opening an artisan bakery in Hull.
The Romans also had a thing about straight lines: rows of soldiers,
numbers, walls, mosaics (which are tiles you can almost be bothered to look
at) and – most importantly – roads. Before roads was invented, you had to
travel around by standing at the edge of your village wishing you could
teleport or seeing how far you could jump.
But what the Romans really loved was bathing. Before them, water was
just in the sky, as rain. Now they’d tamed it. Baths were places to meet
people, to exchange gossip, to find stuff out, to get naked and show
strangers your genitals. They were very much the internet of their day. And
the Romans loved bathing so much they built a whole massive bathing
complex and named the city after it: Bathe.
To an unsophisticated British tribesperson, all covered in mud with hair
spiked up and a club, the baths at Bathe must have looked
incomprehensible. It would be like Steve McFadden getting on board
Concorde. He knows it’s special. It’s cleaner than anywhere he’s ever been.
It’s exciting. And he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know how to behave.
He might do a poo on the floor. Or start biting people, in panic. Maybe he’d
smash it up to try and get to the magic inside. Or worship the people who
made it, building a primitive shrine out of his shoes and howling.
Despite all this, some people resisted the Roman invasion. One was called
Boadicea until recently, when she changed her name, like Prince used to,
but while dead, which is frankly a bit late for a rebrand. Queen Boudicca
came from Norfolk, like so many rebels – Myleene Klass, Ed Balls, Delia
Smith – and she hated the Romans. So she led a barbarian army in revolt
and attacked Colchester, turning it from the bustling capital into a
smouldering hellhole full of weeping and despair which you can still visit
today.
Rome was the most advanced warfare machine on the planet. But
Boudicca’s army fought back with the weapon they knew best. Spikes. And
lost. Because spikes.
Once Boudicca was crushed, the Romans ruled over Britain for years,
until suddenly they had to rush home because they remembered they’d left a
complete collapse of civilisation on.
But their influence has never gone away. Imagine a Britain without wine,
roads, Caffè Nero, baths, Cornettos, Aston Villa, aqueducts, alphabetti
spaghetti, the Fiat Panda, the moustache, Milli Vanilli, paella, bukkake,
hand gestures, the isosceles triangle, Viennetta, toga parties, pictures on
floors and Cesar dog food. It’s unthinkable. So to the Romans we have to
say a great big Latin thank you: THANKVS YOV.

Rugby
Rugby is technically a sport, but only in the way that darts or hopping is.
What happens, as far as I can tell, is that two teams of different colour
men compete to get hold of a sort of giant eye. They throw the eye around
and deliberately fall over with it, and sometimes they kick it over a big H.
It’s a sort of cross between You’ve Been Framed and Sesame Street.
But it’s an affectionate game as well. The men all get together for great
big group cuddles or lift each other up like they were going to do a piggy-
back or lie on top of each other like at a pyjama party. It’s great to see men
getting in touch with their feminine side like this. Rugby must be one of the
most feminine sports there is.
Some of the men wear sort of bandages for fun, either on their heads or
their legs – and their legs are fucking enormous. It’s like someone built a
load of Frankingsteins out of the rotating things in kebab shop windows.
Most rugby teams are named after animals, like Lions, Wallabies, Tigers,
Springboks, Falcons and the Welsh, and they tend to come from cities,
because there’s more grass to play on there than there is in the countryside,
which is mainly mud and rivers and tractors. There’s even a city named
after the sport – it’s the city of Rugby.
There are two types of rugby – rugby league and rugby onion. One is
faster and smaller than the other, and the other has a different name. Some
players can do both, which is amazing. It’s like when you found out Hugh
Laurie could play the piano as well as being a doctor.
The biggest game of rugby in the world is The Six Nations, where six
whole countries play against each other to find out which country is the best
out of all the countries in the whole world, out of all the countries that give
a shit about rugby, which is six. Usually this is played on the other side of
the world, so the pubs can open early.

Russian Revolution, The

Russia in the 1900th century was ruled by a king called the tsar, which is
Russian for star, but they do all their letters backwards, so it’s easy to see
what’s happened there.
The king, Nicholas 11, was very, very rich, while everyone else in Russia
mainly ate mud, mixed with vodka, to take away the taste of mud. One day
some of Russia’s top boffins decided this system was wrong. Until then,
only France had noticed that kings have all the money even though they do
arse-all. The idea of noticing this was so unusual that nobody here in Britain
has ever thought it at all. The closest we came was asking the Queen to fix
her own castle when it was burned down that time, and insisting on only
giving her £18,000,000 towards the bill.
Sharing the money round so that everyone had sort of the same is called
Communism, and it was invented by a man called Karl Marx. He wrote a
book called Das Kapital, so called because he wrote it in London, a city
which has a capital letter at the start of it. In his book he said that all the
money in the country should be divided up between the workers and none
of it given to the king, who wouldn’t need it any more because he’d been
shot.
It was a neat plan and really got people excited, so excited that one of
Karl Marx’s friends insisted that it was time for ‘power to the people’ – and
that man was John Lenin. Lenin led a revolution in 1917 that changed
Russia from a corrupt country where a few people had uncontrolled power
and riches into the country it is today.
The rest of the world was not keen on Russia’s revolution and put up
some ironed curtains, to show off the high standards of housekeeping in the
free West. But Russia hit back by building nuclear rockets and making
loads of posters of mums in headscarves lifting tractors over their heads that
you can buy in Camden Market now, and turning its women discus throwers
into the Incredible Hulk. It was a war, but not a normal war, which is quite
dramatic. This war was just low-level annoying instead, and went on for
longer than anyone expected, like a cold, which is where it got its name.
This was the cold war.
Sadly Communism was proved not to work in 1989 when a wall, built by
Communist workers, fell down because Knight Rider had stood on it. When
people saw how flimsy their walls were, nobody could take the Communists
seriously. The workers had done a bad job, and standard practice with
shoddy workmanship is to hold back payment, which the country did,
stopping sharing the money between the workers, and giving it to people
who could be trusted, who spent it on football teams and newspapers in
other countries instead.
 S

Sausages
Sausages are the only meat that can also be eaten by vegetarians. If you
look in the supermarket, you will notice there is no vegetarian chicken or
vegetarian beef, but there is vegetarian sausages. Vegetarians are happy to
eat sausages, and in the case of Linda McCartney even lend her husband’s
name to them. Why? Because technically the sausage isn’t an animal,
because it cannot feel pain. This is why humans have for so long hunted and
eaten the sausage. It’s a guilt-free meat.
A sausage in a long bun is called a hot dog, because it looks like a dog (if
you imagine a dog that lives in a long bun and has no legs or face). Other
ways of eating the sausage include the casserole, the Wimpy bender-in-a-
bun, and quickly.
In the wild, sausages are quite slow and easy to catch, using either a net, a
gun, or a rod, if it’s a freshwater sausage. Saltwater sausages are also
popular, in tins. Even though the internet has changed the way we do
everything, it hasn’t affected the sausage at all. That’s because it’s
impossible to make a sausage out of numbers, meaning that if there was a
terrible nuclear pocalypse of some sort, and all the computers disappeared,
we’d still have sausages, even though they’d be a bit burnt, which is bad
news for anyone who usually leaves the black bits on the plate.

Senses
Humans can find out what’s going on outside our heads by using our
senses. Information comes into our bodies from outside and our brain
analyses the information and turns it into understanding, or, if we’re hung
over, it doesn’t bother doing that and instead sets off a load of sirens and
alarms in our head, to warn us that there is sunlight, and that bus is too red,
and what are we meant to do about cups, until we go back to bed, often
under our desk.
 Some animals have senses we don’t have, like bats have that sound thing
that stops them bumping into caves, and cats have a way of reading your
magazine by sitting on it and absorbing the best bits through their arsehole.
Without our senses, human beings would be no better than bollards.
There are, famously, eight senses. Here are seven of them.

1. Sight
Sight is what boffins call using your eyes. Light comes off things and goes
into your eye through the black bit, which it turns out is a hole, even though
I didn’t want to know that because now I’m scared spiders might crawl into
it while I’m asleep. It’s handy that I’m the sort of person who sleeps with
their eyes closed these days.
When light hits the back of the eye it makes pictures which the brain then
tries to understand. If the picture is of something fairly simple – a flower or
a lemon meringue pie or a hovercraft – the brain will say what it is quite
quickly and move on. If it’s something more complicated, like the
instructions for assembling a sofa bed, or a film that’s won a BAFTA in
French, the brain will have trouble understanding it, and try to use other
senses to help, like smell.

2. Smell
Dogs can smell loads better than humans, but only use it for evil, always
sticking their nose in their groins and other dogs’ arses and piles of fox shit.
Our human sense of smell is very limited by comparison, which makes it
easier for us to live alongside dogs, who fucking stink.
Smell is done with the nose. Most senses require two of things – eyes,
ears, hands. But we only have one nose. This is, again, to stop us smelling
dogs so much, who stink.
We can tell when something is rotten using smell. Our other senses are
not so finely tuned to detect rottenness, and we have to use other clues, like
‘Was it directed by Guy Ritchie?’

