Our boiler is fucked. Totally F - U - C - K - E - D. Of course, I knew that already, but it seems more official when you’ve shelled out £85 for a plumber to confirm the bleeding obvious. So, if any of you know of a decent company that will install a new combination boiler for a reasonable price, please send them in my direction. It’s rubbish when you’ve got no heating or hot water.

On a far more cheerful note, I’ve just found this in my inbox:

I thought you might be mildly diverted to learn that I will be quoting an extract from ‘Swinesend‘ in my Masters degree dissertation - the first paragraph of page 17 in fact. Entitled “Seats of Learning: Conservation of the English Country House in Educational Use” it’s a round up of the heritage conservation issues facing independent schools housed in historic (listed) country houses, including political and economic issues.

Thanks so much for the book- it’s a riot! I am giving it as a gift to the several heads who have helped with my research. It’s an excellent stable-mate to Arthur Marshall’s ‘Giggling in the Shrubbery‘ and James Kenward’s ‘Prep School‘.

So, if you haven’t got your copy of Swinesend, please latch on to one as soon as you can: I could do with the royalties.

I was sent a link to this book extract by a friend who used to attend Stamford High School, which is the sister school of the place I used to go to. As my friend put it:

It’s funny how the two schools have inspired books in close succession - scarred people for life, more like!

The other book she was referring to was Swinesend, which is in many places inspired by my five years at Stamford School. But where I (and my co-authors) created a savage send up of public school life and maintained the stiff upper lip, Rae Earl takes a very different line.

She used to be fat, you see. And if the one cardinal sin at my school was being common (’fucking little pleb’), the worst thing any girl at the High School could do was be an unshaggable pile of blubber. And that was in the eyes of her peers, rather than those of the boys up the hill. I expect it’s pretty much the same now.

That’s why what, at first glance, appears to be a self-indulgent teenager’s diary, strikes a note with me: I know those schools intimately, and am wearily familiar with the repulsive and unimaginative attitudes that are worn as a badge of pride by many pupils. God, how this prime slice of Stamfordian intellectualism brought back memories.

Fab at school today. Daisy got bollocked for spelling “Satan” “Saturn” all through her essay. And this is someone who reckons she is going to apply for Cambridge. Good luck, love!!

My favourite bit, though, has to be when Rae pops in to Stamford School to see her first ever boyfriend who, naturally not wanting to be seen with a fat bird, has done the decent thing and dumped her.

Yes, Harry thing completely buggered. I went down to his study in his boarding house. He was acting dead strangely - showing me his bloody A-level English essay (it was shit! The first line said, “All great books have a beginning, a middle and an end …” Errr … yeah, but what’s that got to do with Jane Austen?) so I took the piss slightly only as a joke. Then he got really odd and asked if I’d always been big.

Superb. A sixth former who’d grasped that books have a beginning, a middle and an end. Probably an exhibitioner, if not a scholar. Rae continues:

Then HONESTLY this happened:

H: “I feel like I have been pushed into this.”

Me: “Pardon?”

H: “People said that you liked me and I felt pressured into getting off with you and asking you out.”

The classic tactic: make sure she thinks it’s her fault. Besides, she’s only fat, so it won’t matter.

Tragic stuff. I’ll almost certainly read the lot when it’s published, and it’ll make me wince page by page.

What I do want to know, though, is whether she includes the fine school disco story about the boy and the girl who were (by my reckoning) in the year below her. It was told to me by friends of a handsome boy I knew, Pete White, who was never happier than when hearing someone else telling it in his presence.

Just in case Rae misses it out, what happened was simple enough. One of the awful official discos in the main hall at Stamford School was drawing to an end. As was usual, the lights were dimmed for the last, slow song, as hormonal young couples thrust their tongues down each others’ throats and discreetly positioned schoolmasters watched (rather more keenly than necessary) from the sides of the room.

One couple were necking particularly enthusiastically, and the boy involved could hardly believe his luck. Then, in a snap, the lights went on, the girl looked lovingly into in his face and, a millisecond after staring into his eyes, slapped him brutally round the face.

“You’re not Peter White,” she screamed.

As co-author of a toilet book about public school life, I’ve been mildly surprised by the fact that Amazon customers tend to buy it at the same time as rather more highbrow choices, and less often with other light-hearted things. So my faith in them was restored this morning, when I spotted what you can see to your left. Of course the ridiculous CRE storm about Tintin and racism was going to do nothing more than boost sales (sales rank: 12th most popular book on Amazon.co.uk at time of writing). Nor was it going to top this for sheer comedy value…

The second instalment from cartoonist Dan Archer. For the full strip, visit here.

