Life is like a bowl of spaghetti,
Suck it up and get sauce in your eye.
Stain your favourite shirt and tie,
But swallow it and sample paradise.
John Lennon, 1974.
Editor’s Note: I have been asked to point out by our publishers that John Lennon did not write this. I am not sure he (John Lennon) even liked pasta.
Hello again, and welcome to Chapter 2. By now you should be burning with the desire to change your life, get rich and help others along the way.
Start chanting positive mantras as quickly as you can. Whilst this sounds a really silly thing to do, just remember that you are going to have to make a lot of changes in your life to become rich and successful.
Exercise 1
When you wake up in the morning say “Keith David (change to your name) is a millionaire” twenty times. Get used to the sound of it. Sooner or later you will be listening to other people talking about you.
Editor’s Note: Believe it or not, Keith really does this every morning without fail. It is particularly embarrassing if we are stopping in a Travelodge.
Before you get much further you really need to decide on what area you are going to become an expert in.
Exercise 2
Look around you. What can you see?
Are you staring out of a window? Look more closely at the window. Is it possible to seal the edges of the glass with toothpaste, saving the average householder thousands of pounds? Are you looking at your partner? Is he/she too short? Would you prefer them to be taller? Is there a way to gain height? What about experimenting with an iron bar, a bag of spinach and carrier bags filled with bricks?
It did not take me long to find something. I set up focus groups, instigated a market research plan, spent time blue sky thinking, drew project diagrams and planned, planned and planned some more.
My chosen area of expertise was how to lose weight without dieting or exercising. Here is some of my blue sky thinking.
Challenging Questions for Creating my Weight Loss Expertise
Q: Why are fat people fat?
A: Firstly because they like eating, not dieting, and secondly because they like lying on sofas watching TV.
Q: With these two issues in mind, what if there was a way to get people to lose weight or be happy with their weight and figure, without dieting or exercising?
A: If there was a way, the inventor would get rich.
Q: How much would a fat person be prepared to pay for this?
A: I don’t know, I’m not fat.
Editor’s Note:
It shouldn’t take you very long to work out that Keith leads a very sheltered life. I send my sincerest apologies to anyone reading this who may be slightly overweight. It does get worse, but please remember when reading any references to fat people that the author is an ignoramus.
It is important to have evidence of your ability as an expert. After all, who is going to buy your book if you cannot demonstrate your expertise? Would you buy an igloo off an Eskimo who had never lived in one?
I enlisted the services of a volunteer by placing an advertisement in the local newspaper asking for volunteers to change their lives at no financial cost. Barry Leffat, the volunteer I chose at random to help me in my quest to get rich and help others, features regularly in these articles as evidence of my expertise.
Keith David is a businessman from a small village in North Wales. He is the author of “The Fat Man’s Guide to Not Being Fat”, “How to Get Rich” and a couple of other self-help books. Best known for his dramatic rise to fame after inventing a dietary plan to lose 7 stone in a week, he is similarly fairly well known for his subsequent fall back into penury. His wife, Anwen David regularly hacks his blog entries and adds factual corrections. You can read Keith’s book on How To Get Rich by visiting Amazon here
This is all total nonsense. Keith did not advertise in the local newspaper at all. He went to The Lump, our local pub, and recruited Barry Leffat, AKA “Barry the Fat”. I am not sure Barry even reads a newspaper apart from the Sunday Sport.
Barry is Keith’s best friend. They are complete opposites but get along famously. Barry is Keith’s side kick and a regular volunteer in any entrepreneurial projects. This is mainly because Barry is usually in the pub at the same time as Keith. He holds down jobs from time to time including relieving pigs (for artificial insemination), tree surgery, mole hunting with a shotgun and working as a taxi driver under a pseudonym at weekends.
Barry’s surname is Leffat, hence the Llandaffr Village Naming Committee’s decision to pronounce him Barry the Fat. Approximately 6 foot 3 inches tall, with light brown or ginger hair (hard to tell the colour as it rarely gets washed), Barry looks like a young Brian Blessed with a big bushy beard. You could trust him with your life provided it wasn’t a toss up between a pint of Old Peculier (real ale) and your life.
Keith is the complete opposite to Barry. Barry is tall and fat, Keith is short and scrawny. Barry has a booming voice, Keith speaks as if he has swallowed a helium balloon. Barry is coated in hair from head to foot, Keith has four hairs on his chest (I’ve counted them).
Apart from wrist and arm action through the occasional pleasuring of pigs, the remainder of Barry’s body gets little attention as it is not required to fulfil his daily functions. What remains of his athletic abilities has long since disappeared under layers of cake that have attached themselves to his arms, chin and stomach.
Convinced that unless he keeps fit he will die of a heart attack, Keith regularly jogs, swims, plays squash and does everything he can do to avoid certain death at the hands of his complaining heart.
Barry was best known in the world before this Plan for starring in a short film along with the artificial flower out of my VW Beetle dashboard vase. The yellow-headed flower disappeared in mysterious circumstances, which were later explained when the video emerged on YouTube entitled “naked man riding cow with VW Beetle flower sticking out of his butt cheeks”.
Barry lives in a caravan on the edge of the village and technically ought to be known as ‘Barry the Caravan’, not Barry the Fat. Precedents exist in the Village Naming rules for caravan dwellers.
You are probably wondering by now what on earth the Village Naming Committee is, and why Barry has to be “Barry the Fat”.
Every village in Wales has a Naming Committee. It is very common but not essential for people to be ‘Someone The Something’ – eg; Barry the Fat, Sid the Vicious (local bed and breakfast owner). Sometimes these names are pretty obvious. For example, the drug dealer residing in the next village is called John the Drug Dealer and our milkman is called Bryan the Milk.
Each year every Village Naming Committee meets in a local hostelry and determines whether any newcomers merit a village name. Newcomers can live in a village for over 20 years before they are no longer classed as ‘newcomers’.
The committee will not always tell the newcomer what their special village name is, particularly if it is something like ‘Archibald the Bock-Eyed”. You may not even find out what your village name is until a delivery van driver knocks on your door one day and asks if you know where ‘Keith the Twat’ lives (Keith really had no idea where anyone with that name lived).
I have included below an extract from the Llandaffr DH Naming Committee minutes for Keith, when his name was decided many years ago.
Minutes of Llandaffr DH Naming Committee Meeting
Present – Arthur the Landlord, Gareth Jenkins and Willie the Smell.
Summary:
Meeting was called to discuss the village name for Keith David, a new member of the community. It has been proposed that Keith David be now known as: ‘Keith the Twat’.
Reasoning behind the name: Keith David is already known as “That Twat” rather than “Keith David”.
Discussions were had to see whether or not there is another name that could be used. A quick show of hands indicated that there were no other names considered appropriate and the motion to name Keith David “Keith the Twat” was carried.