Kids today, eh?

Wrap up tightly for this one. It is gonna burn like a case of hot pie (hot pie!) cold custard.

What is going on with toys for kids? If you ask Old Man Kevvers what he ‘ad when ‘ee were a lad he’d tell you that it was a drawing of a stick on the pavement, drawn in coal dust, and each morning it would blow away before he had a chance to play with it. Times were different in the 18th century or whenever Old Man Kevvers was around.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to wander into a Smyths toy store then your eyes would be greeted by huge corridors of wall-to-wall dustbin fodder. They will stick a goofy face on anything and charge you fifty quid for the privilege, and your kids and your little sisters and your nieces and your cousins all want this steaming pile of excrement in their houses. Let’s take a look at some of the choices you have from my recent excursion to a toy shop with Professor Reuben:

Has your child or small relation recently been turned to stone by Medusa? Are you wondering what to get them for their birthday now that they have no pulse? Take a look at the Zipline Play Set for the recently petrified. All the fun of flying through the air on a piece of plastic. Make sure not to push them too hard otherwise they’ll shatter on the ground. Also works for those pesky ghosts refusing to pass into the next life.
Q: Where can we put something in an animal that isn’t provocative or sexy? A: In its mouth. Let me present you with the Number Crunching Squirrel! Put a piece of plastic in its mouth and watch it choke to death in the name of light entertainment. Jam disc after disc of brightly-coloured coins into Chip or Dale’s food pipe. It might play a song or add the numbers together, I don’t know, I was too horrified to find out.
I couldn’t walk past this without laughing. I’m very immature.

It was these three items as far as the eye could see. They are your ONLY options for future purchases. Break out the Kunst-Dose!

Story time

Here’s a challenge that none of us will be able to resist.

You know what to do. You have the words. You can also use any other word you like, as long as the other words are no longer than four letters long. I also choose to permit the words “scintillate”, “bigamy” and “washing machine”.

There will be a prize. Probably.

King for a Day

Early. Bleary-eyed. Rummaging through emails before work and there it is.

Now I have my fair share of luck like everyone else. I’m not swimming in lottery wins yet occasionally the cosmos chucks me a bone and a I manage a few numbers in the Chunderball. It’s a balancing act no doubt due to my years of annoying people and general sanctimonious behaviour. Yes, me. Look at me.

“Congratulations! You’re our Mastercard Competition WINNER!”

I’m your what the what now? This email sat in my inbox is telling me I’m a winner. It is praising me for winning more than anyone else. I am a winner. I have won a VIP trip for two adults to attend the UEFA Champions League Final Madrid 2019. I would rather stick my eye sockets in a paste of pepper and lemon juice than have anything to do with fucking football but even so, it does come with hotel accommodation and a £250.00 prepaid card so I can stick twos up at the final and go off to get hammered in some squalid Spanish bar, where the locals can pick my pocket when I am stumbling back to my hotel room around 7pm or however long it takes for me to get wasted these days.

This is pushed to one side by my acute distinct overwhelming sense of pessimism. “What do you think you’re doing? You actually believe you’ve won a competition? When did you enter this competition”

“I… I erm I don’t er… I didn’t?”

“Well done, genius! You didn’t. Why on earth would you have entered a competition to win tickets to the UEFA Champions League Final? It’s clearly a sham. It’s a fake. They’re trying to scam your sorry ass for a quick buck.”

Having checked the details, even though it looked like a genuine email I was inclined to agree with my pessimism that it was some hoodlums attempting swindle the last few pennies from my account. Like with all great phishing scandals, I sent a message to Zavvi saying that I had received an email that looked about as legitimate as a Smidge Manly Coco Loco advertisement from Spain, and asked them to verify if this was the case. I received a response a few hours later, two responses in fact. It seems as though a lot of people had received the same email I had because the first reply was a mass-produced email from Zavvi apologising for their error. This was further confirmed by the poor customer service adviser who had to message me back to say that I had not won the tickets, as well as several tweets from people on Twitter who had gone through the same highs and lows as I had.

