Category: Beans

Avatar 2025 State of the Beans Address

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining me once again. Please can I ask that you all turn off the bubble jets on your personal jaccuzis until we reach the end of the Q&A session, since the noise makes it difficult to hear the PA system.

My name is His Holiness The Right Honourable Sergeant-Major Professor Lord Sir Elbert Louche, QC (Retired), KBE (Retired), KVCO. It is my personal privilege to welcome you to this large field on the outskirts of Hull that has been filled with jaccuzis and burger vans for this, the eleventh annual State of the Beans Address.

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Avatar Suggested new slogan

Ten years ago, when the New Beans was still new, we had a discussion about a marketing slogan for the website. Eventually we settled on Pouring Beans: The Thinking Man’s Casserole which adorns all of our advertising to this day.

Since then a whole decade has gone by, and I wonder if it’s time for a new slogan to appeal to the world of 2024. Until recently I wasn’t sure what I could ever suggest that would beat the current one, but a visit to a coffee shop bathroom in London last week gave me the answer.

One Team. One Pream. We.

Avatar Subscribe to Beans Premium

Here at Pouring Beans, we love to provide you with precisely eight fresh, innovative and exciting blog posts every month. But if you like what we do, you should consider signing up to our new subscriber-level service, Beans Premium.

Pledging a monthly subscription fee will help to cover the costs of running an international media operation on this scale and will make sure we can avoid doing proper jobs and instead concentrate on providing this ridiculous service to you. Plus we’ll make sure you get lots of exclusives, behind-the-scenes access, and the chance to buy merch from our members-only merch store!

Members of Beans Premium can choose from three membership reward tiers depending on their available disposable income.

For just £9.99 a month, you can join the Economy Baked Bean Tier. Just for signing up we’ll send you a three-line email that says “thanks” in a fairly offhand way, and you’ll immediately gain access to the members-only merch zone where you can buy limited edition t-shirts with Chris’s face covering the entire front and/or back. They’re potentially worth thousands of pounds, if they ever become rare and sought-after, but you can get hold of them for just £89.99 plus tax, shipping and booking fees.

If that’s not enough, £19.99 a month will admit you to the Brand Name Baked Bean Tier. BNBBT members get all the benefits of Economy membership, plus they get to see exclusive members-only blog posts (one per year guaranteed). You’ll also get access to a form where you can send emails direct to Kev so you can send him repeated abusive messages asking when he’s going to put another podcast episode up.

The real Beans fans will settle for nothing less than the Upmarket Supermarket Premium Own Brand Bean Tier. A monthly subscription of just £99.99 a month will get you all the benefits enjoyed by the skinflint plebs on the lower tiers, plus you’ll get access to a 24/7 livestream of Chris’s doorbell camera, an annual electronic download of the previous year’s desktop calendar, and a one month free trial membership of the Britannia Music Club.

If you really care, and you really want to support the amazing work we do, then we recommend going all out on the Artisan Handmade Gourmet Baked Bean Experience Tier, which costs just £999.99 a month. You’ll enjoy all the benefits of the other tiers, which are for idiots, plus you can access Ian’s OnlyFans page where he chats with his fans and posts intimate pictures of obscure Japanese tat wrapped in cellophane. And just for signing up we’ll also send you an exclusive medallion on a ribbon, that you can wear like an actual winner, that says “Pouring Beans Superfan” on one side and “If I really cared I’d pay my monthly subscription and also send them some extra money as well” on the other.

Your support means everything to us – we couldn’t do what we do without you. So please do contribute whatever you have – all of whatever you have, ideally – and give yourself the gift of Beans Premium. Life isn’t worth living without it. Sign up now!

Avatar 1000

This is the thousandth post on the New Beans.

Here are some other things where I have racked up achievements in the thousands.

1000 days

I notched up my thousandth day on Sunday 1 February 1987. On the same day, Danielle Steele published her 21st novel, “Fine Things”, and the song I Knew You Were Waiting for Me by George Michael and Aretha Franklin was number 1 in the charts.

