And so came the time for me to expand my column and let you lovely boys and girls know a little more about me. Here is where I introduce my twat of a husband 'Simply' Gary. I am not bitter that he cheated on me with my own mother.
March or Something 2006 or 7
Hello you lovely looking person! No, don’t turn around these words are aimed right into your eyes! You are looking good today. Although not quite as good looking as my friend Michael Jenson, WIG editor extraordinaire, who has promised me that this week’s column will smell like beef! It’s true, go ahead and sniff that screen hard and fast. If there is no beef smell please log a ticket with IT tech guys to get this fixed.
When logging a ticket put the following heading Lack of Beef Coming through monitor. Under this heading just cut and paste the following:
‘The WIG has arrived and I am overjoyed. It completes not only my week but also a part of my life that other publications just couldn’t hope to reach. As I read through the more than interesting articles and useful information contained in this digital magazine I happened across a section written by semi-famous Zelda that promised a particular favourite odour of mine. That odour is of course beef! I have tried changing both the brightness of my monitor and adjusting the height of my chair but neither has produced a bovine smell from the Zelda article.’
You can leave the priority on low as the lovely tech team are very busy trying to create a race of cyborgs and will get back to you as soon as they can.
**** 2010 – I understand that there are people out there that will only eat stuff that grows and not consume beast meat. In hind site we should have all worked together on a less meaty option. Although vegetarians are important for both our economy and are as important to the land as a cabbage, it is ok to eat meat sometimes. I have been working on a way were we can just cuts slices off an animal and cook them but let the animal heal so that it grows some new skin back. When I say that I am working on a way of doing this, I actually mean that I am just going into fields and cutting animals. That will be our little secret.****
Leo Sayer, what a guy. Only 7 inches in height and with the girth of two and a half grey field mice he was easy to transport to the Starbucks near Dunnes Store (better value) in town.
On my way to meet him, I spotted a ball of brown cotton wool. It was one of the strangest things I had ever seen in my entire life for that day. The fluffy ball was blowing around the ground outside Lush and was choking on a greasy sausage roll. At this point I began to think about how nice it would be to have a ball of brown cotton wool to take home and give to Panda. I flipped my arms out in preparation to grasp at the fluff and put it into my pocket. As I got closer I realised it was actually Leo blowing around like a dirty hairy ghost.
He rubbed some of the wet looking pastry from his microscopic facial cheeks and offered his hand in preparation for a hand shake. Not wanting to be rude, I thrust out my own hand in his direction, slowing down as a gale force wind was created by the speed of my hand, almost blowing his flesh off his bones. His hand clasped around my index finger and shook with such enthusiasm that I was almost thrown from my feet and through the window of Lush.
“Sorry,” said Leo, flexing both of his arms in front of me. “Sometimes I just can’t control the guns.”
“Very nice,” I said. I was lying. They looked horrible. One of his arms had a really massive vein going through it that made me feel dizzy.
I walked into Starbucks with Leo sat on my shoulder. Leo was singing a little song and telling me how he and Nelly Furtado were going to be doing a duet. I patted his head reassuringly, I had been looking for an excuse to touch his hair. It felt like smoke.
Sat down and sipping his coffee, Leo began to tell me that he and Vinnie Jones had met up in a pub and Vinnie had began to go on about what had happened one day after drinking tea. Leo said that it was as if something clicked in his head and an incident that had affected him over forty years previous to that meeting with Vinnie suddenly kicked his face.
I looked out of the window and saw two boys fighting over a shoe before asking Leo to tell me more. Those boys were really going for it. One of them was biting.
Leo, (or Gerard as his mum and dad know him) knocked his coffee all over his slippers but seemed to be in a trance as he told me his story.
The date was 1843 and he and his friend Edward Dune were preparing for the school nativity. Leo was playing the manger and Edward was playing one of the manger doors. They were both keen singers and performers and had decided two minutes before the show that they were going to spice the show up with an impromptu dance and song.
The crowd were quiet and watched in content admiration as their sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, friends and myths, acted out the traditional piece of theatre that showed the birth of Jesus. Backstage, Leo had been eating a block of Stilton and some Edam that were to prove a disastrous pair of ingredients to be mixed with the mystical and often devastating powers of tea.
