Alan Partridge: Nomad

by Alan Partridge

I once spent a weekend trapped in a warehouse and managed to survive by fashioning a gown and cowl from bubble wrap and packing tape. That gown and cowl saved my life and felt pretty sassy as well! I still wear it round the house on Saturdays when I’m listening to records or vacuum cleaning.

DAY NINE. I PASS THROUGH Stoke Newington and Crouch End, two pleased-with-themselves North London enclaves where, in the words of Alan Titchmarsh, you could slap a stranger and feel sure they deserved it.

This wasn’t like the Scouts where, if an undesirable child joined, some of the other parents would get together and, purely to protect the good standing of the troop, go to see the scout leader mob-handed and say, ‘If you don’t remove that child, we’ll be taking our children elsewhere.’ You simply couldn’t do that in the army.

Eventually, Michael came to regard me as a firm friend, and although his lack of qualifications made it impossible for me to reciprocate, I did become kinda fond of the guy.

Heathrow is just an absolute tit of an airport.

I take a moment to look at the transport hub that surrounds me. I don’t just drink in its beauty, I actually feel like I eat it too.

At first I struggle to hear myself think, but it’s OK, I just turn up the volume in my mind.

I find myself standing bolt upright, saluting the winged beast above me and yelling up to it at the top of my voice, ‘Good luck, large friend. Take wing and fly. For the skies are yours now and you are free, free to soar and swoop, to glide and gambol across the very face of heaven, until you touch down, weary yet elegant in a land far, far away.’ And with that, Ryanair flight 9853 to Cork is gone.

Although this afternoon it’s not people I’m joined by, it’s children.

Whitney Houston sang: ‘I believe the children are our future.’ I also believe that and applaud Houston for articulating what many other high-profile media figures, such as Pat Sharp, do not.

Now, this is an uncomfortable thing to discuss, but I run towards discomfort like a man who has strapped truth explosives to his body and made his peace with God.

Personally, I’m a fairly accomplished all-rounder, as comfortable nibbling a lip as I am when the mouths go wide.

‘I want to play your bum like the bongos.’ It was the most foolish text message I had ever sent.

And now, I’m on the road again, at the approximate speed of a kerb-crawler down an industrial road behind a train station.

I think the video is meant to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, but good God, it is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Did it really matter who won the 1997 female Ironman [sic] World Championship? Of course not. It’s almost literally a non-event. But they pushed themselves anyway.

I realise what this means just as my knees crumple like the Side Impact Protection System of a Volvo.

I thwack my fingers together like a gangland black chap

I let his insubordination go, knowing full well I’ll get him later in the men’s by gently pushing him against a urinal while he pees.

I close my eyes and sleep, only emerging when a more visibly disabled visitor bangs on the door and asks if they can do toilet.

It’s Friday and I no longer require the drip, so I leave it outside the front door of a residential home for the elderly with a note saying, ‘From a kindly benefactor’.

‘I’ll be dead by then!’ laughs Dawn, and I tell her that’s nonsense, but it probably isn’t.

‘The generosity of a pensioner I met in a swimming pool, and to a lesser extent something Christ said to me,

What absolute bollocks that was.