Avatar The slide

What’s the biggest slide you’ve ever been down? I am asking because I have definitely been down a bigger slide than you and I am planning to smugly win this.

I have been down THIS slide.

It’s part of the weird red metal lumpy thing that was built for the Limpety Pinpicks in 2012. It takes 40 seconds to go down it and I spent a fair amount of that time saying things like WHEEEEE and AAAAAARGH and WOOHOOOOO.

It drops a total height of over 100m, which is the equivalent of a slide going down to the ground from the 30th floor. It is bigger than the biggest slide you have ever been down. I win. Ha.

Avatar The Joy of Corners

Do you like corners? Do you need more corners in your life? Do you find it hard making very simple decisions?

What you need is Cornercopia!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi, I’m Conrad Bundleg and I own Cornercopia, the North-West’s largest supplier of corners in the UK.

We’ve been selling corners for the last twenty years so if you require corners you need to come to us.

We’ve got paper corners, cardboard corners, metal corners, futon corners. We’ve got black corners, yellow corners, blue corners, multi-coloured corners. We’ve got corners for your house, corners for your work, even corners… for your corners!

Someone else may have invented the corner but here at Cornercopia we’ve mastered it.

Cornercopia, on the Bluecoat roundabout just south of Blackpool. You can’t miss us!

Avatar Mysterious lumps

I went for a walk yesterday and explored a park near me that I haven’t been to before. There’s a lot of places near me that I haven’t been to before, because I only recently moved to Royksopp.

It turns out the park contains normal park things (grass, trees, vandalised benches, bins mostly full of water from when it rained). It also contains four mysterious lumps. If I described them to you they’d sound like hills so I am including pictures here to make it clear that they are not hills, they are mysterious lumps, and there are four of them.

A series of lumps

They are all different heights and they are perfectly circular, like weird pyramids. You can climb them all if you want to. Three are just grassy and you have to scramble up but one of them has a spiralling path to the top. It’s surprisingly tall – not that West London is particularly hilly, but it’s higher than all the other hills you can see and most of the buildings. You can see out to the countryside south of London, and to Canary Wharf, and to a little thing on the horizon called the Crystal Palace Transmitter which I have seen somewhere before.

The signs explain that, far from being lumps, they are actually mounds. I was very glad to have the mystery cleared up in this way.

Please use this thread to share stories of any intriguing lumps, mounds or protrudances you have witnessed lately.

Avatar Fashion Guru

After the roaring success of my washing machine repair business, I have been on the lookout for another venture to dip my respective success toes in. I have been inundated with suggestions from fans as to what I can apply my brilliant effortless skills to but nothing seemed quite right. That is until I took a long hard look in the mirror.

“What do you see, Ian?” my subconscious murmured. “What do all your various pairs of eyes see / view / peer etc?”

What I saw that day, I cannot utter again. That image is for m-me and m-me alone. What all you need to know is that I made the grand decision that I would become a fashion guru. I know clothes, and I know people, so it was inevitable that the two would eventually meet. There are a lot of people out there who don’t know how to dress. Why can’t they do it? How hard is it to put clothes on in the morning? Luckily for me though, without these chumble buckets I wouldn’t be in a job.

Using all my knowledge of people and clothes, I will be establish the empire of the 21st century. There will be those who will doubt my prowess and I am more than ready to take on their comments and their egos. There will be those who will make fun of my previous professional career turns, and I can tell you now I am nor will I ever be ashamed of where I came from. Those washing machines were mended with all the love, care and attention I will now be pushing into, erm, denim jackets.

I will be opening up my fashion shop cum studio cum money-spinning franchise in the fashionable area of Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne. When I reach my first cool hundred mil, which no doubt will be before the end of the year, I will set my sights on the next great style capital of the world; Middlesbrough!

If you need me, make an appointment with my PA.

Avatar Report from Manchester

This week I made a short visit to Manchester, a city in the north of England that can be found on any map by simply looking at the wrong side of the Pennines. It was there that a large group of people who like blue things had decided to have a big meeting, though it was a bit different to the other meetings I went to because the people who like blue things seemed pretty sure they were in charge of everyone else, no matter what colour anyone else liked best. They spent a lot of time talking about how only old people like blue things and whether there was a way to convince young people that blue things are best. Outside the conference there were lots of noisy people who had big blue flags with little yellow stars on them, but strangely, none of the people who like blue things seemed to like the people with big blue flags even though the big blue flags were almost entirely blue.

Having had this experience, it is now traditional that I should share what I learned with the Beans.

The first thing I learned is that it rains in Manchester. I arrived under grey skies but it was dry. I walked ten minutes to the hotel. I checked into the hotel. I emerged again from the hotel, on my way to work, to find that it had started doing something that I can only describe as “rain”, though “rain” does not adequately describe the volume of water coming down from the sky. It rained for almost the whole of the rest of my stay.

My shoes were not waterproof. There are holes. They need replacing. They should, I now see, have been replaced some time ago. I spent the day with waterlogged feet. They did not dry for three days. I think I have trench foot.

The second thing I learned is that Manchester doesn’t like people who like blue things. There were a lot of Manchester people shouting at the people who like blue things and someone hung a big banner on a bridge that said HANG THE PEOPLE WHO LIKE BLUE THINGS. Maybe they distrust blue things because the sky is blue when it’s not raining and it’s always raining in Manchester.

The third thing I learned is that Manchester is bad at breakfast. The coffee was bad and the toast was bad and the bacon was bad and the only fruit was melon, cut up four different ways in four different bowls to make it look like there was lots of fruit, and worst of all, there was no jam. No jam at all.

There was also the saddest breakfast table in the world.

I mean look at that. There were two sad little stools under what appears to be a coffee table. Nobody was sitting there. Nobody would ever sit there. It’s a stupid place to have breakfast. Just like Manchester.

Avatar Lumpy Milkshake

Most of my posts for the last couple of weeks have been about food, so I thought I’d try something different and tell you all a wee story about a milkshake:

Once upon a time there was a handsome, kind, gentle person called, erm, let’s say Kieran. He decided that because he’s such a nice person he would buy his friend a drink at lunchtime and took a stroll to Asda to peruse the choices for sale.

As it happens, it is funnier to buy a weird drink than a normal one. It was a crying shame that the awful mango and passionfruit Frijj drink was sold out so, as a second choice, it seemed a good idea to pick the cherry bakewell milkshake. At sixty pence how could he say no?

His work friend was “delighted” to receive such a “generous” and “tasty” gift. He was so “delighted” that he only took two sips and decided it was too nice to drink, and left it on the side of his desk over the weekend.

How surprised the two colleagues were then to return on Monday to find that the milkshake had turned not only into a solid but some kind of funky, disgusting, yellow scouring pad solid.

As a testament to the power of science, I have included two of the same picture up so it looks as though you’re looking at them through a pair of binoculars. Because that’s cool.

One day I’ll write about other things.

Avatar Wooden Juice – a poem

I am afraid of wooden juice,
I don’t know how it works,
I know of liquid juices and
The taste, the thrill, the perks!
My mind cannot comprehend
How solid juice will fit
Down my neck and throat,
Won’t it get stuck in my armpit?

People say to chop it up,
“That’s the best way to do it!”
But others say that doesn’t do,
“You should just opt to neck it!”

As the days wear on I struggle
As to my final decision,
So I flip a coin in the end,
To avoid further mind collision.
It lands on ‘heads’, I’m doing it,
I’ll drink it down in one!
I tilt my head back slowly
Oh, the process has begun!

I woke up in the hospital,
The doctors say I’ll last.
There’s a jug next to my bedside,
This time I’ll drink it fast!