Mrs Miggins thinks big

What’s that crafty (and also hugely desirable) old property tycoon up to now?

Last we heard of Mrs Miggins, some years ago, she was fitting out her properties with those chrome fittings and understated (yet ostentatious) gardens. But the other day I was in Farringdon when I stumbled across the fateful property where we first encountered her.

75 Farringdon Road: 25,000 Sq Ft of Exceptional Office Space

It looks like the house where I, or possibly Ian, it was never really made clear in the lyrics, first fell for Mrs Miggins, has been pulled down and is going to be replaced with some stylish offices instead.

My first thought, of course, was sadness: sadness that a place that meant so much to me, or possibly Ian, had been swept away in the blink of an eye to further expand the Miggins real estate empire.

But then I thought no, let’s embrace the change. I propose that we immediately put in a bid to rent some office space there for the official Pouring Beans offices. We’ve been working from home much too long; it’s time we established a base for ourselves. And there could be no more appropriate address than 75 Farringdon Road. I’m ready to chip in my fiver.

Seagull Competition: Results

It’s been a long time coming and the tension is almost too much to bear. A couple of months ago, we asked the Beans Massive to tell us what a Llandudno seagull was thinking back in May 2017 when he was photographed thusly.

It’s taken a while to select a winner, principally because of the difficulty of locating this exact seagull and then establishing a way of communicating a question about its internal thought processes from nearly two years ago that it could understand, and then interpreting its answer. It has also proven a bit tricky to get it to select a prize.

Designer diseases

I’m starting a new business venture and this is your chance to get in on the ground floor. Here’s the pitch.

Designer diseases are going to be the next big thing. Here’s how it works: influencers are everywhere now, filling up Instagram with their poses and getting lots of sweet corporate sponsorship on Youtube. What they’re missing is the human angle, something to pull on people’s emotions. Enter the designer disease.

We will offer a full 360-degree customised bespoke personal consulting service where we will offer a choice of designer diseases and infect the influencer with their choice of ailment. We then provide the tools and resources for the influencer to splash their horrible illness all over the ‘gram, soak up the sympathy and massively up their likes.

Already, Kendal Jenner (is that one of them?) has signed up for a package we’re calling “The ‘Roids”: painful hemhorroids form a distinctive grape-like package that’s visible through lycra and gymwear. We suggest using pile cream as a stylish but challenging form of face paint.

Are you in? I’m going to need $15,000 for a 5% stake. This is going to be huge.

A life in furniture

Living above a bed shop, you’d think that the item of furniture most at risk of overwhelming my life would be beds. But no: here in the London Borough of Royksopp, it’s sofas we’re drowning in.

As you probably already know, my domestic co-habitant, Steve “Stevey” Stevingtons, is immensely and sickeningly rich: certainly a millionaire, possibly close to Jeff Bezos levels of financial liquidity. So it was that, a month ago, he splashed out on a new sofa to replace his old one. It was a real beast of a thing, a mo-fo so-fa to seat five, with a cornery bit and a separate footstool thing. Absolutely glorious. But as soon as it arrived we both saw the problem: as spacious as our living room is, it’s not big enough for two sofas to be practical.

The old sofa was moved to the balcony for a while, which is also vast, but that was short lived once it got rained on. Steve was forced to dispose of it and for a time we were back to a one-sofa arrangement, until it became clear that the new sofa – hand-stitched in a small village in the Alps and delivered by helicopter at a cost well into six figures – had a saggy ass in one of the seats.

The Stevingtons dynasty are not known for tolerating shoddy workmanship, least of all drooping upholstery, so the new sofa was broken up and this week a third, identical sofa arrived in its place.

I am pleased to report that seating arrangements in the penthouse are now entirely buoyant and without any saggage in the ass or any other region, and I am hopeful that this sofa-saturated period has finally drawn to a close. Thank you for your time.

Happy Christmas, Ian

Everyone loves Christmas. It’s a special time of the year when I get very stressed trying to buy and wrap presents for all the people in my life and then somehow deliver them all to the right people so they will get to enjoy them on Christmas Day.

Almost everyone in my life got their Christmas presents and, on Christmas Day, opened them and hopefully enjoyed them. But not everyone in my life follows the usual path. Not everyone lets themselves be led by the forces of what is “normal” or “sensible” or “in any way reasonable”. Such as, for example, Ian.

In advising me how to get my presents to him, Ian suggested I drop them off at his mum’s house. I did this, at approximately 5pm on Christmas Eve. Ian’s suggestion was not, however as sensible as it seemed, or indeed sensible at all, because he only got those presents on his next trip to Leeds, and that was yesterday.

I could have posted them to Newcastle and he could have had them on Christmas Day. I could have brought them to Newcastle when I was there last month to see him. But no. This is not his way. This is not how his Christmas rolls.

And so, now that Ian has finally got his presents in early March, I am wishing him a very happy Christmas, and offering him my best wishes for 2019.

Four Word Reviews: State of Mind

Ah, Holly Valance. We meet again. We’ve already reviewed the living daylights out of Holly’s first album, Footprints, just a few short months ago. Now, she’s back with her second (2003) album, State of Mind, in a Four Word Reviews first. I cannot even begin to imagine how this came to land on my doorstep so soon after the first.

Live in concert

For one night only, Pouring Beans presents The Porcelainettes LIVE on stage in the concert auditorium below the bell tower. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime chance to catch one of the world’s most hotly tipped up-and-coming ceramic bands in the plush surroundings of this website!

Featuring great covers of classic sing-along hits such as:

“Livin’ Doll”
Nina Simone’s “Little Girl Blue”
Kraftwerk’s “The Model”
“Achey Breaky Ceramic Heart”
“Tiny Dancer”
Annie Lennox’s “Walking On Broken Glass (And Pottery)”
“Statue Got Me High” (it’s a TMBG song, I don’t expect you to get the reference, it’s just for me really)
“Fade to Grey (Hair)”

And many many many more.

Book now!

Seagull Competition: Entries

There’s been huge excitement across the Beans Network since the Seagull Competition was launched, and rightly so. Collating the entries, producing a shortlist and selecting a winner has taken a bit longer than expected, because of the difficulties of tracking down the exact seagull that was photographed in Llandudno in 2017 and then getting it to pay some attention to the competition entries.

Right now we have the seagull tagged, and all the entries laid out neatly on the pier, and we’re waiting for it to fly back down to a bag of chips we’ve enticingly dumped on the floor so we can get it to pick a winner.