Nobody likes a clown.
I say this for a number of reasons, the first of which being the sight of an entire clown outfit in a hedge by the side of the road on the outskirts of the town where I work. Big ridiculous pom-pom buttons; even bigger, more ridiculous wig; sparkly gold-sequined jacket and sparkly gold-sequined top hat; the shattered remnants of a "Police Incident: Did you see anything?" sign. Man, I would have loved to have been part of that particular tar-and-feathering.
The second reason being that sales of my new book - a work of award-worthy comic genius - have just reached double figures. 14 copies! 14 copies, the end result of three years' toil over a red-hot Wikipedia! In the words of a great philosopher: "This time next year, Rodders, we'll be millionaires". I have my dignity, and you have your high expectations from this site, so I will not abuse my position with a cheap plug for my product. But it's on Amazon.
Now, I never expected to be JK Rowling. She's better looking for a start, and has all the machinery of major publishing and publicity organisations behind her. I've got a blog, a Twitter account, and the nagging feeling that I'm pricing myself out of the market at a genuinely risk-taking £2.56. 14 copies, when you look at it from this angle, seems like a small victory. A very small victory, in which I celebrate my royalties with a trip to the cinema. On my own.
A walk through any branch of WH Smiths these days reveals that their top 100 books is dominated by celebrities, some of whom haven't seen a book since they left school at the age of 16. It's a sad fact of life that you've got to put in literally weeks of effort on some reality TV show before you're even given a sniff of a book deal these days. If you're really good at being a celebrity, you get to put out an autobiography every year before you reach 30. And if you're a footballer, you get to call it My Life In Pictures, and fill it with pictures.
This being the case, I am willing to do just about anything (within reason) to become a celebrity and get a Jeremy Clarkson-style write-what-I-want book deal, providing very little effort is involved. My only dabbling with the world of reality TV was coming within an ace of having a programme called Lock a load of celebrities under the stairs with a bucket of meat and don't bother filming it commissioned by a low-end national TV station, so I'll have to resort to other means to achieve my 15 minutes of notoriety.
Maybe - and I know this is going to prove popular - if I forced the teenage students from the BT Infinity adverts through a tea-strainer, turned them into soup, fed the soup to badgers and fired the badgers on a rocket into the heart of the sun, that would do the trick. Despite the obvious outrage from influential badger pressure groups, no jury in this land would dare convict me, and my fame as the saviour of a country's sanity would be assured. The offers, I am certain, would come rolling in.
Or perhaps I should just be happy with my 14 sales. Fourteen's not bad. Though I would love to make it 15.