It was my favourite VC winner was a first World War fighter pilot. His name was Ferdinand West, I think. And they were attacked by 7 German planes. In the first, sort of, wave he had his leg shot off - completely off. So he, it was jamming the controls: he took it out and threw it out of the plane, manoeuvred his plane so they could get off some good bursts into the Germans, drove them away, dropped his bombs, landed back at base, apologised for the poor quality of his landing, and then sought medical attention.
Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous? How it was beaten by its adjective father. And left on the doorstep abandoned by its mother, and it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs. And the verbs were always going out doing lovely things, because they were doing words, and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma. And then after school it was surrounded by quotation marks and got beaten up terribly. And then one day entered into reality TV show and it became very famous and it was much in demand and used to describe all the people who leave Big Brother House?
They built the station next to the power station you see there, which is the third worst eyesore in the country. It was a Country Life thing—do you know what the first one was?
It's so weird that these national heroes are not from the place they are supposed to be. William Wallace was from Kenya. His mother was Masai... Not really!
So, Culloden was really more of a local difficulty; it was Highland versus Lowland; it was like Celtic and Rangers. Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight. And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.
In fact, every woman in the world has got bird flu. But we don't give a shit, we just get on with our lives. Now it's only because a few men have caught it lately that people are going mad about it. "Oh, I've got bubonic plague, but I've still got to do the hoovering."
Cos on my 30th birthday, I got some photos back after we had this dinner, and there were people with indoor sparklers. And I thought, “when did they have them? I must have gone to the loo or something. I don’t remember that.” And the next one was me with a sparkler. Then it’s me with two sparklers. Me lighting sparklers really intently, handing sparklers out.
