Recently I dug out my Lego castle for Ted to build and as he had to do something with photography for a Beaver badge, we made a little stop motion film…

Have you ever played that game where you collectively draw a monster by drawing part of the body then fold it over, pass it round, and the next person draws the next part etc.?

If not you’re probably quite confused by now, if you have, excellent. Well done, you’ve earned 5 additional brownie points.

Regardless I’d now like to present Plolly, Beebee and Trumps, the monsters created by Ted, Sam and Me, and named by Ted and Sam:

We have a motherfucking window bitches!

After only 14 months, our kitchen is once again weathertight. Thank fuck.

This is your timely reminder that wor Kev was famous well before he entered the fray of the ‘Beans.

Kev’s career started early. While the rest of us were lying on our backs with bottles and dummies in out mouths, he was out in the street rounding up the local cats in the neighbourhood to organise a delivery service to rival the Royal Mail. Dem kitties were strapped with all kinds of packages and sent out into the world. Very little returned but it gave the lad a head for business.

When he started primary school he saw potential, not for education but for racketeering. It was only a matter of time before he was patrolling the playground shaking down wimps for change and bottles of milk, no no, a sip was not enough for him. His empire stretched all the way from the swings down to the football pitch and across to the gates by the main road.

He grew tired of this though, it was all too easy. Kev wanted a challenge and he found this in amateur dramatics. There wasn’t a part he couldn’t play: Julius Caesar, Moses, Othello, Rhett Butler, Gary Wilmott, Bruce Forsyth, the list was endless. Success was around the corner and he could smell it. A local talent scout saw his production of Pinter’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and immediately cast him in a new children’s television programme about a boy who made a fortune.

‘Matt’s Millions’ was based on the book by Andrew Norriss about a boy who writes a successful video game on his home computer while ill and off school, and earns over one million pounds for his troubles. Kevin, of course, played the lead role of Matt, struggling to deal with the trials and tribulations of a pre-teen swimming in money. Does he go off the rails, knee-deep in clunge and blow? Of course not, he’s only eleven.

Though it only lasted for four episodes, Kev took his role very seriously and prepared for the part as only a professional would. He organised a meeting with Alan Sugar and shadowed him for a few days followed by a week with Donald Trump, wiping fake tan off his clothes every half an hour. He went deep into everything. When the series finished he had to take a few months off from the business because he was convinced he was a millionaire and expressed open disdain for his parent’s house only having three bedrooms and no pool.

These days you’re more likely to find him sticking abb dabs into cable wires and various other IT-based activities rather than on the telly or stage. Though the world mourns the loss of a world-class thug, entrepreneur and actor it celebrates his ability to cleanse the soul of a computer or whatever it is that IT people do.

Bridlington has a lot to answer for.

You know when people meet up and agree to do exciting things together in a different part of the world and then you pack all your stuff up and hop in a car to drive several miles (or hundred miles in some cases) in order to get to a place where you can all meet up before the big meet up and then you exchange pleasantries in someone’s dad’s kitchen perhaps chase the cats about a bit and then, when the time is right, you all hop in another car and start driving along the road that leads you to the place where the big meet up is going to happen and you look at cows as you keep going and the weather seems overtly nice and you crimsonly waltz up the M sixty something or other until you get to the coast and everything seems great and even though you’re as far East as you can go and the only entertainment is some drunken berks and possibly some bint with a piano in a social club that has about as much charm as a pubic louse and in the morning, with a glint in your eye and a song in your heart, you step outside to greet the world and finally FINALLY try to start doing all those exciting things and…

This happens.

We’ve clearly been having too much fun. The world doesn’t want us to be about and so, without wanting to sound too bitter, we’re shutting this gin joint down.

No, no, turn around my friend, you’re not welcome here. You’ve been spoilt with the sheer volume of content dripping from our collective pores and someone has to turn the tap off. Maybe when you’ve come to understand that, much like Bridlington, occasionally things have to shut the fuck off these pages will once again be strewn (STREWN I say) with all the juicy content you’ve been clamming for.

For now, well, let me close this chapter on a very hackable and mostly quiet October.

Death chases us all. How it follows us at every waking moment, waiting for a mistake or an accident. It lurks in the shadows, it stalks you through your dreams and like two young men on zero hour contracts standing outside Morrisons with clipboards and cheery dispositions, desperate for you to change your energy provider it will never leave you alone.

You would think given how many souls he has now Death would be quite bored with the whole scenario. You really want to throw my bits into the great steaming pot with the billions possibly trillions of others? What do you get from this, Death? Did nobody ever buy you a bike for Christmas? If you’re looking for hobbies, origami is very relaxing (that’s a big lie.)

This is Derek.

We don’t know if that’s his real name because he’s dead. His body was discovered by me a few weeks ago when I was tidying up. Perched upon a picture frame in Reuben’s bedroom, Derek appears to have had a tiny heart attack. He’s not upside-down or smashed into a magazine smear on the window so it must have been natural.

There he stares, with his staring eyes, out across the field. Was it what he saw that caused the trauma or did it happen suddenly, his little light snuffed out without any word of warning? We will never know. For now let us celebrate the brief life of Derek who, by leaving us so early, left the world with one less fucking fly to deal with.

Might update it tomorrow…