Category: Sticky

Avatar Shake your fist harder, boy!

I am knee-deep in the middle of lots of boring house chores. This is my first time on the house purchase bandwagon so whilst I have had some experience painting, decorating and very basic DIY from living in my flat, there’s still a lot that I don’t know.

That’s fine, nobody comes into the world with a drill and the ability to rewire a kitchen. I do what I can and accept help from others when it’s necessary to do so. What I am learning though is that wallpaper is a pain in the arse and should never ever be considered.

Why’s that? What’s so wrong with wallpaper I hear you ask? It looks great when it’s on the wall but flip reverse that sandwich and consider when taking it off. Vikki used the wallpaper remover which turned the room into a sauna from all the heat. Even then, you still have to scrap it off. Once that’s done you have to prepare the walls because you can’t paint over that. This is where the big scandal comes in.

Sugar soap is awful. It’s useless. I think personally it’s the biggest con. You spray or wipe this gunk on the wall to help remove the old wallpaper paste and clean the wall so you don’t have ugly bumpy bits when painting. That all makes perfect sense. You know what’s actually doing all the work though? A combination of the warm water, the sponge / scouring pad and my fucking arm. It’s got nothing to do with the bright yellow liquid we’re forking out 3 to 4 quid a pop on. I had one of those squirty bottle versions and it was three quarters done on one bedroom. The label itself says to, “use liberally”; no doubt to send whatever poor sucker who purchased it back to the shop to buy more of it.

I am never, ever using wallpaper. I have made this decision based on scrubbing eight walls in two rooms and not seeing any difference. Wallpaper can get to fuck. Sugar soap can get to fuck.

Old man rant done. Over and out.

Avatar Get in my mouth

Have snacks, will travel.

Having recently been on an excursion to the Czech Republic, there were lots of opportunities to fill my face with various offerings. Almost on every corner was a vendor or some kind of business selling the local delicacy; the chimney cake (or ‘Kürt?skalács’ as Google reliably informs me). It’s a sweetened flaky pastry baked around these hot rods making a little cocoon of joy. You then get to choose what you stuff into the aforementioned cocoon and the most popular choices were cream and strawberries, ice cream and strawberries, strawberries, ice cream, cream, some kind of minty option and any other variation I haven’t mentioned yet. They were/are delicious.

I am here though to speak about another “taste sensation” that came across my way whilst lumbering around in shops. Tell me, have you ever heard of a Corny Big?

Only the cool people call them ‘Corny B’.

No, I hadn’t either up until recently. It is best described as a cereal bar with the minutest of nutritional value, acres of sugar, possibly a full bag per bar, and the kind of chemical taste that you would need three goes from a mouthwash to get rid of. They were/are “delicious”.

I filled up part of the suitcase with a small selection to take back. I didn’t even get all the different flavours too as there were more hiding in other establishments that we were dawdling about in when waiting for a reservation at a restaurant. What stopped me from getting more? I do have some self-restraint sometimes I’ll have you know (someone told me not to go overboard…).

I only hope that there is a relatively cost-effective way of getting them to the UK so I can indulge some more.

Avatar Orange / Lemon

Here’s a little story that will lift your spirits in these dark times.

At work I’ve been snacking on fruit to try and be healthier. Yes, I want nothing more than to tear into a bag of M & Ms every day, but we all know that that is wrong and is the start of the slippery slope to fat bastardom, something I am keen to avoid at all costs. The human body and its relationship with metabolism, which has been well documented, starts to get worse the older you get. Whereas previously I could eat somewhere close to a pound of mince in one sitting and be perfectly fine, if I tried that now I would spend the rest of the week locked in a toilet.

I bought a pack of oranges for the vitamin C. They’re always described as easy peelers but they’re a shit and a half to get into. Unless the definition of easy peelers is, “something that requires a sharp knife to get into” then you’re not getting into one without, well, a sharp knife that is unless you want your hands covered in juice and pith. The last one in the pack was weird looking, it was paler than the others and kind of resembled a lemon in a certain light. It also had strange green spots that looked like mould, but they were there when I first bought them.

