22
JOLLY
At this point in my life, things seemed to be going swimmingly well. I
was hitched to an incredible woman. ‘Korean Englishman’ was going
down as well as a cobbled street and a top hat. The friendship
between Ollie and I was so beautiful that it reminded me of the great
Harry and Ron. I asked Gabie if she would like me to start calling her
Hermione, and she said that ‘Gabie’ was fine for now, but that if she
came up with a cool nickname she’d let me know ASAP. For a while,
Ollie and I had talked about starting a new channel, with a bit more of a
broader remit. We wanted to be a bit more experimental, and to try out
experiments, without the pressure of it being on the ‘Korean
Englishman’ channel, which now felt well established and we were
naturally protective of it. We were like birds who had just learned to fly
and were thinking about laying an egg, or squirrels who had been
happily nesting in a roof and then felt like gnawing through a kitchen
ceiling. Muncho was excited about a new channel and had come up
with a good name for it, which he had repeatedly yelled in my ear at
the wedding while I was trying to do my speech. It had been pretty
distracting and I did worry that it affected my tone and made me sound
less sincere, but you can’t stop and talk to invisible carrots during a
wedding speech. Ollie assured me I had sounded perfect, like the
rustling of the breeze through apple blossom in springtime in Caterham.
At the time I didn’t know what Muncho was talking about. I just thought
he was loudly expressing his emotions, and while I am all for
expressing emotions, I had quite a lot on my plate that day.
“It’s ‘JOLLY’!” Muncho had shouted again and again. “It’s
‘JOLLY’!”
“Of course it is, it’s a wedding!” I snapped when I finally got a
moment. Muncho sang a few rounds of ‘Happy Birthday’, to calm
down, and then explained that he meant that ‘JOLLY’ could be the
name of our new Youtube channel.