Tiny pig

Having recently been tasked with trying to find more photos for the upcoming 2024 Pouring Beans calendar, I was looking through the various photos on my phone in the hopes of locating the ones of the boxes I used to keep in the corner of my bedroom that were riddled with various quips, zingers and bizarre things written down during phone calls from over a decade ago. Needless to say, the search is currently ongoing (although the boxes may be hiding in the one cupboard in my flat).

As I flicked through the many, many pictures in my possession I came across a series involving a tiny toy guinea pig. These clearly were taken by one or all three of my nieces and transferred via the usual means of Whatsapp. I definitely do not own a tiny guinea pig and did not spend time putting them in hilarious places so that I could take photographs to mark the occasion. We’ve all met me, right? It is the kind of thing I could potentially do, I’ll admit, however this time I am not the culprit.

Given that everyone absolutely loves the PicCollages that I make, I have decided to make a PicCollage to collect the best of the six in my camera reel. Suck deep and bathe, my friends.

Chair finder

The sun was out. The weather was fine. What a lovely day for a drive (and various other old man things).

As I pondered these thoughts my eyes started scanning the horizon line for something to catch my attention. There’s always something out there:

Simply Dutch – the home furniture shop in Northallerton that I always see when driving home to Leeds and still in 2023 have yet to visit (possibly always has a sale)
The Amazon Depot (around the County Durham area on the A1) – you can see it a mile away, the greyest, dullest building you’ve ever seen. It’s about as fun-looking as a machete through the face
Any sign with the village name ‘Shilbottle’ on it – if you know, you know

I was almost home driving North on the A1 when I came across a sign that I hadn’t seen before. There was no chance for me to take a photo so I made a mental note of the name and decided to come back to it later.

When later came about, after putting it to the back of my mind, I decided to see if I could find it. I expected to have it buried under a bunch of similar-sounding business names or other things. It shows what I know. Top o’ the list it was:

Chairs – Chair Finder

Chair Finder is an antiques store in Durham (and to a lessor extent London). They believe every chair as its own character and story to tell. They also have a range of curated interior pieces that they find along the way and simply cannot resist. Not only can you peruse a bunch of chairs but you can also get your nose into a other acquisitions such as stone owls and paintings of men riding donkeys. It’s a plethora of things to delight the senses. No wait, the donkey rider has sold. You’ll have to make do with the ‘Portrait of an English gentleman’ instead.

Now whenever I hear the name I can’t help but add ‘general’ to the end of it so it sounds more like Witchfinder General. There are a bunch of dangerous, drooling men scouring the world, ready to offer you good money for your chairs. They’ll take them away and make them look better or whatever it is antique people do. Something involving Pledge? Maybe.

If Chris had looked on Chair Finder maybe he wouldn’t have spent seven hundred years trying to find the foot rest, foot stool, foot hanger (?) that he needed to match his chair. They would have sent him one in a few hours. He could have saved himself a boatload of trouble.

Perhaps you’re in need of some chairs. Perhaps you need the guidance of a more experienced pair of hands. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help and if you can find them maybe you can hire the Chair Finder.

I.D.T.A.B.F.A.B.B.O

Observation. Observation is key when considering the details of modern life. You might “see” something on your way to work or on your way out of the house but are you really “observing” it?

Luckily even with the downgrade shortly after the Covid pandemic, I still have plenty of eyes with which to keep tabs on things happening around me. When the economy picks up again I hope to install some more eyes, maybe something European. I would look tip top with a pair of mirar ojos or regarder yeux. Something classy, you know?

Whenever I visit home, I usually walk the same ways up and down main street; round the back streets, through the car park on Barley Hill road and out past the path between the cobblers and the firm of solicitors on the corner, then on the way back straight down the main road (but not in the middle of it, that would be silly). I have walked this way hundreds of times and you would have to be an unobservant fool to not see the dance school opposite the car park.

I have seen this place and yet it is only recently that I observed the sign advertising it. There are in fact two, one over the doorway and one on the side of the building. Both signs are almost identical apart from a full stop. Why would a full stop be so important you ask? The accreditations of the dance school are why it’s so important.