So in one sense I have missed out on the chance of flying to Spain to live out a brief fantasy of downing alcohol in a foreign country. On the other hand though I have avoided a poxy holiday based around a shit game of football.

Hotter Otter out.

Easter is murder.

I’m not quite sure what the marketing team at Mars had in mind for this one….

I can only assume from this packet of m&m’s eggs that Yellow m&m and Pink m&m Egg were love rivals for the affections of Green m&m Egg, and that for some reason Yellow has seen fit to slaughter Pink splattering himself and Green in the blood of his rival.

Do you think they picked up on the start of the Easter story, the bit where Jesus gets killed, and not bothered reading on to get to the more traditional ‘re-birth’ bit?

Lemon drizzle

If you ask the question
About what is the best one,
The bakery transcendent,
The cakery resplendent:
I answer it with ease, take
Away your silly cheesecake.
Gingerbread and Eccles
Will meet only with my heckles;
Pineapple upside-down
Meet the deepest darkest frown.
You will find I have no time
For fondant fancy or key lime;
Though partial to a parkin,
There is only one worth markin’.
I tip my hat as witness
To the cake with all the citrus:
Lemon drizzle cake
Is the shizzle cake,
The finest there is,
Lemon driz
Is the biz.

Dear Beans… Crimson Colour Catastrophe

Dear Beans,

It has recently been brought to my attention that the world is not black and white anymore. It is a vibrant, colourful, smorgasbord of everything. I say everything because there are a lot of things now. I do miss the days when there were less things although I am quite happy talking to the small black disc in the corner of the room, especially when she plays me Captain and Tenille songs.

What disappoints me though is that there are no new colours. I want someone to come on the television and announce to the world, “Hey people! If you mix this and that you get a brand new shade! I’m calling it quotium brown!” I would prefer brighter colours though. There must be a new red or orange that somebody can rustle up like cookies from the cooker. We can’t have all the colours now that we’re only ever going to have. Forever. Forever and ever. People get so bored these days that they need new and stimulating things in order to keep them from going mad.

Do you think they are holding back on us? Are there scientists lurking within mountains, swirling ominous solutions in test tubes in the hope of squeezing out a new green?

If not, is there any chance one of you could invent a new colour and send it to me in the post?

Yours faithfully

Portia Cummerbund-Beige

Four Word Reviews: A Christmas Album

April is truly the most Christmassy month. There are several reasons for that. The first is that it just is. I mean, Christmas happens in December, obviously, but that really just makes the idea of December being the most Christmassy month a bit bourgeois and low-brow. No, April’s right on the fashions. The second reason is the weather – all that blazing hot sunshine that’s turned up in the last few days can’t help but make you feel festive. And the third reason is that it was in April last year that we listened to Mahalia’s Christmas album. (You did listen to it, didn’t you?)

Needless to say, then, this April we’re spinning another yuletide disc. This one is A Christmas Album, recorded in 1967 by Barbra Streisand.

Your Contact Numbers

Right.

Chris, I need you to call the Customer Service Desk; an old lady has turned up wanting to return a half-eaten box of grapes and exchange it for a soup ladle. Then when that’s sorted can you ring Captain and ask him if he has had sight of the whale in the last fifteen hours. There were a few blips on the sonar yesterday morning and if we need to start preparing the harpoons I would rather know now.

If Kev is still here and within an audible range, I need you to visit John/Michelle, who is currently in the middle of his/her sex change operation, and ask him/her to cover the deli counter over lunch because Barbara had to call in sick. Once that’s out the way can you make call Jane’s Cage to ask when she is likely to be able to move it to a more convenient place as it is clogging up aisle twelve and nobody can reach the tinned prunes.

Meanwhile I need to contact Wendy who, for some reason, has morphed into an Argos store. Before she starts selling reasonably-priced home and garden wares, in addition to electronics and toys, I must insist that she goes home and calls someone who is more qualified to deal with this situation. I also have to phone FTG (“Furious Toga Gargoyle”) who is parading around the freezer section and flashing his turgid, green dangly bits to anyone within reach. It really is more a matter for the police however I intend to deal with it before we escalate it to the correct authorities.

Let’s not dawdle now, people, we all have a busy day ahead of us.