Category: Charming Pastimes

Avatar Chris can’t organise a village fête

Someone had to say something.

There we are, having a good ole friendly chat at the Winston when this Chris guy starts talking about some formal occasion he’s organising. Nice one, right?

Wrong. He’s got it all wrong. What should be an easy win with an open goal turns into an own goal which smells of bad eggs and then renames all the roads in England and Wales without telling him, and they’re super silly names too that you’ll never remember.

I get the impression he’s never been to a village fête, let alone sorted one out. Here’s all the information we have so far:

What he does have:

  • A carousel
  • A big event (possibly involving cars)
  • Everyone turning up in formal dress

What he doesn’t have:

  • A craft tent full of bickering old ladies
  • A white elephant stall selling all the piddling crap people got for Christmas that were too embarrassed to drop off at a charity shop
  • A man with a laser who loves lasering names into pieces of wood, metal and any other material that’s safe for his laser
  • Whack-a-rat (sometimes known as ‘Splat the rat’)
  • A cake stall where someone has mislabelled the prices so a full fruitcake is 99p but a single scone is £4.99
  • An announcer who is so muffled by feedback nobody can tell what he or she is saying
  • Terrible weather halfway through that clears up after 8 minutes, giving all the old people something to talk about for the rest of the afternoon

As you can see, there’s a lot of work that needs doing in a very short period of time. I’m also sure I’ve missed a few obvious ones there.

I would recommend the services of Kevin “been doing this 30 years, bruh” Hill because he’s been, well, you probably get the jist. The experience and expertise he can bring will be invaluable and will ensure that Chris and his village fête are quintessentially perfect in the eyes of everyone who attends. The eyes are all that matter.

I’ll bring a bag of pennies and the overwhelming optimism of a man who hasn’t watched the news for two decades.

Avatar Am I losing my mind?

There I was, aimlessly looking at my Facebook account.

Do you remember how much you faffed about with Facebook when you first got it? Adding in all your likes, favourite bands and films, trying to find people you used to go to school with and sending them a friend request. Poking, apparently, still exists. You can still poke people even now and a lot of people I know are still poking each other (waaaaaay!) so that’s good to know. It was all pretty pointless.

I still get notifications of memories of things and a lot of them are random statuses I typed trying to be funny and failing miserably. Sometimes they’re photos of Reuben or silly things he said as a tiny baby orb. Today was slightly different.

I was linked to something I’d written circa 2008. A short script for something called ‘Cockitt and Pullit’. This was episode two so I must have been on a roll. I glanced briefly at the script before my current orb needed something and I had to switch it off, and made a note in my head to come back later on for a proper read.

I tried to look it up now and it’s gone. The memories have moved onto something else. I sifted through all the various (mostly pointless) pages trying to find where it could be hiding. I’m convinced there used to be a kind of notebook where you could write and store things. Wherever that is hiding must have my scripts for whatever this Cockitt and Pullit thing.

It was a cop drama, probably stupid as we all know the kind of humour 2008 Ian was packing. I’d completely forgotten I’d written them and for now they remain unseen by my judgemental eyes. I’m sure they’re not worth the paper they’re written on, yet if they’re part of my legacy I want them back for future generations to, well, to have.

Except… it’s not mine. If you Google it apparently it was Chris Moyles’ idea, which makes me even more confused. There are references to it in his blog from around the same time. Now I feel like I’m completely losing my mind and I made the whole thing up.

Sometimes remembering isn’t fun.

Avatar Are you sure about that?

Picture the scene.

It’s the year 2034. The future is finally here. All those exciting opportunities you’ve been waiting for are finally at your fingertips.

You’ve decided that now is the time to open that restaurant of your own you’ve been dreaming of. Years of working in menial jobs for awful bosses. You’ve saved some money, not enough to buy a business but for a deposit to convince the bank to loan you the rest to get you started.

You scout out a great location in and up and coming area. Plenty of footfall to ensure a healthy turn out in that first shaky year or two. Once the word gets out though you know you’ll have to turn people away, you’ll be that popular. You’ve got a killer menu lined up, stuff that people have never considered before, and you’ve also got the talent to back it up.

Everything is in place. Now, all you need is a memorable name to seal the deal in a wigwam.

Avatar 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.

Avatar Can we be serious, please?

I need you to all listen to me very carefully when I say this. I am deadly serious.

I need you to understand that there is a time for nonsense and there is also a time for being serious. I am the most serious I’ve ever been without crossing that line and turning into Serious Ian again (nobody wants that).

If we’re to start this new year fresh then you’re all going to have to give me enough time to eat my oranges.

I don’t want to hear your excuses. I don’t want you running into my house with whatever gibberish you need to tell me; it can wait. I need to take some time to eat my oranges.

