Category: Absolutely superb

Avatar Amphibian/reptile brag

Guess what? My parish has more native species of amphibians and reptiles than yours.

Sometimes when I take the dog out I pass this little statue of a toad, but I hadn’t actually stopped to look at it properly until the other day. It turns out that it relates an important fact about my local area that I didn’t know until now.

The plaque underneath says this.

Whitehill is the only parish in the UK to claim home to all 12 of our native amphibians and reptiles, including this, the rare Natterjack toad. Only 7cm long with a distinctive yellow stripe down its back, it favours sand and heathland and breeds in shallow pools. It eats insects, worms and small reptiles and can live up to an amazing 15 years.

Twelve. Twelve native species of amphibians and reptiles. Your parish certainly has some of them, it might even have quite a lot of them. But it won’t have all twelve. I don’t know why amphibians and reptiles are measured by the parish, which seems an odd choice of geographic area to use for this, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is this.

My parish has more native species of amphibians and reptiles than yours.

In your face, sucker.

Avatar Easter Eggcess

You probably know that, once Easter Sunday is gone, the supermarkets want to ditch their remaining Easter eggs and clear the shelves for something else.

Anyway, it turns out that if you’re a grown up you can do what you want, so on Monday we bought all this.

Then, on Tuesday, we came home to find that each of us had bought some more without mentioning it to the other. So now we have everything you see above, plus three more of the biggest Easter eggs, six more smaller ones, another 16 Creme Eggs, some sort of Creme Egg chocolate bar, quite a lot of Reese’s Eggs, numerous Cadbury’s Caramel eggs and two Toblerone products called Edgy Eggs.

We are now faced with a storage problem that, somehow, neither of us had foreseen.

Anyway, don’t worry too much, we’ll sort it out one way or another.

Avatar Your new favourite blank

Okay, hear me out.

You want to make a statement. You’ve been living in your house for a while now and it’s getting a bit drab. You’re tired of looking at the same old bits of furniture. What you need is a bit of something something to make the living room sparkle.

You need a focal point, a conversation starter, one of those magical items that nobody else has. You need people to walk into your living room or dining room and be so stunned by what’s there that they are putty in your hands.

You can’t buy the kind of shock value this piece will give you. It’s one-of-a-kind, it’s classy and it’s sassy, and it’s in stock right now. I can give you the deets and you can swing by to pick it up in a few hours. You can’t say fairer than that.

Avatar Ian’s holiday snaps – #2

And so it continues.

In Florida there are a lot of gift shops. A LOT. They want all of your disposable income and they will do whatever it takes to get you in their store. A lot of them advertise ridiculous statements such as “gifts as low as $1.99” or “five t-shirts for $9.99” and it’s all lies. You’ll go in to be greeted by five kids t-shirts for $9.99 or the kinds of cheap mugs that not even an auntie with bad eyesight would pick up and consider. All lies.

Initially I ignored these places because I knew what would be inside. Later on I relented for a laugh and, you know what? I was right. Laden with plastics of all shapes and sizes, pirated Disney goods, the kind of nonsense every gift shop has. It was a treasure trove of bobbins.

What made me sit up and notice though were the buildings themselves. Nothing in Florida looks new, in fact everything has this worn out faded murky visage which you get used to after a while.

This shop made me laugh because you notice it straight away and every time I walked past I would think, “mwear!” to myself. The best mwear in all of town. Ladies love top of the line mwear; purchase one today for your gal, fellas!

I also keep saying it in a Matt Berry voice for maximum effect.

Avatar The best home owner job

We talk a lot about what it’s like owning a house. Kev has been renovating and expanding his vast property empire for many years now, of course, while I have been steadily improving our premises with the aid of a toolbox large enough to use as a double garage. Now that Ian has joined the home owner club we have been doing our best to gently and constructively guide him in his new duties.

But I sometimes think that all too often we discuss the downsides: the amount of maintenance work, the unexpected costs, the speed with which nature will reclaim your carefully tended garden as wilderness. So I thought it might be nice to talk about the good bits of owning a house, because some of the things an Englishman has to do to look after his castle are actually very satisfying.

I will open the bidding with pressure washing.

Pressure washing is brilliant.

I love my pressure washer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t taken it out for a spin for about 18 months. Then, the other day, we’d had a drain unblocked and the drainage gully running through the paving down the side of the house needed clearing of all the crap that had built up, so I got the Kärcher out of the garage and fired it up. And once it was out, that was me set for the afternoon. Everything got jet washed.

The best part was discovering that the paving stones around the front and side of the house actually have a colour, as pictured above. I spent a very happy hour effectively colouring them in.

Avatar Ian’s holiday snaps – #1

The best part of being on holiday is taking photos of things that people have zero interest in and then forcing them to look at them once you get home. It’s a legitimate way of being annoying because they instinctively want to know about your time away and you can show them through 10,000 photos of a camel.

Not that I’m on holiday with a camel. Far from it, me ‘n’ the V have been sunning it in Florida for almost two weeks. We’ve done a lot of walking, I’ve drank dozens of watered down sodas and eaten my way through many burgers, tasty barbecue ribs and steaks.

I thought it best to ease you into the holiday snaps with a couple of posts, tossed off in my quieter moments, showing all the excitement of Orlando.

First up is this one. This is a fantastic photo of me emerging from the 7/11 with my Frosty blue ice thing. It was a hot day and I needed some cool refreshment. To my delight, this only cost a dollar for some reason (it was advertised as costing more) so I had to capitalise on the moment. I was on my way to pick up lunch from Subway, a blinding buy one footlong and get another free offer which we used several times. That was a good day.

Avatar Pump up the jam (in your face)

Do you like jams?

Do you like plums?

Do you like plummy jams? Then we’ve got the product for you!

‘KEV’S PLUM PRESERVE’ is a brand new treat that you and your family can enjoy all day, every day. We’ve taken the sweet, tempting taste of jam and slathered that (using a spoon) all over the best kind of fruit you can imagine, plums!

Spread it on parsnips, spread it on shepherd’s pie. Spread it on Bird’s Eye Potato Waffles, frozen pineapple chunks or a spicy and fragrant Nepalese Kukhurko Masu curry. You can even spread it on your hands.

Put a party on your tastebuds. Slam your plums on the table. Bring your miserable life to life with ‘KEV’S PLUM PRESERVE’!

(From Kev Inc., a subsidiary of Kevindo Menendez Food Conglomerate Holdings Plc).

Avatar Album release

It’s finally here – just in time for Christmas! Place your order now for the musical sensation of the decade. It’s the greatest hits of Shoe and Bin!

Featuring all those toe-tapping classics:

  • It Must Have Bin Love
  • It Had to be Shoe
  • Shoe Can’t Hurry Love
  • It’s a Bin
  • I Wanna Sex Shoe Up
  • Bin Around the World
  • Shoe Spin Me Round (Like a Record)
  • Can’t Get Shoe Out Of My Head
  • Working My Way Back to Shoe
  • Since Shoe’ve Bin Gone
  • Shaddap Shoe Face

…and many, many more!

Place your order now, and feel free to let us know what your favourite Shoe And Bin songs are in the comments.