Delete This at Your Peril

Neil Forsyth is an author and journalist. A fellow Dundonian and friend to Bob Servant for over twenty years, he has recently completed Servant's biography,
Bob Servant: Hero of Dundee
, also available from Birlinn. Forsyth is also author of
Other People's Money
, the biography of fraudster Elliot Castro, and a novel,
Let Them Come Through
.

Praise for
Delete This At Your Peril

‘
Delete This at Your Peril
is a very, very funny book and a perfect present for anybody who has: A) a sense of humour and B) gets irritated by Internet spammers and their tiresome scams . . . You will piss yourself and then quote sections of this book repeatedly within your circle of friends'
Irvine Welsh

‘I have worked with a lot of funny men – Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, Harry Enfield. Bob Servant is in a class of his own'
Barry Fantoni
, Private Eye

‘Neil has captured something particular of the Dundonian, surreal sense of humour. And I don't think we've ever had that before. We've had Billy Connolly and Lex McLean's Glasgow stories and traditions, but now we've got this Dundee creature who is just so funny . . . I was in hysterics'
Brian Cox

‘Incredibly funny'
Jimmy Boyle
, author of
A Sense of Freedom

‘Hilarious. I laughed so much I nearly gave him my account number'
Martin Kelner
, The Guardian

‘Reminds me how good good comic writing can be . . . The surrealism is perfect'
Scotland on Sunday

‘
Delete This at Your Peril
carries the spoof letter genre into the internet age . . . A former cheeseburger magnate and semi-retired window cleaner, Bob is a delightfully deranged but likeable rogue. Drinking in and chasing ‘skirt' around the bars of Broughty Ferry with ne'er-do-well mates such as Frank The Plank, he is a late-middle-aged working-class eccentric in the vein of John Shuttleworth . . . a living, breathing creation of comic genius . . . Today Broughty Ferry. Tomorrow, the world?'
Bookbag

‘He's a Henry Root for the digital age . . . a hilarious collection'
GT Magazine

‘Hurrah for Bob Servant! He wreaks revenge on the fraudsters, making them dance to his tune with his wonderfully surreal replies. Read it in private as it will make you laugh out loud, and as for Bob's victims, it really couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of crooks'
The Book Magazine

‘Bob neatly turns the tables, leaving a trail of comic carnage as he gradually draws the unsuspecting crooks into his own outlandish schemes . . . eminently readable and absurdly funny'
Cherwell

‘Genius! Highly entertaining and brilliantly deranged'
Maxim

‘A hilarious collection of preposterous, genuine email exchanges between comedy genius Bob and his victims'
Source

‘Bob is a serious man, a thoughtful man, a complicated man, who knows that when holding a man's cock in the bathroom you look straight ahead
Sharp Magazine

‘Some of the funniest e-mails you will ever read [and] some of the best comedy I have read in a while. If you ever wanted to “get even” with spammers, live vicariously through Bob Servant. The ride is wild and extremely funny'
Lunch.com

‘This book will most certainly entertain and amuse.
Delete This At Your Own Peril
is funnier than 365 joke-of-the-day emails as the spammers realise they are dealing with a raving loony'
Serious Comedy Site

‘After I finished being sick with laughter, I finally get round to writing a review. You can do the old fella a favour by purchasing his excellent book or just send him the money because he'll only go back to window cleaning to fund his jazz mag collection'
www.scaryduck.blogspot.com

‘These are the writings of a clearly deranged mind'
Soteria

‘
Delete This at Your Peril
will not win the Booker Prize'
The Kilkenny Advertiser

Delete This At Your Peril

 

Also by Neil Forsyth

Bob Servant – Hero of Dundee

Non Fiction

Other People's Money – The Rise and Fall of Britain's Most Audacious Fraudster
(with Elliot Castro)

Fiction

Let Them Come Through

www.neilforsyth.com

----------------------------------

The Bob Servant Emails

----------------------------------

Bob Servant

with Neil Forsyth

This edition published in 2010 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2007 by Aurum Press Ltd, London

3

Copyright © Neil Forsyth 2007, 2010

The moral right of Neil Forsyth to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without
the express written permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holders of the
images within this book. The photographs used are for illustrative purposes only
and do not imply any particular attitudes, behaviours,
or actions on the part of anyone who appears in them

p.9 Image used by permission of
www.ChinaStockphotos.com
p.11 Image used by permission of
www.northrup.org
p.17 Image used by permission of Pretendware Clothing Ltd
p.60 Image used by permission of
www.doodle-world.com
p.77 Image used by permission of
www.Painting.About.Com
p.81 Image used by permission of
www.priveco.com
p.145 Image used by permission of Dundee United FC
p.197 Image used by permission of
www.potsaplenty.com.au
p. 202 Image used by permission of
www.eloradollhouse.co.uk

