Category: Things that I did

Avatar A slice of 2010

While rummaging in the dusty Beans archives for material to put in the 2024 calendar, I found a load of photos we took during the making of the Papples’ second album, Masterpiece, back in 2010. (I also found pictures from 2011, when we were making Pop Squared, but I’m saving those for next month because you have to keep those post totals up.)

There are 149 pictures in the set, so you’ll be relieved to hear I whittled them down to 80 before adding them to a new photo gallery in the usual place.

The photos start out in my old flat in Streatham, where we can be seen doing a bit of recording and editing, but then quickly turn to a day trip we took to Kent. I think we spent the day touring around various seaside towns, messing about, taking photos for the album cover and possibly sending postcards to Kev. I’m fairly sure the photos include visits to the Isle of Sheppey, Westgate, Whitstable, Sandwich and Samphire Hoe, though there may be other places too.

In Westgate we refused to get out of the car, and instead spent our time getting into stupid positions (in the boot, legs out of the window) and using the headrests to pretend to be walruses.

Along the way we learn a number of things.

Ian enjoyed taking a self-portrait. Selfies hadn’t been invented in 2010, but if they had, he’d be the king of them. Among the 69 pictures I discarded were lots of alternative shots of Ian’s face that he took himself. There are still loads in here.

I thought it was funny to be completely expressionless and vacant in pictures, and did this almost every time a camera was pointed at me. Most of these are irritating and don’t work, but I will admit that the picture of me outside a pub called “The Smack” still makes me laugh.

We also learn that Kent is full of places with stupid names, and we photographed most of them. Pictures of daft streets, towns and businesses litter this album. It’s a masterpiece of silliness. Enjoy.

Avatar Memories (approaching the grey hemisphere)

It is now only two days until I pass into official middle age, two days before it all comes crashing down upon me. Actually that’s not true. I have long since been comfortable with my transformation from hip thirtysomething into a forty year old man. I’m sure that forty year olds have a lot going for them and, if not, then I’m here to shake things up for them.

I started reminiscing (even more than usual) about my youth and decide to record some of the lessor-known facts in case anyone was interested. They are in no particular order and most of them are probably not worth hearing anyway. Consider yourself warned:

Dad’s Army

I watched a lot of television as a child. A lot. I spent most days flicking through the TV guide circling what I wanted to watch in the upcoming week. On weekends it was worse, starting around 6:30am for the kids TV, taking a little break around lunchtime when the “adult” programs started and then coming back in the afternoon for more cartoons, sitcoms and anything else. The BBC repeated tons of sitcoms over the weekend and I was there for them. In my tiny child brain I would sing, “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Kipling?” when watching the opening for ‘Dad’s Army’. Don’t ask me why, it doesn’t quite scan properly (which may explain a lot of my efforts at writing poetry) and there is absolutely no correlation as far as I’m aware between the beloved cake-maker and the murderous dictator.

Wizards

Later on I wanted to be a space cowboy but earlier on in my life I wanted to be a wizard. This may have been spurred on by what I read in ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. I would steal various shampoos, conditioners, bubble baths and sometimes things from the kitchen cupboards (the bathroom was next to my bedroom so it was easier to sneak in and out with my effects) and mix them together to create potions. Did I have a proper cup or beaker to do so? No, I used the top of an old toy that had broken off. It was as curved green pot thing that was supposed to be the top of the tree. I think my mum noticed things were oozing out of the back of the small wooden desk in my bedroom so they broke in to look at what I had been doing. It seems as though I had also mixed in a dead spider to my current concoction to, I don’t know, heighten the potency of the potion. Needless to say I was politely asked to stop.

Showing off

I did a lot of showing off. I had three other siblings to compete with, I had no choice. Right? Right. I’m glad we’re on the same page. During the summer holidays my dad would “borrow” a video camera from the school he was working at and we would make home movies of varying quality, mostly terrible. In the quieter moments I would use the camera to record whatever I thought would be a good idea at the time. Once I made a stop-motion video of my pink dinosaur killing himself by jumping off the end of my parent’s bed, and when I say stop-motion I mean practically still shots with huge jumps in the middle rather than painstakingly moving the dinosaur into the next position. The crowning achievement however was the time I recorded five minutes of me narrating a fictitious race between… well that part is lost to me. It was a race though because I was doing my best Murray Walker impression. I was young and I had a cold so my enunciation was pretty terrible. I moved the camera wildly from side to side saying whatever came into my head. The film is notorious for one line that my brother and sisters still bring up to this day. I cannot tell you what I am actually saying because there is no substitution in the English language that would explain it yet I cannot fully believe I would say what I said at the age of 6 or 7. What did I say? Sigh. “I wanna see some boobies!” I didn’t fully know what boobies were at that age so why I would want to see them is anyone’s guess. It’s baffling knowing that it’s me and not being able to understand what I’m trying to say. The answer is lost to time.

