Interlude

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached approximately the mid point of this website, so this is a suitable time to take a short break. Please feel free to take this opportunity to visit the bathroom or step out into the foyer to avail yourself of our wide range of beers, wines, spirits and snacks.

Part two of Pouring Beans will begin in a few minutes. In the meantime, please enjoy five minutes of gleeful silliness that everyone of sound mind ought to have in their lives.

Mysterious Hand Man

On March 13, 2014, something important happened. What that something was, though, is a mystery.

Here are the facts of the case.

At an unknown time on that day, a registered user logged in to The Beans and – using their privileged access to this sacred dominion – perpetrated an act of digital flytipping. An image was uploaded to the web server which was not included in any post and which, until today, occupied server space without performing any useful function. That image can now be revealed for the first time in four and a half years. Let’s hope its owner will one day face justice. (Ideally chunky justice, but let’s not be picky.)

Here it is. The Police are referring to it as “Mysterious Hand Man”. Please call Crimestoppers if you have any leads.

Big Frank’s World Domination: Chips

There I was, hungry and looking forward to a tasty chip-like snack. And what do I find? I find that my dad’s muscled in to the lucrative spicy chips market.

Obviously I’m a particularly fancy chap, so I had the Luxury Truffle Chips instead.

Four Word Reviews: Footprints

Whenever a little CD-sized padded envelope arrives in my postbox, it’s like a time capsule. Where will we go? Terrible cartoon cover versions of the 90s? Forgotten Gospel from the 60s? Or perhaps, like today, we’ll find ourselves transported to a world I’d almost forgotten: the very early 2000s, and a branch of pop music that I mostly tuned out was big in the charts. It was heavily RnB influenced and it gave us “No Scrubs” and Gwen Stefani’s second wind and lots of songs with hi-hat and a whole, horrendous wave of misogyny, from “Thong Song” to “Hot In Herrrre”. And, at the lighter, poppier end of this best-forgotten spectrum, it gave us Australian soap star Holly Valance, and her 2002 album Footprints.

The lead single and the most memorable thing to come off this album was “Kiss Kiss”, a cover version of a song that had been big in the Middle East already, and which was sort of interesting because it had that RnB sound but it also had lots of floaty, Disney’s Aladdin-style fantasy-Arabia instrumentation. It also had a weird kissy sound as its chorus line instead of words, which was a bit embarassing.

If you thought “Kiss Kiss” was a pretty brazen “come and get it” song for a 19-year-old to be singing then you should hear the rest of the album. Put aside the bang-on-trend production – which I am happy to do, that trend being 16 years old and not something I cared for even at the time – and you appear to have an album conceived and directed by male middle-aged record company execs with their trousers around their ankles excitedly working out what they can get a 19-year-old girl to sing without it actually being pornography. And I might be getting old but I was starting to find it creepy by about track 5.

Anyway: let’s see the shape of this thing.

Track	Title	Word 1	Word 2	Word 3	Word 4
1	Kiss Kiss	Kisses	instead	of	words
2	Tuck Your Shirt In	Detailed	dress	code	pop
3	Down Boy	Quick	yet	queerly	quiet
4	City Ain’t Big Enough	Desperate	to	be	TLC
5	Cocktails and Parties	Smugly	not	seducing	husbands
6	Whoop	“Kiss	Kiss”,	but	“Whoop”
7	Hush Now	Eternal	meets	Leg	Jazz
8	All in the Mind	“Massive	explosion,	magic	emotion”
9	Harder They Come	It’s	no	Jimmy	Cliff
10	Help Me Help You	Helplessly	slushy	twinkly	bobbins
11	Naughty Girl	Breathily	dubious	sexiness	attempt
12	Connect	2000s	RnB	harpsichord	action
13	Send My Best	Sensual	acoustic	guitar	finale

Track 2 is, like “Kiss Kiss”, very Middle Easty, and I wondered whether the whole album would be like that, but the answer is no, it’s just those two tracks. The other 11 could be Eternal, Destiny’s Child, TLC or maybe Cleopatra songs if you weren’t listening too closely. It’s been produced to death, all twinkles and vocoders, and a lot of songs have that stuttery effect in the bridge where it sounds like the song is skipping in time with the beat. You’d know it if you heard it. All those songs did it in those days.

And it really is all very sexual. Here’s some of the lyrics I scribbled down, though this list could have been much, much longer. I don’t need to go into the insinuations that “Harder They Come” is making.

“I can be your fantasy, give you what you want”
“Keep you up all night”
“I’m proud to arouse”
“I’m a naughty girl, I can dance what you want me to dance”

In summary, my favourite thing is that, because it was made in 2002, it’s an “enhanced” CD featuring the videos to “Kiss Kiss” and “Down Boy”, and a special feature about the making of them. I didn’t watch them, obviously. I’d heard enough of this by the time I reached the end of track 13. I’d just forgotten that video extras on CDs used to be a thing and it made me feel a bit nostalgic for a few minutes. My least favourite thing about this album is that I’m not sure whether listening to it means I have to go on some kind of register now.

