Category: Things that I did

Avatar 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.

Kitchen roll

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?

Avatar 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:

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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.

Avatar Dear Beans… My Late Lucid Literary Lamentation

Dear Beans,

For some reason, which clearly escapes me, everyone on this website absolutely, positively hates my books. With a passion. With more than a passion. With big arms and a scowl.

Having sold eight million copies of ‘Running Away: The Me Within Me (Not You)’, I was expecting a certain level of praise and a huge dollop of respect for having conquered the literary world and the New York Bestsellers List for approximately seventeen weeks. What met me, however, was the kind of despair and ridicule best reserved for X Factor contestants who couldn’t get through Boot Camp.

I don’t understand. My book received several 5 star reviews and a glowing report from both Richard and Judy and also, Chris’ favourite, Su Pollard. So where does the venom lie? Is everyone jealous of my success, my fame, my bingo trophy?

I can only hope that my new book ‘Two Pumps and a Squirt – The Kevin Hill Story’ will seek to rectify the problems everyone has with my expressive and hugely successful way of writing.

Yours faithfully

X

Avatar Claim to Fame

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Take a seat. Clean up your mess. In fact, you might want to reverse the order of those things. As long as you get them both done.

You should know that you may be within the vicinity of a local celebrity. Not that I like to spoil the surprise but the recent release of Dylan Moran’s newest DVD, ‘Off The Hook’, contains a very special treat for everyone. The main performance was recorded in London. The DVD, however, contains additional material that was recorded at The Stand in Newcastle upon Tyne.

If you listen very carefully you can make out two people laughing very loudly at the ensuing comedy. Audrey ‘Piledriver Transmission Cupcake’ J clocks in with two mighty guffaws and there’s an extended chuckle of chortles from Emma ‘Bat Pan Mants’ M. My laugh, sadly, was not robust enough to make the cut and therefore you will not be able to hear the lovechild of Frank Bruno, Jimmy Carr and Eddie Murphy tittering away in the background.

Avatar Brioche: still an afterthought

Last week I bought a big bag of brioche buns for breakfast.

On Thursday and Friday I got some out and had them.

This morning, I was looking for breakfast in a kitchen that was increasingly looking breakfast-free, when inside the white Lego head I found the rest of the brioche rolls.

I didn’t think I was the kind of man who’d buy some tasty French treats and then forget about them, but it seems that all these years on I’ve learned nothing. Brioche is still an afterthought.

Luckily they hadn’t gone off because brioche keeps for ages, so I ate them anyway.

Avatar The “X Factor”

I appear to be watching a television programme called the “X Factor”. I’m not really sure what to make of this, and I’ve never really watched it before, but there appears to be a simple formula to the proceedings.

  1. Young woman with slightly-too-revealing outfit sings a song but wobbles her voice around so instead of just singing the song she sings all the notes ever invented.
  2. Judge who didn’t choose the song says it was rubbish. Judge who chose the song says it was brilliant.
  3. Man in shiny outfit sings a song with a bit too much rapping while women writhe around him in skimpy costumes like feminism never happened*.
  4. Judge who chose the song says it was a game changer. Judge who owns the programme and can do what he wants says something sardonic and cutting.
  5. Group of people who have no life experience and want only to be famous come on the stage and sing a soulful version of an 80s pop song with more wobbly Mariah Carey vocal stylings.
  6. Judge who appears to be dressed for bed says they didn’t think it would work but they’re so excited for how far you could all go.
  7. Presenter pulls the contestants aside and asks how it was. Contestants say it was great and they’re so happy to be here. Presenter says thank you and that was amazing, even though it was plain to everyone present that it barely even qualified as interesting.
  8. Voting happens and some of the entirely interchangeable contestants leave, though some are then allowed to sing again and might stay in, and others will be arbitrarily brought back later, comfortably removing any sense of jeopardy.

My main conclusion is that the titular “X Factor” appears to be ill-defined and plays at best a peripheral role in what is actually a singing competition. Most of the screen time is taken up by contestants, who are, to a man, detestable, singing other people’s songs to a panel of judges, none of whom would be worth saving from a house fire. Perhaps it would be better to rename the programme something more closely related to what happens on screen, such as “Twats Singing At Twats”.

* Feminism has yet to happen on ITV.

Avatar An introduction to marking

Today I learned how to mark children’s schoolbooks. This is an important skill, so for your benefit, here are the basics I picked up.

  1. Use a red pen. Marking is red. Green highlighters highlight some bits of red pen writing. You will be told which bits.
  2. Tick everything.
  3. If everything was right, put on a sticker that says “brilliant”.
  4. If it was mostly right, put on a sticker that says “good”.
  5. If the kid is clearly a bit dim use a sticker that says “target” and tells them to buck their ideas up.
  6. If you’ve run out of “good” stickers, cut the word “brilliant” off a “brilliant” sticker with scissors and that will probably do.
  7. Don’t mess up the piles. The piles were sorted by someone who knows more about it than you do and are not to be disturbed.

Good luck with your marking. Feel free to practice by marking this post in the comments below.

Avatar Gratuitous self-promotion

I wrote a thing for a blog site that gets even more people visiting and posting comments than The Beans, if you can believe such a thing.

You can read it by clicking on these words, or these words, or this letter Q, but not these words, or this asterisk: *

This post is not just blatantly self-promoting and aggrandizing, but also rather lazily adding to my Bean Count for this month on a day where I clearly couldn’t think of anything better to post.

Now go! Go and bask in my reflected glory! Go and revel in the euphoria and majesty that is me!