Puffins?

One of those things

Childhood, ah, such a bewildering time to be alive. For one, you have no responsibility and so much potential. You have no money but everything you actually need is provided to you for free. If you want to spend the entire weekend sat with your face in the television with a mouth full of marshmallows then you can, or at least until one or more of your parents objects to this. The point is that, as everyone is aware, life is so very different as a child.

I could bore you to tears with stories of my time as a tiny Ian. You may or may not have heard them already and the ones you haven’t heard are just as tedious. Believe me, I am doing you a favour by keeping my mouth shut. I haven’t quite reached the age of telling every single person I meet in the street (not that they would given how bovona has given everyone carte blanche to ignore you even if you have a leg hanging off or knife at your throat) of the time I found £1.10 in the front garden in the snow and became so excited you would have thought I had discovered the Turin Shroud hanging off the bin.

Do you remember those… things that you used to make? I want to remember the name and I don’t want to have to Google it like everything else. The power of words (Words!) don’t fail me now. You folded it up and asked someone to say a number. Then you would use your hands to move it the appropriate number of times and ask for another number, repeat, and then open one of the panels to reveal some mystifying piece of knowledge. It looked a little like this:

No, I haven’t lost my mind and made one I did something much more reasonable; I found one on the floor and brought it home. A scruff I may be and nothing more because there is no other way of finishing that sentence. I wanted to remember a time that was much more innocent, of whistle pops and candy whistles, running around the park until your lungs bled with Tizer (you know, before they changed the formula and made it taste like a shark’s coldsore). I am not clever enough to make a fully functioning version of this, nor an interactive snazzy one on a computer. I do want you to know this though:

If you pick 0 or 1: You are a banana
If you pick 2 or 3: I am in love with you
If you pick 4 or 5: You are in love with me
If you pick 6 or 7:

?????

Dear Beans… Trippin’ over Trouser Tribulations

Dear Beans,

It has recently come to my attention that I may have been a little hard on something that has always caused trouble in my life. I have my reasons, believe me, this isn’t something that I have plucked out of thin air. Looking back on my behaviour I am a little ashamed; I suppose everyone makes mistakes and the only way to learn is by making them. That said, how can anyone like 3/4 length trousers?

They’re ridiculous. They look like you tried cutting the trousers to make a pair of shorts and gave up halfway through. They look as though you’re wearing ill-fitting clothes. Who’s bright idea was to sell someone an item of clothing that is missing a part of it? What kind of person does this appeal to?

That was how I used to think, the malice lurking underneath the top soil, the brazen hatred seething through the pork vestibule. It’s not as though my wife ran away with some trousers and I have spent the rest of my life resenting the whole lot of them. Whole lot of them, wow, it’s talk like that that made me sound like a trouser racist.

I am doing my best to move on. This is less a plea for help and more an admission of guilt in the hope that by doing so I can exorcise some of the more harsher criticisms that I have levelled at those so-called “missing trousers”. Human nature is so broad that it can cover a wealth of topics. The only explanation why I shied away from them for so long, that I ranted until hot steam poured out of my ears, is because if I did try to wear them it would expose the tattoo of Pam St Clement (aka Pat Butcher from ‘Eastenders’) at the base of my leg. I don’t want people knowing that I have it; my love is a secret kind of love.

Anyway, thanks for listening. I’m going to omit parts of my name so you don’t know who I am.

Yours faithfully

*evin *ill

Random Sandwiches

Let us address the elephant in the room. You are so predictable. You are so absolutely boring when it comes to food and you know it; each and every time you wander into a supermarket, a corner shop, a Subway you purchase / order the same thing. They have a full menu of sandwich fillings and all of them are ignored so you can eat the same dull slice of nourishment.

You need to buck your ‘chude up, sunshine. You think your good lady wife is going to stay with you and your sluggish Ham ‘n’ Cheese forever? No way. Both of you are teetering on the edge of a marital precipice and the only way to tip it in the direction of the future is to fill your plate with something different. Grab your raincoat and follow me.

Nestled in the wonderful corner of the world that is somewhere nearby, Random Sandwiches offers a world of culinary perfection unseen in the rest of the country. Their list of fillings would blow your mind if you saw it in person and so everyone who wanders into the shop must wear a blindfold, and have it read to them by a woman with a posh voice.

The most popular flavours at the moment are as follows:

Jagged glass and American irony;
Rubber dingy, yeast and sun-bleached afternoons;
Heron and scotch egg;
Two lemons encased in a pagoda of dreams;
Swordfish eczema on naan bread, smothered in forgotten dances from the 1920’s’;
A fresh pair of stressed socks under a splodge of elk light bulbs and mayonnaise.

I don’t know about you but my mouth is already watering as I finished typing this. I can’t wait for them to re-open after the lockdown so I can grab a patronising handshake on rye and crisps for lunch.

Newsboost – Old Codger Couple Cooks up Controversy

Shock news today as it was revealed that the two old people in the UK road sign are not actually two people, it is one person and her ventriloquist puppet.

The sign, which warns the general public of the impending danger of the elderly, has been in use for over 70 years and only now has it been revealed by the UK government that the second person is a puppet. At the time it was intended that two people be present in the picture only when it came to paint it one of them took a longer nap than intended and didn’t show up. Luckily the original model, Constance Felling, was an avid marionette aficionado and had her puppet, Swallow Thard, fill in the gap.