As promised a while back, and now I’ve been given permission to put it online, I’ve posted a copy of the article I wrote for this month’s The Resident magazine. It’s wry, it’s bolshy and its main point is to sell my book that a private education isn’t automatic proof of either good manners or a sense of social duty. I’ll leave you to guess which of the two I actually do have.

You can download a PDF copy of the article from this link, or if you prefer to have a browse through related pieces then this is the page to visit.

Introducing the brilliant new comic strip by Dan Archer, illustrator of Swinesend: Britain’s Greatest Public School. You can find out more about Dan and his work by visiting his website, his blog (on which he posts lots of recent work) and his MySpace profile.

If you’d like to view a larger version of Dan’s cartoon, please visit the CPSA site at www.crappublicschools.org/dan/

Unless I’ve very much got my wires crossed, there is an article of mine in this month’s Resident magazine, a glossy which is distributed to 50,000 homes in Belgravia, Chelsea, Fulham, Holland Park, Kensington, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill, Pimlico and South Kensington. Once again, I’m taking a pop at public schools and, I believe, my piece will be accompanied by an extract from Swinesend.

A copy is being sent to me, and I’ll ask whether I can reproduce it on this blog, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with a snippet from near the end, into which I worked one of my favourite gags (which I first read here):

As anyone who has seen drunken and well-heeled teenagers burning stolen fences on the North Cornwall coast knows, a public school education is not automatic proof of either good manners or a sense of social duty. And nor has it ever been. As the former brothel madam Janie Jones recalled after dealing with a client who mentioned his schooling to guarantee his behaviour: “We didn’t know what a Wykehamist was, so we looked it up in the dictionary. When we couldn’t find it, we assumed it meant pervert. So Franie went, and he was.”

Rowan Pelling, who is one of the finest people alive, gives Swinesend and the Crap Public Schools Association lavish praise in today’s Telegraph.

If these tragic tales ring bells, may I recommend the funniest website of all time: The Crap Public Schools Association. It is “…for those unfortunate people who attended a British public school and those who did not but, perversely, wished that they had. Or, like many Labour Cabinet ministers, those who did and wished they could say they hadn’t.”

There’s even Britain’s first online public school, Swinesend, where you can be ill educated for free. “New scum” can sign up for virtual bullying: “If you’ve got a moment, we’d love to strap your head to a boiling radiator pipe.” The site is worth perusing for vintage school songs alone. Take this Edwardian paean to Stamford School designed to be sung “with gusto” to the tune of The Vicar of Bray:

“In Father Time’s remoter days, By strange coincidences/Noah built the Ark and someone else/Schola Stamfordiensis.”

Trust me, after a couple of hours online you’ll start thinking they should loan state-sector teachers to public schools.

Bill has posted an entertaining article over at Harry’s Place arguing that the last thing the state education system needs is an injection of the public school spirit.

He might have mangled his Greek (thereby disregarding his university’s motto of AIEN ARISTEUEIN (sorry, I can’t get the Greek character set to work)) but it’s a good read nonetheless. And it seems to have shifted one or two copies of Swinesend.

It may not be the most earth-shattering news in the world, but I was really pleased to spot that my book, Swinesend: Britain’s Greatest Public School, has just become the bestselling spoof/parody title in Waterstones. Sure, it’s not the next Harry Potter, but it’s the sort of news that makes you feel like picking up your pen and jamming the nib into the next target.

I think I know what that will be…

Former university flatmate, best man, co-author of Swinesend and joint founder of the Crap Public Schools Association, Bill Dornan, has finally started blogging. His blog is called A Foolish Interruption in honour of the time he was Paxmaned on University Challenge (in 1996, I think - I do recall inviting lots of people round to laugh at him on the telly).

Anyway, go and take a look and tell him what you think.

After Bill Dornan and I wrote this piece in The Times last month, we had some very unusual follow-up from the media. None was more offbeat than the interest shown by a magazine called Membership Today, which has just published this article on us. Nice work Alex, but we were drinking those brandies and soda in the morning: nothing like fortifying yourself when you’re about to head towards Brixton tube station.

On a related note, I’ve just had an email from someone who is busy reading Swinesend:

Bought and am reading the book - frighteningly so very true in many many places. Were any of the authors educated at Haileybury, or are all these places the same?

They’re all the same James, they’re all the same.