In April 2017 I emailed Melissa a full confession about what happened that fateful day in Kettering. I also sent her the chapter that you have just read in full so that she could approve it for inclusion in these fine memoirs. Her response was not what I expected:
‘I did not get what you did with the strawberries. Did you gulp them? Did you throw them away? Did you take hers or the remainders?’
So just to clear everything up – I gulped them. I gulped my mother’s spoonful of wild strawberries and left her with just the remainders. I gulped them all. I also let myself into Melissa’s house when no one was in and took a secret crap in the toilet, then walked upstairs half naked to clean myself up, then walked back downstairs, still semi nude, got dressed, let myself out and never told her about it. But she had no questions about that whatsoever. Just the wild strawberries. Which we’ve established I did indeed gulp.
W’s
The Wow! Scenario used to practise at a place called the William Knibb Centre in Kettering. My friend Sid worked there and as we were packing away one evening he had some exciting news for us: ‘A youth centre in Corby has two yellow polystyrene W’s that they’re looking to give away for free. They’re both about the same size as a bass drum, so you could put one either side and it would say WOW. Do you want them?’
A few days later I drove to the address Sid had given me. I was in my parents’ car, can’t remember what make it was now but it was small and I hadn’t written it off. I know it was small because I was unable to fit the W’s inside of it. Mainly, because each W was not ‘the size of a bass drum’, they were the size of an entire drum kit. They were massive, not just tall but deep and wide as well. All three dimensions were working against me and it was impossible to fit one in my car, let alone two. Sid may have played down the size of these monstrosities, but now I saw how big they were I wanted them even more. They would look so cool on stage and I had to have them. I tried tying the W’s to the roof of my parents’ car but when I drove away they quickly slipped out of place and fell in front of my windscreen. The caretaker at the youth centre stepped forward and suggested he phone his friend who had a van. So he rang the van man and the van man stopped having dinner with his wife in order to help me. I felt awful about this but it was too late now, the van man was on his way to help someone he’d never met before transport two things that he didn’t need back to his house.
I drove home, looking in my rear view mirror at the van man and his wife following me in the van man’s van, and kept on feeling guilty. Occasionally I asked myself why I was doing this. Maybe I thought these W’s would be the answer, maybe if the band had giant yellow W’s on stage we would finally start to build a fan base, maybe we’d get a record deal, we’d headline Glastonbury. Maybe I was still feeling a bit existential since the car crash and now couldn’t say no to anything and had to follow everything through, no matter how ludicrous it seemed. Or maybe I just thought it’d be cool to have two giant yellow W’s knocking around the house. Whatever the case, I felt like I might have gone too far.
As we pulled into my parents’ driveway I remember my dad leaning out of an upstairs window topless, shouting, ‘No no no no no’ over and over again, waving his arms to try and shoo the W’s away from the house. I told the van man to leave before my dad could get downstairs. I would suffer the consequences alone. I offered him some money but he pushed it back into my hand. ‘All I ask is that you remember the Van Man,’ he said. And as you can see, I have done just that.
My dad didn’t deserve this, he was a good man who had supported his son every step of the way, even when he started an experimental jazz/pop band with his friend Graeme, and now I’d started to bring novelty size letters home for no apparent reason.
It took an hour to get both of them into my bedroom and once they were in my room I had virtually no space left in which to move around. There was already a drum kit in my room AND a toy alligator the size of an adult human being. I had won the alligator at a county fair in North Walsham when I was seven. He wore a neon-pink top hat and a T-shirt that said ‘Party Gator’ across the chest. I named him after Manchester United right-winger Andrei Kanchelskis and my parents hated him because he was enormous and didn’t need to exist.
Andrei Kanchelskis
Now that the W’s were here, they hated Andrei Kanchelskis even more and maybe even liked their eldest son a little less. I would put forward all of the classic arguments that teens throw at their parents when it comes to their bedrooms: it’s my room not yours, you don’t ever have to come in here if you don’t want to, I’ll put up with the lack of space caused by two giant yellow W’s and a Party Gator, not you. But every time they caught a glimpse of the inside of my bedroom, their blood would boil.
And considering how upset my parents were at the arrival of the W’s you would think I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, deliberately acquire more of them, much less go out of my way to do so. But that’s precisely what I did. Because I’m a real great son.
The size of a W compared to James Acaster aged 21
About a week later and The Wow! Scenario had a gig in Northampton. We were approached by a photographer who wanted to do a shoot with us wearing our outfits. (Our friend’s mum had made these for us. The outfit was a grey T-shirt with a black shirt collar sewn on to it, black school trousers, navy blue slip-ons and a homemade yellow tie that stuck on to the front of the T-shirt with velcro. We called them WowFits. Shut up.) We were well up for this photoshoot, especially because we now had these yellow W’s in our possession (they were still in my bedroom as we were unable to transport them to gigs – my parents were understandably furious when they learnt we hadn’t found any practical use for them). But when we told the photographer about these W’s he shrugged and said, ‘Oh no need to bother, I’ve already got one.’