The more I looked at the orange the less I wanted to eat it. I started asking people at work of they wanted it to which I was greeted with a resounding “no!” for some reason. A few days went by and still there was no desire to eat it. You know me, I’d eat a sewer grate if it was coated in jam. Was it the fact that it took several minutes to get into it that was putting me off? That oranges are a pretty weak fruit overall? Who knows but whatever it was it permeated in my mind and caused a few more days to slip past.

Eventually I stopped being silly and I ate it. By now people were sick of me asking if I wanted to have the orange. I left it on my boss’ desk when she was in a meeting and, when she returned, responded with, “WHAT’S THAT DOING THERE? I don’t want your bloody orange, Ian!” I, in turn, thought this was hilarious (#fittingin). On a quiet day when nobody was looking, I stripped it of its skin and chomped it in three bites. The unusual green spots weren’t mould, so I presume they were some sort of birthmark.

A joke is only worth doing if you’re willing to run it right into the ground. I took a photo before I ate the orange so I could eventually send this to everyone in my team.

They are gonna love me so god damn much.

Avatar Car sweets

I don’t know what the weather’s been like up in the frozen north lately. Maybe you’ve had a bit less snow and a few days’ break from clearing the ice off your windscreen on a morning. But down here on the tropical borders between Hampshire and France, we’ve been having some fairly warm days.

On Monday it reached about 32 degrees here, which is jolly warm, I can tell you. I went shopping to the big Sainsbury’s, partly to stock up but also partly to spend half an hour in the air conditioning, and while I was in there I bought myself a little treat. I like to have some sweets in the car sometimes, and I am very partial to jelly babies. I got myself a bag of Bassett’s finest, and when I got back to the car I pulled them out of the shopping bag and dropped them in the driver’s side door pocket so I could reach in for some tasty goodness while on the road.

Here are some things I didn’t think about when I got home. I didn’t think about the fact that, if you park your car in the sun, the inside temperature quickly reaches a point about 30ºC higher than outside, so by mid afternoon the inside of my car would have reached a nice cosy 62 degrees. I also didn’t think about the fact that the melting point of gelatin is below 40ºC.

Anyway, the point of this is that on Tuesday I got in my car to go somewhere, and mid-journey, reached into the door pocket to find some delicious jelly baby treats. My hand unexpectedly entered a large gooey mass of melted jelly baby remains. I then got it all over the steering wheel too.

The jelly babies are irretrievable and could not remain in the car. They are entirely unsuitable for mobile snacking. So I’ve brought them inside and used a sharp knife to carve the jelly morass into bite-size chunks, which have an appearance somewhere between colourful jewels and gross melted sludge.

The moral of the story is: in the summer, have non-melting car sweets, such as extra strong mints or digestive biscuits.

Avatar Half way through 2021

It’s been doing its best to match the appalling failure that was 2020, but we’re not letting it. No, 2021 will be the year things got better, not the year things got worse.

Still – it’s been a bit of a slog so far. Now, to celebrate the fact that half of it has gone and the other half is probably going to be a bit more enjoyable than the first one was, let’s all sit down and have a slice of cake.

Avatar REM Covers Album

What was that? It was a bad idea to begin with and now you’re going to run it into the ground like you always do? You clearly know me so well.

Hi, I’m Ian, I recently turned 37 and I still retain the intelligence of someone a quarter of my age. I used to take song lyrics, change them into something else and then hand them to my friend to upload onto our website because that was “funny” even though most of the time it really wasn’t.

Do you remember ‘Slut Call Girl’, a “hilarious” reinterpretation of Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’? Probably not. It was one of my better efforts. The others are better best forgotten.

In the spirit of this though I have decided to drag all of my showbiz mates out to record a covers album to end 2020 the way it began; awfully. It’s even worse, it’s a funny covers album. I will be taking some of the moved beloved rock songs from the last 30-40 years by one of the most amazing bands from within our very own lifetime and I will be turning them into a one joke joke about curling one off.

(I can hear you groaning already)

Let’s take a look at the track listing:

Everybody Poos
The One I Shove
Shiny Happy Faeces
Nightshitting
It’s The End of The Roll As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
The Sidewinder Shits Tonight
Strained Currencies
What’s The Excretion, Kenneth?
The Great Pee-Pond
Imitation of Shite

I feel as though I may have crossed a line that I can never recover from; please forgive me Buck, Berry, Mills and Stipe.