He explained that as he reached the last gram of cheese a thirst, like none he had ever come across before, tore through his larynx. There was a choice between bottled water or the contents of a tartan flask. Being a rebel, Leo was drawn to the tartan.
Leo explained that he was in agony at first as the tea went down his throat and had closed his eyes. As he opened them he found that he actually existed in two places at the same time. One place was the back of the stage, the other, three hundred years into the future.
Leo said that this only lasted a few hours and that he was unable to move the whole time. All he could do was observe. Later, he found that whilst he was in his state everyone could see him clearly but his hair had moved six or seven inches backwards and down his neck.
When I asked him about the future he told me that everyone is slightly different. You can read more about Leo’s version of future events in my book Can Tea Really Make You Invisible? when it gets released.
Before I go any further and we look at this week’s problem, I received an email from Grahame Barnett who wanted to know if I have ever read ‘Mongrel Magazine.’ My answer to this is no, not until yesterday. I decided to take some time out and pursue this magazine online. My heart was already full of excitement at the prospect of a magazine dedicated to the love and nurture of mixed breed dogs. I have no dogs of my own but me and ‘Simply’are still positive will continue to try.
So, mongrel magazine came up on my screen and all my hopes of this ‘mixed dog breed’ magazine were destroyed like so many useless porcelain hammers. So, once again answering your question Grahame, yes I have read mongrel Magazine. I was disappointed. Sorry I didn’t reply to you sooner but by attaching a fly swatter to my face with superglue in a bid to stop direct sunlight hampering my work actually hampered my work.
Don’t you forget to keep sending your worries and dilemmas into me through the WIG. I read every email and respond to each personally and without the aid of any laboratory analysis. Think of me as a cheesy coleslaw when wanting to enhance a ham sandwich, a mintish paste for your teeth when you teeth have become offensive or a massive cave full of computer equipment, a car, a jet and a boat, when you are a man that likes to dress up as a bat and has to fight guys that do jokes, riddles and penguin impersonations.
My wits are yours to taste.
Dear Zelda,
I hope you can help me. I have found myself in the middle of a really strange scam that has left me impeded. I can’t do anything properly any more and people keep laughing at me!
I had just got home from a busy day in my job at GEM and had put the television on. By the time I get home, Master Chef Goes Large is usually on. I wasn’t too hungry as I sat down to watch the program but as I watched a woman fill a duck with horse meat, roll that in goose fat, bread crumbs, egg and then fry it for 3 minutes on the back of two beef burgers, my hunger had become irrepressible. Not entirely sure what I was going to cook I took out all the ingredients I had and put them on my kitchen worktop. What was I going to have!? Burger and Soup? Soup and sausages? Maybe even soup and cockles? I looked at the kitchen work surface, my heart filling with dismay. A jar of lemon grass stared back at me.
I tried to make the best out of this bad situation and fried some of the lemon grass and set it on a plate to cool down. I put about an inch of the lemon grass into my mouth and almost gagged. Whilst in mid gag I realised that my freezer was full of ready meals so I could just have one of them.
I could hear my phone begin to ring from the front room of my house and decided that it would be interesting to see who was on the other end of the line. I didn’t recognise the voice at all but what I can say is that his voice was so soft, it was like warm creamy milk pouring into my ears.
“Hello there Miss Middersweatson,” said the voice. “I am pleased to tell you that you have won a prize!”
I tried to remember a competition that I had entered and eventually came to the conclusion that I hadn’t entered any.
“I have come to the conclusion that I have not entered any competitions,” I said with confidence.
The man replied to me in an even milkier voice and explained that the prize was as a result of me being in the right place at the right time. This seemed more than genuine and I accepted his reason for me being entitled to the prize. He told me the address I needed to go to, a time to be there and that when I got there I would be given my prize, which was an I-Pod.
Two days later I arrived at the venue and was greeted by a well built man with really fat baby-like hands. When He spoke I knew right away that he wasn’t the same person I had spoken to on the phone as there was a distinct lack of dairy in his voice.
