He just tried to put on a display for the family. He’d really bigged it up beforehand. For the last week or so he’d just left flyers littered about the house saying ‘THIS THURSDAY. COME TO THE GARDEN. YOU’LL LOVE IT. LOVE FROM ARTHUR XX.’ Anyway, we all went out there and he was stood in his wax jacket looking excited. “Prepare to be blown away!” He barked. Unfortunately though, he couldn’t seem to utilise his paws to light a match to set off the fireworks, and when we tried to help he just growled at us and told us to stay away. After three hours of watching him try to set up a catherine wheel with his nose, he eventually told us all to just go inside, and he’d be in later. Now all I can hear are faint murmurs of the soundtrack from The Shawshank Redemption from the bottom of the garden and the bottle of whiskey that we keep on the side at all times in case of emergency has disappeared. I think he’s embarrassed. He shouldn’t have played it up so much.

Today I actually decided I’m going to restart the sitcom I’d pretty much finished all over again. It doesn’t work as well as I’d like and I think the only way to fix this is to change virtually everything there is. This means that the sum of my writing efforts this year are currently nothing. This is disappointing, however, on the plus side, I genuinely believe that this script will be better for the change, if I get it right, and could actually end up being quite good. I mean, I say that now, but by the time it’s finished it’ll be the usual process of sitting around berating myself for being rubbish. I hope that all writers (I say this as if I’m a writer, when, as mentioned, I’ve not actually finished anything yet) think they’re terrible. That would be somewhat reassuring.

Loyd Grossman made me a pizza today. I say he made me it, it came in a Loyd Grossman box, so I assume he makes them himself. The box implies somewhat that dementia has set in with Loyd, as rather than having a picture of him just smiling, as most celebrity-endorsed products have, he’s instead decided to go with a picture of him smelling a tomato and looking angry. Is he not happy with the tomato? Or is he trying to hide behind it? Either way, he has no need, as the pizza was quite tasty. He shouldn’t be concerned in any way that people might associate him with the pizza, because if anything that might be a good thing. Hopefully he’ll get over his shyness, and future editions of the pizza will see him either emerging happily from the tomato, or looking quizzically towards the tomato in the distance and shrugging his shoulders in a manner that says ‘I can’t believe I was smelling the tomato angrily, what was I thinking?’. This is how Paul Newman’s Salad Dressings panned out you know.

“Alright Paul, if you could just stand over there and smile we’ll have this done in no time.”

“Stand and smile? Is this for the salad dressings?”

“Yeah.”

“Actually, I’ve had a few ideas of my own about that.”

“Right… go on…”

“What if, instead of standing and smiling, we took a picture of me angrily kicking a piece of lettuce?”

“Well Paul, that’s… well, it’s interesting, and I’ll consider it, but in the meantime, why don’t we just take this smiling picture?”

“Ok, ok, so you don’t like that, I get it. What about, instead of that, we have me coughing on a radish?”

“Coughing on a radish?”

“Coughing on a radish.”

“I’m just not sure how this is going to translate to sales Paul…”

“What if I just smiled…”

“Yep, good.”

“… at a photograph I was holding of me kicking some lettuce.”

“Paul, I’m not sure you quite understand what I’m getting at here. How do I put this… people don’t want to see you being violent towards vegetables, that’s not going to make them want to buy your product.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Just trust me on this, we’ll go with the standing and the smiling for now, and I’ll explain later.”

“Righty ho…”

“Ok, you ready?”

“Yep, ready.”

“Say cheese!”

“Wait! One second!”

“Fucking hell, what is it now?”

“What if I were to cry… at an aubergine.”

“Oh forget it, let’s just draw the picture on.”

True story. I mean, he’s dead now, so won’t be able to confirm this, but I’m fairly sure this is how it all panned out.