Though you may thinketh long and hard about the answer,
You know nothing in life has ever prepared you for the force of the
It might defrost your chicken pasta bake.
It might defrost your hat or the gloves under the radiator.
Could it be that you call your father and he’s feeling a little warmer than usual, but not too warm in that the main power of the microwave was used? Could it be?
Once that button is pressed, who knows what will happen. Nay nonny no nay, never touch that button.
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.
Have you been a good boy? There’s one sure-fire way to find out.
I’m sure you know this, but all we have to do is look underneath the priority seating in coach 4 of the 21.53 South Western Railway service from Guildford to Farnham.
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.
Not to brag, but we’ve got one of those kitchen taps where you can pull the end of it and it extends out like a hose. It’s pretty good.
Recently the hose bit stopped going back in to the tap nicely, and that was because a little rubber ring that made it seal snugly in place had broken.
I did some searching online. No combination of words referring to a “washer” would produce results, nor did my searches for any kind of “grommet”. No, it turns out this wasn’t rubber or even silicone, nor was it a washer, grommet, seal or band. The thing I needed was a nitrile O-ring.
Amazon sell them for a couple of quid, so I placed my order. Here is the thing I needed. I fitted it to the tap and the tap works nicely again now.
The only issue is that Amazon won’t sell you one of them. It will only sell you a pack of 50. So I now have another 49 going spare. Assuming these things fail at the same rate as the original, this will keep my tap in full working order through to December 2175.
As a result I feel safe in letting go of a few spares if it will help my fellow man. They have an external diameter of 20mm, an internal diameter of 16mm and the band is 2mm thick with a circular cross section. Let me know if you’d like one.
Those of you with long memories will recall the harrowing story I related back in July about clearing the browser cache on my phone and losing my winning streak on a stupid tetris game I play every day. I’d been trying to beat my personal best of 80 and bombed out at 79.
I had to start again at 1, and Wednesday 15 October was the day I would finally reach 80 if all went to plan.
Well, good news: today is Thursday 16 October, and I now have a new personal best.
I’m not going to pretend this is the biggest thing going on in my life at the moment, and it might not even be the biggest thing happening in yours. But it is a bit of good news and we could all do with that. Jolly good.
Blessed as we are to be alive in the year 2025 so that we can witness, ummm, the release of the Lego Gameboy after all this time. Praise be, we are blessed.
We’re also blessed for a number of reasons which I won’t go into here. That’s too boring. What isn’t boring is talking about apples, right?
Right?
Last year after we moved into the house, we noticed that one of our neighbours further down the street would regularly leave a box on a little table with a sign saying, ‘help yourself’ or, ‘free to a good home’. In said box were apples and sometimes pears. I took a couple home and they were delicious, all the more delicious because they were free.
Fast forward to a week ago and there’s a knock on the door. Our next door neighbour held a bag of apples in her hand, handed them to me and said, “if any pears from our tree happen to drop in your garden, take them. They may need a few days to ripen but otherwise they’re fine to eat.” Unbelievable generosity. I had ten free apples in my hand and carte blanche to gorge myself on pears. Pear gorge? Pear gorge.
Fast forward to Friday afternoon. I’m still making my way through the apples when there’s a knock on the door. The husband of the neighbour from the previous week hands me a black bin liner containing roughly twenty-five apples. Twenty-five! I have to ask.
“Does every house on this street have an apple tree apart from us?”
The neighbour laughs. “Possibly. Before the houses were built, this was an orchard. There are some houses that have plum trees, pear trees, cherry trees, all kinds of fruit.”
Out of all the fruit in the world, what did we get with our lovely house? A f*cking gooseberry bush. Nobody wants gooseberries. They’re about as versatile as a quince. I also now have to find some way of consuming twenty-five apples on my own because Vikki is more into strawberries and other berries. I’m not being ungrateful, I am super pleased to have free fruit in my fridge, and *somehow* I will chug my way through all dem apples. Look at me and be inspired.
I am finally (legitimately) Kevin Hill: Science Master.
If you had any doubts about how happy I am to see the back of academia (studying, not my job obviously) then check out this image of me after the ceremony a few weeks ago…
This is not the face of a man about to embark on further study.