Whatever you need to tell me, put a pin it in and try me the next day. Whatever job needs doing, you’re going to have to give me some extra time to get it finished. I’ve got oranges to eat and I won’t let anyone get in my way.

There. I’ve said it. Don’t get upset because I’m telling everyone the same thing. My oranges come first.

Avatar ‘Frog Detective: the entire mystery’ – mini review

Before the time comes when I have to (metaphorically) throw all of my interests into the loft because of the upcoming childingtons, you won’t be too surprised to note that I have been playing video games.

A lot of video games. I have been pursuing a life of video games because what else would you do in your early forties? Build a shop? Eat some yeast and submit a two star review as it, “wasn’t what you expected it to be”? Complain about the diversity of umbrellas? Take up yodelling? I don’t want to do any of that.

What I want is to live out my dreams of being a detective. I want to solve crimes and make a name for myself without leaving the sofa. Thankfully, there are now a multitude of games that allow you to do that. I chose ‘Frog Detective’ because I had heard it was funny and it was short.

You play as the titular Frog Detective, the second best detective in the land, second best to Lobster Cop. He’s a very busy boy and currently at the top so you’re doing your best to keep up. What follows is three very short vignettes where you “solve” three very short crimes. The reason that important word is in inverted commas is because there’s not really a lot to solve.

The game is played in first person. When you speak to other characters in the game, the camera zooms back to a third person perspective. You get given the case when the supervisor, travel to where you need to and start interviewing everyone. It’s not a game to be taken seriously in the slightest. You’re not a hard-boiled gumshoe here, you’re a happy-go-lucky frog with a magnifying glass. All you need to do is keep talking to people to find out what they want and then go get the item they need. It’s more of a fun fetch quest simulator than anything else.

Luckily, the quality of the writing is what saves the game from being forgettable shovelware. Everyone is a weirdo. You get an intro which shows you all the characters you’ll be meeting when you start the episode. You’ll meet a sloth who is convinced his island is haunted by ghosts, an invisible wizard whose celebrations have been wrecked by an unknown menace and a supposedly sheriff-less town that’s hiding a terrible secret. Every character has an unusual quirk which results in conversations that go places you’re not expecting. At one point I had to find out which kind of dancing a monkey preferred so I could tell the person that fancied her this important fact so they could impress her at a contest. I found an (I think) antelope floating in a hot tub who demanded some food and when I tried to give him the pie I found on the floor he insisted on having a fresh one. When you write it down it sounds like nonsense, and also when it plays out in front of you it’s also complete nonsense.

You can finish all three episodes in under two and a half hours. At the end there’s a secret sneaky bonus game that you unlock which is fun for a while. It’s a very simple game at heart; you won’t find any mind-bending puzzles from the likes of ‘Broken Sword’, ‘Monkey Island’ or ‘Grim Fandango’ here (I know I made the same point in my ‘Lord Winklebottom Investigates’ review but they’re the most recent point-and-click games I’ve played).

If you see it on sale then I would thoroughly recommend it because it’s very silly and guaranteed to make you laugh.

Avatar Will I Think of You?

That’s a bit of a loaded question if ever I heard one.

Will you think of me? It depends on what kind of thoughts you have there. If they’re going to get weird and sordid then I’d rather you didn’t. You can keep me away from your dirty mind.

I found this book in a glass cabinet denoting that it is better / rarer than most of the other books in the shop. Notice how young Leonard Nimoy looks on the front, coupled with his description as, “one of the shining stars of Star Trek” and you can gather this book is surely somewhere close to 60 years old.

As it was placed away from general viewing, it meant that I didn’t get to read the shimmering words and haunting images of old Spock. I’m sure they were very deep and meaningful, more than I could ever write anyway.

Avatar Wang Four Stars

Years ago I used to sometimes get the train home from Blackfriars station. This was around the time they were just starting the process of completely rebuilding it, and one of the first things they did was take the light-up advertising poster frames off the walls. Behind them were lots of paper posters, presumably the last ones to be put up before the frames went in. They all seemed to date from the late 1980s.

There was all sorts of old advertising on display, some older than others, but this one caught my eye. It’s for an event called Wang Four Stars.

Yes, charity was the winner back in June 1988 at this event hosted by Jimmy Tarbuck and Terry Wogan, and sponsored by, er, Wang.

Presumably large numbers of people were expected to make the journey to Moor Park to watch celebrities play a round of golf. Maybe there wasn’t much to do in 1988. Other big names teeing off for a good cause included Cliff Thorburn, Sean Connery, Kevin Keegan, Russ Abbot and Shakin’ Stevens.

The poster is at pains to point out that there will be professional golfers, leading “personalities” and excellent catering facilities.

And, as it also makes clear, it’s all thanks to Wang.