THE TOP 50 PARASITES TO HOST BEFORE YOU DIE

As the seasons change over, cultural pundits and commentators alike are all huffing and puffing over what we will be wearing, listening to, doing and constructing in the next few months. You’ll find endless lists in the broadsheets and supplements; sometimes the lists contain 50 items, sometimes 100, but it’s usually a neat round number with some kind of link to the decimal system. You don’t see lists of 33, or 17. I don’t know why. I imagine that numbers not ending in 0 might feel a little marginalised, and I worry that they might turn their backs on the quality press and become aficionados of the Red Tops and Scandal Sheets. When I say I worry, I don’t lose sleep over it, but I do know that 27, for instance, is a very impressionable soul, easily led and given to minor acts of retributive rebellion. I’ll keep an eye on her. I remember the time she almost ran away with an outright bounder from the Binary System, and 45 and I had a hell of a time convincing her that shallow charm in the form of multiple 1s and 0s was no substitute for the solidity and dependability of, say, a good honest Prime Number. (I would give an example here, but I’m not entirely sure I know what a prime number is – I think it might be one that is only divisible by itself and 36).

I’m not just concerned, though, by the neatly rounded numbers that make up these lists, I am also bemused by the ways in which they seek to act as a memento mori. They all encourage one to go and read or look at these 100-odd things ‘BEFORE YOU DIE.’ It’s enough to make you paranoid. Do they know something I don’t? Are the dark circles under my eyes not just the general malaise and weariness of adulthood but an indication of some genetic disorder that means I won’t see another Christmas? Is that twinge in my right knee a creeping canker that will grow and spread throughout my body like ground elder, choking all the good parts of me until only disease and decay is left? (In the case that you know me and quite like me, don’t worry about that – I know I just get a bit of patellar tendonitis in the right knee when I jump about too much and don’t use the Ibuprofen gel enough, I was just using a bit of pretentious hyperbole; however, if you know me and aren’t that keen on me, then I’m sorry, but I don’t really think I’m dangerously ill).

But back to the topic: 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die, 50 Dances You Must Do at a Wedding Disco Before You Die, 100 Spells You Must Cast Before You or Your Familiar Dies, 50 Types of Sushi You Must Encourage Some Other Hapless Soul To Eat Before You Die. Some other hapless soul because sushi is nasty. It’s RAW FISH, but it’s always fun to take other people to a sushi bar and watch their surprised and sometimes alarmed gurning as they try to pretend they like it – and please don’t write to me and tell me you do like sushi, because I just won’t believe you – or, more likely, I’ll smile and say alright, ok, the sushi example was a silly one, I know, I know, lots of people like it; but we’ll both know, really, that that’s a lie, and the next thing is that you’ll be trying to tell me that anchovies aren’t just flattened earthworms and that the Emperor has a lovely new outfit. In any case, eating raw fish is inadvisable as it is frequently riddled with parasites which will swirl around in your innards and start to consume you from the insides out; and wasabi sauce, although it might smell and taste like an acidic industrial disinfectant, will not kill these tiny piscatorial worms that attach themselves to the walls of your intestines in such numbers that your gut will look like velvet under a microscope. Like the very same velvet from which the Emperor’s new jacket is fashioned, in fact. Don’t you watch the Discovery Channel? They show documentaries every week about people whose heads are eaten by grubs that fall from trees in a rainforest, or people who eat the raw flesh of fish and other beasts and become hosts to the most vile nematodes nature has to offer. Ray Mears, too, and people like him, they selflessly try to warn you not to walk barefoot in the woods lest some maggot drill its way into the sole of your foot and slither up your tendons and veins to set up home in your hippocampus, and they tell you about fish worms, day in, day out; you’re not Gollum, you can’t just gulp a still-leaping trout down whole. Watch National Geographic at nine tonight, there’ll be one on. It’ll be listed as ‘Fish Maggots Ate My Soul’ or something. And take note, and never eat sushi yourself. Take a little plate to the sushi bar with you, and put on it a jam tart or a fig roll or something of that ilk, quietly slip it out of your bag when your hapless friend is reaching for the wasabi. No-one will know, because sushi usually looks like a nasty cake or biscuit. And nobody ever got worms from a Garibaldi.

