> Who at school made you laugh?
You mean someone *at* my school? Rather than, say, the authors I read while I was a schoolboy? I didn't go to one of those famous public schools where every third person is simply marking time until they get into the Footlights.
I went to a West Midlands comprehensive surrounded by machine gun towers and razor wire. Pupils didn't do humourous impressions of Grimworthy the Latin Master, then just broke in to the building at night and set fires.
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> You mention on your website that you eat two fingered kit-kats 'like I'd eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first.' Can you give one good reason for this?
Only my majestic correctness, I'm afraid.
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> Not good enough. What is in the secret box in your attic?
A second, even more secret, box. And a copy of Mayfair from 1974. It's funny because it's true.
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> What does it feel like to be plagiarised by the Daily Mail? Were you more annoyed by the theft or by them changing your name to Colin?
Well, I don't feel comfortable answering that as though I have some unique insight. Surely, you could ask any number of people how it feels to be plagiarised by the Daily Mail, couldn't you? In fact, the most annoying thing about it was that I thought, 'Oh, raining arses: now people who happen across the site are going to think, "this bloke has just blatantly ripped off the Mail and pretended it's his own work. What a dishonourable person." How really quite murderously vexing.'
As an aside, they reprinted my stuff almost verbatim. But the few words they changed had the effect of ruining the jokes in those bits. Clueless.
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> Honestly, how many of the reader reviews on Amazon for your books were written by you?
None. Honestly - I swear on every one of the WC3 Standards Documents. As it happens, I don't think good reviews make anyone buy a book anyway (though a single bad one will often plant a grain enough of doubt to *stop* them buying it, sadly), but that's irrelevant in any case: faking a review myself would be wholly un-British.
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> In your entire writing career, which sentence are you most ashamed of writing?
There's a sentence in the novel Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About where the protagonist, Pel, is talking about himself and he says, "For me, half-heartedness is a full quarter too hearted." I put it in as an - *utterly* throwaway - comment as I moved between proper, funny lines. It is, I think you'll agree, howlingly rubbish.
However, at least two journalists have quoted it (positively) in their reviews of the book. Thus, a thing that I don't really like at all - that only scraped in while my eye was off the ball - is put forward as my representative. If only Word had a undo function that went back two years and (literally) globally, eh?
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> Who do you want to play you in the film of your life, and why? Some Bloke. For obvious reasons: Some Bloke would bring all the necessary qualities to the part. It's the kind of role, I reckon, that could almost have been written specifically for Ed Wood's chiropractor.
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> Tell us something true about one of your neighbours.
The neighbour one house down is mad. The trouble is, when you tell people this, they think you mean you have a 'mad' neighbour the way almost everyone has a 'mad' neighbour. I don't mean that. I mean she's needs a team of SWAT doctors armed to the teeth with lithium. Imagine living next door to a middle-aged woman who eggs your house. Seriously. Mad. *Mad*.
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> What is the best sweet ever?
Sour gums. They're gums, and they're sour: genius. The worst sweet ever, by the way, is the sherbet fountain. Those things where you suck sherbet up through a liquorice tube - straight up onto your uvula so as to immediately fling you into a teary-eyed, coughing fit. They're like novelty emphysema for kids.
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> Did Margret ever get her wormery?
Of course. I fulfil all of Margret's desires. Eventually.
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> Which celebrity would you most like to punch hard in the face?
Possibly Andie McDowell. I could list many reasons for this, obviously. Tch. "Is it raining? I hadn't noticed."
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> Finally, have you ever been to Peru?
I don't fly anymore. And, if I did fly, I certainly wouldn't fly to *Peru*. I believe the in-flight menu is merely a A4 sheet containing photographs of the other passengers.
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Mil Millington's latest novel, A Certain Chemistry, is out in paperback now. (It's £6.99, or in the 3-for-2, Summer Reading offer at Waterstone's. So virtually free, if you think about it.) It's published by Flame.
For more about Mil and his girlfriend visit:
http://www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com
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To buy a wormery for the woman in your life, visit
http://www.greengardener.co.uk/worms.htm
The Friday Thing is a weekly email comment sheet. Casting a cynical eye over the week's events, it is rarely fair and never balanced.