Читать книгу I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan - Alan Partridge, Alan Partridge - Страница 9

5 Press play on Track 1 of the soundtrack.

6 In more ways than one, as it transpired. Years later, I took a walk to this place at dusk and saw a teenage couple sullying my memory of that tree with some pretty vigorous frottage. I was going to run at them with a stick, but in the end I didn’t.

7 ‘I do not know what’.

8 Press play on Track 2.

9 By the way, update on the Murray Mints: one’s already gone, the other is a shadow of its former self.

10 Bear in mind, this was the late 60s. Everyone was experimenting. We’d just put a man on the moon, anything seemed possible. In this case, of course, it wasn’t. But then we didn’t have Google. If you wanted to find out if something was possible you had to try it for yourself. Terrible business.

11 Of which more later! (possibly)

12 Press play on Track 3.

13 Internet’s down.

14 Internet’s still down.

15 Time of me writing, not time of you reading.

16 Didn’t read it out.

17 Divorces.

18 It’s a technique I still use to this day when talking to quiet people at cocktail parties.

19 Naysayers have suggested that I’m dramatising details of my early years because my publishers were concerned that my childhood was boring. How wrong they are. If anything I’m bravely playing down some of the hardships I faced in a way that critics might choose to describe as ‘stoical’.

20 Auntie Valerie, who was there that day, is adamant that Dad said absolutely nothing of the sort. But, like I say, this is a woman who often forgets her own address, so you can strike her testimony from the record.

21 This was a feeling I would come to know well in later years. Major blood loss has been a close friend of mine – be it the kind I’ve endured (impaling my foot on a spike before a sales presentation, sneezing blood over a nun’s wimple) or the kind I’ve inflicted (punching a commissioning editor, shooting a guest). And on each occasion, the initial regret has been swiftly replaced by a joyous high, brought on by relief, defiance or morphine. In this case: it was a brand new sense of purpose.

22 Metaphor.