But to go back to the lists and their sinister reminder of your death. I’m not really sure what they’re for. Well, no, that’s not true; they fill up space in the weekend newspapers and give people something to talk about over sushi. You can either feel very smug that you’ve seen 25 of the 50 films that should be seen before you die, or else feel an idiot because the only one you have seen is ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’; then you can feel desperate because out of the 100 Dances to do at Wedding Discos, you’ve not done the birdie one or the ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ (but you have done that Whigfield ‘Saturday Night’ one), and you start to consider your age and your circle of friends and family and you realise that there is no chance at all that you will be invited to another 84 weddings between now and the day you die, and that means that you will have failed and will take your last breath knowing that you are incomplete and unfinished and there is nothing – save spending three years or so crashing the nuptials of strangers – there is nothing you can do about it.

BEFORE YOU DIE. You have to try to cram in all of these things BEFORE YOU DIE. The problem is, although death is perhaps the only certainty in life, its time of arrival is extremely uncertain. Lots of people know or have heard of someone who was given the worst news by the doctor: you only have six months. Trouble is, that was five years ago. And there are all those people on Death Row, whose appeals go on for years and years. So, even those of us who think we have a good idea of our expiry date might be wrong. And that mythical bus that trundles around knocking people over could be hurtling towards any of us right now. You might be served a lethal part of the Fugu Puffer fish in a sushi bar (the ovaries of the female are the most dangerous of all, so always check your portion carefully).

So, my response to the hip broadsheet lists is this: thank you, I have read some of those books and seen some of those films. I might catch a few more of them at some time. I might not bother. I was born into an Irish-Spanish Catholic family and was educated at a Catholic school, and was thus taught that death is not the end. I’m lapsed now, like we all are, but you never know, do you? So what I might do, instead of panicking and feeling culturally inadequate, is that I’ll sit back, finish this cup of wasabi, stuff the Arts section of the weekend broadsheet into the recycling and then maybe I’ll wait till AFTER I DIE to see some of those films. I’ll definitely wait till then to see all the ‘Star Wars’ ones, and even though I have read half of it, I might leave the second half of ‘Ulysses’ for the afterlife too. I’m going to make sure my fleshly remains are both mummified and desiccated fully before I read another Jane Austen. I want even the worms that feasted on me to have been dead for decades before I watch ‘The Matrix’. I’ll have all the time in the world then. I’ll have eternity.

Posh Food

As a child, I was raised on lumps of grotesquely deformed gristle and gobs of cabbage so watery it had lost all integrity and become a kind of tasteless puree.  I bet Cabbage Coulis is now gracing the menu of some fashionably overpriced eatery in one of those big cities you hear so much about on the telly, but back when I was forced to eat it because other children in foreign countries were starving and I ought to be more grateful, it was rubbish.  My mother was a bad cook and my father had grown up in a house with five brothers and one sister, so whatever was put on his plate he ate as quickly as he could, always subconsciously fearful that Kathleen or Terry would swipe it from under his nose before he had a proper go at it;  he never really noticed how bizarrely vile it was.  My mother most frequently made stews, mince and some strange kind of dull yellow mucus cheesey concoction.  I remember when she once decided that her menu lacked variety and took to pushing reluctant, quivering blobs of lard into some flour and then rolling out the resulting greyish paste, cutting it into rings to bake on a tin tray and balancing these strange discs on top of whatever it as she had made that day, thus creating a ‘pie’.  ‘It’s not stew again, no, it’s a steak pie,’ she would claim.  Or else ‘minced beef pie’, ‘cheese pie’ or ‘cabbage puree pie’.  To me, it usually looked like some unfortunate Mysterons had crashed and drowned in a lake of vomit.

