The Moaning of Life. Karl Pilkington
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IT ALL STARTED in a hotel room in Tokyo. There was a knock at the door, and I didn’t want to answer it in case it was one of the hotel staff. I didn’t want them to see what I had in my room, as I knew it was against their rules. The problem was, if it was one of the staff and I didn’t answer the door, they would let themselves in anyway, as I hadn’t put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign up. I had no choice but to answer it. Luckily it was just Richard, the director.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m knackered, as I’ve not slept much,’ I said. Then I showed him my problem.
‘What the . . . Why have you got a turtle in your bath!?’
I never thought anyone would have cause to say those words to me. And all because I went out to get a bite to eat. The plan was to get some food close to the hotel and then come straight back and get to bed to try and fight the jet lag. But that’s not what happened. I headed off down one of the narrow side streets looking for somewhere that did takeaway noodles, and that’s when I made eye contact with the Chinese softshell turtle. It was sitting on its own in a glass box, using all the energy it had trying to get out. And this wasn’t a pet shop, it was a restaurant where the turtle was waiting to be sacrificed for the next customer who had a taste for turtle hot pot. I felt bad for it, so I ended up going into TokyuHands (a homeware shop) to buy a cool box and then bought the turtle. I took it back to my hotel room, noodle free. I suppose if it had been a member of the hotel staff at my door I could have just told them it was a snack I had bought to munch on while I had a bath. Thinking about it now, I could probably have ordered another one of them on room service so it had a mate to play with. It’s odd how the hotel rule book says you’re not allowed pets in the room when they don’t draw the line between pets and food in this country.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ asked Richard.
It was a question that had been on my mind all night, and I still had no idea. I’d been googling ‘turtle + japan’, but I couldn’t find any kind of animal home or RSPCA kind of charity online. I just found instructions for how to cook them. Japan isn’t a great place for any sort of animal to live, as they seem to eat everything here. I’m sure when they read the story of Noah and him getting the animals on the boat two by two they just think he’s doing a weekly food shop. I know that dinosaurs were meant to have been wiped out by some giant meteorite, but there’s a bit of me that wonders if it was the Japanese that ate them all.
‘Have you got a name for it?’ Richard asked.
‘Tony.’
‘How did you come up with that?’
‘Tony the turtle. It just seems to roll off the tongue. Just like it’d be rolling off someone else’s for tea if I hadn’t saved it.’
I felt sick with tiredness, as I had been up and down all night worrying about the turtle. I kept hearing it paddling about in the bath and was worried that it was going to strangle itself on the chain that was attached to the plug. Then there were moments when it wasn’t making any sound at all and that worried me even more. I was up and down checking that it was still breathing, which isn’t easy when the creature in question is encased in a shell and you can’t see its belly moving. It’s funny, as for this part of my trip I was supposed to be thinking about kids and why I’ve never felt I wanted them. One of the main reasons I don’t want kids is the fact that they take over your life. Tony was proof of this. I’d missed my tea the night before, hadn’t slept properly all night and still hadn’t had breakfast, all due to me worrying about him. This is how it would be if I had a kid. I’ve seen it with mates who have them who say, ‘Oh, you should have kids, it’s a life-changing experience.’ But what does that mean? Losing a leg is a life-changing experience, but that doesn’t mean you’d actually want to lose one. ‘Oh, but you’re missing out,’ they say, as if they know what I want more than I do. Would they say to a gay bloke: ‘Oh, you should get your hands on a nice pair of tits, you’d love it, mate’?
Having kids is the biggest decision you have to make in life, cos once you’ve had one, you can’t send it back. And you don’t get a chance to try it out first. It’s a bit like Marmite – you might love it or you might hate it, but either way you can’t just go and pop the lid back on if you don’t like it. You can’t read reviews before you commit to it like you can before you buy something on Amazon. In fact it’s more like buying something off eBay where you don’t know what you’re going to get until it turns up. Everyone always says having kids is amazing, but people said that about the pyramids in Egypt and I didn’t feel the same when I saw them.
When people find out I’m not keen on having kids they ask me how Suzanne feels and whether she wants them. Once she mentioned that she would like to hear the patter of tiny feet around the flat, so I told her to get a dwarf cleaner. The problem is, she has these ideas one day and then gets bored of them the next. She hassled me for an ice-cream maker once, so we bought one and she only used it twice before it ended up in the cupboard under the sink. She couldn’t do that with a baby, especially not now that the ice-cream maker is taking up all the space.
LIFE WITHOUT KIDS
We were in Tokyo to go to a fertility festival, and Richard said we had to get a move on. So I had to leave Tony the turtle in the bath for a few more hours and deal with him when we got back. We put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and headed off.
The Kanamara Matsuri festival happens once a year at the Kanayama shrine in Kawasaki. It’s an event couples go to together to receive a kind of fertility blessing if they want to have kids. It was set up back in the Edo period in Japan (1600–1868), which made me think it was going to be a really traditional kind of affair, so I was surprised to be greeted by a man wearing a nob on his head. It didn’t look like part of any kind of ancient tradition to me, he just looked like a dodgy low-rent Doctor Who character with a pink centre parting. He was waving a plastic penis about in his hand too. I wasn’t sure if he was some kind of official at the festival or just a local nutter. There used to be a man on our estate called Mad John who did this sort of thing on the back of the 261 bus into Manchester, and he got put away for it.
There were loads of stalls selling all sorts of merchandise, all with the same theme – everything featured a nob on it in some way. Pens with nobs on the end, nob-shaped ice lollies, nob balloons and nob ornaments. It was great for the guy selling hot dogs, as he didn’t have to make any extra effort. I bought a pack of Kama Sutra playing cards. Each card featured one of the Kama Sutra positions so they were ideal for playing ‘poke her’ with (good pun that).
You’d think we were at some kind of bachelor party, but this festival was supposed to be a celebration of fertility and procreation. I don’t believe in things like this. I think staying at home eating asparagus would improve your chances of having a kid more than buying a novelty tea towel with a nob drawn on it. The reason they have all these nobs on things is down to a local legend. An old story goes that there was a sharp-toothed demon who fell in love with a beautiful young woman. She wasn’t interested in him, and when she married another man the demon became so jealous he decided to move into her vagina (squatters’ rights and all that). The night before her wedding, the demon got his revenge by biting off the penis of her husband when they were having sex. Everybody in the village was upset, so the story goes, and the local blacksmith decided to forge a steel phallus that they could trick the demon with. The demon bit into the steel phallus, broke his teeth and moved out of