Butt is it art?

Whilst galivanting around Edinburgh during my recent birthday escapades (god, he never shuts up about his sodding birthday, does he?) Vikki and I managed to take in a lot during a very small period of time. The Christmas market, which was due to open on the Friday we were there, actually didn’t until the evening which was after we had left. This reminded me of Bridlington and all the lovely things that were closed due to the timing of our visit. We did, however, get to walk around the lovely National Gallery which had huge paintings of this and that. Not being an art person myself it was nice to pretend to be a posho and gawp at all the Georgian and Elizabethan works of art all the while wondering when I could eat again and where the gift shop was.

I then came across a monkey in a painting and, boy, wait, there is actually a whole painting to go with the monkey. As I stepped back to look at the entire thing I realised that I didn’t have a clue what any of these paintings meant. Some were nice, some were food for the soul (blah blah blah), most were expensive firewood. I don’t know, you don’t come here for intellectual musings. I’m the dick and fart jokes department so let me tell you I was way out of my depth.

The plaque stated that, “the precise meaning of this rare secular work by El Greco is uncertain. The boy’s act of kindling a flame may allude to the arousal of the sensual passions. A monkey in art is often symbolic of vice, while the man grinning inanely could represent folly. The painting may thus illustrate the simple moralising message that lust appeals to our foolish and baser instincts.”

Art is subject to interpretation and any meaning could be correct. I will, however, volunteer my own thoughts:

Nobody is grinning inanely. The fisherman on the right is clearly a pyromaniac and is looking for some cheap thrills before he has to go back to, I don’t know, the North Sea or wherever he’s working. He looks tired more than anything else.
The boy needs a hobby. Maybe he’s lighting the thingy for attention? Come on, little Billy, go learn how to grift or dance for pennies on the corner.
Once you see the monkey you can’t un-see the monkey and therefore everything else in the painting is irrelevant. He may as well have only painted the monkey which is a stellar painting of a monkey. 10 out of 10

This may carry on into a regular series because I feel as though art and art appreciation could be a new career for me in 2024. I’m clearly very good at it and you should always do what you’re good at.

Do the splits

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the age of forty. After an uphill struggle through some difficult times you’ve made it and you’ve made it in one piece. Now all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the view through these novelty binoculars.

It seems as though I can’t go a few weeks without making a fool of myself. Last week I got lost driving back through Gateshead and almost drove into an industrial estate and then accidentally drove through a bus lane. That was fun. I don’t really have much of a defence other than it was dark and I was hungry so my hunger caused me to drive the wrong way. That’s what I’m going to write to Gateshead Council when they send me a letter asking to pay a fine for driving like a clown.

Let’s do something a little more contemporary though to really illustrate the fact that I’m potentially getting worse. Subjectively. Gingerly. Crimsonly.

It’s the end of the day and I am striding to my car. I don’t walk anymore you see I stride. I’ve got the prestigious job and the happy life so I take a manly stride to get me around places now. As I approach my car I see that the car next to me has parked a little too close because everyone is terrible at parking. I can open the driver door however it requires a bit of manoeuvring (I can never spell that word) to hold the door so I don’t smash it into the other car but also leave enough space to get my sorry ass into the seat. I manage to get my left leg in and I hear it, the sound that I have heard a few times before. I don’t feel as though I have lunged too far however by the sounds of things I have crossed a line and one that once crossed cannot be undone. I may as well have put my foot in the footwell of the adjacent car for what it’s worth.

I know the sound because it happened to me about a year or two ago. That is the sound of my jeans splitting. That is the cold air reaching my bare skin which up until recently was covered by my jeans. The material could clearly not take the isometric shapes my legs were making whilst trying to get into the car and now it’s all over. I still have to pick up some food on the way home and luckily I have some jogging bottoms in my gym bag, which is stashed on the back seat. In Asda car park I hide momentarily behind my door and pull them on over my now sagging jeans. Nothing left to do but stride around picking up what I need and head home like a grown-up, a grown-up wearing two pairs of trousers.

Blurrd 2: Return of the Killer Blurrd

Back in June, me and a bunch of cronies travelled hundreds of miles out of our way to go see Queens of the Stone Age at Cardiff Castle. A week and a half ago, we drove as far as Stockton-on-Tees to see them again.