3. Taste
The other sense is taste. Taste is like smell for the mouth. We used to think
that different parts of the tongue were used to detect different flavours, and
Mrs Mottishead made me draw a map of a tongue at school, but Wikipedia
says that nobody thinks that any more, and it was a total waste of time,
particularly all that colouring in. It’s as bad as when they told us about man
landing on the Moon, and that turned out to be made up as well.
When you think about a betrayal like the tongue map, it’s hard to know
who to believe any more, but a good answer would be ‘Not Mrs
Mottishead, because she’s lying to you about tongues, and all that time you
spent looking for a purple felt tip that hadn’t dried out to colour in your
pointless lying tongue map could have been spent down Clinton Cards
shoplifting Garfields,’ and the only sense I get from that isn’t taste, it’s
regret. Bitter regret. A bitter regret which is tasted all over the tongue. Not
just on the purple bit.

4. Feeling a bit sick

This is like a sixth sense, but it’s the fourth sense on this list, because it’s
one of the most important. Feeling a bit sick is very highly developed in
humans. Humans can feel a bit sick at a detail and depth that dogs and bats
can only dream of. We have even invented corkscrew rollercoasters and
Jagerbombs to explore the very limits of feeling a bit sick.

5. Touch
I forgot this one. It’s done with the fingers, and is basically what they’re for,
that and pointing. Nerves send signals to the fingers to tell them to touch
things. Then signals travel back up the nerves to tell the brain that the
fingers have touched something, which the brain knew already because it
sent the signal in the first place. It’s like phoning your mum, and she keeps
telling you stories that you told her yourself last week because she’s run out
of stuff to talk about.

6. Dread
The sense of dread is another one that humans do best. Dogs can’t even
dread at a thousandth of the strength as a human. They might have smell,
but all their other senses are rubbish. If a dog had a proper sense of dread, it
might anticipate how badly it would smell if it rolled in fox shit, and it
wouldn’t do it. Don’t get me wrong, I like dogs, but they’re a bit of a one-
sense-wonder.

7. Sixth Sense
The sixth sense is the feeling you get that you can’t explain that you might
be a ghost, or that everyone else is a ghost, or that Bruce Willis is a ghost.
Again, this is way more developed in humans than in any other animal,
except hippos, who think about almost nothing else.

Shakespeare, William
Even though he’s been dead for thousands of years, we still talk about
William Shakespeare. But why? We don’t talk about Les Dennis any more,
and he’s still alive, and he hasn’t done anything wrong. Well, the answer is:
because Shakespeare was the best at writing there has ever been, which
means everyone who does words for a living, from Dan Brown to Tim Rice,
owes him so extremely much.
It’s often said that if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be sending his
scripts to television and film companies, who wouldn’t make them because
they were so long and boring. But back in his day, Shakespeare’s plays were
as popular as bottled water is now.

EARLY YEARS

William Boris Shakespeare was born on 23 April 1564, which was a

Thursday. Elizabethan England was nothing like today’s Britain: there were
no toilets and no Sainsbury’s Locals. We don’t know much about
Shakespeare’s childhood, except that he must have had one, otherwise he’d
never have become a grown-up, like Bart Simpson hasn’t yet.
Shakespeare’s father was a tanner. Back in the 1564s, people didn’t go on
holiday to Faliraki, they went to the next field, and it was only explorers
and birds that went abroad, so if you wanted a tan, you got it done locally.
As a baby, Shakespeare showed few signs of becoming the most
significant figure in literary history, so nobody bothered noting down the
details of his life.
We do know that Shakespeare went to school in Stratford and Avon, and
probably had trouble fitting in, like a lot of kids do who move schools. He
was probably one of them really clever kids who had glasses and weird
shoes and picked his nose during P.E. As a boy, he would have looked much
like boys today, but bald and with a ruff instead of an Angry Birds T-shirt.
In those days, water was too awful to drink, so even kids drank beer. So
everyone at school – the kids and the teachers – would have been drunk,
which, if you think about it, sounds amazing. It’s no wonder he never
learned to spell.
Shakespeare would never have had a bike or a Swingball or even a Furby,
so he probably spent all his time making up stories. It’s surprising there
weren’t millions of brilliant writers then. They had bugger all else to do. He
might have written all sorts of stuff when he was at school, like ‘What I did
on my holidays’ or ‘The Tragedy of Father Christmas Part 1,’ which would
be worth a fortune these days if only his stupid teachers hadn’t chucked
them in the bin.
He would have sung lots of nonsense playground rhymes, like ‘Mary,
Mary, Quite Contrary’ and ‘Ring O’Roses,’ which people say is about the
plague, when it’s obviously about hayfever – but he probably made some up
himself, like ‘My Friend Billy Had A Ten Foot Willy’. Bet you that’s one of
his. It’s got a proper story, and a tragic hero.
One thing we know for sure about school in Shakespeare’s time is that it
was far easier than now, because you didn’t have to study Shakespeare.

LOST YEARS

Between the age of eight and eighteen, we know nothing about what he was
doing. There’s a whole decade of his life unaccounted for, like Harold
Bishop off of Neighbours.
There are several possibilities. He might have gone on a long gap year to
somewhere exotic like Didcot Parkway. He could have gone time travelling
into the future to see what a robot Shakespeare would sound like. Or maybe
he went like one of them weird people that disappears and turns up years
later living in a caravan on a farm.
Anyway, the point is he went missing for a few years, like Peter Andre.
And we can’t explain it, like Peter Andre – because the records are simply
not good enough, like Peter Andre.

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

At the age of when he was eighteen, Shakespeare married his teenage

sweetheart, the actress Ann Hathaway. Because he was in showbiz,
Shakespeare was always changing his name, like Cheryl Tweedy
Fernandez, and his marriage certificate is in the name of William
Shagspere, which is probably one of his rude jokes.
Being in love was a big thing for Shakespeare – you can tell because
much, much later he wrote a film about it, and called it Shakespeare In
Love, so we’d know. He also did what a slightly sappy boy does when he
fancies a girl: wrote poems. Specifically, he wrote sonnets, which are a type
of poem with an almost musical flow. Sort of like rap but designed
especially to be impossible to dance to or enjoy.
But poems don’t make much money. Only one person has ever made
their fortune from poems – the poet Sir Clinton Cards, whose works still
sell today, making him the world’s first and only poetry magnate, apart from
those packs of little words you get to put on your fridge.
Shakespeare needed money to support his wife and three children, and
nobody wanted to pay for sonnets, because they were awful. So he
converted sonnets into something that could make money: a play.

OLDEN DAYS THEATRE

To the Elizabethan audience, a play was a sort of film, but one you couldn’t
pause unless you knew everyone in the cast and had a very loud voice.
Shakespeare’s first play was The Comedy Of Errors, and it’s obvious that
he had trouble coming up with the characters, because he wrote a pair of
twins as the lead roles, and then wrote another pair as well, which is
basically cheating. His first play did well, but if Shakespeare wanted to
make a go of it in theatre, he couldn’t do it in Stratford, or even Avon. He
was going to have to go where it was all at: London.
People in London only really liked beer and shouting and public
hangings, so anything arty wasn’t allowed in the main bit and had to go and
live on the south side of the river, where rich people never went, just like
nowadays. But pretty much as soon as Shakespeare arrived, there was an
outbreak of bionic plague. There’s no evidence that it was Shakespeare’s
fault, but you never know. He was a man capable of more things than most
men.
The bionic plague killed about 10,000 people in London, and when the
ones who were left had finished coughing, they needed cheering up, so the
theatres re-opened. And they needed stuff to show in them, otherwise
they’d just be buildings full of people staring in total bewilderment at just
walls.
 It’s hard to believe today, but back then people really did go to the theatre
on purpose. It was one of the few things they could do when they weren’t
busy working or coughing. There was no TV or cat videos, so for
entertainment, people would mainly look at the sky. But with no planes,
there was nothing really on the sky, so theatre became really popular (most
theatres left their roofs offs, so if you preferred, you didn’t have to join in,
you could sit and watch sky instead, just like in pubs today). This was
Shakespeare’s moment.

SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

There was no doubt that Shakespeare was the best playwriter there had ever
been. But there was enough doubt that he had to start his own theatre
company to put them on – like forming his own band, except they didn’t
have songs, they had long scenes where people said ‘zwounds’ and
‘forsooth’ – and they didn’t have guitars, they had moustaches.
In many ways, Shakespeare was a DIY pioneer: not only did he write his
own plays, and form his own theatre company, but he even built a theatre
for all the above to go in. That theatre was the theatre called the Globe
Theatre, and it still stands today, despite having been destroyed by fire over
400 years ago.
Here, he put on play after play – Romeo And Juliet, which is about a war
between some sort of Kardashians and some sort of Baldwins; Macbeth,
which is a play about Macbeth, whose name (Macbeth) you shouldn’t say in
a theatre, even though it says Macbeth’s name in the script and people call
him Macbeth in the play and it says Macbeth on the posters; The Tempest,
which is sort of like Lost except there’s a wizard on the island – the nearest
Shakespeare ever came to writing a proper Super Nintendo game; Richard
III, which is about a sort of elephant man who’d give anything for a horse;
King Lear, the really complicated one where someone loses an eye, like a
boring Thor; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his sort of Disney one, with
all woodland animals and fairies and songs and that.
If you couldn’t afford a seat at the Globe Theatre, you stood down the
bottom with all the sweaty people to watch the show. (A bit like on trains
now, except you have to be able to afford a seat just to stand with all the
sweaty people.) The people standing down the bottom were called
‘groundlings’ or ‘stinkards’, because they stank and lingered on the ground.
Some of them went to the theatre just to sniff each other, because when
you’re poor you’ll do anything for entertainment, like when old people take
out their teeth to make kids laugh.
Shakespeare’s plays used to be put on in the afternoon, while it was still
light, so people used to skive off work to come to the theatre. Except for the
rich ones, who probably just told their secretaries to say they were in a
meeting while, in fact, they were at the theatre, watching people pretend to
be royal and cross.
Because there was no roof, if it was raining at The Globe, you’d get wet,
which is a pain – but if it was meant to be raining in the play, you’d
probably think it was amazing because the weather was acting as well as the
people on stage. There was also no microphones at The Globe, so the actors
had to shout. Plays shouting isn’t like proper shouting, like when a bus
won’t let you on: plays shouting isn’t because of emotion, it’s because they
put the seats too far away. This can actually make going to see a play quite
exciting, because of the fear that the people in the story will stop shouting at
each other, and shout at you if you try to leave.

THE GOOD YEARS

Shakespeare was doing well. We don’t have exact figures, but his spending
would suggest he was earning a shitload. Which, in today’s money, is an
absolute shitload.
Shakespeare was the most famous person of his times except for Her
Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth The First, and Wet Paddy, this bloke who
used to bite the heads off cats at the Southwark cockpit.
After he’d become rich and famous, Shakespeare bought loads of
property and built a second theatre. He was in many ways the Donald
Trump of his day, except he had loads of talent and hadn’t completely
publicly lost his fucking Maltesers.

THE FINAL YEARS

We sometimes think of Shakespeare’s later years as his dark years. But all
his years were dark, technically, because the light bulb didn’t exist until
Thomas Eddington discovered it in California, during the Queen Victorian
era. It’s amazing to think that when Shakespeare had the idea for Hamlet, a
little candle would have appeared over his head. Really dangerous. Maybe
that’s what burned off the top of his hair.
 At the end of his life, Shakespeare ran out of new ideas, and died. Which
is something that had been done loads before. We don’t know what
Shakespeare’s last words were. Probably ones he made up. But they never
caught on.
Shakespeare died on his birthday, so it’s impossible to know how old he
was, because it might have been before or after the bit when your mum
says, ‘You’re not actually thirty until ten minutes past ten’. So he could
have been fifty-two or fifty-one. But dying on your birthday is a pisser for
your family, who have to eat birthday cake with all tears in their eyes. And
in that respect, Shakespeare’s death was a tragedy – which is probably what
he would have wanted.
So, we don’t know when Shakespeare was born, what he did for ten years
of his life, how he spelled his name, who wrote his plays, how old he was
when he died or why he left his wife nothing but an all-right sort of bed in
his will. We don’t even know if he called himself Will or Bill or Willie or
Billy or Wills or Shakey. But that doesn’t stop whatever-his-name-was
being the most talked about playwriter in all history, and some of it was
quite a while ago, before even loom bands and Angry Birds.
But will there ever be another Shakespeare? I don’t think so. Not exactly
the same. Not these days. You can’t get the ruffs.

Sir George
Sir George is the patron saint of old England. Scotland, Ireland and
Walesland have their own ones, just like they get different ITVs.
Sir George, who was a Roman soldier born to Greek parents in either
Turkey or what was then Syria but is now Israel, is the quintessential
Englishman. He’s also the patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia,
Gozo, Malta, Portugal, Romania and skin diseases, which makes him very
important to you if you’re on holiday or itchy.
Like Elvis, Sir George never came to England and like Elvis, he had a
horrible death. Although being stretched, burned, poisoned, having molten
lead poured in your eyes and mouth and sixty nails driven into your skull
before being dragged through the streets and beheaded is still more
dignified than dying by falling off a toilet.
 It’s probably a good thing Sir George never came here, because someone
arriving from Syria, tooled up and ready to fight for an imaginary cause,
sets off all sorts of alarm bells.
Some of the facts about Sir George are unclear, but one thing we do know
for sure is that he slayed a mighty dragon. We don’t know when, but we
know it happened because a bystander took a painting of the event. It’s one
of the few facts to come out of the Dark Ages.
Thanks to Sir George there are no dragons in England any more.
Presumably, they all moved to Wales, where they love them and put them
on their flag. Sir George rid England so thoroughly of dragons that if you
look for any evidence of dragons existing, you can’t find any at all. To the
casual viewer, it would seem that the dragon was never there, Sir George
never killed it, and that the whole myth was nothing but a myth. But luckily
for England’s national identity, the myth of the myth being nothing but a
myth is nothing but a myth.
We still celebrate Sir George’s Day every April by dressing in T-shirts
with the English rose on and wearing novelty hats in the shape of pints of
lager and singing traditional English songs like ‘Tubthumping’ by
Chumbawumba.
And we still celebrate dragons today by sending everyone in Britain, one
by one, to help be in Games Of Throne.

Skellingtons
Inside everybody is another, scarier version of them, made out of bones.
This is called the skellington and is what stops a human from being like a
bean bag or Morph.
A human skellington is made up of over 200 separate bones, but not so
separate that they fall into bits. The knee bone’s connected to the thigh
bone. The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone. The hip bone’s connected
to the back bone. Most of this is explained in a song which doctors spend up
to seven years studying before they are allowed to run an accident and
emergency department.
Your bones keep growing until you are in your early twenties, when other
stuff starts growing instead like your arse, beer gut and nose hair.
 Bones are a good way to protect the sensitive soft parts of the body. For
example, your brain is valuable – your body might need to use it at a
moment’s notice one day – so it is protected by a hard, thick skull. But
some important parts have no protective bone covering, such as the tits and
cobblers, even though being punched in them is bloody agony. Evolution
sometimes lets us down. Maybe if we carry on punching people hard in the
groin and chest as a way of winning fights quickly, then our children’s
children’s children will have evolved tough little helmets over their
knockers and knackers. That’s if children don’t stop happening because all
the men’s plums have been punched useless.
Some parts of the body are not visible on a skellington because they have
no bones, like the elephant’s trunk, which appears on skellingtons as a big
hole. I bet Michael Jackson was gutted when he bought the Elephant Man’s
skellington and the best bit was missing.
When skellingtons do a dance, you can hear xylophones. Scientists still
don’t know why.

Soup
Soup is like food except it’s a drink. Except it’s not, it’s a food. Get your
head round that if you can.
If you want some food but also want a drink, it’s basically perfect. Soup’s
been around for ages, and was how primitive humans managed to do food
and drink in one before the evolution of the Wetherspoons meal and a pint
deal.
The best soup is tomato, from a tin, off your lap with a cold. And the
worst is oxtail, which is like evil Bovril. Other soups include carrots. This is
the only thing that soup has in common with snowmen. Until some bright
spark puts twigs in a soup, which is bound to happen at some weird
restaurant one day.
Why do we even have weird restaurants? Nobody asked for weird
restaurants. Just like nobody asked for driverless cars.
Anyway, that’s soup.
 Spotify
It used to cost money to buy music: you had to go down John Menzies to
the tapes bit, ask for the latest UB40 or whatever and pay actual money.
Spotify cuts out all that. Which is a shame because sometimes at the counter
at John Menzies you could buy a bag of Ringos, and Spotify won’t let you
download crisps, even if you sign up for the Premium account.
Music is actually quite heavy – because the money it costs to pay the
artists properly is heavy, because of coins. By not paying for it – either you
or the people in the bands – everything can be lighter. So light that music
can travel down an internet in a way that would be unthinkable to music
lovers of the past, like that dog with the trumpet that was on carrier bags.
When records used to be in those bags, music was really heavy. Even the
music that wasn’t heavy, like light music, was heavy. And heavy metal was
unbearable. I think the future’s amazing. And that can only mean good
things for UB40.
I’ve gone off music.