You might think, then, that when I grew up and went away to a big city to study and have coming of age experiences, that I would be amazed and delighted at the cosmopolitan culinary delights awaiting me, but this was not so.  I was fully expecting to have awakened tastebuds I never realised I even had, but what I discovered instead is that a great many of the foodstuffs that people gasp over and pay good money for in restaurants and serve up to their friends at those excruciating soirees and dinner parties you have to go to when you become even a little bit adult are actually just as mad and inedible as my mother’s ‘pies’.  I was reminded of this last week when I met up with some former colleagues at an authentic pizzeria in Walsall.  They all went a bit eager and excitable when they realised you could have anchovies on your pizza and started hyperventilating and almost having orgasms at the mere thought.  I’d never had anchovies before because the childhood gristle experiences turned me vegetarian, but I am fond and foolish and did not want to appear unworldly, so I too feigned excitement and asked for anchovies.  I was a little surprised, then, when I was served a vast pizza onto which several little earthworms had squirmed and apparently expired.  I imagine that if your nostrils are small enough, you could easily suffocate in a mound of melted cheese and dough.  My next thought was that I had been set up by my buddies, and they had told the staff to put rubber joke shop worms on my pizza and that all I had to do was shout out good-humouredly, ‘Aargh, nice one, you had me going there.’  Had it been a joke, I might even have done that, but I would have gone home fuming and put a hex on them all later.  However, it soon became clear that these earthworms were the anchovies that had earlier caused such effusiveness, and I then had to spend the evening eating around them and trying to hide them in my side salad, which is probably a more fit resting place for expired nematodes than is congealed cheese. 

I also need to make reference to sun-dried tomatoes.  I believe they are allegedly sun dried to preserve them or to intensify the flavour, but I still think that the production process is probably more like this:  get a friend to consume lots of  vinegary wine and olive oil, then ask them to eat tomatoes;  some time after swallowing, slap your victim very hard on the back so that a half digested tomato in a slimy, acidic coating is expelled.  Catch it in a jar – you don’t want it to touch the floor because that’s unhygienic -and say it’s a Mediterranean delicacy.  It’ll look like the fledgling bird viscera your killer moggies leave scattered around the garden in Spring, but people will buy it and say they like it, just as they’ll claim to like finding sultanas floating in their curry, when everyone knows that you put sultanas in cakes and scones and they are for you pudding, not your dinner.  Same with apples and grapes in coleslaw and the like.  And finally, if tomatoes can be sun dried, then so little balls of green snot.  These latter can then be served up or sold as capers.

The Grand National

With The Grand National bearing down upon us, and Donkey Derby season riding fast on its heels, I’m sure you’re as concerned as I am about how best to use your betting money  down the bookie’s.  So, on your behalf, I’ve spent the past week hanging round the Russian Tea Rooms, Bungalow 8 and the Betty Ford Clinic asking the top celebs how they choose their winners.  Here’s what some of them had to say:

TONY CURTIS: “When I was starring in ‘The Vikings’ with Kirk Douglas, we always used to see what the runes said.  You’d be amazed at how often those runes were right! Once we learned how to guess at what the inscrutable scratches on them might mean,  me and Kirk were quids in and the beers were on us every night.  They were also an invaluable aid to pillaging.”

Pip’s verdict: Tonys right!  The runes are indeed generally 100% accurate and you can now buy authentic Norse runes in most branches of W.H. Smith.

ALAN BATES: “In order to make predictions of any kind, I always wrestle naked in front of a roaring fire with a rugged thespian.  It helps if he’s hirsute and built like a prop-forward.  After a couple of hours, the combination of heat exhaustion and repressed homo-eroticism allows me to see God, and then I just ask Him what’s going to happen.”

Pip’s verdict: Alan could be onto something.  If the Almighty is indeed omniscient, then He should at least be able to give tips on the National!  However, with the price of fossil fuels rocketing (not to mention the attendant environmental concerns) and most of us having only limited access to homo-erotic literary scenarios, this could be a tricky option. Alright for the heavyweight thespians, but maybe not for us mere mortals!

JACKSON POLLOCK: “Lots of folk think that in my energetic, rhythmic canvases I have concealed secret messages containing the names of all future National winners.  They couldn’t be more wrong!  Although my art might be inspired by a kind of surrealist automatism, when it comes to having a flutter, I carefully study form and read ‘The Racing Post’ every week. I don’t always win, but if you never bet more than you can afford to lose then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Pip’s verdict: Sensible advice indeed from the wild man of art. You pay your money and you take your choice.

