Quote… Unquote

Went into town with Bob for a recording of the long-running BBC Radio panel game Quote… Unquote, thanks to free tickets from a neighbour, and was very pleasantly surprised to see Andrew Mueller
- one of my all-time favourite writers – on the panel. I’ve been a fan
since university, when I read his work in the now-defunct Melody Maker. His collection Rock and Hard Places
was the best book I read in 2000 and I’ve returned to it many times;
it’s damn-near unmissable (and thanks to the whims of the publishing
industry, also damn-near unfindable).

The shows were funny though somewhat imbalanced, with Nigel Rees
being somewhat codescending to Mueller and downright dismissive of Pam
Rhodes, preferring instead to kow-tow to the irritatingly-twee John
Suchet, a never-ending source of anecdotes about his brother.
Fortunately Brian Sewell saved the day (and how often does one get to
say that), particularly with this line:

I’m not going to have a funeral. I’m going to leave my body
to science. It’ll go to a medical academy where students can practise
with it. And people tell me that I mustn’t do that because they tend to
take the penis and testicles and hide them in sandwiches and give them
to girls. But I don’t care!

After the show I managed to snatch a brief conversation with Andrew who, along with being incredibly nice, pointed me at his new site
which contains a hefty chunk of his writing, including many of the
pieces from the book and the complete archives of his current Time Out column.

I’m going to bed now, because I’ve just turned thirty. Bugger.