We all know how slow bureaucracy can be. Fill in the forms and wait years for action. Call every day only to be put on hold with no explanation. But eventually it all pays off.
We all know that fathers of grown ups are Big. Our lives have been overseen by these titans of parenthood. But one among us has reached this status for themselves, and now – despite cutbacks in the civil service and the lack of urgency in the postal system – his official certificate has arrived.
Now that I am visually challenged, I have come to understand the true value of seeing things. For so many years I took for granted my ability to just point my eyes at something and see it properly. Now my feeble oculus needs prosthetic assistance, I realise what a gift sight can be. I’ve been a fool all these years. An ignorant fool. An ignorant fool with 20:20 vision.
That is why I have started a campaign: Public Glasses.
My new charitable organisation will place glasses at strategic points across the UK, so that everyone can look at things no matter where they are.
No longer will you need to squint at a blurry landscape or the fuzzy remnants of an Iron Age hill fort. Whenever you feel the need to direct your peepers at something, just grope around at your barely identifiable surroundings, and there you’ll find a pair of specs, placed there for the benefit of the nation by Public Glasses.
I’ve made a start by filling my local park with glasses, and I encourage you to do the same. Then, when you’ve done that, donate all your money to my charity. Together we’ll bring the gift of eyesight to the masses.
Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun watching Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, which is on iPlayer and I think BBC3. It’s an Australian panel show and it’s really silly. (Guy Montgomery is a New Zealander, and I think it’s run in NZ for several series already, but only the Aussie version is on iPlayer.) It’s genuinely great.
Guy Montgomery clearly knows how dumb the show is and can’t hide how much his stupid jokes and tasks make him laugh, which I find very funny. His assistant is Aaron Chen (I’ve seen him before in Fisk, which you should check out too, it’s a very dry Australian sitcom that we blasted through in no time), who brings an enormous amount of awkwardness to everything he does.
If you need an explanation to get you started, it’s nominally a spelling competition where the guests have to spell words to earn points. But the rounds are all different every time, they’re all enjoyably stupid (spell your hat, spell the name of the random audience member, spell the celebrity name while doing an impression of the celebrity) and some are explicitly designed to give the guests a really hard time (spell the ethnicity of the mystery guest). I don’t know who the guests are, with the exception of Tim Minchin, but that doesn’t seem to matter. They’re just comedians falling into elaborately built spelling traps.
Please enjoy this thing I have also enjoyed. Thank you.
Pubs all used to be more or less the same, back in the day. Dark brown furniture, brass rail along the bar, limited range of warm beers that were predominantly bitter and included something called “mild”, and the only food offering was pork scratchings.
Nowadays pubs come in a wide spectrum, from the old man boozer to the soft play family carvery. Most pubs serve food of some description. But every now and then you find a pub that is genuinely fancy.
How fancy? Well, now you can find out by scoring your pub against this helpful checklist.
Guest ale on tap: 1 point
Guest gin with home-made marketing display on the bar: 2 points
Man at bar is wearing a gilet and has an extremely large dog asleep at his feet: 1 point
Dog snacks on the bar are in a stylish glass jar: 1 point
Separate “restaurant area” for dining, though you can also eat in the bar if you want: 1 point
“Please wait to be seated” sign in dining area: 2 points
Separate menu for Sunday lunch: 1 point
Separate menu for dogs: 2 points
Exposed wooden beams: 1 point
Exposed wooden beams that are actually structural and may be grade II listed: 2 points
Table service for diners: 1 point
Table service where the waitress is an actual waitress and not one of the bar staff: 2 points
Made-to-order bar snacks available: 1 point
Made-to-order bar snacks feature miniature fish and chips served in one of those fake mesh buckets as though it’s just been lifted out of a deep fat fryer: 2 points
Made-to-order bar snack menu features n’duja, olive tapenade and padrón peppers: 3 points
Men’s toilets do not smell of urinal cakes: 1 point
Men’s toilets look clean: 2 points
Men’s toilets actually are clean: 3 points
Men’s toilets have hand lotion in little squirty bottles by the sink: 5 points
A few weeks ago I set a little quiz, with pictures of my trying on a range of spectacles, in an attempt to make light of my ongoing ocular deterioration.
Nobody had a go at guessing which ones I would choose, but the answer is these ones, and to thrill and delight you further I am pleased to now present a fashion shoot in which I demonstrate everything my new glasses can do.
It’s official. Now I’m on the bandwagon, spectacles are the new rock and roll.
Most days, when I’m not at work, I take the dog for a walk, and most of the time we go to the same place, which is some woods near us. I’ve written about them before – I like walking in woods, the dog likes having lots of space to run around and bark at squirrels, and they are full of intriguing military wreckage.
A couple of weeks ago I suddenly stopped in my tracks. Following a path through the trees that I follow every single time I go there – let’s say every other day of my life, on average – I saw something I had never noticed before. Can you see it?
About fifteen feet to the left of me, fifteen feet away from a place I walk over a hundred times a year with my eyes wide open, was something I had literally never seen before. A whacking great big concrete pylon.
You literally can’t miss it. It’s huge. I suppose it’s the same colour as a tree and about the same size as the tree trunks around here, but even so, I might miss it once but I don’t see how I’ve missed it every day since 2023.
It looks like it’s been there for decades. It looks like something from the 1940s that’s been disused since before I was born, slowly being forgotten in the depths of the woods.
But I can’t help wondering if that’s true. Has it really been there all along? Or has someone just put it there in the last month or so? Are they trying to mess with my head? Is it me they’re targeting? Is this something I have genuinely never noticed in all this time? Can it be true? Am I losing my mind?
You want a little treat in the afternoon. Something to give you a bit of a sugar rush to propel you through the rest of the working day. Something to dunk in your tea.
A biscuit would be nice. But a biscuit is missing that special something. What would be better?
I know. What if it was creamy. A creamy cookie. Well, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.
Help yourself and dive in to the creamiest cookies you’ve ever known. How can a liquid be so crunchy? We don’t know. We just know that they’re so, so creamy.
