Words: Grant Runyon, Illustration: Jamie Willow
I haven’t had the pleasure of gracing these pages since October 2019, when I was poached from my role here at Gallery Magazine with an offer that was too good to refuse. I met a tall dark stranger with a goatish air at the Five Oaks roundabout, and after a few pints of Breda and a contract written my own blood I was the proud, loud proprietor of my own opinion column in the traditional media.
I never bothered reading the fine print, but they paid me more than I’d been used to from Gallery – I had an expense account for breakfast at the petrol forecourt, a weekly coupon for the meat raffle and a sponge bath every Tuesday. Unlike an actual journalist I wouldn’t even need to do research, as the standard for writing a “controversial” opinion column is to repeat the opinions of mean hairdressers and men who lost their golf clubs in the divorce, but as if you’ve come up with them yourself. They warned me if I showed any signs of shame or self-awareness I’d be taken out and dumped in St Peter’s Valley like a feral chicken.
For a while it was paradise, pretending to have my dad’s opinions and bullying random minorities for cash. I basked in the adoration of a dwindling audience of the Island’s most spiteful retirees and unlike writing for Gallery did not need to hedge my bets by printing “this is obviously satire” in block caps in both margins, because my target audience thinks satire is a town outside Glasgow and that irony is what liver tastes like. As somebody with no tact who likes making up statistics I’ve always been committed to the concept of free speech, so I set out to ruffle feathers, to say the unsayable, which is still unsayable even if technically Katie Hopkins or Ricky Gervais has already said it. Unfortunately, like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun and the editors stopped defending my inalienable right to uncensored thought. I had embarked on a particularly fruity online rant after one of my colleagues stole my thunder with 800 words on why cycle lanes were invented by Hitler. I hoped I’d trigger enough of a response to be crowned king of the Island’s most belligerent WhatsApp groups, but the tweets broke containment of my readers and it turns out that I was very, very wrong to accuse Mr Tumble of being a “woke trans member of Jeremy Corbyn’s gender ISIS” in a public forum. I would like to reiterate that apology to his ruthless firm of lawyers, and to ISIS, who object to Mr Tumble on ideological grounds.
Bloodied but unbowed by cancel culture, I hoisted my sails and charted a course out of newsprint and into the bacteria-infested waters of digital media. My podcast “The Difference Opinion” is still pulling in an impressive share of listeners in the Trinity and St John catchment area, but although I am proud to be lauded as “the Joe Rogan of Grand Vaux” the downside of cultivating an audience of men with very thick necks is that they are easily distracted by other forms of entertainment, like flashing lights or moo cows. My subscribers continually walking into traffic, choking on their own spit, starving because they can’t open tin cans etc. is messing with my income, especially as the podcast is only monetised via the Jersey-themed cryptocurrency I developed, ShegCoin. At the moment it’s worth next to nothing (attention: Mr Tumble’s lawyers) but that means that you’re virtually guaranteed* a return if you invest enough.
Unsatisfied with my status as Maufant’s #1 cryptocurrency guru, I thought about applying to work as a talking thumb on GB News, but then I hit on a different way to go viral with credulous goons, and set myself up first as a professional Covid denier and then launching Jersey’s first climate sceptic OnlyFans. In another misstep it turns out that you shouldn’t spread yourself too thinly – this is both metaphorically and literally true if you get your accounts mixed up and email a video titled “dangerous injections” to one of the real housewives.
I’m now banned from TikTok, Instagram and Club Penguin. I have taken a leaf from the book of chinless manfluencer Andrew Tate and opened an in-person boot camp for aspiring alpha males who want to learn what it takes to be as much of a success as I am. You might think that it’s a bit of a reach to go from local writer to the type of celebrity who does videos about slapping people and is wanted by Interpol, but Russell Brand got his start dressing as a Victorian scarecrow on a Big Brother spinoff, married then divorced Katy Perry, and is now baptising lesser members of the Trump family in a paddling pool full of his pant whiskers. I’ve been trying to snag an endorsement from somebody with a bigger, thicker audience but until Elon Musk responds to me I’ll need to be satisfied with the thumbs up emoji from disgraced footballer Joey Barton.
Meanwhile I’m topping up the pension fund by putting my broccoli-haired houseboys to work as professional dog walkers, which is one of only two growth areas of the British economy since the pandemic. The other is vapes, allowing me to double my income by loading up your wheezing pugs like tiny mules with a stack of Spicy Tango Menthol Blasters and leading them past the schools. We’ve lost a handful of cockapoos to spontaneous combustion but my guy in Taiwan has promised to send over replacements. Whether it’s dogs or vapes I don’t know, and don’t care.
So what next for the Top G Grant Runyon? The Gallery editor is trying to tempt me back but I doubt his commitment to free speech or to handing over multiple pages at the front of the magazine for my range of supplements called things like “XXL Bully” and “Girthzilla”. They are perfectly safe, tested once in Taiwan, a second time on Jersey’s dogs and then finally on my manosphere lodgers. “No cap, fr fr fam! Rizzy rascal skibidi toilet. Totally GOATED” was their review. I am 90% certain this means they don’t cause brain damage, but if you think I’m wrong you can ring the Gallery office and leave an incoherent voicemail to set me straight. Just don’t tell Mr Tumble where I live.
