Did You Hear About the World Champion Air Campanologist? He won the No Bell Prize.

That's an actual proper joke, so you'd better enjoy it.

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I’m going to win the Nobel prize for literature next year. And I’m gonna have a pop at Chemistry too. If I can just get one I will be happy though.

Has anyone ever got one on their first go at doing some chemistry? To be fair I did get a B at O level, so I am not exactly a novice. You could just fluke it on day one, add a couple of liquids together that no one else has done and bang, climate crisis solved.

It would really annoy the lifetime chemists, wouldn’t it? If some prick turned up and nailed it on day one, before he’d even put on his safety goggles. “Oh look, I turned lead into gold. It was pimpsy. Why’s this taken you 500 years, you clots?!”

Do they do one for sexual chemistry? If I’d made a load of money from inventing dynamite and then suddenly felt worried that people would remember me for being responsible for killing loads of people, I’d have made the categories much more fun.

Current holder of Literature medal.

I admit that literature is my best bet though, cos I’ve been writing professionally for getting on for forty years. You’d think they’d have recognised this blog by now. Even just for persistence. It’s never been nominated for award and has barely been even acknowledged by the press, so it’d be a real victory to leap straight to the Nobel. The quality may not be much, but the length. Look at the length. There can’t be many single works out there that have the word count of this thing. According to Warming Up word counter Jon Burton, it was nudging towards 5 million in November 2018 and we’ve had 7 more years of squeezing out constipated ideas (that’s the kind of line that will make the Nobel Committee’s ears prick up- and maybe their pricks prick up too. Would pricks rear up be better? These choices can make the difference between awards and no awards). So it’s got to be over 7 million by now (NB Jon’s specific number 4,988,871 words/6,856 pages also included my Metro columns and 1998 tour diary which I don’t count as Warming Up canon).

If I had continued putting out Warming Ups as a book I might be on volume 90 by now. I could get people selling them door to door like the Encyclopedia Britannica (which doesn’t have an entry on me, presumably out of jealousy).

Hey look, hats off to Alfred Nobel (who presumably managed to blow a few off with all the explosives he invented). I wish more super rich people would use their money for good, if just to assuage their guilt a bit more. There was the bloke who bought a London sized portion of rainforest to preserve it from the loggers- for only £8 million it looks like. If you find yourself with more money than you could spend in 100,000 lifetimes, where you could lose £100 million and it have no affect on your life at all, why wouldn’t you?

Hardly anyone talks about how Alfred Nobel blew their hat or head off, but everyone mentions how cool he is for giving 11 million Kroner to someone for being good at chemistry. Every fucking year. Even after he’s been dead for 130 years.

And look if Donald Trump can win one for peace (or even be considered), then the idea of Richard Herring winning the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences (even though he has no idea what they are and has never done one) is surely not that outlandish.

I just feel that 2026 is going to be my year.

Please do not make a No-Ball prize joke.

a) I have one ball

b) it is too soon to be making jokes about having had cancer.