The most infuriating fruit

The survey results are in. The winner’s name is being carved onto the award. Pomegranate is the most infuriating fruit. It’s a fact. You know it’s true.

Its name is clearly pronounced “pom-e-gran-it” but for some reason it’s spelled with the letters “ate” at the end. Ridiculous.
The outer skin is designed to only come off in a thousand leathery flakes.
The edible bits are approximately one million tiny bloblets of fruit. Before you can eat them you have to excavate them all in a sort of miniature mining project. This takes absolutely forever.
When you eat the edible bits you find that the nice juicy tasty bit takes up only about half of it and the rest is a woody seed that gets stuck in your teeth.
The edible bits are actually called “arils” which is just pretentious. Gaaaaah. I hate it.

On the other hand they do taste nice.

Bad Day

So, after faffing around in the dark for five minutes, I sit down again on the floor and realise I’ve forgotten to get the scissors.

Rewind to five minutes prior to this. At the entrance to the kitchen I forgo turning the lights on, because I’ve lived in the flat over ten years and I know where everything is, and blunder in. In my haste I flap my arms and accidentally knock over the half-filled cup of tea sitting on the side. The tea quickly streams along the kitchen top and filters down through the drawer and the cupboard, before resting peacefully on the floor in a heap. I already feel warm, now my face is positively beaming with embarrassment.

Half an hour prior, Reuben is heading off to bed. As he slips under the covers, I reach over to grab some bags from the floor that need sorting. Something though is amiss; my hands feel wet. I look up and nothing has leaked through the ceiling. “Did you spill your drink?” I ask. “No dad,” he replies. I raise the hand to my nose and sniff. Oh joy, it’s cat piss. The cat has snuck into my room and decided to piss over my stuff, oh, and a brand new pair of school trousers too. Excellent. I’m so glad I had nothing planned for the rest of the evening, now I can put another load of washing to get rid of that oh so beautiful kitty urine aroma. Splendid.

It was not a good day.

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.

This is not breakfast

Most days I have breakfast at home before I go to work. I know how to do breakfast. Make some coffee, put some bread in the toaster. Some days there’s something more interesting like crumpets. Pour a glass of orange juice if there’s time. Any idiot can do breakfast.

Not, it turns out, the people who run the only food outlet in the building where I now work. No, as I descend the marble staircase into the atrium there are inviting smells coming from the cafe, but the company that runs the franchise don’t understand breakfast. The inviting smells will invite you to disaster.

During the day they sell health food. In the morning they sell insults.

Here’s their breakfast menu almost in its entirety:

Ham hock protein pot with poached egg, spinach and chia seeds: £2.35 [this is the size of a yogurt pot]
Scrambled egg protein pot with semi-dried tomato and marinated mushrooms: £3.70
Scrambled egg protein pot with chorizo and avocado: £3.95
Scrambled egg protein pot with Greek-style cheese, herbs and chilli: £3.70
Organic porridge with soya milk: £2.55
Coconut milk porridge with toasted seeds: £2.95
Cherry and pistachio yogurt pot: £2.99
Chia and almond bircher muesli: £2.99

That’s more or less it. There’s no bacon sandwich in there, no egg that is not scrambled, no porridge made with actual milk from a cow. (Fake milk from soya or a coconut does not actually make something that looks or tastes like porridge, it makes sloppy white soup with lumps in. I know because I tried it one hungry morning and it was worse than I could have imagined.) There isn’t anything bread-based, because bread contains wheat and wheat is not healthy. You can have a vegetable smoothie with your breakfast (including kale, cucumber and spinach) but you can’t have a slice of toast with butter.

There isn’t really any point to this beyond the fact that sometimes I get to work early and I want something to eat and when I go downstairs I find nothing but seeds and spinach. It just makes me very upset and very disappointed, and I don’t know how these people can do something like this to a fellow human being. That’s all.

Owl Kitchen. Or not?

When you’re walking around a shop there is a fair amount of pressure. You, as a consumer, need to spend your money otherwise the shop won’t be there anymore. So what will you buy? What wonders would you prefer to spend your hard-earned cash on?