Use tombolas responsibly.  Please note that I do not condone the theft of the little biros from either Ladbroke’s or William Hill’s, although I reckon you should take as many of the tiny pencils as you can from Ikea, as that’s the best wood you’re going to find in the whole store

Hair Fear

Ever since a disastrous perm left me looking like the long-lost evil twin of Vera Duckworth and had me confined to the house for several months, I have suffered from severe coiffeurophobia, or fear of hairdressers.  The mere sight of a bottle of Amami blow wave lotion is enough to send me screaming from the room and, since the early 80s, I have almost exclusively done my own hair with scissors that are designed for cutting the rind off bacon.  It’s alright, though, I don’t eat bacon.  I did have one lapse in the 90s when I was persuaded to visit a salon and ‘get some layers cut in’. ‘It’s fun,’ I was told, ‘it’s relaxing and a new ’do really perks you up.’ I was misled. It was like a cross between medieval torture and an initiation ceremony for some sinister cult. After having my head jerked backwards into a ceramic font and being doused with scalding water (presumably something akin to baptism),  I was forced to cover myself in a billowing black ceremonial robes, wear a bizarre rubberised collar around my neck and stare at my ashen reflection in a mirror for forty minutes whilst being mercilessly interrogated.  Was I very busy at work at the moment?  Had I been on my holidays yet?  Did I like the new Simply Red?  If I gave the wrong answers, poisonous acids were squirted in my face and sharp pronged scissors were wielded perilously close to my ears, like in the salon scene from ‘Reservoir Dogs‘. Music seemed to be seeping from the ceiling, at a volume just high enough for the song to be identified but not high enough for it to be listened to properly (just as well, for the compilation used in this dark ritual included tracks from both Sade and Bryan Ferry). Around me, people dressed in black milled to and fro, asking each other for what can only have been other implements of vile torture, such as the ‘heated rollers’,  the ‘barrel brush’, and - most terrifying of all - the ‘tongs‘.  The ordeal could only end after my head had been pulled to and fro whilst jets of red hot air were blasted at me and I had been forced to commit the most unnatural act known to man - I HAD TO LOOK AT THE BACK AND SIDES OF MY OWN HEAD.  How this was achieved, I know not, as I had been made to inhale a mist of mind-altering chemicals before the vision was shown to me.  People have since told me that they just do it all with mirrors, but I‘m not sure. There was something evil at work there. When I was finally released, my hair was so stiff and bouffant and my face so frozen in a rictus of stubborn endurance that I could probably have walked into a job doing the weather on a cable channel. 

A Lexicon of Pain

For years now, I’ve trailed doggedly from one end of Tin Pan Alley to the other, touting the score of my rock opera based on the 70s TV series 'The Waltons'.  At one time it was rumoured that David Hasselhoff had shown a fleeting interest in the Ike Godsey solo number ‘Freak Out in the General Store’, but it seems now that even that musical gem is unlikely to see the light of day. The Hoff  thought it to be ‘not the kind of song that can be adequately performed on a tumbling German wall’.  Que sera, as say the pretentious people who like to pepper their sentences with ill-fitting foreign phrases.  C’est la vie.

