Celtic Illumination, part 331, The secret handshake of The Illuminati.

I see that some of you are a little confused about my official standing for the position of King of Ireland.  It is true that in the old days, there would have been a group, or a pool, of people all of whom would have carried the mark of God, being a small deformity on the left hand, and of course being an O Neill from the Tyrone clan of O Neill’s.  Young Peter Browne over there in Saudi Arabia is moaning that, with my luck, being chosen from a group will be highly unlikely and he therefore will miss my investiture in Belfast cathedral.  Forgive me for not giving you all the information, which is that at the moment I am only aware of two people who fit the criteria for High Chief Of the Clan O Neill and therefore able to be considered for election to the ultimate position of King of Ireland.

There’s me, myself, the one who has been through all the training from the double top secret cabal and then there is my eight year old niece.  So you can make up your own minds who the council might choose.  There may be one or two more elderly candidates knocking about but if someone is to sit on a throne then you know yourselves they better have the legs for it and we all know who has the most loveliest legs in Ireland.  I’ll say no more on the subject.  But I would also like to point out to young Browne that Belfast is not the capital city of Ireland, it’s Dublin.   Although I have to say that I would prefer my investiture to be held at Clonmacnoise monastery, because of its ancient connection to the Kings of Tara.  (By the way, for all you heathens out there, the Celtic Cross pictured on my WordPress account, that should appear alongside this blog, is actually at Clonmacnoise monastery.)   And it’s a bit presumptuous, Mister Browne, to be thinking about investitures when we haven’t even worked out our secret handshake yet, never mind inviting Demi Moore, whoever he is.  I will put his confusion down to the sunshine, perhaps when Noel Coward sang that only mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the mid-day sun, he should have added especially those eejits who drive around bombing ranges in the midday sun.

He even referred to ‘my luck’ which I would have thought all of you by now would understand does not exist.  Everything that happens to me in my life has been planned to happen to me.  What you might consider to be an episode of bad luck I would consider to be a lesson in humility or compassion.  Well; I would now, perhaps not then when it was happening to me as I was unaware of the station in life that was my destiny.  I don’t know how they did it but the double top secret cabal managed to stir up most of the footballers and football agents connected to Manchester United, the image of pigs at a trough springs to mind.  The publishers decided that enough was enough and cancelled the deal.  Thankfully I was not relying on the Manchester United deal, it would have been nice if it had moved through to fruition, but as Winston Churchill once said, shit happens.

For me the important thing was the ability to find a suitable client and then come up with an idea that matched that client.  Yes, Manchester United were perhaps the most famous football club in the world, but I was sure that I could come up with another idea.  There was usually a list of people that I felt could be utilised passing between Jeffrey and myself, I just didn’t sit there and pull people or ideas out of thin air, there was quite a lot of debate and research going in to each proposed project.  Then I go and get a telephone call from a television producer.  This guy worked for Tiger Aspect and was directing the new six part Lily Savage television series.  It was just as well that I had the tape recorder going as he spoke to me for forty five minutes.

Three were to be six thirty minute programmes, each containing various comedy sketches.  Because of the standard of the two books I had written for Lily Savage, I was now to be given four sketches for each show.  I remember him asking me to write six sketches, one for each show, with Lily Savage and Vera Duckworth, a character from a popular television soap opera, where the two of them would pretend to be a sort of Cagney and Lacey duo running about Manchester attempting to solve crime.  Another six sketches were to feature Lily, her mad sister, and confused daughter, thinking they had won the national lottery but then discovering they hadn’t.  I was then encouraged to come up with a short sketch, thirty seconds or thereabouts, for each of the six shows and another sketch, again one for each show at about one and a half minutes each, but both of these were at my discretion.

In the novel writing world and short stories, even blogs, the word count as you will have noticed me mention before is the key measuring stick.   Look at any short story competition and you will see it limited by the number of words, but in television and radio it is time that is the key factor and it is also how you are paid.  So once again you would go to the Writers and Artists current yearbook and the range of up-to-date rates for radio and television would be stated.  The only programmes where you are not paid by the minute are hour long dramas where you are paid per programme.  It was nice to have a change of writing and my experience of the television studio at the local college would hopefully now pay off. 

This work had come directly to me so it wasn’t going through Jeffrey, he didn’t even know about it.  I wasn’t sure what to do about it until Murphy telephoned me and suggested that rather than have Jeffrey represent me why didn’t he, Murphy, represent me?  Murphy knew nothing about my other projects and Jeffrey had been working pretty hard for me.  I knew that Jeffrey was one of the leading literary agents in London and I knew nothing about Murphy.  I am sure the double top secret cabal wanted to see how I would react to this situation, would I do the right thing or would I be greedy and stupid enough to try and squeeze a few hundred quid more out of the deal.

I decided to tell Jeffrey as if anything went wrong along the way I would have him in my corner, plus it was the right thing to do.  If I wanted to disappear into the wilds of Ireland and spend the remainder of my life writing then I would need Jeffery and his dealing and contacts in London and I would need to know that we trusted each other implicitly.   Jeffrey was not a happy bunny and declared that he would be taking legal action against Murphy as Murphy was attempting to steal his client, and therefore his income.  I hadn’t viewed it like that but now that Jeffery had explained things to me, from his point of view, I could see just how underhand Murphy was being.  Now Jeffrey is reluctant to deal with Murphy so I agree to talk to Murphy.

I really had had about enough of Murphy, the one thing that angered me most was that he claimed to be Irish and I could not abide the fact that one Irishman would try to con another.  I telephoned him and explained that he was on, what the English call, ‘a sticky wicket,’ because Jeffrey now knew that he wanted to steal me away from him.  I suppose I should have been happy that two men were fighting over me, although if the truth be told and with legs like mine, it wouldn’t have been the first time.  Murphy seemed to take the fact on board that he would simply have to proceed with our original proposal and even though he knew that Jeffrey had a publisher lined up and ready, with a cheque sitting on the desk, he wanted to check around a few publishers himself.

I did get one very nice telephone call from Frank Bruno.  Frank telephoned and apologised to me for messing up the whole deal.  It was lovely of him to contact me and to tell you the truth, even though he was a wife beater and therefore the lowest form of life possible, I actually felt sorry for him.  The whole situation appeared to have humbled him, which I am sure would still not be as bad as his poor wife would have felt every occasion the heavyweight champion of the world laid into her with his fists.  Frank suggested that we leave the project for a year or two and then come back to it.   I sort of knew that he would never recover from being shamed as a wife beater, every time he would appear in the media it would always be brought up, and perhaps rightly so.  I’m not sure, I’m not a judge, just an ordinary fellow, with the loveliest legs in Ireland, the world’s leading Master Candle Maker, the High Chief of the Clan O Neill and therefore the true King of Ireland.