Tenniversary

It’s been ten years since one of the most important cultural events of our, or anyone else’s, lifetimes. The Papples’ debut album, Wasting my Life, was released in May 2009 to a largely indifferent public.

To celebrate this milestone, Ian and myself made a pilgrimage to a number of sites on the south coast where the photos for the album sleeve were taken. We then recreated as many as we could find to mark this seminal tenniversary event. Join us, now, as we take you through all of the photos we recreated, slowly, one by one, whether you want to see them or not, like a distant relative showing you some old holiday photos.

Pouring beans

If you Google “pouring beans”, we are number 3 in the listings. And rightly so. Bronze is a fitting medal considering the effort we put in here.

The top two results are both websites describing an activity called “pouring beans” which is a lesson used at Montessori day nurseries. Since we do very little bean pouring here, and the pouring of Montessori beans is clearly more popular than we are, I think it’s time we examined this practice. I also think that if we put the pouring beans activity on our Pouring Beans website we might get bumped up the listings.

Here is the full guide for you to try at home.

Age	2½ to 3 years
Materials	Two identical jugs, beans, tray, mat
Aim	To pour the beans from one jug to the other and then back
Learning outcomes	Concentration! Patience! Hand-eye co-ordination! Hand control! Eyes! Beans! Pouring the beans!
Instructions	You… I mean, you get the kid to pour beans from one jug to another. If you want to make it more complicated than that, there’s some more detailed instructions here, but I expect the kid will lose interest before you finish explaining it and go and run around for a bit instead.
Extending the activity	Use smaller grains. Use bigger grains. Use smaller jugs. Use bigger jugs. Do it without jugs. Do it without beans or jugs and just imagine it. Sit in silence and think about beans. Just sit in silence. Just be quiet. Why can’t you be quiet. Now go back to pouring beans.
Variations	Use different beans or rice or dice or something else.

I’ve spent the evening doing this and I can confirm three things.

It’s relaxing for the first two or three minutes.
After the first few minutes you start to get very bored, and then shortly after that you begin to lose your mind. After an hour I had named all the individual beans and was taking register while they tipped from one jug to the other.
The version of Pouring Beans that we’ve been doing, that is less directly bean-related and more about blogging, is far more enjoyable and deserves to be first in the Google search ranking.

Stick

It must be really boring to be a stick.

You spend decades pushing your way slowly out of the side of a tree, looking at the same view every day, sharing your life with the same branches and twigs.

Years later, a bit of wind dislodges you. For a few moments you enjoy the most thrilling episode of your life, as you fall to earth, but soon realise that you’ve ended up lying on the floor with much the same surroundings, only now you’re no longer growing, you’re just waiting to rot down into the ground.

We can’t save all sticks from the monotony of their existence, but we can make a difference to one stick. Ian chose The Stick. This is it.

The Stick spent its whole life on a tree near Royksopp Lido before falling off and lying on the ground for a bit. Thanks to us, though, it’s had a new lease of life.

A walk to a pub and then a night on the floor near the pub
A trip in a car to Brighton
Being thrown onto the bark chippings under the tree outside my flat

I’ll keep you updated on the progress of The Stick and its amazing new life. For now, though: you’re welcome.

Ian’s Otter Answers

Back in mid April I asked the Beans community to answer five simple questions about otters. It was extremely important.

One of our number, Ian “Hotter Otter” McIver, kept stalling until eventually a month later he asked to post his answers to me because “I don’t want anyone else to know”. I told him that if he posted them to me I would post them to the Beans. Kev pointed out that even if they appeared on the Beans there was a decent chance that nobody would look at them.

Ian’s answers have now arrived, handwritten, by post. I am now, therefore, posting them here, but I am doing so in as conspicuous a way as possible in the hope that at least some people will see them.

Here are Ian’s otter answers

How do you feel about otters?

I have always liked otters. They are very cheery and bring a smile to my viso/volto. My brother, John, is also obsessed with otttttttters. He has a weird statue thing outside his front door with three otters, possibly having a tea party (?)

Baby otters?

They’re very cute although they do have “Desperate Dan” chins and could easily be extras in a low budget British gangster film. Cockney otters? Yes please.

How about this otter, specifically?

What a chirpy little lad or lass! That’s the kind of picture you’d put in your bathroom, possibly framed with tiny flowers, and it would make any house guest tilt their head and squint with delight. It should be a famous otter; here, take my money!

Does this otter change how you feel?

No. I still love all the otters. It does scarily resemble the face I pull at work when the phone starts ringing(and when I recognise the number).

How many of these otters would you like? Note that I will fight you for the otters. I want the otters. How bad do you want them? I will fight you. You can’t have them.

