A stunned silence fills the blogosphere, the hallowed halls of Open Salon suddenly erupt with murmurs and rumors.  “Is it really him?” someone asks. There is no response. People are too afraid to comment. “He’s been gone forever, it’s been months. Surely he won’t be coming back at all.” Comes the reply. Oh, how wrong they are. He did come back. “Wasn’t he off helping find new breeding grounds in the Antarctic for the Emperor penguins?” “I heard he was at the Royal Wedding as Pippa Middleton’s personal trainer – how else did she get an ass like that?” “Actually, I heard he was auditioning for the lead role in an upcoming Baywatch movie – he’s such a talented actor and oozes charisma from those damn sexy dimples that even the fact he can’t swim was lost on the producer.” Yes, these were the murmurs and more. He did come back, and his tale goes like this… 

Editor’s Note: This is the unofficial VH1 version.  

Cursed is he who believes he has talent, who believes he can write, who wants to write, but sits at his keyboard and cannot write. Such was the fate of Geraint Isitt, a man known to many as “The Penguin”, to others simply as “Ger”, and still to others as “that tasty piece of man flesh.” Whatever your relationship with him, and whatever you call him, there is no denying that he was in funk that George Clinton would have been proud to put a bass beat around. A funk that rendered the rest of his life tedious and boring; even though he tried to battle out of it.  

He tried everything to get his creativity sparked and the words to flow. He tried to write an unofficial biography Inigo Montoya, the famed Spaniard from the Princess Bride, but apart from writing, “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die” as the title of the first chapter, he put the movie on instead and sat in front of the television for hours.

Haunted by his lack of creativity and energy, he feared he had mononucleosis, the dreaded kissing disease he would have killed to have as an awkward teenager. The only thing he may have contracted as a teenager was blindness, but we all know that is just a myth anyway. After a series of tests it was decided he didn’t have mono, he was just incredibly lazy. The spark and drive took a further plunge, well below the plunging neckline always associated with Anna Nicole Smith. 

The flame still burned, faint as the embers the morning after a wiener roast, but the glow remained. Something needed to happen. In a world where everyone is connected within the blink of an eye, the power to download movies is a mere key press away, or a celebrity’s marriage can end by statements posted on Twitter (Editor’s note: not Geraint’s), surely it wouldn’t be too hard to use this technology for the betterment of creativity and verbiage. And you know what … we’ll tell you after the break. 

{Insert advertisement for Charlie Sheen’s world tour} 

The spark came, in the most unlikely of places. He had just finished filming Weekend at Bernie’s 16 – Hanging with Mr Madoff (or sitting at lunch after another riveting meeting at work – depending on whether or not this will go in his autobiography after he’s as famous as Tink), when he put pen to paper and scribbled down a sentence. That sentence led to two pages in his 30 minute lunch break.  

I caught up with the reclusive camera shy and soft-spoken man to hear his own take on things. I was alarmed by his cadence, his profession to seeing his start as only that. He responded honestly when I asked him what it was that got him going again. “It was simple really,” he said between signing autographs for the various girls who share his bus home at night, “but it all came down to simplifying things. When I wrote those first few words, and not even good words, but probably better words then you’ll ever write (Editor’s note: he said this directly to me and explicitly told me it only meant me), I captured something pure about writing again. I had forgotten just how romantic writing can be. The feel of the paper beneath you, watching the corners curl up as your hand bends them as you scribble across the page.” He pauses to answer a phone call from JK Rowling about how to create memorable characters. “I’ve always held my pen funny as well, so my pinkie actually touches the page, and I’m often left with smudges across my work, not enough to blur them completely, but enough to let me know I was on a roll.” 

Since then he has added more words and more pages, but nothing filed away as special. “My ideas tend to hit me at work so I scribble things down right away and steal a few minutes here and there to try and animate them. Now that my football (soccer) season is finished, I can start planning more time at home and put in the solid hours required to get better at this craft (Editor’s note: while he talks a lot of shit, you do get the impression that he really doesn’t believe he can write). I still want to write. I still want to entertain. I’m not done talking yet.” 

He goes on to tell me that things in his life have all seemed to take a turn for the better recently. His quiz team won for the third straight time (even without that punk-assed bitch Stephen Hawking who wasn’t good enough to join), he bought new shoes and a squash racquet so he could start to dominate against his friends again. “I did see the Royal Wedding, so that rumor wasn’t necessarily untrue”, he laughs as he helps name a stranger’s baby, “but I watched it from the British Consulate in Saudi and had a great day. I was actually talking to my Scottish friend James and a young lady who had to spend her summer in Saudi with her parents even though she was in university in London and part of a talent agency thought she and her mom could learn a few lessons about life from us.  Well, mainly her mom wanted us to talk. (Editor’s note: he thinks he remembers the young girl’s name in case she becomes famous and he can say ‘I remember when she was pouting about spending her summer in Saudi’). 

He’s a couple of months from 40, but he’s just signed a new contract, is planning an African safari with his lovely wife Kirsty, and the amount of increase he received will cover the cost of the Masters program he wants to do. 

Yup, life is good right now for Geraint Isitt. If only he could stop talking about himself for long enough to listen to the other voices around him. 

Cheers.