Stones Age, The

In the Stones Age, all people were cavemen. Cavemen were hairy, angry
people who lived outdoors, like Bill Oddie.
Where modern day us is interested in shoes and NutriBullets and tennis,
Stones Age man was mainly interested in stones. He used them to make
basic weapons and tools, like hand axes. They’re boring and shit by today’s
standards, but back then they were cutting edge, because they had a cutting
edge. It was all pointy stones, pointy sticks, spikes. For people obsessed
with pointy things they were pretty pointless.
Stones Age men were simple hunter gatherers. They’d hunt for big
dinosaur steaks, and gather them into their primitive cars, with their feet
poking out the bottom. And take them back home, where they’d put the
sabre tooth tiger out and pop a record on the pterodactyl record player. Then
they would sit around the fire, which was the only thing they invented that
wasn’t made of stones, and tell each other stories – about stones.
 French cavemen would paint pictures on the wall of their caves, but
there’s no evidence that British cavemen even put some shit on a stick and
drew rude mammoths. They were bone idle. Even though there were other
things just lying around, near the stones, like wood, and wool, they never
bothered doing any drawing.
It would be easy to understand how amazingly lazy cavemen were if they
had something nice to lie down on like a sofa or a cushion, but they only
had stones. You’d think that would have given them some get up and go.
But no, they just collected stones.
Think how advanced we could be now if Stones Age man had only been
arsed. We could have pretended to land on the Moon thousands of years
ago. We could have been pretending to be on Neptune by now. And if
Stones Age man had actually landed on the Moon, he’d have done exactly
what we did – brought back stones.
Stones Age man needed big thrills, though, and got it in the form of
Stonehenge. Cavemen had small stones. Now they could go and look at big
ones. To Stones Age man, Stonehenge was a cross between Nemesis at
Alton Towers – in that it was a spectacular attraction – and the queue for
Nemesis at Alton Towers – in that it never fucking moves.
But these small, hairy creatures – sort of giants but normal size – spent
generations sharpening stones and not inventing the razor, and hitting things
together like cross chimps. As a result, Stones Age man left us a legacy of
stones. He was basically an idiot. It’s a wonder any of us is here.

Unanswered Questions About The Stones Age

• Why was Stones Age man so stupid?
• Why is there just spikes in museums, not the rest of their stuff?
• Didn’t they notice wood?
• How did Fred Flintstone die?
 T

Taj Mahal, The

The Taj Mahal is one of the most spectacular buildings in the world, and
one of the few to be made entirely of ice cream. (At least, that’s how it
looks.)
To stop it melting in the hot sun of India, where it lives, the builders must
have used the same technology they use to make Baked Alaska. It is, by
volume, by far the largest Baked Alaska on Earth. It was built in the 1600s
to please the wife of the Indian king, who must have really liked ice cream,
but was sadly too dead to enjoy it, and was instead buried, in chocolate
sprinkles, at its heart.
That’s if it’s made of ice cream. The publishers refused to fly me there to
run a taste test.

Television
Once upon a time, you had to have a TV to watch TV. Now you don’t need
a TV at all. You can watch TV on your computer, your tablet, your phone
and probably, by the time this book comes out, your toothbrush or your
shoes. There’ll probably even be a way of watching television in a book, by
turning the pictures and sounds in the programme into words and then
putting a picture of someone from the programme on the front so you don’t
mistake it for a real book.
The best new place for television is the television in your pocket: your
phone. The phone used to be a thing for communicating with people. Now
it’s for looking at and ignoring people. Which is much more useful. Now
you can watch Loose Women on the train and Homes Under The Hammer in
the toilets when you’re getting bored down the pub.
These days, the big screen in your front room looks a bit of a dinosaur. If
there was a dinosaur with a big square face.
So what’s better? Phone or TV?
 TV has some of the most amazing wildlife programmes on it, like Blue
Planet and Raa Raa The Noisy Lion. But my old Nokia had Snake on it,
which is not just wildlife, but also a game. So that’s 1–0 to phones. TV’s
got loads of great game shows on it. But not Soda Candy Crush. Which is
brilliant. 2–0 to phones. When you get bored with the TV or the adverts
come on, where do you look? Your phone. 3–0 to phones. You can’t take
your TV into the bathroom with you to whack off to porn. 4–0 to phones.
Unless you’re P Diddy and you’ve got a TV already in your bathroom. And
I’m not P Diddy. I’m P Cunk. So that’s 5–0 to phones. My mate Nev’s got a
huge telly, like the size of a shop. But so what? I can hold my phone really
close to my face and get the same effect. 6–0 to phones.
So our phones are basically TVs now, as well as phones and maps and
computers and cameras and calendars and watches and calculators and
weather forecasters and credit cards and them little minicab offices you get
in Chicken Cottage.
And our TVs are basically giant phones that only do one thing. They’re
big, they’re expensive if you don’t get a twocked one from Smack
Converters and – unbelievably – most of the time they’re still in black and
white, when they’re turned off. My iPhone 5C’s bright yellow, even when
it’s run out of battery. It’s a joke.
Think of something you do every day, like ordering pizza. You just go on
your Domino’s app, order a large Meatzza Pizza with a Barbeque Stuffed
Crust, and half an hour later Omar drives it round on a hot moped. If I
wanted to order a pizza using my TV, I’d have to actually go on TV and
persuade the producers to let me say, ‘If there’s anyone from Domino’s in
Derby Street watching, could you send a large Meatzza Pizza with a
Barbeque Stuffed Crust to my flat for about 8 p.m. as usual? Omar knows
where I live.’
And what if nobody was watching because they were busy making
pizzas? What if my bit got edited out? People could starve. Which is why
more people use phones than TV: because phones save lives.
Scientists predict that one day we’ll all be doing everything on our
phones, a bit like we already are.
Of course, the nightmare scenario – now phones are basically getting
bigger and bigger again, after they spent years getting smaller – is that
they’ll become the size of TVs, and we’ll all basically be carrying TVs
round with us everywhere, like we’re looters in a riot.
 And then we’ll have drunk people leaving their TVs on the train, people
dropping TVs down toilets and having to put them in sacks of rice
overnight, and everyone will have to have enormous pockets and giant
handbags. And if that happens, we’ll probably all start to evolve bigger
fingers, and in a few generations’ time, our grandchildren will be these
gorgeous little kids with massive, fat hands, like the mascots at Disney or
Miley Cyrus. And then we’ll have to introduce giant cashpoints and extra
large spoons and PlayStation controllers the size of tables and people who
want to clap will probably have to wear ear protectors by law. If you think
about it, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
I wish they’d never made TVs and phones the same thing. I think it was a
mistake. One of those things humanity is one day going to regret. Like
walking upright. And yoghurt.
By the way, ‘TV’ is short for television. I should have said that up the top.
But it’s still true down here.

Time
As the world spins faster and faster, time seems more precious every day.
But time is not like other precious things: you can’t hold it, like a necklace,
or taste it, like money. Yet some people say time is money. Which it isn’t,
or coins would tick. And you’d be able to spend it on stuff or put it in the
bank or blow it on something daft. And who’s ever heard of anyone
spending time or saving time or wasting time?
So how many of us actually understand time?
Time has been around since before the beginning of time. Today, it’s all
around us – on our phones, in the corner of the news – but once upon a
time, if you wanted the time, you had to make a special visit to the
headquarters of time: Greenwich Clock Museum in Greenwich in London,
the place where all time is made. All the clocks in the world are set from
Greenwich, which must take ages. And when they say ‘the clocks go back’
this is where they go back to, to have the new times put on. It’s usually an
hour.
So what is clocks?
Clocks was invented by the ancient Mesopotamians in ancient
Mesopotamian times – but they didn’t know they were ancient
Mesopotamian times because there were no clocks to tell them what the
times was.
Because of the shape of clocks, you might think that time goes in a circle.
But it doesn’t. It actually goes in a line. At Greenwich Clock Museum
they’ve got the line it goes in: the famous Greenwich Marillion Line, made
of heavy metal and named after the band Marillion, who are named after the
Line. Every day that’s ever happened starts at the Line. On one side of it is
the past – and on the other is the future. So you can stand with your legs
either side of it, and feel the present literally forcing itself cheerfully
between your legs.
But even boffins who understand time don’t understand what it is. Is it a
physical thing? Is it alive? If it is alive, is it OK?
It’s no wonder no one can explain time. When you start finding out about
it, as I was made to, it gets insanely complicated. For instance, because of
the speed of light, which is the fastest speed there is, the faster you’re
going, the longer time takes. So if you put a candle on a skateboard, and it’s
sitting still, the light’s taking however long – but if you move the
skateboard, the light’s taking the same time, but the time is taking longer. (I
think that’s it.)
That must be why time flies when you’re having fun, but when you’re
panicking or nervous, like when you’re on an escalator and you realise
you’re standing still but still moving, you sort of freeze, and time stands
still, like in The Matrix.
Perhaps the only thing we know for sure about time is that it’s slowly
running out for all of us. And that’s a comforting thought.