I believe that the kind of person who creates a survey about how much they love otters has a love that cannot be beaten, whether physically of (of?) or emotionally. You win, sir. All the otters are yours.

As good as new

A while ago I bought a new car, as you might remember. (It replaced a large tin of beans I was temporarily driving, and is in every way better.) I liked driving a new car. The only sad thing about it is that, once you’ve been driving it for a while, it’s not new any more.

I’ve now learned that there is something you can do about this. Here is what I suggest you do.

First, get yourself into a traffic jam, and make sure the car behind you is being driven by an absolute tool. I chose a really solid jam on the M1 back in April, where I could stop in lane 3 with my handbrake on and nothing at all was moving.

Second, and this is more tricky to arrange, get the absolute tool in the car behind you to stop paying attention. Being an absolute tool, he won’t have put his handbrake on, and instead he’ll be sitting there with his feet on the pedals. When he stops paying attention, his feet will slip and he won’t notice his car setting off forward at not insignificant speed because he’ll be looking at his phone.

Third, use the rear bumper of your car to stop the absolute tool’s car from making any further progress. This will result in a small crack across the width of your rear bumper. If your car is anything like mine, the rear bumper will be the only place you’ve picked up scratches and a couple of chips to your paintwork.

Now, speak to your insurance company. They will get some money off the absolute tool which will pay for a firm of professional accident repairers to pick up your car, take it away, fix the rear bumper and return it.

When your car is returned to your home address, it will not only have been repaired, with a new freshly-sprayed bumper replacing the old one with the scratches and chips in it, but it will also have been valeted inside and out, including cleaning all the tyres and polishing all the interior fittings.

Hey presto! Your car is now just like new.

My plan is that, about this time next year, I’ll get another absolute tool to go into my rear bumper so I can have it all polished up again, and I can drive a brand new car forever.

Where to wee

A few months ago, my department was moved downstairs as we were merged in with another similar department. Now we all sit in the same place. Our new surroundings are in the basement, as befits our status. Engineers do not need daylight, and are not to be allowed to have it. We are so deep in the basement that Bakerloo line trains cause an audible rumble through the walls every few minutes. We’ve calculated that they might actually be slightly above our floor level.

One interesting feature of the sub-basement where we have been hidden away, as though we are some sort of embarassment, is the shortage of toilet facilities. It’s almost like this floor was designed for apparatus rooms and storage areas, and the idea that teams of people might spend their lives down there wasn’t considered by the architects.

That leaves me with a choice of three sub-optimal toilets, as follows.

Toilet One is a single cubicle, self-contained with a sink and hand dryer, located a short walk from our room, but close to other rooms where people work so it’s often busy. If you flush the toilet the sink tap stops running, so you have to wash your hands before you flush or (more often) you forget to wash your hands before you flush so you then stand there for several minutes waiting for the cistern to slowly refill before you can get a trickle of water on your hands.
Toilet Two is another single self-contained cubicle, not much further away, but located at a little kitchen area where people come to make tea. From inside the cubicle you can hear everything people say and do at the kitchen, and I know from experience that people in the kitchen can hear everything that happens in the toilet cubicle. I don’t like that at all. Once I sat in there for the whole time it took someone to make a round of tea because I didn’t want them to hear me having a poo.
Toilet Three is yet another self-contained cubicle, and technically a disabled toilet with one of those seats that feels a bit higher up than it should be. The automatic tap makes a massive noise when you wash your hands, like a siren going off to alert anyone nearby to the fact that you’re using a disabled toilet. It’s a long walk away from the room where I work on the other side of two security doors. Someone once came out of it when I was approaching to go in who gave me a really angry look.

I haven’t yet decided which of these is the least worst, but please keep me in your thoughts as I struggle to find somewhere satisfactory to go for a wee at work.

Story time

Here’s a challenge that none of us will be able to resist.

You know what to do. You have the words. You can also use any other word you like, as long as the other words are no longer than four letters long. I also choose to permit the words “scintillate”, “bigamy” and “washing machine”.

There will be a prize. Probably.

Lemon drizzle

If you ask the question
About what is the best one,
The bakery transcendent,
The cakery resplendent:
I answer it with ease, take
Away your silly cheesecake.
Gingerbread and Eccles
Will meet only with my heckles;
Pineapple upside-down
Meet the deepest darkest frown.
You will find I have no time
For fondant fancy or key lime;
Though partial to a parkin,
There is only one worth markin’.
I tip my hat as witness
To the cake with all the citrus:
Lemon drizzle cake
Is the shizzle cake,
The finest there is,
Lemon driz
Is the biz.