Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As the stories went on I tried to compress more and more puns into each one, and it be-
came a matter of authorial honour to have a greater concentration of puns in the story I
was working on than I'd achieved in the one before. I'd count all the words in each story,
then count all the puns, divide one by the other and so arrive at the story's pun-to-word ra-
tio. This quickly became by far the most important attribute the stories possessed (it was
easy to measure, it was precise, it felt almost scientific … sometimes I think I might have
made a really average bureaucrat). Characterisation, plotting, moral themes, plausibility?
These were just words.
And not even very good words, either, by this way of thinking; 'plotting' might have
a punning link to gardening or something, but 'characterisation' is just a dead loss; ditto
'moral', though there might be a way to separate the 'm' in 'moral' from the rest of the
word and so … No, too contrived even for me. 'Themes' could stretch to a lame lisp-ori-
ented pun about seams … 'Plausibility'? No, just useless.
(This weakness for puns and juvenile wordplay is something that I am not quite totally
over even now, three decades later; there was, in the first draft of Chapter Three in this
book, in the sub-section '
Whisky; the how-to bit
.' the unfortunate sentence at the end of
a paragraph, 'Still, waste not wort not.' Thank goodness I took it out.)
I am probably not as ashamed as I ought to be that I can still remember how im-
mensely proud I was when - in Dahommey's final short story,
The Apparently Intermin-
able Adventures of
- I got the pun-to-word ratio down to below one in ten.
Deeply sad. I kind of knew it at the time, too, but I didn't care. It was fun.
All I can say in my own defence is that at least I was never stupid enough to imagine
for a nanosecond that any of this stuff would impress girls. I enjoyed doing this sort of
thing for its own sake, and if a few of my male pals thought them worth a groan or two -
for a groan is about as generous and positive a reaction to a pun as you're likely to get -
then that was okay too, though still not the reason I was actually doing any of this.
Even so, in a vain and misguided attempt to get more people to read these appalling
pieces of nonsense, I'd started illustrating them with collages constructed from photos
ripped out of the
Observer
magazine. These were and are by far the best things in the little
school-book-based pamphlets that each of the stories appeared in. Some of the collages
are almost inventive, and a few arguably witty.
Possibly because of my fiendish wordplaying, more likely because of rude pictures
featuring swimwear models, Les asked to see some of my work one day. Unaccountably
disinclined to quickly return it and back away smiling reassuringly while not making any
sudden movements - and vowing never to acknowledge my existence ever again - Les
instead appeared to think they were actually worth looking at, if not worth reading, obvi-
ously. I was flattered in the extreme and we became friends.