Constance has since passed on but we did manage to speak to a surviving relative, her daughter Rosemary. “David never arrived. They waited over an hour for him and he never emerged. His house phone rang and rang with no luck so the team divided into two; one set went to check that he hadn’t died and the other carried on with the sign. Mum was ever so resourceful and whipped out Swallow so the work could progress. They had to make the legs look less lifeless so they drew mum’s legs twice and put a set under Swallow. David was fine, a little drowsy from his sleep and nothing more. He was too late though as it was all finished by the time he arrived.”

She took a sip of her Special Brew and carried on, “That’s why it looks the way it does, as though the woman at the back is squeezing the bum of the guy in front. Everyone has been laughing at it for all these years and it’s nothing to do with sexual harassment; mum actually had her arm up his arse.”

The ‘Elderly People’ sign was voted the fifth most popular in England and Wales after a poll in 2011.

This follows on from February’s news when it was revealed that the person in the ‘Caution: Pedestrian Crossing’ the road sign wasn’t crossing at all, he was punching an Irishman in the stomach for sleeping with his wife.

Smug it up

It is terrible, absolutely terrible when you cannot find the thing you are looking for. I must have looked for, ooo, less than five minutes and they just aren’t there.

Where are all the photos of smug fuckers who live on canals? Hidden away in people’s photo albums no doubt. The internet refused to give up the goods so I had to make my own.

God damn useless internet.

The 5 worst things Morrissey’s arms have ever said

*Clickbait*

We all know that Stephen Patrick Morrissey is an outspoken English faded popstar, to quote a certain Mr Manly. The internet is scattered with the daft, racist and downright bizarre things that he has said after almost 40 years in the music business. Does he say them for fun, to gain publicity to keep his fame up or does he actually mean it?

Something that has been kept under wraps though has been the second layer of bad, the custard skin under Morrissey’s comments, another level of absurdity below the absurdity. Morrissey’s arms are just as bad as the person they’re attached to. Here are, in no particular order, are the top five worst things that they have uttered:

Whilst out on the town in 2004 celebrating the release of his seventh studio album ‘You Are the Quarry’, and after way too many Sunset Margaritas, Morrissey’s arms were overheard bragging that, “Poor people are only good for two things: shooting and lighting my cigars off!”
“I once glued three 9 year old children together to make a 27 year old man and it didn’t work.” This was taken from an interview with Monta Mino, a hugely popular Japanese television presenter in 2004. Morrissey’s arms claim that the comment was mistranslated at the time but later he stood by it and added, “We called him Winston and he lived in my garage for three months. I spat on him every time I saw him.”
His taste in food and drink are more well-known than anything else as Morrissey’s arms edited the food column in the Guardian for the best part of five years between 2008 and 2013. That said, during his tour in 2015 he let slip to a journalist prior to his gig in Birmingham, “I eat pangolins three times a week. I can’t eat them all so I leave them alive until halfway through and then throw away the rest. Raw pangolin tastes like liquid gold.”
“Alfred Bonar Law was a waste of space. I have artists paint his likeness into mangoes and then I shove my thumb in his eyes for fun.” Referring to Law, the shortest serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century, Morrissey’s arms also went on to question his sexuality and his ability to use a bow and arrow in an interview with Time Magazine in 2005.
A lot of the time the views between left and right arms match. Sometimes though their opinions conflict leading to some dramatic confrontations. When asked by Jonathan Ross to elaborate on his opinions of France, Morrissey’s left arm begin with, “I visit it several times a year. They bring so much to Europe that one cannot underestimate the cultural impact of France, even if most of them smell like dead turds floating in a pool of piss.” The right then barged in, “I want to put all of them in a box and shut the lid using a sharp flamethrower. One time me and Bono got so drunk we steamrolled a village in Cumberland and blamed it on the French.”

The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree and those armpits stink for a reason.

Thanks for watching, feel free to like and subscribe and for all things Morrissey’s arms keep it PB Beans 2020.

Nostalgia – Young Me (and him)

Look at you. How old are you? You’re very old. You have done lots of things in your life and more often than not someone will have been there to make a note of it or possibly take a photo.

Nostalgia is what sells lots of old crap in that you remember how it was “back in the day” and then you want to get that feeling back by, I don’t know, buying your first car again, playing that Atari you had up in your uncle’s loft or investing in Microsoft shares. When I was looking for a photo for my brother I found a few photo albums, most of which were filled with sentimental (i.e. pointless) photos of my bedroom when I was 9 and other guff. I did, however, stumble upon several re-discovered gems of what used to happen when Kev and I, and sometimes Tom, would get whammed.

Now don’t get your hopes up, dear people. If you’re looking for sordid, filthy accounts of unscrupulous behaviour then you’re really on the wrong website (you took a wrong turn at boobpedia.com). What I’m talking are polaroids (easy now) of us all looking young surrounded by drinks bottles and cans. If you ever wanted to know what Kevin looked like with a bog roll on his head, holding one of those plastic separators you get with cans of lager, then you’ve come to the right place. If you were “desperate” to see a photo of me fake passed out on the floor then go no further.

I don’t remember ever looking that young but I know it happened. Here’s the proof: