Old tat? Yes please!

How are you for gravel? Got enough?

Are you looking for a beautiful hand-made gift for a loved one?

Are you craving some more bits to fill up your cupboards, drawers and/or shed?

Free and affordable items are few and far between these days. Luckily there are mega chads still out there willing to part with their prized possessions for next to nothing, and sometimes nothing.

My local Facebook group has never let me down. Let me show you some of the treasures that have come up over the last month:

My favourite, by a mile and a half, has the be the one below because it makes me smile so much. I burst out laughing the first time I saw it:

The words, “whatever you see them as” will forever send me into tiny giggles. I’m considering writing them on the wall in the living room; it’s the new ‘live laugh love’.

Take a look at YOUR local Facebook group. Perhaps YOU’LL find something too.

Big Ian

We all know how slow bureaucracy can be. Fill in the forms and wait years for action. Call every day only to be put on hold with no explanation. But eventually it all pays off.

We all know that fathers of grown ups are Big. Our lives have been overseen by these titans of parenthood. But one among us has reached this status for themselves, and now – despite cutbacks in the civil service and the lack of urgency in the postal system – his official certificate has arrived.

It’s time for us to acknowledge Big Ian.

Newsboost – All is well in Benwell

Shock news today as an area in the North East of England has been crowned the World Health Organisation’s top place for mental health.

Benwell, an area in the West end of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, has been given the accolade by the WHO after it was voted the best place to improve your sense of well-being, but it wasn’t an easy ride and did involve a drastic last minute name change.

“First impressions are everything and Benwell has been giving out the wrong kind for years now,” says local councillor Felicity Dropping. “We decided that it was time for a change and so some of the local school children suggested changing the name. All it took was erasing one letter. It certainly saved a lot of money when updating all the nearby signs.”

Benwell, now christened Be Well, has had a flurry of tourists visiting the area since the name change.

“It’s amazing how drastically everything has changed. We weren’t even trying for any kind of award. We used to be known for our crime statistics and now we’re known for our easy going nature and herbal teas.”

The place has seen a 700% rise in tourism since the name change, an unprecedented amount all things considered. This has mostly been Europeans, with a huge collection of Danish shoe makers flooding the town. The Local Authority are also looking to invest in the area to capitalise on this good will.

“We’re hoping Starbucks are going to build one of their drive through coffee shops, that will really add a touch of class,” Felicity continued, “we’ve also seen interest from McDonalds, McVitties and Donald’s dodecahedrons. Its such an exciting time for everyone involved.”

Only time will tell if Be Well will stay well.

A thing you should watch

Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun watching Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, which is on iPlayer and I think BBC3. It’s an Australian panel show and it’s really silly. (Guy Montgomery is a New Zealander, and I think it’s run in NZ for several series already, but only the Aussie version is on iPlayer.) It’s genuinely great.

Guy Montgomery clearly knows how dumb the show is and can’t hide how much his stupid jokes and tasks make him laugh, which I find very funny. His assistant is Aaron Chen (I’ve seen him before in Fisk, which you should check out too, it’s a very dry Australian sitcom that we blasted through in no time), who brings an enormous amount of awkwardness to everything he does.

If you need an explanation to get you started, it’s nominally a spelling competition where the guests have to spell words to earn points. But the rounds are all different every time, they’re all enjoyably stupid (spell your hat, spell the name of the random audience member, spell the celebrity name while doing an impression of the celebrity) and some are explicitly designed to give the guests a really hard time (spell the ethnicity of the mystery guest). I don’t know who the guests are, with the exception of Tim Minchin, but that doesn’t seem to matter. They’re just comedians falling into elaborately built spelling traps.

Please enjoy this thing I have also enjoyed. Thank you.

We are all last minuters

You run a remarkably successful (?) website. You need to come up with content every single month to entertain the millions (?) of punters who keep turning up for laughs (?).

Okay, I’ll stop there.

If you ever needed proof that despite our best intentions, we all normally earn a bean by scraping something up on the last day of the month then here it is:

I did a screenshot with an even longer list but I think I may have deleted it and/or it got lost in the hundreds of baby orb photos I’ve taken since September.

Hey, we’re all human. Coming up with new and entertaining ideas is hard when you lead such busy lifestyles such as ourselves. I’m not going to beat myself up over something as trivial as this. I’m going to listen to the weird whistling sound the radiator in the dining room makes now that we’ve had a new boiler installed and smile.

Calendar expansion pack delivery

The unprecedented girth of this year’s Pouring Beans Calendar has caused many of us difficulty, as we found that only eleven months would fit into the calendar’s patented display case. Thankfully, help is now at hand.

Your delivery of an official Pouring Beans Calendar Patented Display Case Expansion Pack Deluxe™ will take place shortly, and provides more space than is required even for the 2026 Calendar’s pages, which are printed on the same stuff they use for invitations to a coronation.

You will shortly receive:

2x Brick Corner 1x2x2, white

2x Brick 1×6, white

3x Brick 1×8, white

You will additionally receive any nitrile O-rings (20mm diameter) that you may have previously requested as part of the same package.

We recommend inserting these pieces as a new layer in the Display Case, and removing one layer of flat pieces, to obtain the optimum space for your 2026 Calendar. The additional pieces may be stored on the back of the Display Case and brought back into use in future years if Phil at work decides to order even more absurdly luxurious paper than this. However, we are now confident that, whatever arrangement you decide to settle upon, your Display Case is now capable of adapting to any calendar thickness eventuality.

Yours sincerely,

The Pouring Beans Calendar Customer Fulfilment Team

2026 State of the Beans Address

Good evening, and… can you hear me? Sorry, I thought I was muted. Good evening, and thank you for joining me via this video link. I am currently inside the crater of an active volcano and therefore unable to join you in person, but I trust that the pub function room is comfortable and that the buffet of assorted crisps and corn-based snack foods are going down well.

My name is His Holy Eminence The Right Honourable Lieutenant Colonel Professor Lord Sir Elbert Louche, QC (Retired), KBE (Retired, Reinstated), KVCO. It is my great pleasure to have the honour of presenting this, the twelfth annual State of the Beans Address.

Nearly New Year’s Eve honour list

In typical fashion, there needed to one of these.

Ending a year comes with all kinds of lists. Best this, worst that, how much money did that lose etc. I am no different. I am the best and worst of me, and I personally lost a ton of money at the box office. Over seven hundred million at my last count. Atrocious.

There are so many people and THINGS to thank that there isn’t enough time in the day to get through them all. There’s barely enough time to write this between bottle feeds and nappy changes, so here’s a brief list of thanks to those that deserve it most:

Vikki – though the majority of this list will be played for “laughs”, a heartfelt moment if you please. I couldn’t have gotten through this year without my better half. She’s the only person I know daft enough to get pregnant, then fly halfway round the world to Florida so she couldn’t go on any of the rides at Disney World. A true stalwart if ever I saw one.
My shoulders – me, as a whole, does not deserve to be on this list. I was clumsy before and have only gotten worse in these last few months. The MVP though goes to my shoulders who have rocked a little orb to sleep on a daily basis, sometimes carrying him for up to an hour. The other limbs were helping but without the shoulders they would never have gotten this far. I will be forever grateful.
Ice Cube – if you havent yet watched the sensational piss fire that is Amazon’s ‘War of the worlds’ then I recommend you put down this website and head straight to a device that can stream it. The most bizarre adaptation of HG Wells you’ve ever seen, it’s two hours of watching a man (ye man, Ice Cube) flounder at a computer screen in an un-ironic fashion AND a fully fledged advertisement for Amazon itself. You have to see it to believe something so purely wank can exist.
Support bands – wandering the outer echelons of my mind whilst trying to rock a tiny orb to sleep, I drifted far off into the ‘I’ll do anything to stay awake right now’ category and came across support bands. The amount I must have seen back in my 20s and 30s must be lots (there are no concrete numbers here, people). Mostly unseen and unappreciated, not all of them went onto bigger and better things. Still, they’re usually there playing to 5 people like they’re on Wembley stadium and to that I salute you, support bands, and your continued enthusiasm.
The Prep Machine – we started off with a kettle (about 30 mins), then we moved to portable formula feed kit (used incorrectly 12 mins, used correctly 2 to 3 mins) and lastly settled on a prep machine. Though I was skeptical at first, especially considering the price, it has reduced making a safe bottle of milk for the lad to around 90 seconds. It is one of the most useful pieces of kit you can have with a newborn orb. Convenience is a luxury and I am glad we have it instead of being screamed at constantly until the food is ready. Bless you.

All of those that didn’t make the list, don’t feel bad. Try harder next time. Do better, yeah?

Thank you one and all.