by Annabel Port
“Will it go in the magazine, then?” I ask. He says he can’t promise.
I send him this:
Dear Mark,
Lovely to meet you before. I’m back in the office now, so thought I’d put in writing our remarkable discovery, which would be great to feature in your Biologist magazine.
So here at the RSRS, we realised that regarding the phenomenon of caterpillars turning into butterflies, it’s actually more believable that somebody made it up than that it actually happens. Let’s face it, no other creature does it and it does it hidden from view, like Houdini escaping from padlocked chains when he has actually got the key Sellotaped to the sole of his foot or something. It’s not science, it’s science fiction. And it’s kind of embarrassing that we’ve believed it for so long. We look like jerks.
But at the Society of Biology you can escape this embarrassment. Please do publish our findings.
Let me know today what your plans are as I’ve got the New Scientist on my back, but I like you more.
Many thanks and all best wishes,
Annabel
I hear back quickly.
Dear Annabel
Many thanks for your email.
We’ve hugely enjoyed your early/late April Fool’s joke in the office today. Please feel free to accept the New Scientist offer.
Best wishes
Mark
I’m a bit confused as it’s October and I don’t think early or late April Fools are a thing. If you do it outside of 1 April, surely it’s just a joke. And I wasn’t joking. But the good news is, someone at the Society of Biology clearly listens to the radio show. So maybe other great scientific minds are listening too. I can leave all this in their safe, know-it-all hands.
The End (or why I stopped
doing all of this)
This feels like a good place to end. A place where someone has finally exposed me as a radio presenter wasting everyone’s time. I suspect it says a lot about our listening figures that it took so long for this to happen. And these are just thirty-two challenges out of around one hundred and eighty that I did. One hundred and eighty over five years. Did I not mention before that I did this for five years?
Now you think I’m insane and Geoff is a sadist. What kept me going though, was the loveliness of others. In my life before these challenges, I’d thought about 15% of people were lovely. I now think it’s around 95%. They are far more accepting, tolerant, patient and kind than I ever would’ve imagined. Or perhaps it’s just a politeness that stems from fear: “Yes, I will massage your back in the street but only because, even though you look normal, this is not a normal thing to ask, so I am terrified of you.” Maybe that’s it. Actually, I’m pretty sure that is it.
Geoff once said to me while setting a challenge, “Things will start going wrong for us at some point. My long-term plan is to become destitute. I see myself as very much going down the tramp route. But I feel somewhat responsible for you. I feel a bit like how Frankenstein must’ve felt about his monster.”
I suppose there is something a bit monstrous about someone unashamedly getting in a sleeping bag in a bar in the Ritz.
And there is still time for us to realise his vision of me, shunned by society, and of him collecting cardboard. The radio show where all this happened is now no more, so these challenges really are over. But if you’re ever at work and get a call from reception saying that a Finty Mettledown is here to see you, maybe it’s me, doing it all again for old times’ sake and because I’m bored of watching television.
About the Author
Annabel Port is a Sony Gold Award-winning radio presenter, formerly of the Geoff Lloyd with Annabel Port show on Absolute Radio. She is also a podcaster and has written for television. Annabel vs the Internet is her first book.
Acknowledgements
This is going to be very much like an Oscar acceptance speech (but without any of the actual winning of an award). I’m going to really gush, safe in the knowledge that I don’t have to have eye contact with anyone while I thank them. Make no mistake about it, I’d never be able to say any of this to their faces.
Firstly, thank you to everyone at Unbound, especially my editors: DeAndra Lupu for whittling and polishing the manuscript into the book you hold now. And Philip Connor for his help shaping a series of radio challenges into something readable, patiently wading through all my bad writing habits and for gently telling me that it’s “hang-gliding” not “hand-gliding”. Who knew? Not me, as it turns out.
I would also like to thank Danielle Zigner for her input at the very early stages of the book, and Sara Barron for generously giving me unlimited access to her expert opinion and invaluable advice throughout.
I’m indebted to Geoff Lloyd for giving me the opportunity to work on a radio show and the space to learn how to do it. Most importantly, he devised the radio feature and came up with all the challenges you read here as well as countless others. I’m just a workhorse cowering in the glow of his genius. If this was my Oscar speech, I’d probably be crying now.
Everything you’ve read was originally heard on Absolute Radio so thank you to all the producers that I worked with there during the course of these challenges – Nelson Kumah, Gareth Evans and Dan Benedictus. I’m also very grateful to John Williams and Kiersten Lucas, without whom I would never have had a job there.
The orchestra has probably started up to try and cut me off now but I can’t finish without acknowledging the unnamed and much appreciated real-life cast of this book. The security guard at the Ritz, the youth-club worker willing to believe I was seventeen, the man on the street who let me try out metempsychosis, and every other person I approached who was patient and kind, tolerating my ridiculous requests and replying to my stupid emails. You cheered me up every workday and made me like people more than I ever used to. I’m sorry for wasting your time.
To the crowd that funded this book, without you this would still just be a dream. I want you to feel like a big Daddy Warbucks-style benefactor for the rest of your life.
And finally, thank you to Tom. For everything else. Even though you still haven’t finished reading the first draft. I haven’t taken it personally.
VIP Faces
A huge thank you to the faces of these supporters.
John Betjeman (and Colin)
Both Paul and I got the “tilt your head” memo
Damo’s only got one side
Ethiopian mask, hard hat, Stephen
What a lovely face to get stuck to mine
Rusty’s Mr Wright
Times Square as it should be
“Red carpet” Gary
Threatening Marty
Ruth (the one on the left)
Good and evil
Speilberg or Korzelius?
Can you see where I got my bandy legs from?
Supporters
Unbound is a new kind of publishing house. Our books are funded directly by readers. This was a very popular idea during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now we have revived it for the internet age. It allows authors to write the books they really want to write and readers to support the books they would most like to see published.
The names listed below are of readers who have pledged their support and made this book happen. If you’d like to join them, visit www.unbound.com.
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ne - Happy Birthday lovely, Bear xxx
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