ISBN
: 978 1 84158 919 0
eBook ISBN
: 978 0 85790 000 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Brinnoven, Livingston
Printed and bound by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

Introduction: Meet Bob Servant

1   Lions, Gold and Confusion

2   Bob and the Postie

3   Alexandra, Bob and Champion

4   Uncle Bob's African Adventure

5   The Sea Could Not Take Him, No Woman Could Tame Him

6   Olga, Sasha and the Jamaica Lakers

7   The Hunt for Jerren Jimjams

8   From Lanzhou to Willy's Chinese Palace

9   Bobby and Benjamin are New Friends

10   Natalia and Her Grandmother

11   Peter's Pots

Acknowledgements

For my big brother Alan, with love

I remember the first time I saw Bob Servant very well. It was in the late 1980s and I was a ten-year-old cycling through Broughty Ferry when I saw a burger van opening for business down at the harbour. This was a novel event both for me and, it would turn out, for Broughty Ferry and I skilfully reined in my Raleigh Burner and watched the momentous scene unfold. There were a couple of glum-looking men sprucing the van up, switching on ovens and so on, but my attention was drawn to another man who sat on a nearby bench watching them and occasionally offering words of advice that appeared to go largely unheeded.

I can really remember only a few details. One is that Bob had a bright red face, another is that he was drinking what I thought at the time was a milkshake but I now strongly suspect was a cocktail, and the final thing I can remember was what he said. He said, with an epic sense of despair, ‘Fuck me Frank, watch the fucking sausages.'

The next time I saw Bob was perhaps five years later when I opened my bedroom curtains and there he was at the other side. The suddenness of my appearance caught him unawares and for a moment Bob threatened to fall off his ladder but he caught himself and gripped the window frame, panting and sweating and saying, ‘Christ, you nearly fucking did for me there son.'

Bob, it seemed, had taken over the window-cleaning round that included our house. I can recall my mum's confusion at the increased frequency of the window-cleaning team's appearance. ‘Someone's making a bloody fortune,' my dad used to summarise when he returned from work to hear of yet another visit.

Bob and I quickly became not friends, but certainly firm associates. For a bored schoolboy, Bob was a man of the world who advised with little encouragement on anything from women to feverish speculation on local thefts, and his ongoing feud with a local newspaper. For Bob, I was a willing listener, and the search for willing listeners has probably been the great cause of Bob's life.

In the winter Bob would appear on Saturday mornings, scaling his ladder dressed for Kilimanjaro rather than our two-storey home. I would crack open the frosted glass and it would begin. Both he and I would be going independently to watch Dundee United in the afternoon and, from deep
within his array of padding, Bob would offer a range of optimistic predictions as steam rose from his bucket and multiple layers.

In the summer, Bob would curl a thick arm over the windowsill and start, usually with:

‘Ah, how you doing? I was just saying to Frank there . . .'

And then he would unleash a story, a joke or, often, a plan. Bob's plans were extraordinary, containing an audacious mixture of ambition and completely undiluted self-belief. He toyed for a long time with entering local politics for what he called a clean-up campaign. That plan was quietly abandoned when Bob and Frank, whom he had appointed his election agent, could not decide on a suitable slogan.

Frank, I should point out, was Bob's regular window-cleaning sidekick and, I presumed (correctly), the original Frank from the burger van. Sometimes there would be other men with Bob, all of whose grave moods would clash markedly with his, but Frank was the standard. Perhaps because of this sustained exposure to Bob's peculiarities, Frank's depressive air was almost overpowering.

While Bob was halfway into my bedroom explaining how he was going to build a private zoo, or complete the Dawson Park monkey bars course in less than a minute, or swim the River Tay once things warmed up a bit, I would peek down to Frank, who would be standing at the foot of Bob's ladder.

At the very best he would look crushingly bored. At worst I would sometimes catch him staring at Bob's ladder with a distant look in his eyes, as if calculating just how many of life's worries would vanish with a hefty kick.

It was a few years on, when my friends and I began sneaking into Broughty Ferry's bars, that I saw a different side to Bob. His window-cleaning operation had been passed to strangers but his message on the matter was very clear.

‘Not to worry,' he told me with an elaborate wink, along with the much-repeated suggestion that he had landed a significant windfall on the round to go with the riches from his years as the owner of a cheeseburger van.

There was also something about gypsies stealing his ladders that always sounded to me like a botched insurance job. Once, emboldened by drink, I put forward that theory to Bob, who replied with a quote from Winston Churchill that bore no relation to the situation whatsoever.

It became strange to walk into a Broughty Ferry pub and for Bob not to be there. If the place were quiet he would be hunched over a barstool, lecturing the barman and jabbing a finger to make his point. In busier pubs he would retreat with companions to a table, though this didn't stop the barman being generously incorporated by Bob into his conversation.