James Acaster's Classic Scrapes

by James Acaster

This book is essentially the tale of a man repeatedly urinating into his own mouth. Pleased to meet you.

So I did what any boy who’s bitten off more than he can chew does and I went home and I asked my father for help.

It was at this point that I began to suspect I was not a juggler and that, although what I was doing may be technically considered juggling by a tiny minority of the world’s population, in this church hall alongside a boy who may have legitimately run away with the circus, it was nothing more than moving two balls from one hand to the other without dropping them on the floor.

I loved hole-punches as a child but never had cause to use them. The amount of children doing their own filing is startlingly low. I often think it’s a shame that hole-punches are so much fun but are seldom used by the people who’d appreciate them the most. Hole-punches, much like swivel chairs, are wasted on adults. A child looks at your average office and sees a playground; an adult looks at an office and sees a prison sentence.

Tying a tie for the first time when you’re twenty-eight is like never watching a single film until you’re twenty-eight and then trying to watch and understand 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Imagine you’ve gone into a cinema that was meant to be showing The Tigger Movie but you’re secretly watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in there while the staff wait for you outside and are wondering why you’ve been in there for three hours when The Tigger Movie only lasts one hour and twenty minutes.

The second man to approach me described my take on the song as, ‘One of the most horrifying things I’ve ever witnessed.’ That sounds pretty extreme as it is, but even more so when you consider that the jam night took place on (and remember that everything in this book is true) 11 September 2001. On the actual day itself. There was footage of New York being shown on the TV screens in the bar and yet he still felt the need to say this to me. Some people have found it hard to understand why the jam night was not cancelled that night, considering the news, but I think we all know that if we had cancelled the jam then the terrorists would have won. And nothing sticks it to them more, in my opinion, than a good old-fashioned disco beat. So in many ways, I had done the right thing.

Having a conversation with a drunk person when you are sober is like being a classroom assistant in a primary school for kids who are drunk.

In fact, any chance you get to do something technically illegal while making zero difference to anyone’s life, take it.

while I will die one day, there are some things that are way worse than dying and it’s important to experience those things while we’re alive in order to put death into perspective; that way we won’t get too down about our own mortality.

Sometimes it’s nice to confirm that the world is exactly as you thought it was and your role in it remains entirely the same.

I loved wrestling as much as I loved line dancing and I may be the only person who’s ever said that

Once I’d noticed that she was getting irritated I did what I always do and I said yes to the very next option regardless of whether I wanted to or not.

I tried talking to the lady next to me about how cool the bus was, but she asked me why I was talking to her and so I turned away to look out the window because I didn’t have an answer to her question. (I still don’t. I’ve thought about it since and on a philosophical level I have no idea why any of us speak to anyone else. I haven’t done it as much since, actually.)

They put the strimmer in a bin bag then put another bin bag over the top of it and taped the bags together by wrapping an excessive amount of gaffer tape around the middle. As secure and practical as this was, it did make it look like I was carrying a dead body in some bin bags. I couldn’t sit down with it on the tube so just stood by the doors while my fellow passengers looked at me with suspicion, memorising my face just in case I was the most confident serial killer in London and had decided to take the remains of my latest victim home on the Piccadilly line because I was in a bit of a hurry.

I guess the only lesson of the book is this: do not be open to new experiences, avoid anything that could potentially not work out for you, and enter into everything with the utmost suspicion.