The Thirty-Nine Steps to Happiness

By John Buchan and Geri Halliwell

Hints and tips on how to improve your life, written by John Buchan (Oxbridge scholar, author, barrister, politician and statesman) and Geri Halliwell (literally lightweight "entertainer" living on borrowed time and fucking Popstars - the rivals).

Don’t trust the Germans. Especially the ones with secret code books hidden in their tobacco pouches. They are trying to steal your milk. Milk is good for you, if you are a young cow, and it is cow milk you are drinking. But too much milk is fattening. Fat is bad, like Germany and pacifism.
The grass is always greener when you’re on acid. This is why drugs are bad as well. Except the ones that make you thin, like speed or emetics. Thin is good. Too thin is even better, and emaciated is perfect.
Impersonating road-menders can save your life if you are being chased across the moors by Germans that can hood their eyes like hawks.
Little dogs are not pathetic. They are sweet and kind and lovely. You must resist the temptation to kick them like the little furry rugby balls they are. Avoid hoofing little dogs as hard as you can, trying to get their guts to burst out of their little heads and slop onto the pavement. Just stop it. God will stick pins in your eyes if you do it again.
Dead men tell no tales. This is why they were rarely employed as Jackanory presenters.
Have a positive mental outlook. For Heaven’s sake, don’t become a neurotic bag of bones with an eating disorder and too many freckles. It’s embarrassing, quite frankly, and rather unpleasant to look at.
Your time in the limelight as a pop singer can be brutally short if you are lacking in talent. Alternative employment as an attraction in medical freakshows or stick insect breeding programmes should be considered when the hits dry up and EMI stop returning your calls.
Avoid meddling with forces you do not understand. This applies particularly to scientists, devil worshippers and South African mining engineers on holiday in London.
Eating the bodies of your victims makes it less likely that you’ll be caught. Honestly. It works for my cat.
Golfers are not necessarily what they seem. Some of them could be Germans waiting to steal our naval secrets before sneaking away on a submarine. Germans are like that. You have to be careful, because they can turn on you in a moment's notice. And don't get me started on the French, please.
A career as a shameless media whore is not necessarily indicative of a shallow and wasted existence. Refer to Step 6. Although being Governor-General of Canada and an acclaimed novelist is better by quite some considerable margin.
Every day you eat less than you excrete is a good day. It means you are that one step closer to God. God will take away the pain and make everything better. No-one is ginger in Heaven.
Always eat three square meals a day. Carpet tiles are best, but at a pinch, roof slates will do. There’s surprisingly few calories in carpet tiles, especially the low fat variety from B & Q.
Don’t bother reading Russian literature. I read some once; couldn’t understand a fucking word. Waste of bloody roubles, in my opinion.
Cover versions are cool. The Beatles did covers. Therefore It’s Raining Men was as good as the Beatles. QED.
Get your story straight in your head before claiming that you’re just a tramp who nicked a few sovereigns from a crashed car. The Germans won’t believe you otherwise.
No-one will notice you are painfully underweight if you wear nothing but your pants. For some reason, all eyes are averted and your secret remains safe.
Carrier bags are not the best places to put sick in. Use your shoes, or your acoustic guitar or something. Anything, in fact, but a carrier bag.
Have a sense of humour for God’s sake. Don’t cry if Johnny Vaughan says something nasty about you on breakfast television. And if it’s any consolation, ‘Orrible was the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever seen by several very long miles.
Embrace feminism. Generations of women fought for equality so that you could wear a micro-miniskirt and shout some half-assed slogans from the stage at the Brit Awards. Honestly, Emily Pankhurst would have been proud of you. And there's nothing at all exploitative about performing semi-naked in front of several thousand baying squaddies. After all, we're all feminists now.
Get at least one gay male friend. Apparently, this can make the difference between sanity and a nervous breakdown. God knows what the breakdown would have been like.
Borderline racism can be acceptable. But only if you were born in the days of the British Empire and have been dead for at least sixty years.
It's never too early in the day to take a slimming pill. You may have been sleeping on your back with your mouth open - how can you be sure that you haven't swallowed any spiders during the night? Imagine the havoc this will wreak on your calorie counting! It just doesn't bear thinking about. It's better to be on the safe side and chug a couple of pills as soon as you wake up.
It's amazing what a good music producer can do to a wasp's arse of a voice. Isn't technology wonderful, eh? See, you are a good singer. Just filter your voice through every single virtual gadget that Cubase has to offer, and you too can sound like your voice has been filtered through every single virtual gadget that Cubase has to offer. It's easy to convince yourself that you sound like that naturally - all you have to do is perfect the art of ludicrous self-delusion. Congratulations - you are now a bona fide pop star.
Take your climbing gear if you are planning on going anywhere near the Big Ben clockface. But only in the film.
Never bet on a blue horse. They never win.
Always carry a stick. Transvestite Monks are everywhere.
Cringeworthy exhibitionism is a legitimate form of self-expression. Don't let the rest of the world tell you otherwise. After all, what do they know? Absolutely fuck all, that's what. No-one understands how you feel except you and your therapist.
Anything that feeds off your body is your friend. All parasites help you stay thin. This includes ringworms, candiru, tapeworms, blowfly maggots, stomach cancer cells, ebola viruses and crocodiles.
Go to stage school. Stage schools always turn out well-adjusted young people with no overpowering lust for fame at any price. They do not instil a relentless competitive bitchiness, nor do they encourage you to pursue unrealistic dreams of stardom at the expense of personal development and a sense of self-worth.
Things are never as bad as they seem. That doesn't stop them from being pretty fucked-up, but at least its something to cling on to in the small hours when everything seems meaningless and you find yourself reaching for the family-size pack of triple-strength paracetamol that you keep by your bed just in case it all gets too much. Besides, paracetamol is bad for you. It contains calories.
The middle of a treeless expanse of Scottish moorland is with hindsight perhaps not the best place to hide from people. Especially German spies who appear to be mind-readers.
It's not hard to have more money than sense. You could be on the dole and you'd be there. So don't panic.
Stomach-stapling is a bad idea. It is painful and dangerous and is definitely not recommended. The best place to put the staples is just below the larynx - this prevents your food from reaching your stomach in the first place, and might possibly improve your singing.
If you are big-boned, contracting bone cancer is one way of losing weight. Try swimming in the sea next to Sellafield or buying your own x-ray machine and living in it. There are no sure-fire ways of catching bone cancer, but I'm sure that with sufficient perserverance you will get there in the end.
Never Eat Shredded Wheat. Not only is this a useful mnemonic for the points of the compass, it also reminds you not to have any breakfast.
Never Eat Lunch Or Dinner Either. Not a useful mnemonic for anything, but another piece of good advice.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Practice makes perfect. And an attractive set of cushion covers.
Never start something you can't finish. If you start something that requires 39 items, to take a random example, keep going to the bitter, bitter end, even if you scraped clean through the bottom of the barrel a long long time ago.