do you remember when we made some pies mike ?

good times.

Yours apologetically,

The Kelvedon contingency

I’d just like you to know that I’m fully aware of the pie trick, and I didn’t learn it from you. In fact I may have inovated it myself but make no claim to being the original inventor. It must be one of those inovations where people all over the globe are coming to the same technological conclusion at the same time – history is full of examples: cinema, the motor car, manned flight – there is always a dispute about who came up with the goods first, but nobody is actually stealing anybody elses ideas.

Anyways – congratualations on Earth Inc – I remember you telling me about it in a bar in Poland (it had dog in it’s name, the bar not your book). I’d like to read it but can’t see where it’s available.

Don’t know what you can write about tomorrow – at the moment I’m wondering why German Keyboards have the Z and the Y swapped – or maybe it’s English keyboards which the wrong way. Maybe the Germans and the English invented the keyboard in tandem, and no one is to blame. Write about Tandems, they’re good.

Best wishes

Ewan

I thought I’d reply to this post, in case you don’t look at old posts again, because you’re lazy or have short term memory problems. You were correct in the identification of the Lee and Herring material. Only they called it the “and then I got off the bus” joke. I think they might have mentioned “and that was just the teachers” too, thinking back. I was also at that very Stew Lee gig at Glastonbury. I used to like seeing him every year at Glastonbury, saying the same 6 jokes as he’d done the year before, but somehow still making them funny, and then he ruined it by finally writing some new material. Have you read his book, by the way? It’s pretty good. Maybe writers don’t read other books, in the same way as some musicians don’t listen to other music, in case it interrupts their own ideas.

Your pie story also reminds me of a similar incident with a pizza a few years ago. I removed the freshly cooked pizza from the oven, put it on a plate, then walked up the stairs, tripping on the top one. The pizza slide off the plate, and my instinct was to save the pizza, so put my free hand (the one not holding the now fast emptying plate) out to rescue it. Unfortunately, the pizza had decided to do what toast with butter does, and cats don’t, and turn itself over, resulting in my hand being covered in hotter-than-the-sun cheese and tomato sauce. I swore quite a lot and recoiled my hand – which of course meant that the pizza I’d suffered so much in an attempt to save ended up face down on the carpet anyway – and rushed off to put my hand under the cold tap for about 10 minutes. I had horrible blisters on my hand for a week after. But facebook wasn’t around in those days, so I just had to make do with telling some guy I think I met once briefly at a festival (or may have been ‘the other one’ – which one of you is Annefrankingmachine?) who won’t remember me anyway. The joys of the internet.

Oh, and a book-based update. I’m now on page 43. Updates as they come in.