The World of Karl Pilkington (15 page)

Steve:
Certainly. You may as well give it.

Karl:
Treat ’em when they deserve it.

Steve:
Right.

Ricky:
I remember once when Suzanne was ill. She had a fever but there was no food in the house. What did you suggest to her? She was too ill to cook.

Karl:
Well it was when we were still living in Manchester and we needed to get some food in for tea and I said, ‘Come on, come to the supermarket.’ She was like, ‘No I’m ill, you go,’ and I hate buying food. I just sort of get a bit blank when I’m looking at food – there’s too much in’t there, that’s the problem?

You go down all these aisles and there’s just too much. So anyway I said, ‘No come on. Come with me.’ She was like, ‘I’ve got this fever. I’m hot and everything.’ So I said, ‘Well come to the supermarket and you go on the frozen aisle, cool yourself down.’ And she did and she said it made it worse. She was ill for another three days.

Steve:
How would you go about chatting up a woman in a bar? What tips could you give?

Karl:
I’ve never worked like that. It’s always been a friend of a friend and all that, and just happened to meet them and then you have a chat.

Ricky:
How did you meet Suzanne?

Karl:
That was when I was working with her and she gave me 20p for the hot chocolate machine. She never asked for it back. I thought, ‘She’s alright.’ That was eleven years ago, so it works.

Steve:
You’ve never given her that 20p back?

Karl:
She’s never asked for it back.

Steve:
And did you return the favour? Perhaps on the next date? Did you buy her a KitKat or something?

Karl:
No, I don’t think I did. I think word got out that she liked me and I think I did some work for her. I did some editing for her to sort of show off me skills and that, and she was like, ‘Oh you’re good at this aren’t you.’ I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and I think she got us another drink ’cos I was doing that editing for her in me own time.

Ricky:
So you’re up on the deal aren’t you because I know for a fact that you’ve not spent any money on her in eleven years, so you’re 40p up.

Steve:
At least.

Karl:
I wouldn’t. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do it. I’d have to hold it in or something. I mean when I was a young kid – I don’t know how young you are when you wear a nappy and that – but I remember that I didn’t like it, doing it in a pair of pants like that, a pair of nappies and that, and I used to have to. Even when I was too small to sort of get up on the toilet, because you’d fall in, me mam knew that I didn’t like nappies and I used to just go in the corner, just near the kitchen, in this thing like a litter tray. Like cats have. It wasn’t like that but that’s the same sort of idea and I’d go there and I’d do me thing and me mam used to say, ‘Oh he’s going there. Don’t look at him.’ Because it put me off. You know, like cats don’t like being watched when they do it.

Ricky:
When they go in their litter tray in the kitchen?

Karl:
No, no, they don’t like it.

Ricky:
What, so you were just like a little feral kid? Just running around and going in the litter tray, covering it up, and then running up the curtain and eating a sweet at the top of the pelmet?

Karl:
No, but nobody likes being watched and that’s what I’m saying. If you’re sat on a train and you’re knocking one out and that and everyone’s looking at you, I don’t think it’ll catch on.

Ricky:
Well it has caught on. They are just sitting there, reading the paper, doing Sudoku, and they’re looking round as they are going and they are thinking, ‘Oh no one knows I’m going.’ Everyone’s thinking that and everyone’s going.

Steve:
It’s partly because there are a hundred and twenty million peasants from China’s vast rural areas who swarm into the cities for work, and so that sheer number of people means that the trains are so overcrowded.

Karl:
I mean what are we getting to? What’s going on in the world that this is happening? I mean people have always had to travel for ages. I just don’t understand why there isn’t a toilet on it. We’re going backwards. We’re going backwards.

Karl:
Aren’t we? Why isn’t there a toilet on it?

Steve:
Maybe there is but maybe people are thinking that the queue is going to take forever. If you have got 125 million people …

Karl:
Yeah, but not everybody wants to go at once. I mean I know the Chinese and all that are at the forefront of everything that goes on in the world, inventing stuff first, but this isn’t one of the best that they’ve come up with.

Ricky:
What have they invented then, the Chinese?

