Avatar Southseeing not Southdoing

It didn’t even have a title until I sat down to scan it in, and now here it is: the book recording possibly our most chaotic and disrupted silly weekend away together, the time that you were both supposed to see my new house and instead we all went to Portsmouth, except I wasn’t even in Portsmouth for some of the time.

Still, this one is an absolute joy to peruse. Among many other things, you can delight yourself with:

  • Wabs McKenzie in the “snuggle hole”
  • Hat-a-boat
  • How boats really work
  • Tad Kensington and his “unique process”
  • Ian in da Club (covered in monocles)
  • Chris sings the Backstreet Boys
  • Mildren

You can either try to remember it in vivid detail, or you can cheat by visiting our Books page.

Avatar Can’t Stop the River Force 5

Avenging bunged-up watercourses across the north east of England, the River Force 5 are on hand with their collection of sticks and poles to slowly move rocks and piles of leaves around, allowing the water to flow more directly and efficiently.

Now you too can revel in their escapades and benefit from their wisdom in this, their first non-fiction publication, Can’t Stop the River Force 5.

In this charming volume you will discover:

  • Kev’s Sleeping Bag Deluxe
  • The Grn
  • How to deal with a gay issue
  • The tale of Robert Flandersnoof
  • Plenty of tug and tumble

You can, as ever, read it on our magnificent Books page.

Avatar Four faces

The human face is capable of showing a huge variety of emotions. Some of them are obvious, so plain that even children and dogs can recognise them: smiling means happiness, for example, while a furrowed brow often means consternation or constipation. You may know of others.

Today we are going to look at four of the lesser-known emotions and the facial expressions that go with them. I hope you find this guide instructive.

Pudding shop

The pudding shop face should show a mixture of delight and surprise. Some people choose to include a measure of snootiness but this is optional.

Crescent in disrepair

When faced with a grand Regency Crescent in disrepair, perhaps while visiting a spa town that has fallen on hard times, most people extend the tongue slightly, making a face that is close to some expressions of unbridled silliness, but which is actually a sign of great concern for the preservation of listed buildings. A minority of people make a face that is virtually indistinguishable from the pudding shop face, Ian.

Very exciting

Excitement usually produces wide eyes and an open mouth, but in extreme cases – where the excitement being felt is beyond the highest reaches of the Alton Towers Excitement Scale – a common human reaction is to close the mouth, move the hand protectively to the chin or sideface, and look sideways on at the exciting phenomena.

Terrible man

A terrible man will arouse strong feelings in anyone of adult age. Many people find themselves involuntarily contracting their neck and tightening their lips. Some also experience gastric bloating and wind.

Avatar Three Men in a Tin Shed

After a suitable gap, long enough for us all to forget most of what’s in it, I’m delighted to announce the online publication of Three Men in a Tin Shed, the commemorative book of Bridlington 2021.

If you care to flick through its lemon cake tinged pages, you’ll find:

  • Ian’s Love Pipe
  • Kev’s fizzy pizza
  • Chris showering in jeans
  • Ludwig von Slugwig
  • Ian “taking the weight”
  • Chris’s cockney French
  • Kev stepping over Wom
  • The “ramming it home” flowchart

You can read it, and all our other literary masterpieces, in the Books section.

Avatar Happy times in a sad seaside town

Recently, three extremely silly people went to Bridlington, and spent most of their time avoiding Bridlington itself by sitting in a small caravan and taking it in turns to play a racing game. However, for some brief periods, they did do a limited number of other activities, where those activities hadn’t been closed down for the winter.

You can now look through a photo album recording their escapades in full. Please feel free to add to it if you have your own pictures and/or memories of this very silly time. Here it is!

Avatar A new thing: photos!

This is something I thought about a while ago, and may also have mentioned, but also may not have. Anyway, whether I mentioned it or not, it has now changed from “a thing I was thinking about” to “a thing I did”.

We’ve all got lots of photos from all the times we’ve met up and done stupid things. All mine are just sitting around on my phone or in folders somewhere on my laptop. That’s useless, when they should really be here on the Beans, in our shrine to three lifetimes misspent doing pointless things that nobody but us find funny.

So I’ve done a bit of faffing and made a photo gallery thing. You can find it by clicking Photos in the menu, or by clicking on these words here.

If you’re like me, and you have photos, then you should also add them, and together we will have lots of photos, which we can look at occasionally, and the rest of the time we will ignore them, just like everything else on this website.

How do I add photos to the things?

Good question.

  1. In the admin interface, go to FooGallery > Galleries, and either create a new one or edit an existing one. If you’re making a new one, give it a name.
  2. Click “add media”. This opens the same interface you use to add photos to blog posts. You can upload pictures or select them from the media library here. Select all the pictures you want to include.
  3. In the sidebar, select how you want them sorted. You can try it by date or by title, depending what works best. You don’t need to change any other settings.
  4. Click publish (if it’s new) or update (if it’s not).

If you made a new gallery, you now need to add it to the album list so it turns up on the photos page. This is easy.

  1. Go to FooGallery > Albums.
  2. Click “edit” on the album “Photos”.
  3. Click the new gallery you created, so it gets a blue tick on it like all the others. You can drag it to another place if the galleries are in the wrong order.
  4. Click update.

You now know as much about this as I do. Hurrah!

Avatar Five

It’s here! Many years late and all the more welcome for it, we now present The Official Book of London 2014, “#Chris30”. It is of course from the fateful time Kev and Ian came to see me in London for my birthday, and Kev wasn’t very well, but we still played dinosaur golf anyway.

It’s a rollercoaster of long-forgotten birthday emotion, featuring:

  • The invention of Smidge Manly
  • The David Craig Face Clock
  • Book #selfies
  • Tit tetris (titris)
  • Chris’s chunky ass
  • Sadsack’s sick sack

You can read it right now on the Books page or, if you don’t want to go via the Books page, you can read it by clicking exactly here.