And then he showed us a photo on his phone of exactly the same sort of giant yellow W as the ones I had in my room. He told us he had been given the W by a company called Connexions. He explained that Connexions was an organisation that helped young people decide what they wanted to do with their lives, after school, college or university. They provided information on the steps you could take in order to achieve your goals. They had recently launched a campaign in Northamptonshire entitled ‘What Next?’, and as part of this campaign, a giant yellow W (W for What Next?) was delivered to every branch of Connexions across the county and, according to our photographer friend, the staff at Connexions hated the W’s even more than my parents did.
‘They’re desperate for people to take them off their hands so I said I’d have one in case I needed it for photos. That’s probably where your W’s came from too,’ the photographer said (the next day I checked with the youth centre who gave us the W’s and they confirmed they were indeed from Connexions).
My friend Emma was at the gig and later that night I told her about the big coincidence with this man having the same W as the ones we had. I explained the whole backstory regarding the Connexions people and how much they hated the W’s and Emma had a suggestion to make: ‘If they don’t want them we should go round taking them off their hands until we’ve got every single one and then you can do a gig where you fill the stage with yellow W’s.’ Not only did I agree to this plan but I was so on-board that we sorted out the day we’d start the project – Saturday – there and then. Full disclosure: we were both really into Dave Gorman at the time (still am) and maybe his adventures had rubbed off on us. When you’re in your early twenties and feel a bit aimless, hearing stories about a man finding meaning in the apparently meaningless is extremely inspiring. Maybe this was our Dave Gorman moment? Maybe we would meet a whole host of characters through gathering these W’s and in doing so understand more about ourselves and our fellow man? This could bring people together! I went home and looked forward to Saturday.
The day rolled around and, against all logic, neither of us had backed out. And so we drove to Wellingborough in Emma’s car (which was as small as my parents�
� car) to pick up an item that we knew would not fit inside our vehicle. I began to wish I’d kept the van man’s number but then again he might not have appreciated me making this his full-time job: picking up W’s, dropping them off at my parents’ house, then speeding away before my dad could catch him, shouting ‘Remember the Van Man’ out of his van window as he screeched round the corner. No, we had to figure this one out by ourselves – we were Dave Gorman now.
The Wellingborough branch of Connexions had the W in the window with a bunch of flyers strewn across it. We walked in and sat in the waiting area. As we waited, I started to feel bad because everyone in the queue before us was waiting to ask for help figuring out their own way forward in life and we were about to ask for something utterly pointless. I also began to doubt they’d really give it to us. Their W was in the window on display and they seemed to be using it. What if it was just the Northampton branch that hated their W and the Wellingborough branch was actually rather fond of theirs and we were about to come across as rude and weird and then we’d have to leave while everyone gave us funny looks all the way out the door? Maybe this is exactly the sort of behaviour that warrants an intervention from the people at Connexions. I didn’t think I needed help figuring out what I wanted to do with my life but once I told them what I’d come there for they might beg to differ.
‘Can I help you?’ said a kind-faced lady.
Emma answered with confidence. ‘Can we have that W in the window?’
The kind-faced lady breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Please just take it, we hate it so much, thank you!’ She didn’t even ask why we wanted it. One of the younger women who worked there wanted her photo taken with the W before we left because she’d always wanted to sit on top of it. We got a photo of her sitting atop the W giving the double thumbs up, looking as though she’d just achieved a lifelong dream. This was exactly the sort of stuff we were hoping for! Bringing people together, making people’s days, using the absurd to break down the walls that separate us all! We were so Dave Gorman.
We had parked further away than was ideal. The car was about a twenty minute walk away, the W was huge and bright yellow, and we were attracting a lot of attention. Some kids on bikes began to follow us, shouting stuff like ‘W is for wanker!’ at me. Normally when kids are shouting this kind of stuff at me I would either ignore them, reply in a sensible manner, or make the mistake of trying to sass them back. In this instance I was in such a good mood post-getting-a-W that I found their jibes hilarious and sort of just agreed with them, which weirdly endeared me to them. Before long these three teenagers were pretty much our friends and thought that me and Emma carrying a giant yellow W around Wellingborough was awesome (W is for cool more like!!!).
When we reached the car the teenagers got worried. ‘How you gonna fit it in there, mate?’ But Emma had come prepared. She opened the boot and pulled out a saw.
‘Two V’s,’ she stated. Soon I was lost in a cloud of polystyrene snow as I sawed the W in half. We had turned it upside down (it was now an M, strictly speaking) and Emma and one of the teenagers were holding it steady for me. One half went in the boot, the other in the back of the car and we received legit high fives from our new friends before they cycled away shouting ‘W! W! W!’ over and over again like an aggressive website address (Dave. Gorman.) It had begun; we couldn’t stop now. Emma decided she would keep the V’s in her garage and looked up where all the Connexions were in Northamptonshire so we could continue our mission the following weekend. Then I received a text from my photographer friend: ‘Would you like this W? I’ve no use for it.’
