The Sunday Hangover With Warren Ellis

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
001
WARREN ELLIS

It was a grim Sunday in Iceland when my hosts drove me out into the interior of the country -- the central area that they close off for six months of the year because if you go there you will just die. The interior of Iceland looks like the moon, only with moss speckling the rocks. Apollo astronauts trained here. The moon probably looks nicer. And in a spacesuit you don't have to inhale the tang of geyser-polluted air that makes much of Iceland smell like an army of sick old men have been farting on it since Noah was a boy. We drove out to a black cave in the middle of nowhere. Just a hump of black rock. The hollow didn't extend back more than thirty metres from the mouth. It was full of language: Icelandic words scratched into almost every inch of the rock. "My neighbour," one of my hosts said, "was one of the last people to be born here. In 1929." I looked around again. All those scratches. The marks of families who'd lived in this cave, generations going back hundreds of years. And empty for less than a century. It wasn't a cave. I was standing in an old house on a stand-in for the moon.

It was then that I realized that they were all grinning weirdly, and backing away towards the cars, and that the nearest settlement was fifty miles away.

I have always hated Sundays.

* * * * *

My name's Warren Ellis. I write books and things. I am not the Warren Ellis who plays violin and works with Nick Cave. He's Australian, for one thing. No relation, unless his great-grandad was some dodgy offshoot of the family who was deported for stealing a pig or something. Years ago, Blixa Bargeld sent me an email, thinking I was the other one. It was a litany of horror, detailing their mutual friends who'd died, gone mad and/or been hospitalized since last they spoke. A woman who works at Mute Records once wrote to tell me that the other Warren Ellis had grown a beard, and that they blamed me for it. I heard from the man himself about a year ago: we're supposed to have a drink at some point. We share a mutual friend in Jim Sclavunos, the unreasonably tall Bad Seeds drummer and Vanity Set frontman. Haven't clapped eyes on him in years -- was supposed to see him in London last year, I think, but I was in the West Country, eating a pig and watching the Medieval Baebes performing ten feet in front of me. The Medieval Baebes are very pale and very thin and do not wear underwear. From a certain angle, with the light falling the right way, you can see what the Medieval Baebes had for dinner. Britain's tv organic farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall -- a posh bloke who slaughters his own livestock with disturbing relish on camera -- was also in attendance. "He only comes for the booze," the staff muttered darkly, as he tottered around the tent with a blunt butter knife looking for a pig to kill. But it was too late: medieval food expert Stuart Peachey had already pickled the bugger around back. The staff came to our bench, as the vinegar pig was served to my daughter. "Why did you bring her?" they said. "She's too young to die."

"Try this," my daughter grinned, offering me some. So I did. My tongue started to bleed and eight of my teeth fell out.

"No she fucking isn't," I said to the staff.

* * * * *

I was having dinner with a visiting American comedian friend in London a couple of years ago -- one of Marco Pierre White's restaurants -- and he and the others convinced me to order the "roast suckling pig" on the menu. There was great anticipation as the dish arrived -- it was fast, we only had time to drink a couple of bottles of wine each. But it was three slices of pork and a sliver of apple. I still pity the other diners who had to put up with the people at the back yelling "Where's my fucking pig? Bring us the pig! Get out there and kill me a fucking pig! We demand a pig with Marco Pierre White in its mouth, right fucking now!"

Marco Pierre White, if you're reading this -- you are a weakling. Furthermore, you owe me a pig.

Patton Oswalt does not yell "Where's the fucking pig?" in RATATOUILLE this weekend.

* * * * *

Hello. Now we are introduced. Through the magic of Suicide Girls, you will be waking up to me every Sunday morning. Isn’t that a comforting thought?

Warren Ellis wants you to buy his bloody book.