I am no dancer. If you see me dancing you’ll wish you hadn’t. I don’t know a pirouette from a monestary. Are they dance moves or names of clowns? Who knows. The sign on the side has three sets of acronyms but the one on the front, at first glance, has only one: I.D.T.A.B.F.A.B.B.O. That’s one long qualification, I thought, and what the hell could it stand for? Ten words? Are these dance people mad? I looked a little closer and saw that it was actually two acronyms: I.D.T.A and B.F.A.B.B.O.

Are they having a laugh? Imagine having that printed on your business card and having to explain what it stood for. Having done a bit of research I believe the sign on the side is the correct one because I.D.T.A (International Dance Teachers Association), B.F.A (Batchelor of Fine Arts) and B.B.O (British Ballet Organisation) are all legit. From a quick look on Google Maps though this one was put up first which begs the question why did they then print a second sign that was incorrect?

If I get close enough will the rogue full stop turn out to be a giant spider? I wish I had taken a photo because there are no photos of the sign on the internet and I sound like another crazy person talking about something that may or may not exist. I guess I will have to wait until my next visit to solve this mystery (not a mystery).

UPDATE (02/08/2023): since writing this post I have done some digging and with a little help have managed to obtain these up-to-date photos of both signs.

My memory was totally wrong about the BFA. It was, however, correct about the full stop. The top picture is the side sign and the bottom is the one on the front which has that extra full stop making it look like a mega qualification.

Box lid

Recently I was shuffling some nonsense around and stuffing more boxes into the solitary cupboard at my flat in the hope of creating a little more space.

As I was tearing up some old cardboard I found that a young Reuben had doodled on the inside of one of the smaller boxes.

For those whose eyesight is not as good as it used to be, the top has ‘secret files’ and several incriminating piece of information about walruses. Roy Orbortron (the robotic version of Roy Orbison who was created to carry on his musical legacy) is a walrus for some reason and he has changed the words of the classic song ‘Pretty Woman’ to ‘Pretty Walrus’. This may have been done in the hopes of attracting a mate although nobody can doubt the controversial nature of this switch.

But wait! There’s more!

Roy Orbotron (different spelling) also orbits the planet Venus as a disgusting Transformers-esque robot walrus meaning that he must split his time equally between serenading female walruses with his back catalogue and flying around the second nearest planet to the sun. Thankfully he didn’t choose a planet that was further away otherwise he’d never have enough time between the two feats to organise, I don’t know, a summer holiday. Quite why he is orbiting Venus is not explained in the document.

If you have any clearer answers then do let us know. For now, watch out for any suspicious walruses or walrus-based robots who may or may not be flying through the sky and/or playing the guitar (boy this post is exhausting to write).

Birds of a feather

A spontaneous or random act of nonsense, that’s what this is.

Whatever I say is clearly not aimed at anyone in particular but there are some important factors that need to be considered such as geography, prior criminal activity, geography and that someone was emailing erroneous and bogus claims to me but a few weeks ago which he still hasn’t apologised for.

It seems as though someone else has been embracing the ideals of Office 2: the return of the killer office and carrying them forward into the 21st century. For those that don’t remember, Office 2 was located on the fourth floor of what is now The Core Shopping Centre in Leeds off the Headrow. It was the singular level next to the lifts that only had a very small space, big enough for two idiots and some food from Greggs. We would hang about and mock the onion hags for coming up to the fourth floor when really they wanted the third for the shops. You could argue, however, that it is the principles of Office 3, AKA locker 29, the locker that I kept putting arbitrary objects into which was located in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. I “bought” it for a pound and repeatedly filled it with whatever I felt like because it was mine and the fact that it was all confiscated still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Mine.

Anyway, it seems as though someone has been keeping a copy of the film ‘Hellraiser’ on VHS perched on the top of a bus stop in South London for almost a decade. I took the following screenshot from Twitter because it spoke to me. This is the kind of ongoing “joke” that people like us have been perpetuating and it should be celebrated in all its glory. I only wish that there was some anonymous PO Box number that I could forward a copy to in case the person or persons carrying this huge task are running low on copies.

Also it’s clearly Chris because he lives in France which is near London.

Thank you! Good night!

You are such a monkey puncher

What would you think if I told you there was a video game called ‘Monkey Puncher’?

Would you think it was a simple game about twatting a monkey in the face over and over again? Perhaps it’s one of those free-to-play mobile games that you download, use once for a cheap laugh and then carry on with your life? Look at me now, neither of those options is correct.

