When I first started doing stand-up, I wanted to be like Noel Fielding (doing his solo stuff - not the Boosh) and so wrote a long rambly oddity about monkeys and giant nuns. I performed it once, in Bridgenorth to apathy and stares. It was a moment which would fuel me into writing... jokes! The original peice (which was riffed around and improvised with) is here for your enjoyment below - suffice to say, I'm only just starting to return to my oddness after the initial scare, it's only aken me 4 years to decide I want to let my stranger side shine on stage and even now it's tightly reined in.

That doesn't stop people keep introducing me as "quirky" or "abnormal" though...

I don't function well in the real world. And I want to try and make people understand why.

Once I've had a thought, I can't do anything until I've followed it to its illogical conclusion.

It's difficult to explain, so I'll give you an example.

It was about 8 in the evening, and I was sat in my lounge thinking about experiments that have been done on animals to try and find out more about how the brain works.

There were two experiments in particular that were in my head that evening. The first was an experiment designed to find out what happens if an animal doesn't dream.

Well cats roll over when they're dreaming. So scientists got a load of sleeping cats, on little platforms, in a swimming pool.

You can see where this is going.

The scientists were then suprised when cats, subjected to this kind of treatment, went insane...

The other experiment. My favourite. Was a recent one, where scientists took a rat. Stuck electrodes in its brain and made it remote controllable.

Now, I do have issues with this. I mean, remote control rats aren't very useful really are they? Granted, you can scare your Gran, but you can scare your gran with dead rat projectile just as well.

So then I thought. How much better would the scientists time have been spent. If they'd created a remote control Monkey. Think of the possibilities. *Mime sitting in a chair, using a remote, being a monkey, going to the fridge, getting a beer etc*

But. Why stop at one remote control monkey. Why not a thousand? A million? An ARMY of remote control monkeys! I could take over the world, invade downing street. Replace George Bush with a chimp. They'd never know the difference.

Then I realised that it was lunch time. I'd gone to bed thinking about monkeys, lain in bed awake, thinking about monkeys, gone to work and all morning I'd been thinking about monkeys.

A had to get the monkeys out of my head.

So I started building a 20 foot high model potato out of lego in my front garden.

It was beautiful. Mejestic. The whole village came round and we worshipped the potato. It brought the community together in a way that had never been acheived before.

Everyone, except my next door neighbour. Who didn't see the beauty in the lego potato, who thought it was an eye-sore.

I was reported to the planning council. They came round and threatend to knock it down if it wasn't removed within 24 hours.

I tried. But I didn't have the heart to knock it down. So the next day, the planning people came round with their bull dozers. But just as they were about to advance on the lego potato, it hatched. And from the ruins of my potato arose a giant 15 foot nun.

She stalked across the village, eating the elders. And we rejoiced, for it was a beautiful thing. But when she returned and began to rule us under a strict catholic regime, we realised that none of us were going to be able to have sex again, until we were married.

So I unleashed my army of remote control monkeys, and a great battle ensued for the next 20 years. After the war was over, the nun, and all of the monkeys were dead. And we rejoiced, but again we rejoiced too soon.

Because now that the monkeys and the nun were gone, there was nothing to stop the army of mental cats from infesting the village and stealing all of our remote control rats.

And then it was 8 the next day.

And THAT is why I don't function well in the real world.