Never mind Ian, am I losing MY mind?

Most days, when I’m not at work, I take the dog for a walk, and most of the time we go to the same place, which is some woods near us. I’ve written about them before – I like walking in woods, the dog likes having lots of space to run around and bark at squirrels, and they are full of intriguing military wreckage.

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly stopped in my tracks. Following a path through the trees that I follow every single time I go there – let’s say every other day of my life, on average – I saw something I had never noticed before. Can you see it?

About fifteen feet to the left of me, fifteen feet away from a place I walk over a hundred times a year with my eyes wide open, was something I had literally never seen before. A whacking great big concrete pylon.

You literally can’t miss it. It’s huge. I suppose it’s the same colour as a tree and about the same size as the tree trunks around here, but even so, I might miss it once but I don’t see how I’ve missed it every day since 2023.

It looks like it’s been there for decades. It looks like something from the 1940s that’s been disused since before I was born, slowly being forgotten in the depths of the woods.

But I can’t help wondering if that’s true. Has it really been there all along? Or has someone just put it there in the last month or so? Are they trying to mess with my head? Is it me they’re targeting? Is this something I have genuinely never noticed in all this time? Can it be true? Am I losing my mind?

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.

From the archives: Ian’s essay

A billion years ago, Ian and I had the use of a teacher’s office at school. When we left school we missed this tightly controlled social space, and a wave of nostalgia washed over us in the aimless days between finishing sixth form and starting to live in the real world.

While still feeling the aftershocks, Ian put pen to paper and wrote this essay about his time there, which for some reason I have on an old hard drive.

A small SSSSSS-SSSSSS-Essay by Dave

Why did I love the office? Well, being four score 90 years and a bit, I feel it is my duty as an ex-member of the office to explain to the people who never experienced the office (clumsy heathens!) because it is inexplainable. Don’t think you can stop me. I have credentials now, and a bank account. Do you know where most of the money go… anyway

The office, a stalwart if ever there was a stalwart. I remember the first time walking in there; I didn’t have a fucking clue what to think. There was this guy who I remember playing P.E. with, mainly cos we both sucked at it (George). There was this guy who sat at the back of my Biology class in year 9 and everyone knew his name, I just kinda didn’t know who the hell he was, well my back was turned to him so it’s not my fault (Chuckie). And another guy called Marshall, who looked like Kelly Jones (although he claims he isn’t). Alex was there too, twas a brisk and subtle morning sometime in a year. I started off as a cleaner and rose to the ranks of an equal amongst the others. We had a government and all. There were many times my head hurt and we ate biscuits. Thankyou goodnight!

…… …….. …….

Was that clear enough or is it just me? Ok, so we were a bit nerdish but that wasn’t the point! We had a place to go that was warm, safe, full of food, nearby, had a computer to play music and doss about with, and a private table to do work on if we could be arsed. I couldn’t. Chuckie did when it was 5 minutes before his Geography lesson. George did most of his at home and Marshall hardly ever turned up to Art. Yet we all still passed EVERYTHING so it just goes to show, you can get away with it. Thankyou goodnight!

….. ………………….. blip

In all honesty school was fucking fuckshit. The only reason to bother going was the office. It will always remain in our hearts, and remind us not to take life seriously as a wise young Greecian once told me, “Life is for living” and ain’t that the truth baby!

By Dave – 30 minutes before work

On this day

As the year draws to a close, your Pouring Beans Calendar 2025 is running out of pages. Luckily another one is on the way, and everybody should have their copy ready for the New Year.

This is going to be the sixth consecutive year I’ve had to find just over 310 things that we have said, done, drawn or written to fill the pages of a calendar, meaning I’ve had to find 1565 things already. In my quest for content I thought I would try something new. So in 2026, you can expect a lot of the pages to reference things that have happened on that specific day in the past.

The “on this day” thing proved to be a great way of coming up with things to fill a calendar, but to make it happen I needed to find out what has happened on each day of the year. Obviously I could find old photos and look at the day and time they were taken, which got me a few. But I needed something bigger. I needed nostalgia on an industrial scale. I needed an “on this day” machine.

So I made one, and now you can play with it as well if you like. It’s in a secret location on the Beans server here.

Give it a day of the year and it will find everything that has ever happened on the Beans that day. Every post, every comment, from both New Beans and Old. It will then list them all with the year they happened, from most recent at the top to most elderly at the bottom, and it will give you links to see them in their original homes.

It was just meant to be a means to fill a calendar, but I found it hugely enjoyable and thought you might like to play with it too, so there you are. Enjoy.

A gift from past Chris

Past Chris has been kind to me this week.

On Thursday, at work, I spent the day installing some new equipment as part of a project we’re doing. The desks in our control room are full of ancient PCs that are long overdue for replacement and we’re now, finally, replacing them with new stuff. That means taking the old PCs out, untangling all the existing cables so they can be removed, and then running new cables to all the screens and stuff.

It takes about four hours to do a single desk if everything goes to plan, and at the end of it you have cuts and grazes all over your hands and your arms from the cable ties and the metalwork and the unexpected encounters with sharp corners as you rummage about.

One of the desks I did on Thursday four screens, plus one more that had been there for years but hadn’t got a PC attached to it. It was always meant to get a PC to support some other new stuff we’re installing which is why I’d put it there all those years ago. Thursday was the day it finally got wired up to something.

