Steve Coogan & Me

So the secret is out: Steve Coogan is my #1 celebrity crush

If we have ever talked in person for more than one hour, I possibly brought up the fact that Steve Coogan is my #1 celebrity crush. He has held his position for a very long time — the previous record-holder had been Orlando Bloom.

The very early 2000s have come and gone quickly, and time has not been kind to all of us.

The reason I’m telling you this: I’ve been reading a lot of Calvin Trillin lately. He’s the kind of writer that my writing would have been inspired by if I had read him before I started writing. In his 1978 book Alice, Let’s Eat, an essay entitled ‘Mao And Me’ details his fantasy — obsession? — about being nominated by the US government to take Chairman Mao off for dinner.

Mr Trillin and I are weirdly similar: our sense of humour (I mean, at least in writing; I’ve never met him) and predilection for the absurd are noticeable. He has, however, travelled across the US on food writing missions for The New Yorker. I, on the other hand, am currently unemployed. There are other significant differences — he was born in 1935, I was born in 1989 — but his amusing fantasy is very similar to one of my own: meeting and taking Steven Coogan for dinner. In Brazil.