 However, I am nothing if not resilient and resourceful, and a new project has recently begun to take shape in my mind, born from personal experience.  As I sat in the doctor’s surgery the other day, I heard him ask me, ‘If zero is no pain, and ten is the worst pain you’ve ever felt, at what point on that scale would you place the pain you’re feeling now?’ The question brought to mind the emails I sometimes receive from a cinephile friend, who, aping the pomposity of the broadsheet reviewers, offers me a star rating for every film he sees.  I suffer from a kind of latent dyscalculia which prevents me from giving a numerical value to anything, whether it be the latest Fassbinder or a potential oesophageal ulcer. I also failed to see how the holding up of a scorecard could offer the doctor any real insight into my suffering.  What if I’m a lily-livered princess who pricks her finger and swoons for a century?  Or else an SAS trained hard-knock bitch who would scarcely wince at her own disembowelling?  It might even have been easier if he’d asked me to place my suffering on a scale from Wham! to Leonard Cohen, or overcooked aubergine to lightly steamed mange tout, or a nylon shellsuit to a merino wool overcoat.  Chickweed to roses, maggots to damselflies.  Nevertheless, I prefer to find solutions to problems rather than to moan and wail, and as such I am now in the process of assisting medical professionals worldwide by drafting a definitive ‘Lexicon of Pain’, a guide which will most likely revolutionise the related fields of diagnostics and analgesia and will also provide me with the fortune and recognition that ‘Walton Mountain Rock’ has so miserably failed to do.

Even though this is but a draft, please bear in mind that it is nonetheless under a very stern copyright and that my legal team are waiting are to pounce mightily on gazumpers and plagiarists alike.  The questions (hereafter rendered in upper case) represent the voice of the physician (or Sawbones, if you will), whilst the responses (rendered in ordinary lower case) the voice of the patient (hereafter known as the Invalidated). 

WHAT COLOUR IS YOUR PAIN?

The exact colour of the flame emerging from the gaping maw of a Bunsen Burner in an underfunded laboratory.

DOES YOUR PAIN HAVE AN ODOUR?

Both sweet and fetid, like the breath of a hyena that has recently feasted on the corpse of a reckless explorer.

DOES YOUR PAIN HAVE A GENDER?

Yes, it is a 1,000 page nineteenth century epistolary novel that deals with the ultimate futility and brutality of love.

I SAID GENDER, NOT GENRE.

Oh, sorry.  My pain is female.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE APPEARANCE OF THIS FEMALE?

She is thin, verging on skeletal.  Her large grey eyes are full of sorrow of which she cannot - or dare not - speak.  A lank fringe of pale hair falls over her face as she turns towards you.  Her small hands drown in the fraying sleeves of her voluminous cardigan.

AND WHAT IS HER NAME?

Lotte.

WHERE IS SHE FROM?

Probably East Berlin.

HOW DOES SHE SPEND HER DAYS?

In despair, listening to David Hasselhoff sing inferior rock songs from atop a crumbling wall. 

I SEE (AT THIS POINT DOCTOR NODS SAGELY AND ADDS TO HIS ALREADY COPIOUS NOTES). LET US TRY MORE.  DOES YOUR PAIN HAVE A SOUND?

I believe its song is akin to experimental analogue electronica from the 1950s, or else the sound of ‘Wot?’ by Captain Sensible played on an eternal loop, cutting through the scholarly hush of the Reference Library on a Tuesday morning.

IF YOUR PAIN WERE A LANDSCAPE, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

The rock strewn wasteland on the edge of a decaying town, before it becomes nowhere.  Like Stoke or Walsall.

And so it goes.

If there are any health professionals reading this who would like to become part of the Beta Testing Group for my Lexicon of Pain, please do not hesitate to drop me a line.  As I have just swallowed a Cocodamol and two Ranitidine,  I can be reached at the edge of a pool in midsummer, weeping willows dipping their tresses into the water as dragonflies dart in shafts of shifting sunshine and a lamb with fleece as soft as a cloud made out of feathers walks beside me, bleating angelically

Some Notes Relating to the Excrement of the Canine

Some Notes Relating to the Excrement of the Canine

I am a very responsible dog owner and I never take my hairy Jack Russell girl out without stuffing my jeans pockets with Asda carrier bags for the collection and storage of any bowel movements she might make. The resulting front denim bulge makes me look like a well-endowed ladyboy, but vanity is of little consequence in such situations.  I don’t even moan too much if my finger goes through the flimsy plastic, I simply smile stoically and carry on until we get to the stream by the new flats (the Estate Agent calls them ‘apartments’, but this is the unfashionable North End of Stafford within spitting distance of the Rangers ground, not Los Angeles, so we’ll call them what they are), into the waters of which I then thrust my soiled hand.  Sadly, there are dog owners who still let their furry charges leave their faecal matter all over the pavements. I am a woman of some curiosity, though, and I have been making notes and observations about these brown pavement treasures, and have realised two things which, to my knowledge (and I’ve checked Proctowiki) have not yet been recorded.