Top Gear
The BBC loves making old programmes again with different people in: they
did Porridge, they did Open All Hours and they did Are You Being Served?
But their most successful one was the reboot they did of Last Of The
Summer Wine, where they took the three old men going downhill in an
unlikely vehicle and gave it a complete makeover, adding loads of pizzazz
and whizz-bang and changing its name to Top Gear.
Foggy, the tetchy, arrogant one, became the comedy character Jeremy
Clarkson; Clegg, the quietly spoken one, became the character James May;
and Compo, the scruffy little mischievous one, became the character
Richard Hammond. And instead of confining their escapades to Yorkshire,
the three of them capered around the world, hilariously crashing cars and
ruining caravans and damaging the environment and slagging off
foreigners and using all sorts of language and causing near-diplomatic
incidents with the Argentinians, the Germans, the Mexicans, the
homosexuals and the Romanians.
But much of the original Last Of The Summer Wine format remained: it
was still three loveable old men wasting their time because they all had
some fundamental personality flaws, and it was still watched by millions of
slightly undemanding people week in and week out, long after it was past
its best.
In the explosive final series, the character of Jeremy Clarkson lost his shit
with a producer and walloped him for not being able to find a steak in a pub
– which some people thought was going too far, and the show was
cancelled.
Shortly after that, a spin-off show was launched – confusingly, also called
Top Gear – starring Joey from Friends and the hilarious Chris Evans off of
TFI Friday. They had a buddy-buddy relationship, like Butch Crassidy and
The Sunny Delight Kid. But viewers didn’t take to the pair, especially the
Chris Evans character, a sort of millionaire schoolboy who’d won a
competition, and he was eventually written out.
I don’t know if it’s still on. I only really watch Love Island.

Triangles
A triangle is any shape with three sides, except a coin, which has a head
side, a tail side and a round-the-edge side but is apparently not a triangle.
The triangle is the only shape named after a musical instrument, except
the symbol. Though one day the French will probably call a rectangle ‘le
synthesizer’, maybe as a mark of honour when Daft Punk die. They’re like
that, the French.
The word ‘triangle’ in English comes from the word ‘angle’, meaning
angle, and the word ‘tri’, meaning three, because there are 180 angles in a
triangle, and 180 divided by 10 is 18; and 18 is 3 times 6; and 6 is 3 times
2; and 2 is the smallest number, so therefore: ‘three-angles’ = triangle: 180
angles.
The amazing thing about a triangle is you can fit those 180 angles into the
triangle no matter how small the triangle is. Think of the tiniest triangle you
can imagine (the one you fold a crisp packet into, or the top of a pencil, or
the pointy hat on a microscopic wizard) and you can still fit every one of
those 180 angles into it. They must be really squashed up.
Because of this, we can do some amazing calculations, knowing what we
know about triangles. Hold onto your hats, especially if you’re a
microscopic wizard.
Each corner of a triangle has 60 angles in it (180 divided by 3), so that
means there are 900 angles outside the triangle. These 900 angles outside
the triangle are the angles you can’t see, but you know are there. This is
called dark maths.
That means there is a total of only 1080 angles in the entire universe: 180
inside the triangle, and 900 outside, everywhere else in the whole of
everywhere. Those 900 angles are divided amongst all the triangles in the
universe. And because there are 180 angles in each triangle, we can use this
to work out how many triangles there are in the whole of space: 900 divided
by 180, which makes five.
Proving that there are five triangles in the universe. We already know
about the crisp packet, the pencil top and the little wizard. That leaves two
more. One day, science may find the other ones, but they’re probably on the
other side of space.

Trump, Donald
See Lies.

Truth
These days it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. On the big issues,
nobody can agree what’s actually going on. Whether it’s Brexit, or Trump,
or the Loch Ness monster, we might as well all live on different planets. But
outside our sexual media echo chambers is there anything we can all agree
is true?
What is truth? The dictionary says it’s a noun, whatever that is. But is that
true? Can we trust the dictionary? Well, if you look up ‘dictionary’ in the
dictionary, what does it say? ‘Noun.’ Again. Whatever that is. It’s as if
someone doesn’t want us to know the truth.
Truth is what’s actually happening. So it’s true that I’m dictating this into
my iPhone. And it’s true that I’ve got some of the granola bar I had for
breakfast stuck in my teeth. But the fact that my Nissan Micra turns into a
pumpkin at midnight isn’t true. So it isn’t a fact. That was a trick. And you
fell for it, Siri.
Some people say truth is stranger than fiction. That means it’s stranger
than that book where children are tortured by an army of orange dwarfs in a
sociopath’s chocolate factory, so you’ll understand why nobody believes in
it any more, because that’s pretty fucking strange.
Scientists use something called proof to test if something is true. That
means doing an experiment and always getting the same result. So if I toss a
coin and always get heads, that would prove the coin was true. But if I got
tails, even once, the coin would no longer exist. Which is why science is so
expensive.

TRUTH AND FULLOSOPHY

Throughout history people called fullosophers have wondered if anything

was true, and refused to accept reality, which was a good way to avoid
having to get a proper job.
Aristotle said, ‘To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is
false. While to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is
true.’ To this day, nobody knows what he was drinking.
A fullosopher called Russell Bertrand, in many ways the Russell Brand of
his day, said that many different ways of seeing the world might exist, but
only one could actually be true, like how all the cakes in Bake Off look nice,
but only one can win.
In the olden fashioned times, people didn’t believe something was true
because it was true but because someone said it was true, usually a priest or
a god or anyone with a beard. Nowadays, we don’t do that, because of Noel
Edmonds. But some people think that belief is the same as truth. They say
they believe in God, so there is a God. Other people say they don’t believe
in God, so there is no God. But nobody knows how needy God is – He
might need to be believed in just to exist, like David Gest did.
In the 20th century, people started to mess around with ideas. Picasso
painted pictures of impossible people with triangle faces and eyes on
different floors – and as a result, someone I haven’t found the name of came
up with the idea of relativism.
Relativism has nothing to do with having your family over at Christmas –
it’s about saying that everything’s up for argument, which is actually a lot
like having your family over at Christmas.
Relativism is useful when there’s no scientific proof that something is
true. For instance, there’s no proof that Bombay Bad Boy is the best flavour
of Pot Noodle, even though everybody knows it is. So we just have to say
that it’s better than all the others. Especially Sticky Rib.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TRUTH

Spandau Ballet sang a song that went, ‘This much is true’. What they meant
is still hotly debated to this day, but the single cost about £1.10 when I
bought it in Boots. That much was true.
It’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not when even clever people like
Stephen Fry used to be on the television all the time saying there’s no such
thing as the Moon just to piss off Jonathan Creek. Are these trees real? Are
those trees real? What about love? Or Yorkshire pudding?
What about me? How do I know if I’m real? For all I know, I might have
been made up by someone for a laugh.

Unanswered Questions about Truth

• If someone says, ‘Hello, I’m a liar,’ how do you know they’re telling the truth?
• Can you tell if someone’s telling a lie if they do a blowoff when they’re saying it?
• Do old people eat talcum powder?
• Is there really a truth fairy?
• If you swallow bubble gum does an apple tree grow in your stomach?
• If you turn a lie detector upside down, does it become a truth detector?
• Have anyone’s pants ever actually caught fire while they were telling a fib?
• Is it true what Einstein said – that if you were travelling at the speed of light, and you
turned the lights off, you’d crash into something?
• Is the sky actually blue or is it another colour and we can’t see it, because there’s all that
blue in the way? Like the green bottle they put Appletiser in.
• When someone does an E and tells you you’re their best mate – is that them lying or
telling the truth?
• Where does the truth go when it dies? (I got this question from the words of a power
ballad.)
• Has anyone ever photographed a truth?
• In court, when you promise to tell the whole truth and all that, why do judges still dress
like twats and nobody says?
• Is a white lie racist?
• In that Ricky Gervais film, The Invention Of Lying, why was it ever made?
• If you took a lie detector out into a field, could it find where people say gold’s buried but
isn’t?
• If truth is measured in yeses, is that why there’s YESterday but NO tomorrow?
 U

United States of Americans, The

The United States of Americans is a great big country on the other side of
the world (or ‘the pond’, as they sometimes call it) where there’s
Hollywood and hot dogs and huge cars and guns everywhere and cowboys
and cactuses and skyscrapers and superheroes and stars and stripes.
But there’s more to the USA than that. Although, to be fair, not much
more. That’s quite a lot already.

