Welcome to SportsCast! We all definitely know lots and lots about the sports, and this time around we delve deep into everyone’s favourite, Rugby Eggers!
We run you through:
- Collecting the feathers
- Gloves or no gloves
- Results and reactions
The Shoe and the Bin
Welcome to the Shoe and the Bin, Carnforth’s leading example of prime pub bistro patisserie and winner of four ‘Confusing pub but great grub’ awards since 2015.
We pride ourselves on the concoction of food available from our three leading chefs participating in everything from Chinese to Thai to Brazilian and traditional English fare. If you’re after something in particular we can guarantee that we will have cooked it at least once in our 35 years of trading.
With the Christmas period approaching, it would be best to book a table now, even if you don’t need it. We get fully booked within a few hours of December and we would hate for you to miss out on all the fun. Chef Boswick is cooking up a storm with his mango and hazelnut chutney stuffing balls and chef Annalise can’t wait for you to try her steaming mincemeat gravy cake trays.
This is but a small sample menu of the delights that you can expect to see over the festive period, subject to availability and whether or not we can be bothered to dust off the extra kitchen equipment required to make it.
December Menu
Starters
- Home cured tin roof salmon, horseradish cauliflower umbrellas, picked Gorbachev, snout oil (GF)
- Mixed balcony terrine, feta mousse sharks, disgusting leek with a fresh jus (V, GF?)
- Smoked bollok baraccas, sauce uncommon gribble, apple underarm spin, sourdough shat (DF)
- Cajun pork snubbles, caramelised orange dandruff, picked mooli, fractured booli (GF, possibly DF)
- Singing mackerel herblets, bromance potato salad, “laughing” croutons, citrus gel, Tale of Two Cities
- Seasonal salad, seasonal purée, seasonable backwash, seasonal roasted barley with a seasonal fresh jus (VG, yes, very good)
Mains
- Acrid cod, saffron undercarriage, stained broccoli, split butter opera fund (GF…)
- Hasty beef feather blade, caramelised fondant jacket, mash ‘n’ a half, wander carrot, criminal leek, red wine jus (GF?)
- Ravished sea bream, blimey purée, dilapidated Jersey royals, curious tenderstem with nutty forecast fennel slaw
- Tempura eagle tofu, distinct absence of potato, pak choi, pineapple choi, Chris Choi, waffle and spring onion salsa
- “Bing Bling” chicken breast, telephone purée, hot potato mingers, creamed dialect, with a fresh jus (GF!)
- Paranoid risotto, herb space, toucan cheese (V)
Desserts
- Unruly salted caramel chocolate and leisure centre tart, mango flange
- Brigadier red wine poached pear, flaked docile crumb, arresting cream, taxi home (GF)
- Angry lemon posset, chuckle crumbles, raspberry mullet
- Mincemeat gravy cake tray, meringue parapets, upskill crust, shot of Pepto-Bismol
- Chocolate mousse, tear-stained cinnamon dome, passionfruit bookmark with a banana bichon frise sauce
- Vanilla crème brûlée, black olive amaretto, with a daunting fresh jus (GF)
The Shoe and the Bin: come for the food, stay for the food.
Le Soulier d’une Vie
(The Shoe of a Lifetime) A French Arthouse film
In a small, forgotten quarter of Paris, an unremarkable alley harbours a peculiar sight: a solitary shoe resting atop a weathered bin. This seemingly mundane object becomes the focal point of a poetic journey in Le Soulier d’une Vie.
As the seasons change, we witness fleeting moments from the lives of the residents who cross paths with the shoe. There’s Élodie, a dancer grappling with the loss of her passion; Pierre, an aging baker reminiscing about his long-lost love; and Léon, a young boy with an unyielding curiosity. The shoe, a silent witness, absorbs their dreams, secrets, and sorrows.
Through a tapestry of vignettes, the film delves into themes of impermanence, connection, and the beauty found in the mundane. Shot with a delicate hand and a lyrical eye, Le Soulier d’une Vie is a melancholic, yet hopeful reflection on the fragments of life that unite us all.
‘Skon På Papperskorgen’
The new film by acclaimed Swedish film director, Sherburt Bergmun.
‘Skon På Papperskorgen’ (‘The Shoe on the Bin’). What begins as a seemingly innocent piece of footwear dangling on top of a waste receptacle soon turns into the calling card of a madman.
Police inspector Kalle Alexander is called to the scene of a crime where the body of a young man lies dead. Nearby a note attached to one singular shoe atop a bin speaks of cataclysmic actions and further deaths in the future. He has very little to go on but after ten years in the job, he’s more than ready and prepared to get started.
He has a drinking problem, he smokes too much, he can’t make connections with anyone and leads a solitary life since his wife ran off with the local chemist. There’s a cat from a neighbouring flat who may well be his only friend.
