A taste of Scotland

Where’s this guy been? He’s been taking a month off, is the answer, choosing to suffer the ignominy of a nasty dried pea on the Bean Counter for the sake of enjoying a month free of the obligations of blogging and commenting. Those arduous tasks take their toll on a man, even one as handsome as me, and a few weeks away from it make all the difference. I’m back now, fully recharged and ready to write more glittering blog jewels.

If you want a more literal answer to the question “where’s this guy been?”, then the answer is Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a city in Scotland, famous for the coldness of the weather, the vivid orange of the Irn Bru, the fakeness of the tartan sold in tourist shops and the whisky. The other thing it’s famous for is its castle, an amazing fortress sitting high atop a rocky mountain in the centre of the city, and though few believed me when I told them, it is made entirely of whisky.

I tasted it, and it was delicious. Then I went home. #tastinghistory #edinburghmems

Owl Kitchen. Or not?

When you’re walking around a shop there is a fair amount of pressure. You, as a consumer, need to spend your money otherwise the shop won’t be there anymore. So what will you buy? What wonders would you prefer to spend your hard-earned cash on?

For instance, would you like to buy this?

Now I am all for knick knacks and tat yet I am confused and perturbed as to what this owl wants. Clearly it wants to cook but it can’t spell ‘cook’ so it looks like it is asking for ‘cok’. So is this an owl with poor spelling and grammar? Was it the result of bad education?

Unless its eyes are the o’s but then there’d be three so the item’s message is ‘coook’ which is the kind of enthusiasm I can fully understand. But then why a spoon and a fork? Why is the owl trying to eat a fish when owls don’t eat fish?

I stared for a good five minutes at this the other day and I am still no further forward. Perhaps somebody else might be able to solve the mystery.

I like owls but this just seems wrong.

A narrow escape

I’ve been worrying about this for literally years.

Some time ago – I don’t know, let’s say in 2011 or 2012 – I was in my flat and I was multitasking. I thought myself pretty cool at the time. Task 1 was sharpening some kitchen knives by swiping the blades through my little knife sharpener thing. Task 2 was watching something on TV – chances are it was QI XL on Dave. I could literally do both those things at once. I was amazing.

To achieve this state of advanced productivity, I positioned myself in the kitchen of my flat, facing the TV, using the backrest of the sofa as my workbench.

Some time later – weeks, or months maybe – someone came over to my flat and asked me “what are these?” I followed their gesturing hand and found that the “these” in question were a number of incisions – knife wounds, no less – in several places on the top of the cushions at the back of my sofa.

Trouble is, it’s not my sofa, is it? No. It’s my landlord’s sofa.

I have been silently wondering how the seemingly inevitable conversation would go, and whether leaving it until I moved out, years later, would make things better or worse. Do I plead ignorance? Or do I admit everything and hope that honesty is the best policy?

Last week, fortune smiled upon me. The people moving into my flat after me will bring all their own furniture. They don’t want a sofa. Our new flat is unfurnished and we need a sofa. My landlord has a sofa that they no longer want.

And so I now find myself in legal possession of the cosmetically-damaged sofa, without having to explain its slightly damaged cushions to anyone, and having got away with my careless crime scot-free.

A narrow escape.

Mid Thirties

A week or so ago, I turned 32.

This is an important moment. I’ve left behind the first couple and I am now officially in my thirties. I am in my thirties. When I was a teenager that phrase would have been more or less on a par with old age pensioner or incontinent geriatric.

Consequently, in my twenties, I made a serious mistake. I held on to my “early twenties” for far too long. 20, 21, 22 – nobody would argue that they are your early twenties. But I carried on thinking of myself as being in my early twenties at 23 and 24 too. That was fine at the time. I clung to my youth.

Then my 25th birthday arrived and with it came a terrible realisation. 25 had to be my mid twenties, there was no denying it. But if 20-24 had all been early twenties, then I had squeezed my mid twenties down to a year, and at 26 I was unwillingly hurled forwards into my late twenties. My late twenties. They were almost over with four years to go. Nightmare.

So with this decade of my life I am determined to get it right. Having turned 32, I am now officially declaring myself to have entered my mid thirties. By taking a hit now, and entering my mid thirties early, I can continue them much longer, and I don’t have to think of myself as reaching my late thirties until I’m 38, at which point I should be able to come to terms with the idea.

