Train announcement

Bing bong

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard this 17.32 Trans Country Express service to London Central Station.

We’ll be calling at Picturesque Village, Windswept Halt, Dulltown West, Dulltown Central, Dulltown East, a station with seemingly nothing anywhere nearby, Large Commuter Suburb, Long Wait in the Countryside, Several Identical Places, Cheadle, Yemen, and London Central Station.

Our scheduled arrival time at London Central Station is 18.44 this evening.

Please note that some of our calling points today have short platforms and you will need to be in the correct part of the train if you wish to alight. Passengers for Dulltown East and Large Commuter Suburb will need to be in the front eight carriages. Passengers for Dulltown West will need to be in the front ten carriages. Passengers for Large Commuter Suburb will inexplicably need to be in either the front four or rear six carriages. I don’t make the rules.

As this service will be arriving in to London Central Station before 18.43 this evening, daily travelcards are not valid for travel, but commuter plus cards are valid, and ultra saver photocards are mandatory. First class accommodation is available in carriages 4 and 8, and passengers will need a first class ticket and a peerage or hereditary title in order to travel in the first class compartments.

A trolley service of drinks and light snacks will operate on this service from Dulltown Central onwards. If you do intend to buy something from the trolley please note that alcoholic drinks cannot be purchased once we leave Cheadle since beyond that point we enter the London Central Station duty free zone. However, on our final approach to London Central we will be pleased to offer discount cigarettes, perfumes and spirits.

A reminder to passengers that due to current Government regulations it is mandatory to wear spectacles while travelling on public transport unless you are medically exempt.

My name is Carmelita Delasquez, and I am your guard for this journey. If you require any assistance during your journey, you can currently find me in carriage six of this twelve coach train. If you see anything suspicious please don’t hesitate to inform myself or another member of railway staff, or call or text the Railway FBI on 64064. See it, say it, suck it and see.

On behalf of myself and the driver, I’d like to wish you a pleasant journey with Trans Country Express today. Our next station stop will be Picturesque Village, which I’ll begin announcing in about thirty seconds’ time. Thank you.

A new year’s message from picturesque Hampshire

2022 State of the Beans Address

Hello, and thank you, once again, for joining me. My name is The Honourable Sergeant-Major Professor Lord Sir Elbert Louche, KBE, QC, and I am delighted to welcome you to the refurbished Great Hall for the eighth annual State of the Beans Address.

Christmas wrap up 2021

It’s all over, all over again. Time to walk round the house with a bin bag collecting the wrapping paper and hope you don’t accidentally bin the presents too.

I got some nice presents this year, and I hope you did too. One of mine was shared with Kate and was one of the most unexpectedly brilliant presents ever. We had a bricklaying lesson.

Here are the bricks we laid.

Happy new year everyone. May 2022 be filled with joy and nicely pointed with good strong mortar.

The history of Christmas

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s nearly Christmas. There are very few signs to warn you of its approach – it would be handy, for example, if everything you saw and heard in the media for the last two months had involved a Christmas related song, perhaps – but I have checked and it’s coming at the end of this week.

We all know what that means. There will be trees and presents and cake, and the law will turn a blind eye to breaking-and-entering offences committed by overweight bearded pensioners in unlikely red outfits. But where does Christmas come from? You don’t know, so prepare your thanks because I’m about to tell you.

Time for an unforgettable Christmas feast

Christmas is the eldest child of Father Christmas, born in December 1955 in Lapland. Father Christmas himself is, of course, the nephew of Zeus. After spending a happy childhood in the snowy reindeer-filled northern reaches of Finland, young Christmas left home and travelled to Liverpool in the hope of landing a role in Brookside.

The lack of an authentic scouse accent prevented that dream from becoming a reality, and a few years later Christmas was working in a branch of M&S where a toy sale coincided with the accidental delivery of too many frozen turkeys. The marketing opportunity was obvious. Parents were persuaded to get their kids some knock-off toys and treat themselves to a slap-up turkey lunch (pictured) by Christmas’s dad, whose booming voice and hypnotic catchphrase “ho” entranced the crowds at the Uttoxeter department store.

Today those traditions have spread far beyond Uttoxeter and the surrounding villages of Willslock, Dagdale and Spath. Now we can all enjoy the warm glow of buying some knock-off presents for each other and eating a type of meat that, at any other time of year, we’d avoid in favour of something that didn’t have the flavour and texture of teatowels. Hurrah.

In celebration of the big day, which is definitely some time this week but I’m not 100% sure when, please enjoy this Twitter thread of dreadful Christmas dinners. Thank you.

Even more old news

Everyone – and by that, I mean I assume everyone without having actually checked with any of you – everyone enjoyed my previous forays into old news, looking back at what had happened on various days in May and January. Since ~~I’m low on posts this month~~ we’re coming to the end of another year, this seemed like a good time for a look back at December 19 in the personal history of one Christo M. Fury.

Given that we’re just a few days adrift from Christmas, I was surprised to discover that my camera roll from this day in years gone by does not contain as many Christmassy things as I expected. Let’s see what’s in here.

Smidge in writing

Smidge Manly is one of the UK’s most famous interviewers, entertainers and northerners, so it’s no surprise that YouTube is bristling with videos of him in action, doing all the things he does best.

What you might not know is that, nowadays, YouTube automatically generates subtitles for videos. It does this by running the soundtrack through a speech-to-text programme and putting the results up on the screen. It’s done this for all Smidge’s work.

Unfortunately for Smidge, YouTube hasn’t yet got the hang of his accent.