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Karl Pilkington is the bestselling author of seven books: The World of Karl Pilkington ; Happyslapped by a Jellyfish ; Karlology ; An Idiot Abroad ; The Further Adventures of An Idiot Abroad ; The Moaning of Life and More Moaning . He was part of the Guinness World Record-breaking podcast The Ricky Gervais Show , which was downloaded over 300 million times and became an animation for HBO in the USA. He also starred in three series of Sky 1's global hit An Idiot Abroad and two series of The Moaning of Life .
ALSO BY KARL PILKINGTON
THE WORLD OF KARL PILKINGTON
HAPPYSLAPPED BY A JELLYFISH
KARLOLOGY
AN IDIOT ABROAD
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN IDIOT ABROAD
THE MOANING OF LIFE

FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 2016
BY CANONGATE BOOKS LTD, 14 HIGH STREET, EDINBURGH EH1 1TE
CANONGATE.CO.UK
THIS DIGITAL EDITION FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2016 BY CANONGATE BOOKS
COPYRIGHT © KARL PILKINGTON, 2016
THE MORAL RIGHT OF THE AUTHOR HAS BEEN ASSERTED
PHOTOGRAPHY COPYRIGHT AJ BUTTERWORTH, JODIE KRSTIC, MUS
MUSTAFA, SIMON SMITH AND ME & YOU PRODUCTIONS LTD
ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT © ANDY SMITH
PHOTOGRAPH P.106 © MUSEUM VICTORIA CC BY. PTERONURA
BRASILIENSIS, GIANT OTTER, MOUNT. REGISTRATION NO. C 30005.
PHOTOGRAPHER: JON AUGIER
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING-IN DATA A CATALOGUE RECORD FOR THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY
ISBN: 978 1 78211 731 5 eISBN: 978 1 78211 732 2
EXPORT ISBN: 978 1 78211 734 6
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ART
IDENTITY
HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE
The BODY
WASTE
TIME
IF YOU GO to a fancy restaurant these days you normally get given something that is called an ‘amuse-bouche’ – that’s French for ‘amuse mouth’ – which is basically an appetiser that they serve before the food you have actually ordered turns up. The whole point of it is to whet your appetite. More often than not it looks like stuff they’ve just brushed up from behind the cooker and stuck on a broken Jacob’s cream cracker. I tend to eat it just cos it’s there but I very rarely enjoy it and it isn’t a part of the meal I remember when looking back. To me, an amuse-bouche is like an introduction to a book, in that you could easily do without it.
I thought I’d finished writing this book. I had handed in the six chapters to the publishers and was all pleased with myself that after almost nine months of sitting in front of my computer, it was finally complete. Except it wasn’t. Jenny at the publishers said she wanted some more. Jenny is never happy. If God had handed her his Ten Commandments for approval she would have suggested he write another three. ‘Why do I need to do an introduction?’ I asked. She explained that an introduction should inform the reader of why I travelled around the world looking at the topics I’ve written about. I said that I had written over 120,000 words and all this information was already in each chapter, but she insisted that an introduction was still required. So I am sat here feeling like a marathon runner who’s been asked to do a lap of honour. I know the saying is that you should never judge a book by its cover but I’m asking you not to judge this one by the introduction. I don’t know what to say that I haven’t already covered, and would prefer it if you just went straight to the start of chapter one now. But for the benefit of keeping Jenny happy I’ll keep going with this introduction even though I don’t believe in them.
I think if a book has been well written you shouldn’t need any explanation at the start. I only got round to watching Star Wars for the first time last year and thought it was odd that it had all that scrolling text about ‘in a galaxy far far away’ at the start of the film explaining the background to the story. I thought I’d downloaded the bloody Kindle version of it due to the amount of text there was to read. I wonder if Jenny was involved in Star Wars and demanded it had that intro added on afterwards.