When you’re faced with life and death though, friends are the last thing that you need. Kalle will find himself both in the firing line and gripping the trigger as he chases leads down in the most disgusting and darkest recesses of the city: he’ll scour every shoe shop, browse every Etsy listing in the surrounding area and he’ll even make his explosive presence known at the shoe factory downtown.
Alfred Binko (the award-winning actor of ‘Get up, Get off’ and ‘The Room around the Curtains’) stars in a career-defining role alongside veteran character actors Klaudia Shinn (‘Carry on, Mr. Scrappenberg’), Veronika Graaten (‘Solitary Mammals’) and Dhillon Ratiz (‘A Man for Many Flowers’). Ably abetted by the deft and kinetic cinematography of Shalein Tracker and a plump orchestral score by Gérard Picko, ‘The Shoe on the Bin’ is a modern Scandinavian classic that will show you the heart of darkness that can lie within the wonderland of everyday menace.
Shoe on a bin
Hey, everyone look! It’s a shoe on a bin!
…
Sigh. Well, what did you expect? When you’re pulling four different posts each month, every month, you will occasionally draw a blank. I’ve been knocking these out relentlessly for years now and you’d think it would get easier, but it doesn’t. You go to your phone to find some inspiration (a photo you’ve taken, an article you’ve been reading etc.) and you come up with nothing. What’s the alternative though? Do “a Kev” and scrape a bean once every twelve months?
People want content. Websites need new content. What would our fans (?) do without new things to read and interact with? We have an obligation as content creators (?) to pull more and more things out of our respective backsides to fill empty space. Empty space is similar to dead air; nobody wants it. They also say the same things about my self-help books.
I did briefly consider other options for this photo. If it were necessary to develop it into something more constructive then I could have:
- Pretended to be the owner of the shoe and sent out a request for the other to be returned
- Written a ransom note as the kidnapper of the shoe
- Created a fake dating profile for the shoe looking for a partner
- Another thing (the best thing).
What kind of a person would I be? I need to try harder. I can do much better. For this month I will therefore only be posting shoe-based content. November is the month of shoes. It’s not as if you can think any less of me, right?
… right?
Floater
Recently a new floater has entered my life. It is a dark spot in my right eye that is very obvious when I am looking at something white – a blank Word document, for example, or a sheet of paper, or this empty blog post that fills the screen. It hovers a bit below the thing I’m looking at and is only sometimes visible.
There it is. Little bastard. Go away, floater.
Generally speaking anything that has the title “floater” is something I disapprove of. I like floats perfectly well, of course – there are three that spring to mind:
- Vehicles moving in a carnival, carrying people who wear bright costumes and wave a lot. I like waving. These floats are good.
- A glass of coke with a block of vanilla ice cream in it, forming a weird foamy top and offering the pinnacle of hot day refreshment from the 1980s. Coke floats are delicious and I haven’t had one for ages but I might now have to go make one.
- The small amount of cash put into a shop’s till at the start of the day. I don’t have any strong feelings about this but I certainly don’t disapprove of it.
Floaters though? No. Nothing good comes with that name. The lavatorial variety need no discussion. The eyeball kind haven’t bothered me much until now but they are not welcome here.
I’ve always had a couple of little floaters in my eye, of course – virtually transparent ones only occasionally visible when I look at a bright clear sky and focus my eye a certain way, or something. But now this little dark bastard is here, uninvited. He will probably be a feature of my vision for the rest of my life, and is visible proof – highly visible proof, since he’s literally everywhere I look – that I am growing older and my eyes are only going to get worse.
Last year I went to the optician for the first eye test I’ve ever done. I have been lucky with my eyes until now. I’d noticed that reading anything with small writing now involved moving that thing slightly further away from my face. The optician said no, my eyes were great, nothing needed, thank you. Excellent, I said. Come back in two years, he said. You’ll need glasses then. My face dropped. Is there anything I can do, I asked? No, he said. You’re just getting old.
Now my glasses deadline is just 12 months away and, as if I wanted or needed a reminder of my gathering years, in what is likely to be my last year of unfiltered ocular excellence, my floater has arrived to remind me of my mortality.
Floaty little bastard.
I’m off for a Coke float.
Happy Halloween?
Nine million minutes ago
It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been slightly more than nine million minutes since the first time Kev travelled down to London to visit me in my poky Mortlake flat. (If you prefer more conventional time measurements, like some sort of idiot, that equates to 6465 days, or 17 years, eight months and 13 days.)
Obviously we used our time together extremely profitably. Among our many intellectual and sporting pursuits, we found time to spend quite a while – several hours, in fact, judging by the timestamps – taking pictures of ourselves with my iMac’s photobooth software.
Here are some highlights of a couple of very youthful idiots having a laugh nine million minutes ago.