Some friends of ours were walking past the Northampton branch of Connexions on their way back from the pub one night and spotted a giant yellow W next to a nearby skip. They carried it all the way home and put it in their living room. We were grateful but confused because we thought the photographer’s W had come from Northampton but it turned out it had not and if we wanted to collect his W then we would have to go to the town of Isham and we would have to do it this week or his boss was going to make him throw it away. Emma was far too busy that week and I had no use of the car so I texted my friend Matt and asked for help, because he had a big car with a roof rack and I didn’t want to saw all of the W’s in half (one was fine but not all of them; it felt like a cop-out).
Matt was married with a child so I thought he would say no, but it turns out that if you’re married with a child this sort of distraction is even more enticing.
We turned up at the photographer’s studio and were surprised when we saw the W he had waiting for us. In the photo he’d shown me back in the bar the W looked exactly the same as our W’s, but this one was different. This W was still encased inside a giant white rectangle of polystyrene – it hadn’t been popped out yet. Turns out he’d shown us a photo of a different W because he didn’t have a photo of this one, which, considering he was a photographer, seemed a little bit odd to me but then again you can’t expect someone to have a photograph of everything they’ve ever seen simply because they are a photographer.
We tied it to the roof rack and proceeded home at a conservative pace. (Imagine the risks if we hadn’t. Imagine a giant yellow W becoming airborne on the motorway, spinning through the air. It’d be worse than knocking out a cow with a slip-on. Oh and don’t worry, this isn’t the story of my second car crash, although I’m fully aware this story feels like it’s heading that way.) My parents had made it very clear to me that there were to be no more W’s in their house (a rule I’m sure no one else has ever had bestowed upon them ever) and so Matt agreed to keep it in his house until I found a better place for it. We put it in his bedroom and it took up an entire wall. We did this while his wife was not home. When she returned home she was far from impressed.
Kettering Connexions was easy to hit up. Emma just popped in one day and walked away with another two W’s that we stashed in her sister’s garage.
Over the next few weeks I would receive a text message from Matt every other day asking me when I could collect the W, each time emphasizing the toll the W was taking on his marriage. The problem I had was that Emma had got a new job. When we started the quest, she was unemployed and looking for a project to pass the time and the W’s had kept her nice and busy for a while. But then she’d found employment sooner than expected and so had to stop driving around the county collecting W’s for no reason. Things weren’t looking good. In fact, things were looking as bad as they could be. If we’d completed the challenge we’d have felt great, if we’d never have started it we would’ve felt relieved, if we’d been able to use the W’s for anything useful at all we would have been proud of ourselves and would’ve looked like winners when everyone else had doubted us. But instead we now had seven giant yellow W’s stored in five different houses and had absolutely no use for any of them whatsoever. You usually only hear about crazy challenges like this when they’re a success. When they’re a success they’re strangely life-affirming and uplifting like the Dave Gorman books we’d both read, but when they are a failure they just remind you that life is stupid and unfair and we as human beings are the biggest idiots of all. If Dave Gorman had met five or six other people named Dave Gorman and then had to pack it in because no one else wanted to meet up with him then he’d have looked very silly but instead he achieved his goal, he won the bet with his friend and has come out the other end a bona fide legend. I hadn’t been able to do a new thing every day for a week and now I had failed to collect a bunch of giant yellow W’s. I was a laughable individual, needlessly attempting challenges that served little to no purpose and failing them every time.
We threw them all in the tip. One at a time, driving to and from the different locations and the tip itself, we threw them all away. The employees at the tip watched us in amazement, trying to figure out what events could have possibly led to this. We threw all of them away apart from two, the two that I originally collected from the youth centre in Corby. My friend Ben had kindly offered to keep them in his gara
ge. We locked the garage doors and forgot about them for five years and then while sitting in Ben’s living room one day we remembered; we remembered that I had acquired these two giant yellow W’s and that he had agreed to store them inside his garage. Only he had moved out of that house two years ago and was now living somewhere new. He had not taken the W’s with him. That means that there was once a day in history when someone opened the doors of their new garage to discover two giant yellow polystyrene W’s staring back at them, completely out of context. They would’ve had absolutely no way of figuring out why they were there and then they would’ve had to figure out what to do with them. Knowing that that happened makes the whole thing a little bit worth it. But still, every time I look at my book shelf and see my copy of Are You Dave Gorman? I think No. No I’m not.
Déjà Vu
After three valiant years, The Wow! Scenario decided to call it quits. Graeme wanted to go travelling and I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I couldn’t carry on as a solo artist because I was a drummer and my singing was terrible.
James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes Page 11