Karl:
Loads of stuff, haven’t they?

Ricky:
Well I was just asking you. You seem quite educated on the subject.

Karl:
They did them cat mop things that I told you about.

Ricky:
Brilliant.

Steve:
This is where you put mops on the feet of cats? Was that right?

Karl:
Yeah, and they wander about the house, clean up and that. Wash the floor for you whilst they’re pottering about. They’ve done, like, hats with umbrellas on ’em. I mean they are known for coming up with stuff first.

Ricky:
My first thought was gunpowder. But cats with mops is good as well.

Ricky:
But what does ‘willy-nilly’ mean?

Karl:
Just sort of like, throwing it about all over the place.

Ricky:
What do you mean? What does the term ‘willy-nilly’ mean?

Karl:
It just sort of means, you know, care free.

Ricky:
That’s right, yeah. So you understood ‘willy-nilly’, you used a phrase. You said ‘willy-nillily’ but you got the gist of it, so what does ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ mean?

Karl:
I don’t know.

Steve:
What do you mean you don’t know?

Ricky:
You must know. Think about it. ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’

Karl:
Is it to do with sewing?

Ricky:
Well yes, sort of.

Karl:
Err … it’s not that clear.

Ricky:
Say if you’ve got a jacket, and the seam starts coming undone. ‘Oh, I’ll leave it. Oh, it’s getting worse and worse’ – soon your sleeve falls off. Initially you just needed one stitch to fix it but if you do it later you need nine stitches. And that, of course, is an analogy to other things. If you leave something that needs attention or repair it’ll get worse, so do it now, do it in time.

Karl:
But it depends if you’re busy at that point, because if you’ve got something else that needs doing, that means that isn’t being done because you’re messing about sorting out a hole in your coat. You can’t always do stuff straightaway, so I don’t know if there’s sort of a middle ground where you don’t have to do it straightaway, ‘a stitch in fifteen’ or whatever. Meaning you don’t have to do it straightaway but just do it before it gets really bad.

Ricky:
Brilliant. Do you think yours is less poetic than ‘a stitch in time saves nine’? This is what you want as a quote: ‘Well, you could do it now but if you’re doing summit else then don’t do it immediately, but do it soon, so it doesn’t get really bad’ – Karl Pilkington.

Karl:
But it’s the same; that’s the way I treat most things in life. It’s like I never go to the doctors unless it’s really bad.

Ricky:
But that’s why a lot of people die, particularly working class people, because they don’t want to bother the doctor, or they are mildly embarrassed, or they don’t recognise bad symptoms. Go to the doctor if you are not sure about something. Like you were terrified to go and have your prostate examined.

Karl:
Still not been. Not doing it.

Ricky:
Why not?

Karl:
I wish you wouldn’t talk about it ’cos now Suzanne will be reminded and she’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, you haven’t been’ and start dragging it up again.

Ricky:
But why are you worried about a little qualified doctor …

Karl:
I don’t know what they’re doing up there. What year are we in?

Ricky:
What are you talking about? They just pop their finger up and …

Karl:
That’s what I mean though. It’s 2006. Why are they still using the index finger?

Steve:
Would you prefer the forefinger or the thumb?

Karl:
No.

Steve:
A thumb on a stick? Some kind of thumb on a stick? A mechanical thumb? A robot thumb?

Karl:
Why isn’t it just a little camera?

Steve:
Well, they put the camera up if they initially discover something.

Karl:
Just put the camera up straightaway.

Ricky:
No. They don’t need to. They pop the finger up, feel that the prostate isn’t swollen, and wiggle it about a little bit up your back passage.

Karl:
I don’t think they need to do that.

Ricky:
Are you embarrassed? Are you embarrassed about being in a room with your trousers round your ankles and a little fella popping his …

Karl:
A little bit, yeah.

Ricky:
Why?

Karl:
And the other thing is, it’s not just that, is it? You have got to go there. You’re sat on the bus, stressing out, thinking, ‘Oh in less than half an hour I am going to have a finger up me arse.’

Ricky:
What is the problem though?