‘Monkey Puncher’ is a game developed by Atelier Double and released for the Gameboy Color in the year 2000. I had never heard of this until a few days ago where it briefly appeared and then disappeared on the CEX website, no doubt snapped up by some lightning-fast robot desperate for his next gaming fix. The goal of the game is to train a monkey to fight in organised boxing matches in order to save the main character’s father and sibling. Then it gets stranger.

It sounds like a monster-collecting game but sprinkled with other elements. You train the monkey so he gets better at fighting then you *reads* send it out to the shops? It goes out and buys items for you. Huh. Then what happens?

“Sparring involves a normal match between the player’s monkey and a computer-controlled opponent, although without a clear winner or any reward beyond stat increases. All the monkey’s stats have a maximum limit. It is possible to date your monkeys either with each other or with a monkey from a friend or a dating shop within the game. After dating, the first monkey vanishes and is replaced with a new baby monkey.”

When I first read that paragraph I thought it said that you could date your own monkey which seems like a gross conflict of interest and not something that should be in a kid’s game. That said, none of what I’ve read should probably be in a kid’s game. You force the monkey to beat up other monkeys, you let it loose in the general public, you can whore it out to other monkeys to make better baby monkeys and this is all to save your family? I doubt Big Dave would approve of these methods to save his life.

There doesn’t appear to be a sequel, almost as if the world could not take and was not ready for an experience such as this. In a hundred years time when the alien overlords have taken over the world then possibly monkey punching will be a real thing. Given how prone the internet is to fads and everything extreme and extremist perhaps we may not have to wait so long before Twitch is chocked full of streams of trained monkeys beating up celebrities to raise money for charity. If I can make a prediction for the future within the next ten years, I would put money on that.

Book surprise

Surprises, eh? Lovely stuff. They come in all shapes and sizes from a fist in the mouth to a great big cake shaped like Vince Vaughan. What you do for your surprise is up to you, or not as the case may be. If you want a specific surprise you have to be very direct to the person you want the surprise to be… ach, I’m not making much sense. It’s too early for thinking.

When I returned from work earlier on this week I was greeted with a mysterious parcel through my letterbox. I knew three things:

The item was thin (the packaging was super floppy)
The item was from Amazon.
I hadn’t ordered anything recently from Amazon.

I was completely surprised then to know that I was now in the possession of ‘Bedtime for the Burpee Bears’ by thoroughly nice person but also walking charisma vacuum Joe Wicks. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but as I am about to go on holiday it would make sense to take it with me as a bit of light reading on the plane or in the hotel room. It’s an epic, 12 or 13 pages long, with additional exercise and recipe ideas which are, “perfect for sharing.” If anybody needs these things you know where to find me.

The mystery therefore stems from the question of whom would send me such a thing, who would be generous enough to send such a beautiful thing, and only two groups of people come to mind: my brother and my mischievous nieces, who are the most likely candidates, and Kevin and wor Ted.

I guess we’ll never know. I’m off to make a sunshine smoothie to wash down the banana pancakes.

Do I do the burpees before or after the food?

Where’s sodding Joe Wicks when you need him?

Shenanigans

Before Christmas seems like an age away now. Do you remember what you were doing in December? No? Do you remember what you did yesterday? That’s a worry. You should get that checked out.

It was a fairly relaxed afternoon in the office and I was on my own as the time ticked towards the end of the day. Being chief morale officer in our team, a role I assigned to myself, I decided it would be best for some harmless mischief. I cast my gaze in the direction of the helpful list indicating the correct terms for the phonetic alphabet. Within a few minutes I had come up with my own and replaced it, expecting it to be mostly ignored as nobody ever seemed to use it.

When we returned after Christmas, I had largely forgotten what I had done… that is until my boss turned to me and asked if I was responsible.

“Responsible for what?” I asked, playing dumb. She had, apparently, noticed immediately and because of my reputation for zany behaviour I was clearly the culprit. Luckily due to it being silly, nothing was said about it. Everyone had a laugh. Ha ha!

“You almost threw me because you don’t have a daughter and this one here mentions one,” she said.

This was the sticking point.

This was the focus of most people’s questions and not the fact that I had made up three new words, referenced an album by Steps and a TV programme with Jack Whitehall.