Stockton is not usually known for its music venues (at least as far as my limited knowledge of the place goes) so the fact that the band chose this over the arena in Newcastle, the Sage in Gateshead, hell, even the Stadium of Light in Sunderland is baffling. The Globe in Stockton was so small we could barely get into the room; the closest we could get to the stage was the very rear by the doors. It felt like more than 3000 people were there, the supposed capacity of the place.

I bought three bottles of water and stood in line at the bar for half an hour. A lady got annoyed because, after going through the security checks, her umbrella was confiscated.

in time honoured fashion, I took several photos from the back of the room and most of them were blurry. Here is my most blurred effort:

I am very proud of my efforts and think I should take up photography immediately.

Nonna

Nonna knows best,
Nonna wants you to know
That Nonna likes pizza,
Pizza toppings on pizza dough.

Nonna needs num-nums,
Nonna kneeds the pizza dough,
Needless to say by evening
Nonna’s certainly ready to go.

Nonna can’t let go,
Nonna wants a side dish,
I can’t make garlic bread,
Side dish is a side wish.

Nonna isn’t happy,
Nonna lets me know,
Left for dead in a dustbin,
Mozzarella, cheese and pesto.

Memories (approaching the grey hemisphere)

It is now only two days until I pass into official middle age, two days before it all comes crashing down upon me. Actually that’s not true. I have long since been comfortable with my transformation from hip thirtysomething into a forty year old man. I’m sure that forty year olds have a lot going for them and, if not, then I’m here to shake things up for them.

I started reminiscing (even more than usual) about my youth and decide to record some of the lessor-known facts in case anyone was interested. They are in no particular order and most of them are probably not worth hearing anyway. Consider yourself warned:

Dad’s Army

I watched a lot of television as a child. A lot. I spent most days flicking through the TV guide circling what I wanted to watch in the upcoming week. On weekends it was worse, starting around 6:30am for the kids TV, taking a little break around lunchtime when the “adult” programs started and then coming back in the afternoon for more cartoons, sitcoms and anything else. The BBC repeated tons of sitcoms over the weekend and I was there for them. In my tiny child brain I would sing, “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Kipling?” when watching the opening for ‘Dad’s Army’. Don’t ask me why, it doesn’t quite scan properly (which may explain a lot of my efforts at writing poetry) and there is absolutely no correlation as far as I’m aware between the beloved cake-maker and the murderous dictator.

Wizards

Later on I wanted to be a space cowboy but earlier on in my life I wanted to be a wizard. This may have been spurred on by what I read in ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. I would steal various shampoos, conditioners, bubble baths and sometimes things from the kitchen cupboards (the bathroom was next to my bedroom so it was easier to sneak in and out with my effects) and mix them together to create potions. Did I have a proper cup or beaker to do so? No, I used the top of an old toy that had broken off. It was as curved green pot thing that was supposed to be the top of the tree. I think my mum noticed things were oozing out of the back of the small wooden desk in my bedroom so they broke in to look at what I had been doing. It seems as though I had also mixed in a dead spider to my current concoction to, I don’t know, heighten the potency of the potion. Needless to say I was politely asked to stop.

Showing off

I did a lot of showing off. I had three other siblings to compete with, I had no choice. Right? Right. I’m glad we’re on the same page. During the summer holidays my dad would “borrow” a video camera from the school he was working at and we would make home movies of varying quality, mostly terrible. In the quieter moments I would use the camera to record whatever I thought would be a good idea at the time. Once I made a stop-motion video of my pink dinosaur killing himself by jumping off the end of my parent’s bed, and when I say stop-motion I mean practically still shots with huge jumps in the middle rather than painstakingly moving the dinosaur into the next position. The crowning achievement however was the time I recorded five minutes of me narrating a fictitious race between… well that part is lost to me. It was a race though because I was doing my best Murray Walker impression. I was young and I had a cold so my enunciation was pretty terrible. I moved the camera wildly from side to side saying whatever came into my head. The film is notorious for one line that my brother and sisters still bring up to this day. I cannot tell you what I am actually saying because there is no substitution in the English language that would explain it yet I cannot fully believe I would say what I said at the age of 6 or 7. What did I say? Sigh. “I wanna see some boobies!” I didn’t fully know what boobies were at that age so why I would want to see them is anyone’s guess. It’s baffling knowing that it’s me and not being able to understand what I’m trying to say. The answer is lost to time.

Entrepreneur

One more before I go. I had a knack of trading things at an early age. In primary school I would take the toy or thing that came in the box of cereal and I would trade them at school with other kids for toy cars. I didn’t want the cereal toys, I wanted their toy cars and for some reason the other people thought this was a fair trade. In secondary school (you may have heard this one before) I would take the lunch that my mum had so carefully put together and sell it to someone in my form for the price of a school dinner which, I believe at the time, was £1.30. I did this every day so I came away with over a fiver a week to add to my pocket money pile. I used the money to go into town at the weekend to buy video games and CDs. My mum wouldn’t be home until after 5pm on a weekday so I would come home and eat bread (about a quarter of a loaf) and cereal to take away the hunger pangs I was feeling. She didn’t find out about this until I was in my twenties. I ate so much bread I believe it may have contributed to the intolerances I am now experiencing as an adult man, plus it made me round and chubby like the Pilsbury Doughboy from all the extra carbs.

Tiny pig

Having recently been tasked with trying to find more photos for the upcoming 2024 Pouring Beans calendar, I was looking through the various photos on my phone in the hopes of locating the ones of the boxes I used to keep in the corner of my bedroom that were riddled with various quips, zingers and bizarre things written down during phone calls from over a decade ago. Needless to say, the search is currently ongoing (although the boxes may be hiding in the one cupboard in my flat).

As I flicked through the many, many pictures in my possession I came across a series involving a tiny toy guinea pig. These clearly were taken by one or all three of my nieces and transferred via the usual means of Whatsapp. I definitely do not own a tiny guinea pig and did not spend time putting them in hilarious places so that I could take photographs to mark the occasion. We’ve all met me, right? It is the kind of thing I could potentially do, I’ll admit, however this time I am not the culprit.

Given that everyone absolutely loves the PicCollages that I make, I have decided to make a PicCollage to collect the best of the six in my camera reel. Suck deep and bathe, my friends.

Excuse me!

Typical. You need to use the payphone and some idiot decides to jam a collection of old storage boxes folded into the tight space along with packing material thus taking up all the area I need in order to make my phone call. I mean I can hardly use the phone on the street, everyone will hear my conversation.

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me.

End of the year

Good Morning ladies and gentlemen

It has been several months since the last official meeting of the British Mash Council. Since then we have acquired a plethora of new members. The profile of mash has grown considerably over the last six months and it only remains to say that this is all due to our hard work, commitment and fervour to the source material. Before, however, we crack open the champagne there is one final matter that we need to go through before the end of the year and that’s our new annual mash push over the next two months.

Granted we probably should have addressed these matters earlier given that November is but six days away however matters outside of our control (such as Gary’s vasectomy and Maureen’s slip on the cobblestones by the church) saw to that. There was simply no time to fit it in before now.

I therefore suggest a stealth drop of even more mash-based merriment through the usual advertising venues and an assault on social media. We already have a name, there’s no need to start handing out the pads of paper, Doris, so put them back in the lockbox. It was sitting right there in front of us the entire time and it has been plucked. ‘Christmash’ (not ‘Christ-mash’ which is what Tony thought it was when he first saw the sign, there’s a subtle art to it, Tony, I do hope you’ve cottoned on to that now) will be everywhere in the next few weeks. The signs have been printed and are currently sitting between the decorations and the unsold toys from last year’s ‘Mashtopia’ festival. I still am shocked that our selection of mash celebrities inclusing Paddy Mashdown, Richard Mashcroft, Mashley Cole, Mike Mashley and Jayne Middlemash did sell better given their likeness and overall quality. It just goes to show that you can know your audience and still not know your audience..

Do you know what I want to see? I want to see it all. I want to live in a world where instead of a white Christmas we have a slightly yellow, buttery hot ‘Christmash’ with kids playing and building Mashmen in the garden while mum and dad finish off the dinner. I want to live in a world where every tree is decorated in a blizzard of instant mash granules, topped off with a mash angel reaching out to the mashes of the world. I want to hear ‘Come All Ye Mashful’, ‘Oh Little Town of Mashlehem’ and ‘Mash to the World’ playing across the tops of houses, coming from behind the doors of churches and bellowing out of every carol singer in the Western hemisphere.

If we hit the ground running then we have nothing to worry about. I trust all of you to continue spreading the good name of mash and by this time in December it will the the best year for the British Mash Council since 2009!