I ran a new video cable for it easily enough, but then I had to connect the touchscreen. The USB cable came out of the back of the screen, ran neatly down the monitor arm, and then vanished into the desk. Inside the desk was a rat’s nest of a million identical cables. I looked at this and then said some swear words.

Then I looked in the pod where the PCs live, because that’s where the cable would have to end up, and in there was a trailing USB cable. Attached to the cable was a green paper label. Written on the green paper label, in my handwriting, were the words “touchscreen USB for 5th PC”.

Thanks, Past Chris. You’re an absolute legend.

That would be enough good deeds, you’d think, but he did it again.

Just now I thought I’d better make a start on the Pouring Beans Calendar 2026. I opened the Pouring Beans folder on my laptop, and inside that I opened the Projects folder. (Kev may want to take notes on this example of a useful filing system for his work on the podcast.) I was going to make a new folder in there called Calendar 2026, but there already was one. That’s strange.

I opened it. Inside it I found this.

And when I opened that folder, I found this.

Inside those folders are 240 photographs, which are an extremely welcome sight when I have 315 blank calendar pages to fill.

He’s only bloody gone and done it again.

Thanks, Past Chris. If I ever get to use a time machine I’ll come back and return the favour.

Classic photo

If you happened to be living under a rock you may not have noticed a certain anniversary of a certain album last year. An album everyone, and I do mean everyone, has heard of from the year 1999. Can you remember the year 1999? What a time to be alive.

Pop music was yet to turn a corner from fabricated bands and artists put together by middle-aged men in suits to everything auto-tuned to within an inch of its life and sounding like they all came from the same computer programme. Yes, as you can see I’m an old person. I can’t say I preferred it when “bands” like Steps, A1, 5ive, Backstreet Boys and all the others invaded your ears through the radio but at least they had a bit of personality and a distinct style. These days I struggle to hear the instruments in modern pop music.

Anyway, back to 1999 and everyone’s favourite Dido. Even I with my angst and my Clash liked a bit of Dido. She may have pronounced ‘I’ as ‘ah’ in every song (“ah won’t go, ah won’t sleep, ah can’t breathe…) and struggled with a tempo anything faster than what can only be described as plodding however there was something about her songs. They were breezy, easy to sing, and plodded so hard even your dad liked it. This prompted everyone in the known stratosphere to buy a copy of her album which is why you’ll find it in most charity shops.

Cut to last year and the 25th anniversary of ‘No Angel’. A milestone. A wonderful thing. I was reading the description when I got to the bottom and squinted.

Dido is a singer. Is she photographic? Of course. So what’s a classic Dido photo? Did I miss that part of her career? Did people walking around with a photo of Dido shaking hands with Prince Charles? Dido playing with friendly gypsies? Dido squatting over a bin? I tried googling it and was directed to an article on Wikipedia about the first queen of Carthage. Please can someone post some classic Dido photos so I know what I’m missing out on.

(Thank you for reading this. I am very tired and struggling for WORDS.)

Newsboost – unused material (part two)

I think I deserve credit for not diving into this straight away after unleashing this hotch potch of box-ticking nostalgia bait. I waited a whole *checks* four months before phoning it in again. You’re welcome.

I also deserve a hearty pat on the back for writing a ‘quick post to earn a bean’ post nine days before the end of the month. I’m breaking all the rules of convention. What a trendsetter I am. You’re also welcome (God, this is exhausting).

We need some kind of awards ceremony to celebrate how great I am not just at being me but also being me in written form.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s dive back into 2014 Ian to see what was going through his mind:

An apple a day keeps the cold-calling telemarketing away
Giant butt sea castle
Torch eyes tours
Dyslexic spelling error sky writer message
Nuclear fallout – beetles and lens solution
Learning to write with toothpaste is silly
Sugar cube igloo
Snake shoelaces. Worm shoelaces?
Bulldog clips rep is misguided (?)
Fruit tennis
Return of the icing sugar squirrels (this one still makes me laugh)
Napkins have feelings too, you know
Bog roll binoculars
Public trampolines
New type of screwdriver

The rest of the ideas from this page were so good they were used in the Twitter feed because they’re all crossed out.

What a great time was had by all.

Anniversary (M-me)

July was a very important anniversary for me. It officially marked my twentieth year up in the North-East of England.

I forget the actual day, some point in July we jumped in a van and drove almost hundred miles into the distance. That doesn’t matter anyway because we’re already way past that point.

Why didn’t I mention it sooner? I was planning on writing this last month and never did. As a prolific writer of bobbins posts, you think of and store one or two things you plan to do in the future. I may have even been planning to do this a lot earlier. Part of me wanted to go all out and wrangle some people together for a party. That would have been nice.

But it never happened. July is a busy month for most people what with the summer holidays, Kev’s birthday, Independence Day, National Fried Chicken Day, National Lipstick Day any many, many more. Trying to shoehorn a sort of important but not really party into all of that would have been exhausting and I doubt many would have been in attendance. Besides, I was too busying wearing so many different types of lipstick that it slipped my mind.

Will I remain up here for another twenty years? I suppose so, what with another tiny person on the way. I’d rather not be putting everything I own (which is a lot more things than 2005 Ian) in a moving van and driving to another part of the country. People barely tolerate me here so there’s no way they’d want me down in *checks* Wells-Next-The-Sea? Is that a real place? It’s on a map but it doesn’t sound like a real place.

Everyone LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! Okay, now stop.