Entrepreneur

One more before I go. I had a knack of trading things at an early age. In primary school I would take the toy or thing that came in the box of cereal and I would trade them at school with other kids for toy cars. I didn’t want the cereal toys, I wanted their toy cars and for some reason the other people thought this was a fair trade. In secondary school (you may have heard this one before) I would take the lunch that my mum had so carefully put together and sell it to someone in my form for the price of a school dinner which, I believe at the time, was £1.30. I did this every day so I came away with over a fiver a week to add to my pocket money pile. I used the money to go into town at the weekend to buy video games and CDs. My mum wouldn’t be home until after 5pm on a weekday so I would come home and eat bread (about a quarter of a loaf) and cereal to take away the hunger pangs I was feeling. She didn’t find out about this until I was in my twenties. I ate so much bread I believe it may have contributed to the intolerances I am now experiencing as an adult man, plus it made me round and chubby like the Pilsbury Doughboy from all the extra carbs.

Avatar H-A-L-L-U-M-I

Back in July 2020, Ian was carrying out some gentle archaeology among his possessions, which had begun to settle in accreted layers like sedimentary rock. In the midst of a rich stratum of shopping lists and half-finished song lyrics, he stumbled upon a miniature Sacred Book, and reported this to the Beans.

The booklet runs only to four pages in a bigger book that is otherwise full of other tat, and records the events that took place in the Magic Lantern pub in Whitley Bay (which later became a Harvester, and is now, of course, a Miller and Carter). In-depth scientific analysis of the occasions on which all three of us were in Newcastle, cross-referenced with the visits that had not produced a full Book, suggests that this was likely to have been in 2009.

We begged Ian to scan in these pages so they could be added to our collective store of wisdom on the Beans. We implored him. We offered him trinkets and prizes and financial incentives in discreet brown envelopes. But he resisted, and no scan was ever made.

Well, I don’t know about you, but my patience ran out, and it ran out at about 6.30 this morning. So I took the dodgy photos he had posted to the Beans, straightened and corrected them, and produced decent quality images of all four pages which I have now added to the Beans, bypassing the whole sorry business of Ian having to scan them. I have titled this new book “H-A-L-L-U-M-I”, that being the first thing written in it.

Its four pages contain an amazing number of in-jokes that survive to this day:

  • Wexford and the cheeses
  • Chris’s scrodsack of change
  • The science of warms per air

So, there it is, a lost slice of history, saved for the benefit of the nation. You can find it in the Books section.

Avatar Where has Kev been?

You know the deal, I disappear for a while, then I come back full of beans then disappear again. Its a story as old as time. Well this time you may be forgive for thinking that I’d just been too busy doing a masters degree or looking after kids or some other made up nonsense, well no. Not this time.

For the last 5 and a bit months I have in fact been trapped down the character hatch. I know, I know, you’ve both told me to leave it shut, but sometimes the curiosity gets too much for me.

Now those of you with a keen memory may remember the last time I went down there, got stuck and was abandoned by Ian who was too busy demanding ham I had no means to provide. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but no. I opened the hatch (with a pack of ham in my bag just in case) and sank down into the Old Beans.

I spent a few hours wandering through the ornamental gardens, had a picnic by the Zorse monument and whiled away another hour or two doing a sketch of the bell tower in charcoal. The tower’s looking in quite bad shape these days, and you can just make out the corpse of a recently deceased zorse leaning against a wall.

Anyhow, I was just about to come back home when I heard that sound… you know the one… The sound of moody guitars, breaking glass and arty poetry that could only mean… Pete Doherty. He spotted me immediately, he had the mad faraway glint in his eye of a man who’d been forced to exclusively eat zorse meat for 13 years, and he was pissed. In both senses. I think he’d worked out how to distill zorse piss into a kind of hooch. Anyway after chasing me round the great hall, the gardens, across the old Loinsford campus and back to the clock tower he eventually caught me and pressganged me into forming a new band with him and doing a tour of the forbidden lands, (the Cockall Archives, the Saint Kingdom and the Savannah of in-jokes).

The band was just us two, and all I could play was the recorder and the demo button on the keyboard. It was awful. Pete wrote some witty satirical lyrics about Ian’s love of ham and the fall of Chris Industries, and off we went. We played 700 gigs, mostly to empty rooms. Occasionally the zorses would come by, and then quickly leave, but mostly to empty rooms.

For whatever reason, when we returned, Doherty was sated. His anger subsided, the punching stopped and he just wandered off into the mist surrounding in the Loosh Vestibule. I was free. I made my escape and resealed the hatch. I’ve learned my lesson (for now), and I’m back. Hopefully.

Avatar Disappointment squared

What does disappointment look like to you? Is it a flaccid (easy now) aubergine that hasn’t managed to grow fully in your allotment? Is it a shiny new 50p coin with a huge dent in the edge? Is it learning that Claire Richards from Steps is coming back with a new solo album? It comes in many shapes and forms and sadly there is no escaping the silky, wet glove that is disappointment.

