This first novel by Mil Millington is the funniest thing I've read in years. I have re-read it so many times that I can now open it anywhere and start reading just for a laugh.
It is about a university library IT supervisor, Pel Dalton (who actually has a degree in social geography and spends his days bluffing his way through his job by saying things like "Ahh, it looks like a server problem" and "Well, the THX series are notorious for doing this" and passing the rest of his time making models of little horses from Blue Tack and having wry thoughts about his colleagues). Between his German girlfriend Ursula, his two kids and and having to take over for his boss who has mysteriously disappeared, Pel's quiet days are about to be over!
If you are like me, you decide to read a book based on its first page, so here is a small taser of the opening of this book:
'Where the hell are the car keys?'
I'm now late. Ten minutes ago I was early. I was wandering about in a too early limbo, in fact; scratching out a succession of ludicrously trivial and unsatisfying things to do, struggling against the finger-drumming effort of burning away sections of the too-earliness. The chldren, quick to sense I was briefly doomed to wander the earth without reason or rest, had attached themselves, one to each of my legs. I clumped around the house like a man in magnetic boots while they laughed themselves breathless and shot at each other with wagging fingers and spit-gargling mouth noises from the cover of opposite knees.
Now however I am in a fury of lateness. The responsibility for this rests wholly with the car keys and thereby with their immediate superior--my girlfriend, Ursula.
'Where--where
the hell
are the car keys?' I shout down the stairs. Again.
Reason has long since fled. I've looked in places where I know there is no possible chance of the car keys lurking. Then I've rechecked all those places again. Just in case, you know, I suffered transitory hysterical blindness the first time I looked. Then I've looked down, gasping with exhaustion, begged the children to please get off my legs now, and looked a third time. I'm a single degree of enraged frustration away fromcontinuing the search along the only remaining path, which is slashing open the cushion covers, pulling up the floorboards and pickaxeing through the plasterboard false wall i n the attic.
I do a semi-controlled fall down the stairs to the kitchen, where Ursula is making herself a cup of coffee in a protective bubble of her own, non-late, serene indifference.
'Well?' I'm so clenched I have to shake the word from my head.
'Well what?'
'What do you mean "Well what"? I've just asked you twice.'
'I didn't hear you, Pel. I had the radio on.' Ursula nods toward the transistor radio on the shelf. Which is off.
'On what? On stun? where are the damn car keys?'
'Where they always are.'
'I
will
kill you.'
'Not, I imagine...' Ursula presents a small theatre of stirring milk into her coffee. '...with exhaust fumes.'
'Aarrrrgggh.' Then, again, to emphasis the point, 'Aaaaarrrrggggh!'
There, that ought to hook ya! Check out the websites below as well.
http://www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/http://www.mil-millington.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/quotes.htm