So here we are: 32, the beginning of my mid thirties, and an early sign that I might be learning from past mistakes. Sometimes.

Modern Life is Confusing

So… there’s nothing quite like the English language. It can manipulated and distorted in so many ways that what it resembles now is completely different to how it was a hundred, fifty, even twenty years ago.

That said, sometimes innovation does not happen overnight. You have to allow it to simmer for a while. It will bubble to the surface to get your attention when it is ready to do so. Don’t rush it, for the love of Buster Keaton! I was recently scouring the internet to look for a birthday present for my godson and instead stumbled over this.

Ladies and gentleman, let me present you with a link to the Animal Pig:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B013PX3XYI

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Animal Pig you should know two important things:

This pig is an animal
This animal is a pig

Note how the two facts are very similar but also very different at the same time. I had gone looking for a present and alternatively received an education in how to refer to modern animals.

Now when I am on my way to a farm I can look forward to seeing the Animal Cows, the Animal Chickens and the Animal Goats. If I’m heading to a zoo I can feast my eyes upon the Animal Elephants, the Animal Giraffes and possibly, if they’re not too busy, the Animal Tigers.

I’m already working on a FUN leaflet for my nieces to explain that we’ve been doing nature all wrong and that we have to shift with the times otherwise we’ll just look simple.

In one sense, why did no-one tell me this sooner?! In another, awww, pigs.

Turning back the clock

This week I’ve left behind the glamorous world I have occupied for the last year and returned to my old job. Those of you with long memories will recall that it principally involves pushing buttons when foreign people point at me.

There have been several effects as a result of this change.

I find myself catapulted back into a life I last inhabited in January 2015. We all remember that month and everything that happened in it. For me, Uptown Funk is still at the top of the charts and Lithuania has only just adopted the Euro. I won’t actually buy the blue and green striped jumper I’m currently wearing for another ten months. I am living in the past.

I am left with a sense of malaise, which comes from the feeling that my career is moving backwards and not forward, and from the changes that have happened to my old job in my absence. I am also getting re-acquainted with many of my old colleagues which involves talking to people. I don’t like talking to people.

Others have been affected too. My beloved Crab Mug, once the darling of a major broadcaster’s master control room, has returned to my flat, where it feels deflated and redundant, but conversely my white coffee cup (ceramic with silicone lid and grip, in a design that makes it look like a disposable cup from a coffee shop) has been liberated from my locker, which had been shut for the last 14 months, and is enjoying something of a renaissance.

This has been a difficult transition for me, one whose effects will be felt through my life, like aftershocks from some sort of career-based earthquake, for months to come. Some of the results are positive and others are negative.

But one thing is for sure. Everyone I know will have to put up with me complaining about it for the forseeable future, and in that sense, they may be the real losers here.

Prepared

How will you defend yourself in an emergency? It’s all well and good saying you can do hand-to-hand combat, or that you know how to hot-wire a car to make a getaway, but when hordes of neer-do-wells are charging towards your location, can you make yourself safe?

Preparation is the most important thing. Preparation will be the difference between survival and defeat.

This week, I took the opportunity to practice building makeshift barricades and defensive structures.

Here you can see a defensive wall that has been built from packs of kitchen roll. It allows you to hide from potential attackers and will repel missile barrages (providing missiles are relatively light and not thrown very hard).

By preparing myself in this way, I know that I can defend myself from any lethal attack in which the attacker is armed only with paper aeroplanes as long as I have about 50 packs of kitchen roll immediately to hand and a few minutes with which to build a wall out of them.

I am prepared and I will survive. Will you?

Remembering is Fun

I have recently been on a bit of a tidying binge in and around the flat. I took a lot of time out in January to buff to sheen all the jobs I had been procrastinating about during December. And there were tons. It also didn’t help that other people were actively handing me MORE things to do but hey, that’s just me. If I’m me, and I usually am, then I’m always helping.

In sorting out a particularly shifty box in the corner of my room, I re-discovered this interesting artefact from a certain Mr C Marshall:

I’m not very good with dates. I am very certain that this was when he, as in him, as in you, Chris, we’re at university learning how to push buttons for the BBC. Just think of where you would be now were it not for the booze and juice aisles.

My absolute favourite though is the ‘don’t know’ section which contained Lord only knows what kind of middling weirdness and frivolity.

Remembering is Fun.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Things that I did