I recently went on a ship and sailed to a different part of the world. It was excellent all the time (whispers, “all the time”) and even though I must have eaten twice my weight in steak and burgers a good holiday was had by all. The ship was swimming in luxury. If you wanted to sit in a hot tub all day sipping champagne and eating tiny desserts you could. If you wanted to go to their cinema and watch four films back to back you could. If you wanted to watch a questionable stage production by one time flatmate of Robbie Williams, Jonathan Wilkes, then you could (the only time we went to the theatre was on the last day when we were leaving and there was no more time for japes).

Families with children were also catered for on a higher level. In addition to the various play rooms and activities there were pools, swimming pools, pools with pizza stations next to them and some kind of sports facility on the very top deck. I would have investigated however we all know I am allergic to 85% of sports in the general population. Did I mention the pools? They even had a night time nursery service so if you wanted to leave little Billy with a responsible adult so you could go get shit-faced in the bar and then return around 1am to pick him up then you could. You really, really could.

As two adults with no small people there was little chance that we could take advantage of any of these facilities. Not that we wanted to but, hey, nobody likes being left out. When the holiday was being booked there was the hint made by the company that some celebrities who would be onboard for a meet and greet. I heard ‘Wallace’ and ‘Gromit’ and I knew that I had to get involved in this kind of action. For four days there was no mention of them anywhere in the leaflets they left outside your day to inform you about the daily activities going on. Nothing whatsoever. Finally on Wednesday morning, cowering towards the bottom and wedged between something called ‘Jukebox Hero’ and ‘Pilates’, was the following:

“Wallace & Gromit Special Appearance – A special appearance from Wallace and Gromit. Come and say hello to the cheese-loving inventor and his faithful four-legged friend.”

We had to go. There was no way we could miss such an event as this. The queue was very long and started snaking through the whole of the atrium; clearly this was a big event for all. We decided to keep back and watch from afar rather than getting too close. Our location meant we could see everything. Like a couple of divas they were ten minutes late. What then happened can only be… well it needs… look at the damn photo:

Not even two people in suits. We’ve got a fully-sized Wallace and a tiny Gromit that he can fully pick up with one hand, no doubt sewn to his hand because he never put him down. I don’t know if the organisers of this even have ever seen ‘Wallace and Gromit’ but they’re fairly even in height due to the latter walking on his hind legs for a lot of the time. The kids that were hugging and posing for photos were fine with the arrangement; not a single one asked to speak to the manager or had some quiet words with a member of staff. It was clear that we were in the minority so we slipped away and discussed our respective disappointment over coffee and cake.

Avatar A reminder of old reminders

I use the “reminders” app on my phone quite a lot, because I am forgetful. It’s clever because you can get it to remind you about something at a particular time, and then once you tick the reminder to say you’ve done it, it just disappears. Poof! Gone.

Except it’s not gone, it seems. If you open up one of the menus and tell it to show you completed reminders, there they all are. All of them. Mine go right back to 2011.

I had a scroll through and most of them are very boring. Some of them are not. Here are some things I have been reminded to do in years gone by.

I don’t know what most of these mean.

Go to bloody Richmond FFS
Crisps
Windy tomorrow
Hotel?????
Fg
More wontons
Dentist/ear/tip
Post Ian a picture of a fist
R4 debacle
Go go go
Listen to the thing
Look for workman
Brioche and food
Family pictures sending please
Ask about onion soup
Friday
The Hoodie Problem
Mike is going to phone you at 4
Remind Steve to freeze three (3) breaded chicken breast fillets and retain one (1) chicken breast steak in the refridgerator
AAAAAAAAAAAA
Clean crap out of headphone jack
Tinsel, silver: six metresworth
Hello! Sorry for the slow reply, I was at work and then I was very, very asleep.
Eyyyyyy mate
Make some decisions
UKIP weather
Pester Kev
Give Joe ten pounds Sterling
Post to the Beans

Avatar Woodwork

I think this confirms that my transition to middle age is now complete. A few weeks ago I cleared out the garage, which had become a bit of a dumping ground, and decided it was time to finally put the space to better use. Every time there’s been a bit of DIY on the go, you see, I’ve ended up sawing and sanding and painting things on the garage floor. This is bad for my back, the floor and the end result.

My purchase of a small folding workmate bench a year ago has helped with this, but only so much. So I built myself a workbench, using bits of wood I’d pulled out of the loft when I boarded it out and some cupboard doors that were meant for the new kitchen but which had a paint defect.

I had expected it to be wobbly and uneven and possibly even end up rocking backwards and forwards if you touched it, but to my enormous surprise it is both level and extremely sturdy.

So this is just to say that I built a piece of very solid furniture from scratch, it was the highlight of my week, and I am now a middle aged man. Thank you.