1.         Sometimes you see white dog poos.  It is a common misconception that the pallor is due to the bleaching action of sunlight.  These ‘whities’ are in fact laid exclusively by poodles and other fluffy, girly dogs. 

2.         It is not an uncommon sight to see a dog poo on which hairy filaments have begun to sprout.  Most people believe this to be some kind of mould growth, encouraged by damp weather; again, this is erroneous.  If a dog poo is left out long enough, a new dog will begin to form around it; the hair growth is the onset of this process.  It is clearly of some importance, then,  that we all remove canine faeces from the streets, lest they become overrun by packs of feral beasts, snarling and fornicating openly. This has already happened in some areas of Stoke.

I’ve also become interested in the measures taken by local councils to discourage the leaving of turds on pavements.  In the North West of England, in a charming village which I used to visit, there was a sign on one of the footpaths that read, ‘STOP FOULING’.  I thought at first it might be a general piece of advice aimed at Vinny Jones hard-men footballers, but it also bore a crude hieroglyph which, on close inspection, and if you did the out-of-focus ‘Magic Eye’ trick,  looked a little like one of those dogs you see on the label of the ‘Black and White’ whisky stuff.  I’m not sure that this notice was aptly worded, because it suggests that some degree of initial ‘FOULING’ is acceptable, as long as you ‘STOP’ at some point. Also, if the sign were spotted by a person of an adversarial bent, its aggressive capitalisation and use of the imperative might elicit a, ‘STOP FOULING? STOP FOULING?  Oh, I haven’t even STARTED yet, squire,’ kind of response. Either way, the end result is some, or even more, fouling. And we don’t want that; I refer you to point number 2, above.

FEED MINT CRACKNELL TO ME

Ever since Nick Hornby referred to Rhubarb and Custard sweets in his novel ‘High Fidelity’ (later filmed in the US as ‘The Kids from Fame’), celebrities have been clamouring to have their corporate identities linked to deceased confectionery of the kind mourned over by middle-aged people in pubs across the land.  The most successful of these to date has been Griff Rhys Jones, at whose petulant insistence Cadbury have  re-launched the  Wispa bar and now multi-packs are available everywhere, usually at a slightly higher price than other Cadbury’s multi-packs.  I can only assume that Griff must be getting a cut.   There are also the Harry Enfield Dime Bars, on sale in all Ikea food stores, stacked between the lingonberry jam and those jars of curled up pickled dead worms they have.  These are even available in cake form, though Harry has now opted to use the Welsh spelling and is calling them ‘Daim’. 

All of this has started me thinking; not so much about the lost chocolate bars, but more about which celebrities might be the best to endorse them in the event of any revival.  I think some of the following might be worth pitching to an agent.

MINT CRACKNELL

Essentially a thick, rippled layer of chocolate wrapped around lethal, mouth slashing shards of minty glass, the advert for this delightful sweet featured the famous ‘Gimme Mint Cracknell and I don’t care’ jingle.  Thus, its combination of peril and casual insouciance would be ideally suited to an endorsement from Billy Idol.  His curling upper lip is suggestive of the pain inflicted by the flesh-tearing properties of the cracknell, whilst his rebellious reputation -  enhanced by the wearing of leather trousers and the falling off motorbikes – shows how much he just ‘don’t care’.  I can picture Billy now, singing about his lack of concern to a pounding soft-rock beat as the blood oozes between his teeth with every minty mouthful.  And if he won’t do it, there’s always Shaun Ryder.

GOLDEN CUP

It’s something of a national joke now, that the England football team never win any significant trophies, so what better way to give our lads the sweet taste of success than by getting them to sell this now defunct  caramel treat.  I’m not really that up on football these days, but I have heard of Wayne Rooney and I am aware that he is generally considered to factor heavily in our national disappointment. Thus, he could hold aloft one of these golden, foil-wrapped bars, swaggering triumphantly down any British High Street as the voiceover (by a half cut, blubbing Gazza) intones, ‘Finally, Rooney brings home a Golden Cup.’  He could even be shown to offer it to the lovely Coleen, as long as she wasn’t on a Bikini Diet at time of filming.

