2 ALSO BY KARL PILKINGTON THE WORLD OF KARL PILKINGTON HAPPYSLAPPED BY A JELLYFISH KARLOLOGY AN IDIOT ABROAD THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN IDIOT ABROAD 3 4 FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 2013 BY CANONGATE BOOKS LTD, 14 HIGH STREET, EDINBURGH EH1 1TE WWW.CANONGATE.TV This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books COPYRIGHT KARL PILKINGTON, 2013 THE MORAL RIGHT OF THE AUTHOR HAS BEEN ASSERTED PHOTOGRAPHY COPYRIGHT FREDDIE CLAIRE, 2013 ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT ANDY SMITH ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY ON P. VI RICH HARDCASTLE BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING-IN DATA A CATALOGUE RECORD FOR THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY ISBN: 978 1 78211 151 1 eISBN: 978 1 78211 182 5 EXPORT ISBN: 978 1 78211 152 8 5 Contents The Wedding Capital of the World The Art of Picking Up Women The Science of Attraction Arranged Marriages The Big Day Getting Married the Pilkington Way Life Without Kids The Miracle of Birth Raising Kids a Different Way Recreating the Experience Living with the Super Rich The Hustler’s Life Helping Others Living to Work A Handyman’s Life Finding a Vocation Happiness through Exercise Happiness from Pain Making Other People Happy Changing the Way You Look to Make You Happy Anger Therapy Living the Simple Life Choosing Your Own Coffin A Different Kind of Funeral Learning How to Mourn Confronting Death Living with the Dead Finding a Resting Place Remembering the Dead 6 7 8 I DIDN’T WANT to celebrate my fortieth birthday. Not because I wasn’t happy about being forty; I don’t mind getting older. I’ve always been older than my years anyway. My mam said I even acted old and grumpy when I was a baby. Apparently I learnt to frown before I could walk and didn’t like having a dummy, as it got in the way of me tutting. I suppose losing my hair made me feel older too. I had a head like a wind-beaten dandelion by the time I had reached twenty-two. I don’t think stress was to blame for the baldness; it was the extra-strong ‘power shower’ my dad had bought off a mate and installed himself. It was way too powerful. Taking a shower was like doing a task in an episode of Total Wipeout. But being bald didn’t bother me, as my hair wasn’t that good anyway. Fine, flimsy stuff it was, that my barber described as the ‘hair of a Chinaman’, so I could never have had a trendy style. Wet-look hair gel was all the rage in England in the early 80s, after Michael Jackson made it popular. It was to help mould your hair, whilst making it look like you’d just stepped out of the shower. But it was never a big seller in Manchester as everybody had the wet look anyway due to the continuous, pissing-down rain. ‘I just want to stay in and have a chilli con carne,’ I told Suzanne. ‘But it’s your fortieth birthday. A few people have asked what we’re doing!’ ‘Well, tell them I’m staying in, having chilli con carne. They can celebrate my birthday without me if they want.’ ‘That’s just stupid,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not. People do it every year with Jesus’s birthday.’ The good thing with her asking meant that at least there wasn’t going to be a surprise party for me. If there is one thing that I don’t like it’s a surprise, and she knows it. If you want to know another thing I don’t like, it’s fuss. I can’t be doing with people making a fuss of me. The first time it happened was when I started work. I was on a training scheme at a printing company and the boss bought a cake and called me to the kitchen. As I opened the door, they all sang ‘Happy Birthday’, which must be one of the most boring songs ever written. It follows you right through your life. Why it hasn’t been updated and changed I don’t know. They remade the film Total Recall recently, and that was totally unnecessary as the original was only made in 1990. Get the bloody birthday song redone. Anyway, I hated all the bother surrounding my birthday and felt embarrassed. I quickly said ‘cheers’ and took the cake home. My mam then explained to me that I should have cut the cake there and then and shared it out, but staying in the kitchen handing out cake and talking to people I didn’t know was not for me. I think this is why Bob Geldof chucked food 9 parcels out of planes in Africa – it was to avoid the small talk. ‘Why should they get my cake?’ I remember thinking. I wouldn’t mind if I knew all of them, but there were people there from different departments, who I’d never seen in my life, and yet they expected to have some of my cake. My mam made me take what was left into work the next day. After that experience, I always arranged to be away on holiday when it was my birthday. I also preferred to get fired from a job instead of leaving, as people don’t tend to get you a card and cake or make a fuss when you’ve been booted out. In the end Suzanne agreed to make me a chilli and it was well nice, and I didn’t have to share it with any strangers. Like I said, being forty doesn’t feel any different to being thirty. Even the aches and pains I have now have always been around. I’ve had backache since I was about ten, after I tried to kick my height and ended up landing on my arse. So now I get through as many heat patches in a week as I do teabags. I normally have two or three on at any one time to ease the pain. I give off that much heat I have old people shuffling behind me keeping warm in my jet stream. For some reason a lot of people think you should be all settled by the time you get to forty and be married with kids, and if you’re not they find it odd. That’s what triggered the idea of the TV programme and this new book. Why do most people follow the same pattern in life, and is it the same the world over? The number of times I’ve been asked, ‘Why aren’t you and Suzanne married? Why no kids?’ I say, ‘Why does everyone feel that this is what you should do?’ They normally follow that up with ‘Well, why are we here?’ – a question I’ve never thought about apart from the time Suzanne took me on a ‘surprise’ holiday to Lanzarote. 10