We waked into a room that was pitch black. The man slammed the door behind me, leaving me alone. I began to panic but then I noticed another door just up ahead of me that appeared to lead outside. As I walked towards this door a rush of air shot from a tube into my face. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I stepped through the door and back into the street, angry that I had been made to look like an idiot. An idiot without an I-pod.
The next morning, when I got out of bed I walked into the bathroom, washed my face and looked into the mirror. That was when the penny dropped. This was all some big strange scam. Please help me Zelda, I have a really big pod coming out of my eye and I am too embarrassed to come back to work until it is gone.
Nicola Middersweatson
Dear Nicola,
You have come to the right person. The eye-pod scam has been going on for many years throughout the world and has only just reached these shores recently.
This scam started in Egypt in 1923 under the watchful eye of Anubis the god of the dead. People would often leave Anubis’s house with tiny little growths on their eyes that would grow into large pink veiny pods that dangled over their eyes.
Just like back in the 20s, nobody even knows what the reason is behind the scam and why eye-pods were even invented.
A similar scam involving free Lego resulted in thousands of people ending up with warped legs that went completely around like wheels. People literally had, what looked like, large hula hoops instead of legs.
Historians have traced the Lego scam back to the 1930s, the times of Zeus. This scam was made redundant after it was found to be quite pathetic when up against the more amusing eye-pod.
Eye-pods grow from seeds and are usually transferred to a person through a tube filled with air and seeds. They can also be passed on from a person suffering with an eye-pod who is blinking really hard against a non sufferers eye.
Eye-pods are only temporary and fall away from the eye without any damage to eyelid or the face. The area that the eye-pod was attached to will almost certainly be painful for a day or two so it is absolutely fine to rub butter into the wound to ease the pain.
Cosmetically, eye-pods are not pleasant to look at and most people find them repulsive and even offensive. One way of making this temporary situation a little more fun would be to paint the eye-pod so that it looks like you have a tiny little ball shaped man attached to your eye. Kids will love it and you are sure to get a smile when you are walking through Belfast on Saturday.
A few tips to avoid the various eye-pod scam:
(1) If your phone rings do not answer it. Never answer your phone ever again. Really! Ever!
(2) If you do answer your phone and it is your mother or father or another person you know ask them for proof that they are who they say they are. These scam artists can put on funny voices that may confuse you.
(3) If you are in a shop, such as Boots, do not let sales assistants spray perfume near your face and eyes. The chances are that you will be in pain and you might have an eye-pod the next day.
(4) Whilst in pubs, try and keep your face away from the backs of chairs or the floor. Not always easy to prevent from happening but one day you could wake with more than a hangover.
(5) When handling monkeys do not allow them to put their fingers in your mouth.
(6) Try to fight the urge to feed ducks. If they become enraged or excited they may peck at your face or flap their wings in your direction. Ducks carry the eye-pod gene.
(7) As mentioned earlier, do not let anyone, even if they do not have a visible eye-pod, flicker their eyelids against your eye. You’ll probably get an eye-pod or an eye infection.
If you live your life around these tips you need never need to worry about eye-pods.
Lots of love,
Zelda
Most people that have had eye-pods will go on to develop AIDs. And, until they find a cure, that condition is permanent and humiliating. For more information on AIDs watch Philadelphia where Tom Hanks does a kiss with Antonio ‘Puss in Boots’ Banderos.
edited for the lovely work publication - The WIG - because there were references that could have been related to pubes or the bit that a man has but women don't. I dare not use such words as penis. I will add the unedited piece, as well as a few others that were modified for the more sensitive folk.
I don't know if you can help me but you are my last resort! I am in love with a man I work with. That, I hear you scream in your catty voice, is not an issue and I understand this but it is my reaction to my new found love that bothers me. I have recently discovered how capable I am of stalking. It started off two weeks ago with little minor issues like following this man home and whispering his name. Whenever he left the office I would sniff his chair as hard as I could which has led to cutting off chunks of his hair and eating it in the toilets.
Don’t let this boy think that he has the upper hand and that you are a pushover. 
Hello,