For instance, would you like to buy this?

Now I am all for knick knacks and tat yet I am confused and perturbed as to what this owl wants. Clearly it wants to cook but it can’t spell ‘cook’ so it looks like it is asking for ‘cok’. So is this an owl with poor spelling and grammar? Was it the result of bad education?

Unless its eyes are the o’s but then there’d be three so the item’s message is ‘coook’ which is the kind of enthusiasm I can fully understand. But then why a spoon and a fork? Why is the owl trying to eat a fish when owls don’t eat fish?

I stared for a good five minutes at this the other day and I am still no further forward. Perhaps somebody else might be able to solve the mystery.

I like owls but this just seems wrong.

The problem with peas

Here’s a tragic story. Have a handkerchief handy to soak up your tears.

On Friday I got out my notepad and settled in to pay my fullest attention to Suggs’ 1995 masterpiece, The Lone Ranger. It will be the latest in my increasingly popular series of album reviews for the Beans.

Having made notes on each track, I packed up and set off towards North London to wait for Elena to finish work and so we could set off for the north. I’d be able to make tea and relax. I’d be able to write my album review. Everything would be great.

Unfortunately London had other plans for me. I can only assume that London actively wanted to prevent the world finding out my thoughts on the synth-reggae and two-tone cover versions offered by the former Madness frontman’s mid-nineties cash-in comeback, because it did everything it could to stop me writing that important and informative blog post. My fourteen mile journey took me three hours in the end, leaving me no time for tea, no time for careful musical contemplation and no time to share my thoughts with the world. I also had no time for lunch.

There are several tragic results from this appalling debacle.

You will have to wait until later this month to read my review, which should have been posted in April.
My next two album reviews will have to be delayed by an extra month, which means no Sade until June and no Shaggy until July.
I only made three posts in April which means I broke my long run of consistent four-posts-a-monthing which had run since December 2014 and scored a nasty horrible dried pea on the bean counter which makes me VERY VERY ANGRY INDEED GAAAAAAAHHHHH.

In short: bad traffic makes for very bad apples.

Next time I’ll take the tube.

Modern Life is Confusing

So… there’s nothing quite like the English language. It can manipulated and distorted in so many ways that what it resembles now is completely different to how it was a hundred, fifty, even twenty years ago.

That said, sometimes innovation does not happen overnight. You have to allow it to simmer for a while. It will bubble to the surface to get your attention when it is ready to do so. Don’t rush it, for the love of Buster Keaton! I was recently scouring the internet to look for a birthday present for my godson and instead stumbled over this.

Ladies and gentleman, let me present you with a link to the Animal Pig:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B013PX3XYI

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Animal Pig you should know two important things:

This pig is an animal
This animal is a pig

Note how the two facts are very similar but also very different at the same time. I had gone looking for a present and alternatively received an education in how to refer to modern animals.

Now when I am on my way to a farm I can look forward to seeing the Animal Cows, the Animal Chickens and the Animal Goats. If I’m heading to a zoo I can feast my eyes upon the Animal Elephants, the Animal Giraffes and possibly, if they’re not too busy, the Animal Tigers.

I’m already working on a FUN leaflet for my nieces to explain that we’ve been doing nature all wrong and that we have to shift with the times otherwise we’ll just look simple.

In one sense, why did no-one tell me this sooner?! In another, awww, pigs.

Broken

In the last two weeks, the following things have broken.

My central heating boiler, which was broken for a week
My phone, which had to be sent off for a week and a half
My coffee pot, which still isn’t fixed
My watch, which still isn’t fixed
My iPod, which I had buy parts to fix myself

This has been dispiriting and distressing, and has severely tested my fortitude.

If you are thinking of breaking any of my possessions, or in any way modifying them so that they break in a seemingly accidental way, or if you become aware that one of my possessions may break or suffer a breakage-like incident, please inform me in writing at least two days beforehand so that I can prepare myself mentally and physically.

Thank you.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Annoyed