Teapipes

Things are complicated now, aren’t they? There’s a lot going on.

I can’t fix that, but I can give you a ninety second holiday from all the complicated stuff in the world of 2018 by taking you back in time to 2012, an innocent age when anything seemed possible, and three handsome young men asked themselves the question: why should a man only be able to drink one cup of tea at once?

OK. That’s all there is. Now get back to your stupid complicated life.

Colour chart

Just in time for Kev’s annual Whole House Redecoration (start date 1 November 2018; completion due 25 October 2019), Pouring Beans Chemicals Ltd. are delighted to announce their new home decor paint range.

All our new paints are lovingly hand-made at the large chemical refinery down by the docks.

	Whimbrel Neither too yellow, nor too sad, Whimbrel is the colloquial name for the traditional butcher’s apron which this haughty colour embodies. It’s the perfect contrast to our slightly lighter Musty White and Smoky White, creating a trio of colours that sit perilously close together in modern and traditional homes.
	Third Degree Burns The deep blackened pigmentation gives a smug burgundy finish with a wonderfully sore feel. This, our most angst-ridden red, reads almost like a disingenuous purple if you compare it to our more painful looking Internal Bleeding Crimson.
	Dipsomaniac This quietly desperate blue feels wonderfully hopeless, and could be suitable anywhere from a service riser to an airy frotting room. The exact shade is rooted in a despondency palette. Like denim, its blue hue is ultimately worthless and yet always feels tipsy.
	Churlish Bile This takes its name from the old English expectorations of simple peasants with a poor diet. With its highly pigmented yellow base, this mid green creates a totally unique look by not actually being green at all. It’s a statement colour when contrasted with shades as repellent as Titchmarsh Brown. It is also fabulous when used with furtive glee.
	Ocean Drowning This rich teal takes its name from highly fashionable show-drowning in pre-revolutionary France. Sitting between Punitive Green and Biliousness, its subtle blue undertones work particularly well in modern aquatic spaces. Slop onto industrial processing units alongside Huguenot Fishwife on pipes and valves for a clean finish that is conducive to modern industry.

Other shades are also available. Please ask your stockist to mix two cans together and see what they get.

The dancing monkey

There are many complex and bewildering technologies to master in my new job, but probably none more complex or bewildering than the robotic dancing alarm monkey.

Alarms go off quite regularly, you see. We look after technical things, lots of them, and the technical things are all wired up to an alarm system, so when something goes wrong it comes up on a screen and an alarm goes off. Then we press a button to make the noise stop and see if anything needs to be done.

The alarm could just come out of a speaker. That would certainly make sense. Instead, though, it’s been wired up to an animatronic monkey with inbuilt speakers. He makes the alarm sound, and he dances from side to side while he makes it. By such means the announcement of a potentially catastrophic system failure is made delightfully charming. This is, with no danger of overstatement whatsoever, one of the best things about my job.

If you have a need to make noises in your job, I would recommend getting yourself a dancing monkey. You won’t regret it.

The balcony

In my new job, I work on the third floor of an old building that has many useless architectural accoutrements and doodads. They’re all things the architect thought would look nice back in 1932, but which now serve no purpose at all, and perhaps they never did.

One of the useless things is a balcony that runs all the way along our side of the third floor, just below the windows. It only seems to be there because someone decided that this side of the building would look a bit more interesting if there was a balcony on it. It’s a very long balcony – perhaps as long as two or three double decker buses parked end to end, or maybe as long as a fireman’s hose, if the fireman’s hose was the same length as two or three double decker buses parked end to end.

It doesn’t look to me like a balcony that I was meant to go and stand on. It’s not very wide, for a start. You could stand on it, and walk along it if you weren’t planning to swing your arms about too much, but you couldn’t put a chair of any kind there, at least not in such a way that you could actually sit on it. The wall along the edge is only just waist high, so you’d feel a bit exposed on it as well.

None of that means that I don’t want to stand on it. Unfortunately, I can’t, because none of the windows open wide enough and the doors – we have two sets of double doors that would open on to it – are locked. The doors are also blocked by some furniture and other piles of tat.

I don’t know why I want to stand on the balcony so much. It would be cold and unpleasant and dangerous, and there would be nothing for me to do once I was out there. There’s no good reason to stand on the balcony. It’s not even a balcony for standing on. That’s why the doors are locked. They aren’t doors for walking through. But none of that changes the fact that I want to stand on it, just for a little bit, just to say I did.

One day it will get the better of me. One day I will climb out of the window. And on that day you will know I made it because you won’t hear from me for a long time, and it will be because I got stuck on the balcony you’re not meant to stand on, and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. And it will be worth it.