Category: Winning

Avatar Rescued by an old friend

When we bought our house five years ago, we moved in to a former military town where all the army things were being steadily demolished and replaced with new housing estates. As part of this new utopian vision, we kept being told that there would be a new town centre, which would one day materialise on the big patch of derelict space in the middle of town five minutes’ walk from our new place.

Over the years we’ve kept hearing stories about all the brilliant things that will be there once they build it, putting a range of wonderful conveniences on our doorstep. But the big derelict space continued to be big, derelict and empty. Would we even live to see this fabled wonderland, this Eden of small town commerce?

Well, finally, things are changing. A couple of months ago work started to build the steel frames of the first building, which will be a big Sainsbury’s, soon to be surrounded by other things as part of a phased construction project. And in the last couple of weeks, with people and cranes and diggers on site, new signs have gone up to advertise the company building it. I couldn’t be more delighted. Look who it is!

As yet, though, no sign of their cufflinks or their children. I’ll keep looking.

Avatar Good boy

Have you been a good boy? There’s one sure-fire way to find out.

I’m sure you know this, but all we have to do is look underneath the priority seating in coach 4 of the 21.53 South Western Railway service from Guildford to Farnham.

Let’s have a look now.

Yes, there we are. So, have you been a good boy?

You have! Well done.

Avatar Jolly good: 81 days

Those of you with long memories will recall the harrowing story I related back in July about clearing the browser cache on my phone and losing my winning streak on a stupid tetris game I play every day. I’d been trying to beat my personal best of 80 and bombed out at 79.

I had to start again at 1, and Wednesday 15 October was the day I would finally reach 80 if all went to plan.

Well, good news: today is Thursday 16 October, and I now have a new personal best.

I’m not going to pretend this is the biggest thing going on in my life at the moment, and it might not even be the biggest thing happening in yours. But it is a bit of good news and we could all do with that. Jolly good.

Avatar Clompotition time (last one)

You’ll all be thrilled to know that this is the last one I have before we can retire this charade masquerading as a proper post. We all have stuff we like to whip out (waaaaaay!) as a cheap post from time to time to fill the quota and tick the boxes. I still have plenty of guff to fill your screens, and your time with, so divant fret, pet, if you’re worried about the lack of meaningful content.

Surely in our roles as gods of the Internet, for existing so long in this digital hellscape, we practically invented meaningful content (or whatever passes for it these days).

Anyway, enough preaching. Guess the expiry date of this bottle of ketchup.

Here’s a little hint too; it’s nowhere near as old as any of the other entries.

Avatar Amphibian/reptile brag

Guess what? My parish has more native species of amphibians and reptiles than yours.

Sometimes when I take the dog out I pass this little statue of a toad, but I hadn’t actually stopped to look at it properly until the other day. It turns out that it relates an important fact about my local area that I didn’t know until now.

The plaque underneath says this.

Whitehill is the only parish in the UK to claim home to all 12 of our native amphibians and reptiles, including this, the rare Natterjack toad. Only 7cm long with a distinctive yellow stripe down its back, it favours sand and heathland and breeds in shallow pools. It eats insects, worms and small reptiles and can live up to an amazing 15 years.

Twelve. Twelve native species of amphibians and reptiles. Your parish certainly has some of them, it might even have quite a lot of them. But it won’t have all twelve. I don’t know why amphibians and reptiles are measured by the parish, which seems an odd choice of geographic area to use for this, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is this.

My parish has more native species of amphibians and reptiles than yours.

In your face, sucker.

Avatar Clompetition time (again again)

We’re back again to bother you with the possibility of having that briefest glimpse of hope of winning. Winning something? No, no, merely winning. You can’t put a price on that.

Today’s sponsor is Bluebocado, the fruit that never gives up. If you want the taste of blueberries with the hearty goodness of avocados then you need to get some Bluebocado in your life.

What sell by date did this attractive jar of marmalade have?

Avatar Easter Eggcess

You probably know that, once Easter Sunday is gone, the supermarkets want to ditch their remaining Easter eggs and clear the shelves for something else.

Anyway, it turns out that if you’re a grown up you can do what you want, so on Monday we bought all this.

Then, on Tuesday, we came home to find that each of us had bought some more without mentioning it to the other. So now we have everything you see above, plus three more of the biggest Easter eggs, six more smaller ones, another 16 Creme Eggs, some sort of Creme Egg chocolate bar, quite a lot of Reese’s Eggs, numerous Cadbury’s Caramel eggs and two Toblerone products called Edgy Eggs.

We are now faced with a storage problem that, somehow, neither of us had foreseen.

Anyway, don’t worry too much, we’ll sort it out one way or another.