SUMMIT

Most people have forgotten this, and quite sensibly too.  It was a vile mix of dark chocolate, white gooey nonsense and – most alarmingly of all – glace cherries.  The TV commercial was based around the concept of a ‘summit meeting’.  Very important looking gentlemen in suits sat around a long table and ate these revolting confections with admirable gravitas.  Selling these now would be a challenge, and if there is one boardroom troll who relishes such a thing today, it must surely be Sir Alan Sugar (happily, his surname is also one of the key ingredients of the bar, so maybe something could be made of that too).  I imagine, in the remade ad, a gaggle of arrogant, vacuous, soundbyte-peddling post-Thatcherite idiots in Next business suits sitting before the sugary guru, about to be ‘fired’, but rescuing the situation at the last minute by offering Sir Alan a bite of a Summit.  He utters the word, ‘You’re...’ angrily and with a sense of impending doom, but as he encounters the first rubbery glace cherry in amongst the spongy white nougat, he softens – like sugar in a hot pan – and ends his sentence by sighing out the word, ‘Hired’ with almost orgasmic bliss.  If Sir Alan was too busy, I would probably look at David Brent.

SWISSKIT

At one time we were all happily yodelling about we’d ‘risk it for a Swisskit’.  It was advertised by a man, possibly a downhill skier, recklessly plunging after this bar made from bits of regurgitated Alpen stuck together with hair gel and chocolate.  Now I do know that Eddie the Eagle Edwards is renowned for hare-brained and pointless Alpine  plummets and would seem a likely candidate for the Swisskit relaunch, but I think he has recently featured in another naff ad, and in an effort to make this product appeal to a target demographic of middle-aged fools, I would give first refusal  to ‘Top Gear’s’ Richard Hammond.  Richard did nearly once behead himself in a quest to go fast, and he didn’t even have some congealed muesli to chase then, so just think what he would be prepared to risk for a Swisskit.  Also, in a clever nod to his on-screen nickname, he could roll down the mountain in a giant hamster ball; this would provide a fascinating visual complement to the accumulating snowball around the Swisskit.  It would be even better if Jeremy Clarkson was waiting at the bottom of the mountain looking sardonic.

AZTEC

Originally launched as Cadbury’s rival to the ubiquitous (and inferior) Mars Bar, the Aztec’s lifespan was all too brief.  The promotional badges bore the legend, ‘Feed Aztecs to Me.’  I think my sister had one.  I don’t remember the TV ad, but the Cadbury’s website assures me that it was ‘lavish’ and ‘filmed at a real Aztec temple in Mexico.’  This information wasn’t  really helping me to think of an appropriate celebrity to endorse any relaunch, but I then discovered that the Aztec people were ‘famous for their agriculture.’  This made me think of celebrity farmers, though I’m not convinced there are any, so I settled on the nearest alternative and came up with Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall. He does grow stuff and he is famous.  He’s especially famous for lobbying Parliament about over-fishing and free-range chickens and organic chard, so for my ad campaign I would want to see him scurrying along the corridors of power after David Cameron, bleating on about bringing back a new ethically produced Aztec.  A little like the old Gold Blend series, I can see some potential for these Hugh-David encounters to develop along a will they-won’t they theme and become much anticipated by the viewing public, growing into a mini soap opera sizzling with unresolved sexual tension.  I can’t be bothered to plot them all out now, but it could end with Hugh and David sitting on some organic soil feeding Aztecs to each other, as a nod to the old badge catchphrase.

There we have it.  Five dead chocolates ripe for re-animation and five exquisitely imagined celebrity endorsements.  As I’m now likely to become a top advertising executive and a Yuppie, I’m off to snort some finely powdered Mint Cracknell through a fifty pound note in the toilets at Saatchi and Saatchi.

Ciao.