I’ve just remembered an introduction to a programme I watched years ago that was so daft it made me laugh even though it wasn’t supposed to. It was a travel documentary presented by Neil Morrissey (the fella off the TV show Men Behaving Badly ) called Neil Morrissey’s Excellent Adventure in Jordan . Now, just like Jenny at the publishers, TV execs also like the start of a programme to cover what the show is all about and why Neil Morrissey has been picked to present it. This is always a tricky sell for any programme as it’s most likely that he just did the show cos it was a paying job and didn’t have much else on at the time. But being honest doesn’t always work for TV. If I was in charge I’d have just called the show Amman Behaving Badly (Amman is Jordan’s capital city). This would immediately make Neil the perfect presenter for the show, no more questions asked. But they didn’t think of this, so to justify his involvement the opening line to the series was ‘I’m Neil Morrissey and I’ve always been fascinated by the desert’. It makes me laugh just writing it. He said it with such seriousness, which made it even funnier. Now, I’ve never met Neil, I’m sure he’s a lovely fella, but I don’t believe for one second that he has ‘always been fascinated by the desert’. I would bet £100 that he was forced to say that line by some TV exec so any viewers wondering why Neil had been chosen to host the show now knew it was because he’s fascinated by deserts.
And now, like Neil I’m being forced to explain and justify why I filmed The Moaning of Life 2 series. Well, first of all I needed to earn some money to pay off the mortgage. The second reason was that if I was going to be away from home yet again I wanted to look at topics in life that interest me. The first Moaning of Life series looked at issues that most people face through their lives like marriage and having kids, but looking back on it, the problem with those subjects was that I went into them with my mind already made up, as I already knew that marriage and having kids wasn’t for me. So in some ways it was all a bit pointless. With this last series I wanted to look at themes that did play a big part in my life even though I didn’t realise how big. The original list of topics I was going to look into were:
My Identity
Time
Intelligence
Food
The Body
Waste
About two weeks before going away to film the Intelligence episode I lost interest when an ape that I was planning to visit and challenge to a game of Pac-Man in Japan pulled out due to its carer not being happy with the fee. So that episode changed to Art. I also didn’t bother with the Food episode in the end either as I thought there were already too many cooking programmes on the TV. Which is a shame really as I could have opened the episode with ‘I’m Karl Pilkington, and I’ve always been fascinated by desserts’.
I think that’s all you need to know for now. I hope you enjoy the book.
AS I WRITE this I’m twirling a stainless steel teaspoon up my nostril. I have my reasons for this, which I’ll explain in a minute. Hopefully that will keep you hooked enough to get you through the introduction to this next topic, which is art. If you’re like me, you might struggle to read about art. I know it’s really important and is a big part of everyday life – I mean you can’t even buy a cappuccino these days without it coming with some sort of doodle in your froth – but it’s boring to hear someone go on about it at great length. It’s as dull as someone telling you about their dreams. They say that in reality, dreams only last two to five seconds, so why is it when someone tells you about one they’ve had, it lasts longer than the Harry Potter series? I’ve switched nostril now. It would be a lot easier if I had one of them two-pronged forks so I could do both nostrils at once.
The art I grew up with wasn’t proper art. Money was too tight to throw away on things that hung on walls or sat on shelves collecting dust. The only art we had was the gear my dad had got off someone down the pub, or ornaments that people had bought us as gifts. I’m not sure any of us really liked what we had; it was just there to fill a space. I’d go to my mates’ houses and they had a lot of the same stuff, as their dads drank in the same pubs as mine. A game of Through the Keyhole would have been impossible on our estate as all the front rooms looked the same. Apart from the fridge magnets. My mam went through a phase of collecting them, but my dad soon got rid, as when you closed the fridge door they’d all fall off. It was like playing a game of Buckaroo every time you had to put the milk back!
Even though I didn’t grow up around expensive art, and I don’t own any now, I do like art. I just don’t like the pretentiousness that surrounds it. I don’t want a critic telling me WHY I should like the art, and how every glance at some painting ‘will evoke painful visceral experiences with forms that are tactilely appealing’, when to me, it just looked like what the bloke did in my cappuccino froth. But then I’ve never been keen on people telling me what I should enjoy. I’m a big fan of fish and chips, but I won’t bother if I can’t have a cup of tea with them. To me, that’s like Ant without Dec. Recently I was away filming and I’d decided to have fish and chips, but when the waiter came to take the order he said they don’t do tea. The cameraman piped up and said a sommelier he knew had told him that the best drink to have with fish and chips is champagne. I said, ‘What else does he suggest, a martini shaken and not stirred with a bloody Scotch egg!’ Seeing as I didn’t know what else to eat and everyone else had ordered, I took his advice. I wish I hadn’t. It was like sticking Anne Frank in an episode of Cash in the Attic – the two things should never go together. I should have known his mate was talking out of his arse. Since when have you gone in a chippy and they’ve stocked bottles of Cristal next to the cans of Dandelion & Burdock?
The thing is, there are seven billion people on the planet, we