Category: Absolutely superb

Avatar Perky Nana

The last time I visited home, my brother thrust this into my hand before I left.

“Don’t be leaving without your Perky Nana!” he said with a wistful look and a tear in his eye.

Actually, none of that happened. He did give me a weird chocolate bar and told me to take it home. I did and then I stared at it for a month or so.

It’s an unusual confectionary item; chewy banana filling covered in milk chocolate. I ate it on a particularly warm day so it was even chewier than usual. The filling stretched out like cheese on a pizza. It tasted like foam bananas, a winning flavour in my book but a bit too fake and artificial for some.

I’ve never seen it before. The back of the wrapper had an Australian address on it, so perhaps it’s in every corner shop and supermarket in Canberra. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’ll be a long while before I get another Perky Nana in my mouth (waaaaaaaaay!).

What?

Avatar I did a thing…

I am now officially a graduate!

I’ve done it.

It’s over.

I am finally (legitimately) Kevin Hill: Science Master.

If you had any doubts about how happy I am to see the back of academia (studying, not my job obviously) then check out this image of me after the ceremony a few weeks ago…

This is not the face of a man about to embark on further study.

Dr. Hill? No thanks.

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.