Things not to do

In the last 24 hours I have learned a lot. Here are some things you should not do.

When making a very short journey of just a few minutes in your car, don’t empty your pockets in the normal way, placing your wallet, phone and keys into the space below the radio. You might forget them when you get out.
Don’t time your journey to arrive at your destination – for example, a garage where you’re leaving it overnight because it’s booked in for some work in the morning – eight minutes before they close.
In your rush to get through the door and hand them your car key, don’t forget to take everything you need. For example, when you’ve picked up your wallet and phone and put them back in your pockets, don’t forget to have a look and see if your house keys are still in the car before you get out and lock it.
Don’t wait until you’ve made a 25 minute journey home (including some walking, some waiting for the bus and some sitting on the bus) before looking for your house keys. If you wait that long you will only realise you haven’t got them when you’re standing outside the building where you live and you’re unable to get into it.
Don’t make a 25 minute journey back to a now-closed garage (for example, it’s just an example) because when you get there you will find that your car has been helpfully moved by one of their staff inside a gated and locked compound, and is now tantalisingly visible but completely inaccessible behind an eight foot metal gate with spikes on. If you happened to leave, I don’t know, your house keys in it, you will not be able to get them.
If you decide to ignore this advice, and you are welcome to do that if you want, then at least heed this warning: don’t do all the things above on the one night in several months when your flatmate is three hours away seeing his family and there is nobody at home who can let you in.

If there are any more things you should not do, please rest assured I will end up inadvertently doing them at some point, and I will come back and let you know about them so you don’t have to do them yourself.

Thanks.

The Joy of Corners

Do you like corners? Do you need more corners in your life? Do you find it hard making very simple decisions?

What you need is Cornercopia!

Hi, I’m Conrad Bundleg and I own Cornercopia, the North-West’s largest supplier of corners in the UK.

We’ve been selling corners for the last twenty years so if you require corners you need to come to us.

We’ve got paper corners, cardboard corners, metal corners, futon corners. We’ve got black corners, yellow corners, blue corners, multi-coloured corners. We’ve got corners for your house, corners for your work, even corners… for your corners!

Someone else may have invented the corner but here at Cornercopia we’ve mastered it.

Cornercopia, on the Bluecoat roundabout just south of Blackpool. You can’t miss us!

The brick

Recently I moved into a new flat, as described earlier. It’s nice. It’s got bedrooms and a kitchen and a balcony and some toilets and all that sort of thing.

Next to the front door, out in the hallway, it’s got a brick.

The brick is painted yellow.

The brick is mounted on canvas.

The brick is inside a perspex display case.

When you look down the hall, every flat has a yellow brick in a perspex display case to the left of the front door. We asked the landlord (who owns the building) why this might be the case. They said they weren’t sure, and they said it might be an artistic thing, and they said they think the flat number might be painted on it.

The flat number isn’t painted on it.

It’s just a brick.

How much stuff I own

Moving house is many things, principal among them a pain in the arse. But it is also a golden opportunity to put everything you own in one place and see how much of it there is.

On Friday, I took this van (with exciting tail lift on which I rode up and down a number of times):

I then inserted into it all my shite:

The amount of stuff I own is therefore precisely the amount of stuff you see above, plus the clothes I was wearing and a Peugeot 207.

I hope this has been as informative and satisfying for you as it has been for me.

Northwards

We all knew it would happen one day, and now it has. I am moving to the North.

Not the North of England, of course. No. Don’t be silly. The commute would be interminable. No, “the North” clearly means “North London”, as anyone safely cushioned within London’s self-obsessed bubble will tell you.

This important change will bring a number of new and exciting features to my life.

I will be commuting to work on a London Tubular Train (described previously on the Beans here, in case you are not familiar with this novel mode of transport).
I will be living in a district of London known as “Ruislip”, which is a complete mystery to me apart from being the setting of every single domestic sitcom of the 1970s. I will therefore be mostly wearing beige flares and a pudding bowl haircut upon moving, and will likely make borderline racist double entendres towards my neighbours to a soundtrack of slide whistles and canned laughter.
I will be closer to the actual North of England than before and reaching me from the outside world will involve significantly less time hacking through the impenetrable jungle of London.
I will no longer have a toilet in every room. (This will be inconvenient but I will have to get used to it.)

I await your warm congratulations on this momentous news, but am realistic about the fact that the state of the Beans lately means I’m basically talking to myself here.

Frankenstein’s sideboard

If you read the papers you’ll already know that Kevindo Menendez – now properly styled Lord Chang of Micklefield – recently sold his former home, a palatial residence that he had spent most of his life enlarging and expanding to a size copiously documented here in the past.

A property of that magnitude, crossing numerous county and parish borders and easily visible from space, naturally fetches a handsome price, and so the estate he has now purchased with the proceeds is one of the largest in the world. I understand it has its own representation at the UN and is a member of NATO.

I was recently offered the privilege of visiting this magnificent residence where I helped Chang himself assemble new furniture.

Ikea do not sell furniture even nearly big enough for this new house, and their normal wares would look like miniature dolls house furniture in its cavernous rooms. That’s why we took several flat-pack kits and re-engineered them to build this behemoth.

The people from Guinness have not yet visited – or rather, to be strictly accurate, they came as soon as we called but they are still travelling up the driveway and are due to arrive a week on Thursday. But we fully expect this unprecedented masterpiece of joinery will be officially confirmed as the largest sideboard in the Western Hemisphere when they finally see it.

Not What You Think

Look at this:

What you’re looking at is a blackboard located at my local IKEA which I recently visited. Now I am mostly an open-minded person but I am quite averse to worshiping characters of any kind, whether religious, fictional, good or evil, when I am browsing home furnishings.

I can only imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue if someone got down on their knees and started to worship a fallen angel near the sofa department. That I do not want. If I am going to spend two hours of my life on a Saturday afternoon slowly walking around the various sections of IKEA I would rather try to avoid a small group of people clustered around a statue or photo, with fire in their eyes, bowing up and down.

Luckily for me, they were done by the time I passed.

Do yourself a favour; steer clear of furniture-loving Satanists.

The Cheek of It

This completely took me by surprise!

Now I am used to receiving abuse from family members, close friends, clients, the general public and the occasional letters through the post, but this is a new low. I was recently walking past a new development of houses and what did greet me upon turning my viewing eyes to the right? A sign in the window as above.

It would appear as though property is now turning its attention to me. I do not know what in particular it had against me and my award-winning personality and, quite frankly, I do not care either. I just wanted to make sure that this issue is brought to light so that others do not suffer in silence.

Thank you.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Abodes