THE CONSTITUTION

In Britain we have never needed a written-down thing that tells us what our
country is, because we just do whatever the Queen says or she cuts our head
off, but in America, they have a book called the constitution, to tell them
how to be American.
The American constitution is like the most important thing for Americans,
because it goes back so far into history. It was written down in 1787,
making America nearly as old as Addis, the company that makes pedal bins
and washing up bowls.
The US constitution is like the instructions for America. Every country
needs rules, especially a new country like America, which had only been
invented a few years before, after being taken from the people who lived
there before. They hadn’t had any instructions at all except the ones about
putting up wigwams, and look where it got them.
To make America work only required seven very basic things to be
written down. This told everyone what America was, so everyone agreed,
and stopped there being a war about it, except the one that started almost
immediately a few years later.
Writing those seven things onto paper literally set them in stone so they
can never be changed – plus twenty-seven changes that have been made to
those seven things – or there’ll be a war.
The changes are called Amendments, because you say ‘Amen’ after them,
and the one you hear most about is the Second Amendment. This is the one
that says all Americans have to carry at least one gun, and fire it into the air
if a stranger comes into the saloon. Another amendment to this amendment
was invented by the monkey-fighting actor Charlston Heston who decided
that if the government wants to take a gun away from an American citizen,
they have to give him some cold dead hams as a prize.

WHAT AMERICANS MEAN WHEN THEY SAY THINGS

In America, they speak English except they change loads of the words, so
you have to sort of struggle to keep up, which is how they like it.
For instance, Americans don’t have pavements. Well, they do have
pavements (or you’d just fall straight through the road into the underground
or ‘subway sandwich’), it’s just they call their pavements ‘sidewalks’,
which sort of sounds like a fun dance.
That’s an easy one, and most people know that. But that’s just pavements.
You don’t normally have to ask for a pavement, or get directions to the
pavement. It’s just there. But the American renaming thing gets right shitted
up around food and the human body.
Americans call biscuits ‘cookies’ and scones ‘biscuits’. They call crisps
‘chips’ and chips ‘fries’. And there’s almost nothing in a salad with its
proper name – it’s all horrible words like ‘cilantro’ and ‘rutabaga’ and
‘scallions’, which is probably what puts Americans off eating salad ever,
and is why so many of them are the size of a trawler. Other things just
sound rude, like ladyfingers and eggplants and taffy.
Meanwhile, back at the human body, they call the bum the ‘fanny’, which
is actually something they should probably tell you at passport control,
because when someone asks you if you want a fanny pack in a shop, it turns
out you can end up spending the night in the cells for what was frankly a
completely understandable reaction. They call full stops ‘periods’, but they
also call periods ‘periods’, so an American telling you something is ‘heavy’
and then adding a full stop for emphasis can also lead to the police being
called when you ask them what the hell they’re suggesting.
Other things that Americans have different names for are ‘graham
crackers’, which they call ‘gram crackers’ (even though we don’t have
either over here) and ‘tomato’, which they pronounce ‘tomato’. Sorry, not
‘tomato,’ ‘tomato’.
 V
Victorians, The
The 1800th century was dominated by one ethnic group: The Victorians.
They voted in a leader who would represent their interests, Queen Victoria,
who was so Victorian she was even named after them. Other rulers had
turned England into Britain. But Queen Victoria turned Britain into the
world, a world called Empire.
British people have never like learning other languages, and always
enjoyed traditional British dishes like the sandwich and crisps. Before
Empire, this made taking over the world difficult, because some countries
had languages of their own, and shockingly different crisps. It seemed
easier to just stay at home. But Empire was a new idea: go somewhere else
and make that country into Britain, so British people could survive there.
Like when Matt Damon went to Mars and grew potatoes in his own
droppings.
The Victorian British Empire spread all over the world, to people as far
apart as India. Although English was the language of the Empire, people in
other countries were encouraged to use very strong accents when they
spoke. This meant that although everyone was ‘a British subject’, what they
were ‘a British subject’ of was racist jokes: racist jokes which kept up
British morale for over a hundred years.
The Victorians didn’t only collect people and countries, they also
collected shit. No period in history has been so filled with knick-knacks.
Every Victorian house was overflowing with shit. China shit. Shit on tables.
Shit in cabinets. Shit on tall wobbly stands. Shit in little boxes that were
themselves shit. In medieval times, if an ordinary person had loads of shit in
their home, it was actual shit. But this was a tat revolution. Factories turned
out shit by the canal-boatload, meaning that an ordinary home could be as
cluttered as Buckingham Palace. The love of shit gave rise to a new class of
people: the nan. We still share our planet with the last surviving nans, a
touching echo of the glorious Victorian race.
The Victorians were eventually destroyed. Nobody knows how. It might
have been disease, or a nasteroid, but one day they simply weren’t there any
more. Maybe they left to build a new empire, in space, teaching English on
Mars and eating poo potatoes. Maybe we’ll never know. I certainly don’t.

Vikings
The Vikings were a race of real but mythical creatures who arrived in
Britain in the 8th century. They were violent sailors with terrifying skull
horns which jutted out of their heads – sort of half-Popeye, half-cow. They
had long boats called longboats, and metal helmets that included special
nose hats, and ridiculous furry coats. They turned up and caused all sorts of
bother. They were basically a load of Hagrids on a stag weekend.
The word Viking is made from two words: ‘Vi’, which is short for
‘violent’, and ‘King’, which is short for ‘killing’. They came from
Denmark, like Lego, and like Lego, if you stood on a Viking in bare feet, it
would really hurt. They were covered in spikes and liked to smash stuff,
like Sonic The Hedgehog or Keith from The Prodigy.
Vikings loved pillage. That might sound like they were 90s clubbers, but
it actually means going mad and taking stuff, like 90s clubbers. They came
here for our treasure. Britain’s coast was packed with monasteries full of
gold and valuables that the British were protecting using unarmed men with
Prince William haircuts who spent all day copying out the Bible. It was a
remarkably poor plan, and the fierce Vikings were soon bravely defeating
every unarmed monk with a lifelong vow of non-violence that they met.
But British King Alfred of Great fought back with a surprise tactic:
instead of trying to repel the Vikings by repelling them, he gave them half
the country and loads of money. That stopped the Vikings raiding, because
they would have just been raiding themselves. It was like inviting your
burglar to move in upstairs. It was a bold plan, and it worked, making
Alfred the greatest king What Was Left Of England had ever had. The
Vikings settled in York, attracted by the easy transport connections and the
Jorvik Viking Centre.
Eventually, interbreeding meant the Vikings lost their distinctive horns
and became indistinguishable from normal humans.

Unanswered Questions About The Vikings

 • How did they get a bike named after them?
• Why did they disguise their boats as dragons? Is that because it’s more frightening than a
boat? Were some of them too frightened to get in their boats?
• When exactly was it that Viking women started singing opera in a metal bra until glasses
exploded?

Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is a way of experiencing total freedom by trapping yourself
in a tight electric helmet. You can get roughly the same effect by
blindfolding yourself and falling over.
The real world is disappointing, especially if you have trouble relating to
other people and smell funny, so coming up with an alternative has for
many years been a priority for the planet’s top boffins. This is why even
though we haven’t got a cure for cancer or jetpacks or any of the other stuff
we were promised, you can buy a virtual reality headset in Argos and live
on the Tardis Enterprise.
All sorts of worlds can be stimulated using virtual reality. The experience
can be quite moving, unless you fall over, which you will. In the future we
may all use virtual reality as an escape, perhaps from our awful future jobs,
whatever they will be once the robots take over. Probably manning the
phones in a call centre that deals with complaints about virtual reality
helmets.
In many ways, the virtual world is quite a good place to hide, unless
you’re actually hiding from, say, the police, in which case you’re not only
quite easy to see, because you look like Daft Punk, but you also can’t see
the police coming, because you can only see goblins, or whatever they’ve
put in the helmet.
 W

Wars of the Roses, The

Far too hard to explain. There are just two things to remember.
Firstly, it was the basis for Games Of Throne, except that the man who
wrote that, Sir George RRRRRR Martin, changed the names so he wouldn’t
get sued, and made it more realistic by filling it with dragons and dwarves
and loads of tits.
Lastly, the most violent event of the Wars of the Roses was the Battle of
Bosworth, which Richard III tried to escape by burrowing under a car park.
He hid there for centuries, but eventually we found him. Alas, it was too
late, and he’d died of tarmac inhalation.

Weather
‘Weather’ is the word we have for what sort of mood the sky is in. When
the sky’s in a good mood, like it always seems to be in happy places like
Syria, it’s nice and sunny. When the sky’s in a grumpy mood, like it (and
everybody else) is in Scotland, it’s cloudy and cold.
Basically that’s because the sky, in common with everyone, likes hot
countries and gets fed up in cold countries. So when it goes somewhere hot,
it’s happy and sunny, and when it goes to Scotland, it gets all grey and pale
and ill and overweight and miserable and aggressive at weddings and can’t
wait to get home.
Sometimes, of course, the sky really loses its shit – and that’s when you
get things like tornadoes and hurricanes and floods. But we all have our bad
days, and that’s no different for the sky than it is for you or me or the bloke
who stands outside the kiosk at the bus station every Friday shouting about
The Rapture, whoever they are.
The government has a special department of sky-boffins called The Met
Office. It’s their job to try to predict what sort of mood the sky will be in
from one day to the next, and, as is obvious when you think about it, they
get it right about half the time. For some reason you have to be highly
qualified to get a job at the Met Office, even though it’s just guessing for a
living. I bet I’d be brilliant at that. Or terrible. One or the other. See, it’s not
hard.
When they’ve guessed whether the sky will be the life and soul or a pain
in the tits tomorrow, they give their prediction to weather forecasters, who
then stand in front of maps depicting the land, not the sky, and talk in code,
using weather boffin jargon like ‘spits and spots’ and ‘treacherous
conditions’ and ‘warm front’ and ‘nice’. Most people nod along with this
and pretend to understand it. But the truth is none of it matters, because
even if it’s lovely and sunny when you leave the house in the morning, it’ll
still be chucking it down by lunchtime.

Weeing in Public
Weeing is something we all prefer to do in private, except for men when
they’re drunk. (They like to play a sort of X-rated hide-and-seek where they
vanish, only to have their whereabouts given away by the river of piss
running out of the alley they think they can’t be seen in.) But sometimes,
when you’re out and about, and a long way from a public toilet – in a field,
say, or the middle of any town in Britain – you need a wee, and that’s when
you have to surrender your privacy.
In a town, that means going into a pub. Normally, they make you buy a
drink, but frankly that’s just a down-payment on your next wee, so if you
don’t want to have to buy a drink, say you’re pregnant. If you don’t look
pregnant – like, if you’ve got a beard or a moustache – then say you left
your calculator in the toilet or something.
If you’re in the countryside (which you shouldn’t be: it’s pointless) you
have a lot more options. If you’re a man, you can go behind a bush or a tree.
If you’re not a man, like me, you have to choose your spot more cleverly.
You need somewhere you can crouch down without being seen. A thick bit
of undergrowth is quite useful. That doesn’t read right. You know what I
mean. Hedgerows or something. (What’s the difference between a hedge
and a hedgerow?) The important bit is that no one can see you. Cows don’t
count: they don’t mind weeing in public as much as people do, because they
do it themselves. I don’t know what horses think.
 One thing, though: before you wee, check the ground below you. If you
can see a mat or a wicker hamper, you might be about to wee on someone’s
picnic, which could ruin their scotch eggs, so find another spot.
A fun mistake is to climb up a tree and wee down from there. I don’t
recommend this, even if the bet reaches £10.

Welfare State, The

The welfare state was an idea from after War Two about how if things could
only get better then nobody would have had it so good. It was called the
welfare state to distinguish it from the previous system, which was well
unfair.
Before the welfare state, you could only have medicine or a house or
money if you had enough money to pay for it, like it still is with food and
clothes and everything else. Once the welfare state had started, even if you
were really poor, you could just have certain stuff like crutches and a front
door for nothing.
The free stuff wasn’t actually free – it was paid for by other ordinary
people who did have money – but if you wanted it, you just took it. It was
basically burglary, but a lot of poor people had just been through a war and
so it was nice to give them something, I suppose.
The welfare state was a futuristic idea, and it was invented by
Clement@Lee, the first prime minister with his own email address, though
it would be nearly fifty years before anyone else had an email address to
send him anything.
Clement@Lee promised that things would be slightly less awful for
everybody once the bombing had stopped, which was a pretty easy promise
to make. But his prediction came true and lots of soldiers voted for him,
meaning that he beat Wilson Churchill. Churchill was the best at war, but
he’d done a war so well that it had stopped, so now he was as much use as a
concrete lifebelt. If Churchill had invented the NHS it would have been
more like a war, and nurses would have been in tanks, which makes it
harder to reach someone with a Mr Bump plaster, but might have made
Friday night in A&E a bit easier to keep under control.
 Willis, Walliam
The Scots have always been a proud, confident nation, ready to complain if
they think they’ve not been given their own little section in a book.
But in 1296, Scotland was reluctantly under the rule of English Edward
The Firstest. One man wanted out: Walliam Willis. No one knew what
Walliam Willis looked like until 1995 when Hollywood scientists
discovered he looked exactly like Mel Gibson, who was coincidentally
playing a Scottish Apache in a film called Braveheart – a sort of Dancing
With McWolves.
Willis gathered a band of noble warriors and defeated the English army at
Stirling Bridge using facepaint and extreme whittling. To this day, the
words ‘Stirling Bridge’ conjure pride in every Scotman’s heart – while, to
an Englishman, those same words conjure up literally no feelings at all.
Their run of luck could not last, however, and Willis and his men were
twatted by the English at Falkirk, turning their blue faces as red as a
Scotsman’s face today. Willis turned tail like a blue-arsed fly, though
history does not record what colour he had actually painted his arse, if he
painted it at all. With Willis gone, a posh Scotsman called Roberty Bruce
thrashed the English at the Battle of Bannockburn and took the throne.
Scotland would never again be under English control. For a bit.
Willis, meanwhile, was eventually captured by the English and taken to
London, where he was publicly hung, drawn and quartered. This means he
was hung by his neck, then while he was still alive, his guts were chopped
out and his body cut into four quarters. Something you can ask your local
butcher to do to a chicken, but not to a Scottish Nationalist.

Windows
A window is a way of seeing what is outside without going outside.
When windows were invented they were the bit of a wall that was like a
wall, but made of the opposite of wall so you could see through it. In those
days, the only thing you could see through was air, so windows were made
of that. Then someone invented glass, which is a sort of cross between
metal and air. This meant that the window bit of a window could be made of
something other than nothing. This was a huge leap forward in windows,
though making a huge leap forward in windows was something that was
made much harder by putting glass in them.
Early windows were usually covered in criss-cross black lines, like they
were wearing stockings, which made them harder to see out of, but it would
be hundreds of years before anyone thought of not putting criss-cross black
lines on the windows, just like it took them ages to think of not putting
criss-cross black lines on the outside of houses. Nobody knows why. Maybe
they just liked lines.
The window was so important, they sometimes put saints in them, and
displayed them in churches. This was a revolutionary new type of window,
the strained glass window. Strained glass windows were widescreen and full
colour, and they must have blown everyone’s mind, because everything else
in the world was shit-coloured. With new inventions, like blue, and red,
windows were very much the internet of their day.
People travelled miles to see these state of the art windows, because these
weren’t like the old black-and-white windows, with St Laurel and Hardy in
them, but blockbuster windows about sexy new saints like St Albans and
All Saints, the patron saint of sewing machines. Nowadays you only see the
bright colours of strained glass in traffic lights, a sad reminder that God is
dead.
As well as churches, windows could be used to make greenhouses, and
deal with the terrible problem of tomato homelessness. The window glass in
a greenhouse is see-through, hence the name. Posh stately homes where you
can buy souvenir rubbers often had ginormous greenhouses for growing
exotic food like pineapples and potatoes and toast. By the Nineteenth
Hundreds, greenhouses had got so big that tomatoes the size of humans
could fit in them, like the one built in 1851 – The Crystal Palace, a sort of
Apple Store in a greenhouse for selling bollocks to Victorians. It worked so
well that they moved it to its own park in London and burned it down.
Window technology kept getting better, and soon it was possible to build
huge skyscrapers out of windows, and even do double-glazing, which meant
window-lovers could have twice as many windows without building any
new rooms. Some people even started wearing windows on their faces, in
the form of glasses, to show how much they loved the clear (or coloured)
rectangles that had changed the way we looked through walls.
 The most modern window is the window on the front of a computer,
which is an electric window, but not like the ones in cars. When you look
through that window, even though it’s made of glass, you can’t see the
inside of your computer, with all cogs and springs, but instead you can see
the internet, which is made of something called Windows. These windows
are part of an operating cistern, which is a sort of electronic toilet for
information.
Who knows where windows will go next? Maybe there will be a window
you can carry in your pocket, or one you can inject, or eat like a pill. It
would have all the views you’d normally see through a window, but in 3-D,
and sent straight to your brain, using microchips. When it comes to
windows, the window really is the limit.

Wright Brothers, The

Orville and Keith Wright were the first inventors of flying for humans.
Orville had wished he could fly, right up to the sky, but he couldn’t, until
his brother Keith invented something nobody had ever invented before: the
aeroplane.
The Wright Brothers’ aeroplane was the first aeroplane to get above the
air despite being heavier than it, which is the wrong way up. Inventing
flying upside down like this was the Wright Brothers’ stroke of genius, and
nobody had worked it out before, and nobody understands it now, but it
works, so the best thing is to shut up and stop bothering the cabin staff.
Before the Wright Brothers, people had tried to invent flying by looking
at birds. At first people looked at the wrong birds, like penguins and
chickens, because they were closer to the ground and so easier to look at,
but they didn’t learn much except that an aeroplane should have a beak at
the front – which they do to this day – and lay eggs (suitcases).
When people looked at higher-up birds than chickens, they noticed that
they flapped their arms (or ‘wings’) and realised that that was probably the
difference between up-there birds like owls and down-here birds like
ostriches: flapping. So the first aeroplanes all had flapping bits, and didn’t
work, though all these experiments have been recorded for posterity in jerky
black and white thanks to late 1980s house music videos.
 Then the Wright Brothers worked out that the thing birds had that kept
them in the air wasn’t feathers or flapping, or even a beak, but propellers.
By adding propellers, like a bird, the Wright Brothers’ plane could get off
the ground, fly dozens of feet, at a height of several inches, and land safely,
just like aeroplanes do to this day, except the ones that crash.
Orville and Keith Wright’s invention made the world smaller almost
overnight, and that meant there was more air. Which is good news for the
aeroplanes of the future, who’ll have loads of room.
 X

Xylophones
A xylophone is a musical instrument that makes sort of the same noise as a
crap piano, but crucially begins with ‘x’, so gets a lot more fuss than it
deserves.
Xylophones are not used much in music, at least not compared to the
guitar or the laser harp. They are mainly used in alphabet books and posters
for children, to teach them about the sound ‘x’. They do this by beginning
with the sound ‘z’, which doesn’t help.
But, to be fair, the only other word that begins with the letter ‘x’ is the
word ‘X-Ray’ and even that isn’t actually a word. It’s a letter. So it teaches
children that the letter ‘x’ begins with the letter ‘x’, which they probably
could have guessed.
It’s as bad as using a yacht for ‘y’ or a giraffe for ‘g’ when all that does is
open up a whole can of awkward bloody questions about how to say the
letters ‘ch’ and how you write the sound ‘j’. Though it does teach kids a
valuable lesson in how confusing and annoying life is going to be. And
maybe that’s the point.
The easiest way to teach children letters of the alphabet is through easily
recognisable objects like fruits. I have made an alphabet teaching chart,
which I hope makes things a lot clearer, the Alphabet of Fruits.
 Y

Young People
One of the annoying things about people is that there’s always more of them
being made. And not only that, but the more of them that there are being
made are nearly always younger and more excited than you. And you’re
meant to keep up. Which is knackering.
Obviously the best things that ever happened, happened around 1980–95.
That’s a scientific fact. Think about it. What’s the best things? Knight Rider
and the Discman and the invention of Doritos. I could go on, but that’s a
pretty good working list of the best things, and science can back me up on
this. Things that happened before then were mainly in black and white or
tapestries, and so it’s hard to give a crap, and stuff that happened after that
is just bullshit. The problem with young people is that they don’t care
enough about things that happened around 1980–95 (the best things) and
vastly overrate things that are bullshit (stuff happening now).
Still, it’s important to listen properly to the voice of young people,
because if you don’t listen properly, you can’t understand what the fuck
they’re on about. It’s like a different language, which is weird, because I
was a young person once, and you’d have thought once you’ve learned
young people’s language, you wouldn’t forget it. But they might as well be
beeping. I haven’t got a scooby.
The best definition of ‘young people’ is anyone whose date of birth
makes you think ‘Shit, I was drunk most of that year’. Eventually you
realise that you’re spending more and more time scrolling down drop-down
menus on websites to find your own year of birth. I reckon really old people
spend most of their retirement scrolling down menus looking for their
birthdate. It’s probably what makes their hands look so knackered.
Eventually your birth year starts to look stupid, like it’s from the War. You
start to expect to dig out an old photo of you and find out it’s actually a
tapestry or a statue. Pictures of your mum and dad start to look so old they
might as well have been taken at the fair in one of those Victorian photo
booths with stupid hats and a frilly umbrella. Young people don’t know any
of this. And they’re idiots.
 Yuletide
Before calendar scientists discovered Christmas, there was a completely
different festival that was exactly the same, called Yule. We still use the
word today in phrases such as ‘Yule Log’ and ‘Yule Brynner’, who is on the
television in films at Christmas.
The calendar gets sad in the winter, because the days shrink. Cold
weather does that to things. So to cheer up the calendar, it’s a good idea to
get really drunk and eat cake. There was nothing to do in Yule times
anyway, because the harvest was in and nothing needed planting, and
everyone was bored because nobody had invented Nintendo Switch.
The evergreen tree was the symbol of Yule, one of the few plants hardy
enough to thrive in the harsh winter, so pagans celebrated its survival by
cutting it down and killing it. Yule was all about decorating cramped, warm
spaces with the fragrance of fresh-cut pine, as minicab drivers still do today.
But the Christians wanted to have a big blow-out winter festival called
Christmas, so they decided to hold it on the same day everyone else was
having their Yule. This was handy because there was already a party on.
Christians basically turned up at a house party and said they were a mate of
Steve’s and could they come in. Christians like turning up unannounced at
front doors at all hours and trying it on to this day.
Christmas soon caught on everywhere, and by the 20st century, the
symbol of the Yule log and Christmas tree had been joined by a jolly
bearded figure who brought presents on Christmas Day: Noel Edmonds. He
would usually be up the Post Office Tower or something, making the
keyboard player from Duran Duran give Hungry Hippos to sick kids. I
don’t think that happens any more. I wouldn’t know. It was on quite early in
the morning and these days I’m usually sleeping off a Bailey’s hangover.
These days nobody calls Yuletide ‘Yuletide’ any more, unless they’re into
real ale and talk with their eyes closed. We all call it Christmas. And we
don’t call it that any more either. Because we call it Xmas. The ‘X’ in Xmas
stands for Christ, as in the superhero films The Christ Men, and the video
games system the ChristBox. And we celebrate very differently. In the
olden days, if someone had seen a tube of Christmas Chocolate Orange
Pringles in a tube with a man with a moustache made out of holly, they’d
have thought the Martians had landed. And whereas in the olden days they
watched Morecambe and Wise, now we watch clip shows of Morecambe
and Wise.
 Z

Zero
Zero is the maths word for ‘nothing’, but it doesn’t literally mean nothing,
because you can’t use it in phrases like ‘zero to declare’ or ‘much ado about
zero’ without sounding like a robot.
In Romans times, numbers didn’t start with zero, they started with one, so
that there were ten numbers from one to ten, rather than eleven numbers
from one to ten like we use now. Obviously only having ten numbers in the
first ten numbers made maths really complicated to do, compared to how
easy it is to do today with eleven numbers in the first ten numbers. Every
time you wanted to add up numbers that added to nothing, you had to
pretend they added up to one, out of embarrassment, meaning that you
could never get to zero. It’s probably why primitive man never got to the
Moon, because nobody could count down far enough to get a rocket off the
ground.
The idea of zero was invented in India around the 5th century BC (Before
Counting). Nobody had thought of giving nothing a name before, because
every time someone in charge of making up words had pointed at nothing
and asked what it was called, nobody could see what it was they meant. By
drawing a circle round it, it was easier to see, a bit like putting a wild
animal in a zoo so you can study it. The number zero was science’s way of
trapping nothing in a circle and making it behave.
By War Two, zeroes were not just working in equations and at the end of
round amounts of pounds on prices, but also in computers, where they did
half the work, alongside another number, one. Without zero, a computer
would be no better than a brick, and MarioKart would be really slow.
Nothing is a very difficult idea to grasp (for some people), because we
don’t see it very often. Even when something has been completely
destroyed, it is not reduced to nothing, there is always something left
behind. For example, there might be dust, or a fine powder, a bit like
ground coffee. This is where we get the phrase ‘ground zero’.
 Zombies
Zombies are sort of human ready meals: they look like humans (and ready
meals) and when you reheat them, they come back to life.
Most zombies look fucking terrible. This is probably because of their diet,
which is human flesh. And, a bit like when we had to burn all those cows
because they’d been eating other cows’ spines, the idiots, zombies have
gone mad. Anyone who gets bitten by a zombie becomes a zombie
themselves, like how Spiderman became a bit of a spider after one got him.
It’s a sort of pyramid scheme but without all those cleaning products you’ve
never heard of.
Frankly, the only hope for zombies is to turn vegetarian. I mean, some
zombies look as pale and unwell as vegetarians, so they’ve got nothing to
lose by getting some broccoli down their necks instead of biting passers-by
like a tramp version of Mike Tyson.
People spend a lot of time preparing for the Zombier Pocalypse, which is
when zombies try to take over the world via shopping malls. This is why
it’s reassuring that Westfield has so many security staff, even though none
of them looks handy enough to take on a starving member of the undead.
Let’s hope they get some heavyweights in there, and sharpish. After all,
time is running out – which is a comforting thought.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philomena Cunk is a journalist and thinker who has presented TV

shows on everything from time and feminism to Shakespeare and Jesus.
She asks the big questions other journalists are afraid to, like ‘What is
clocks?’ and ‘Why do we cry when it’s the onions getting hurt?’