1000 weeks

My thousandth week began on Monday 7 July 2003, a day when I would almost certainly have been in a stuffy office on the top floor of the EC Stoner Building at the University of Leeds, filing away human resources files on staff pay adjustments. On my desk would have been a glass of squash, because I didn’t do hot drinks in those days, so I’d keep a bottle of squash in my desk drawer, and I had a red stripey glass to drink it from. Since I moved to university later that year the red stripey glass became my pen pot, and it still is now.

1000 geeky forum posts

I’ve been part of SABRE, the society for people who share my problem, for more than 23 years, and have made nearly 16,000 forum posts there.

My thousandth post was made on 17 August 2003. It says:

I fell today and may have sprained my right hand – suffice to say I’m typing this left handed, very slowly.

I’ll reply as soon as I can!

1000 comments

It took me two and a half years to clock up 1000 comments on the New Beans. My thousandth is this one from May 2016.

Is the Cromulet in north London? I don’t understand.

Chris5156, 13/05/2016 at 13:47

Avatar A Brave Old Beans

This scarcely seems believable, but it’s true: the first post on this incarnation of the Beans was made ten years ago today when Kev published A Brave New Beans. I still think of this as the “new” Pouring Beans, but it’s been running nearly twice as long as the original. This blog, and all it contains, now forms a record of the whole of our thirties.

Anyway, I wanted to make a post marking this slightly unbelievable milestone, so I have taken my inspiration from Kev’s original post. His “A Brave New Beans” was just a test to make sure everything was set up, and it just contains the word “words” repeated 127 times (I counted). So let’s see how many words we have produced in ten years.

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Avatar 2024 State of the Beans Address

Good morning. Thank you for joining me. It’s wonderful that so many of you have made the journey to be with us today here at the Hollywood Bowl. My name is His Holiness The Honourable Sergeant-Major Professor Lord Sir Elbert Louche, KBE, QC (Retired). I hope you agree that the trip to Los Angeles has been worth it, and I’d like to confirm at the outset that we are unable to reimburse your air fares.

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Avatar Where has Kev been?

You know the deal, I disappear for a while, then I come back full of beans then disappear again. Its a story as old as time. Well this time you may be forgive for thinking that I’d just been too busy doing a masters degree or looking after kids or some other made up nonsense, well no. Not this time.

For the last 5 and a bit months I have in fact been trapped down the character hatch. I know, I know, you’ve both told me to leave it shut, but sometimes the curiosity gets too much for me.

Now those of you with a keen memory may remember the last time I went down there, got stuck and was abandoned by Ian who was too busy demanding ham I had no means to provide. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but no. I opened the hatch (with a pack of ham in my bag just in case) and sank down into the Old Beans.

I spent a few hours wandering through the ornamental gardens, had a picnic by the Zorse monument and whiled away another hour or two doing a sketch of the bell tower in charcoal. The tower’s looking in quite bad shape these days, and you can just make out the corpse of a recently deceased zorse leaning against a wall.

Anyhow, I was just about to come back home when I heard that sound… you know the one… The sound of moody guitars, breaking glass and arty poetry that could only mean… Pete Doherty. He spotted me immediately, he had the mad faraway glint in his eye of a man who’d been forced to exclusively eat zorse meat for 13 years, and he was pissed. In both senses. I think he’d worked out how to distill zorse piss into a kind of hooch. Anyway after chasing me round the great hall, the gardens, across the old Loinsford campus and back to the clock tower he eventually caught me and pressganged me into forming a new band with him and doing a tour of the forbidden lands, (the Cockall Archives, the Saint Kingdom and the Savannah of in-jokes).

The band was just us two, and all I could play was the recorder and the demo button on the keyboard. It was awful. Pete wrote some witty satirical lyrics about Ian’s love of ham and the fall of Chris Industries, and off we went. We played 700 gigs, mostly to empty rooms. Occasionally the zorses would come by, and then quickly leave, but mostly to empty rooms.

For whatever reason, when we returned, Doherty was sated. His anger subsided, the punching stopped and he just wandered off into the mist surrounding in the Loosh Vestibule. I was free. I made my escape and resealed the hatch. I’ve learned my lesson (for now), and I’m back. Hopefully.