Colour chart

Just in time for Kev’s annual Whole House Redecoration (start date 1 November 2018; completion due 25 October 2019), Pouring Beans Chemicals Ltd. are delighted to announce their new home decor paint range.

All our new paints are lovingly hand-made at the large chemical refinery down by the docks.

	Whimbrel Neither too yellow, nor too sad, Whimbrel is the colloquial name for the traditional butcher’s apron which this haughty colour embodies. It’s the perfect contrast to our slightly lighter Musty White and Smoky White, creating a trio of colours that sit perilously close together in modern and traditional homes.
	Third Degree Burns The deep blackened pigmentation gives a smug burgundy finish with a wonderfully sore feel. This, our most angst-ridden red, reads almost like a disingenuous purple if you compare it to our more painful looking Internal Bleeding Crimson.
	Dipsomaniac This quietly desperate blue feels wonderfully hopeless, and could be suitable anywhere from a service riser to an airy frotting room. The exact shade is rooted in a despondency palette. Like denim, its blue hue is ultimately worthless and yet always feels tipsy.
	Churlish Bile This takes its name from the old English expectorations of simple peasants with a poor diet. With its highly pigmented yellow base, this mid green creates a totally unique look by not actually being green at all. It’s a statement colour when contrasted with shades as repellent as Titchmarsh Brown. It is also fabulous when used with furtive glee.
	Ocean Drowning This rich teal takes its name from highly fashionable show-drowning in pre-revolutionary France. Sitting between Punitive Green and Biliousness, its subtle blue undertones work particularly well in modern aquatic spaces. Slop onto industrial processing units alongside Huguenot Fishwife on pipes and valves for a clean finish that is conducive to modern industry.

Other shades are also available. Please ask your stockist to mix two cans together and see what they get.

Flimsy Floppy Bendy Batman

Everyone needs a mascot, everyone needs a prop. When you’re doing things with people (waaaaaaaaay!) it’s always good to have one particular item that everyone can focus on or channel their thoughts into when times are hard. The best example of this would have to be Dr Who, whose exploits of an eccentric flopping through dull science fiction stories would be even more boring had he/she been doing it on their own.

Heading down to Didsbury for a large selection of pints with scale perfect philanthropic Mexican-Chinese genius Kevin and grey-haired family man and insurance savage Tom, I decided that we needed something to drag along for our adventure. I already had a wealth of junk in my pockets (because that’s who I am) so I was immediately drawn to Lego Santa Claus. Yes, he’s small and likely to get lost however he’s made of the firm stuff: he can take twelve hours of drinking, easy to transport, brimming in playful colours and millions know who he is.

Cut to Tom’s wife Claire practically handing me an item that she is done with. “I don’t want to see it again, I don’t want it back. Please take it with you.” It’s a kid’s toy; Stretch Armstrong but it’s Batman. Bendy Batman. What possible harm could this have done to Claire? What evil lies within this rubbery realm of innocent fun? It didn’t occur to me, I placed him in my coat pocket and we left.

As it happens, even with my poor memory, I struggle to remember most of that Saturday. The tweets I made are baffling even by my standards. Photos are non-existent. Vague, sepia-tinged memories of being too drunk to go in the Slug and Lettuce, someone needing a jump start for their car outside a restaurant and pretending to care about football in the most crowded pub on the whole street are all that remain. Floppy Batman was there for all of it. He survived the night and came back in one piece, like a boss. There is a lot to admire.

As it happens, a few weeks later, I’m driving home from work and what do I see? An advert for Very.co.uk virtually on every single bus stop showing, in all his glory, Floppy Batman. It could have been another Batman toy, as there’s many many out there, but no, it’s him, the one and the same. Now he’s whoring himself out for Christmas everyone is going to have one soon. He’ll be accompanying other goons on other alcohol-fuelled Saturday evenings. It’ll take away the magic once the world is doing it. The tart.

I should have stuck with Lego Santa.

The Third Kind of Water

The people have spoken and…

“I demand a third water, beyond simply still or fizzy. Something else. Creamy water, maybe, or extra dry water. Something like that.”

… is what they said. Never let it be said that here at Pouringbeans we don’t give the people what they want. We do, we always do, and we give them it in spades. SPADES!

Without any more fuss, let me present to you, straight from the ever-busy laboratories of Kevindo Menendez…

Antimatter Water

In an interview with New Scientist, Menendnez said:

Antimatter Water was been produced at great expense to satisfy the urges of one egocentric numpty. However in the process we created something beautiful. Its impossible to drink, and if you mix it with normal water, they both disappear, so NEVER do that. EVER. It could cause some unknown science stuff… probably.

The article goes on to state that “In 1999, NASA gave a figure of $62.5 trillion per gram of antihydrogen” so we can only gasp in awe at the sheer cost of the singular glass of Antimatter Water that Menendez managed to create.

The glass of impossibly expensive anti-water will be presented to a Mr. C. Marshall, along side a selection of budget waters from Aldi, at an upcoming meeting to discuss the ludicrous installation of additional eyes to Mr. Marshall’s face.

Table for Two?

Good Evening, Monsieur and Madame. I trust you are having a pleasant Thursday evening? It is the perfect time for a get together of food, wine and conversation the likes of which have never been seen before.

Here, please let me take your galoshes and wellington boots, and you can have a seat towards the back of the restaurant, where the smell of the food barely covers the scent of faeces, wafting from the gentleman’s you-know-what’s.

May I recommend that before I take your drink orders that you take a look at the menu? Our chef has made some recent alterations that I think may interest you. It’s a little more adventurous than you’re possibly used to but I can assure you that you will not be disappointed. I will place your possessions in a badly-lit broom cupboard near the barely visible ‘Fire Exit’ sign and come back in five minutes to help with anything that I can.

Please feel free to help yourself to complimentary aniseed ball-bearings to help cleanse the pallet before the real action starts:

Evening Menu

Starters

Herb-coated shenkles of pen lids, rocket, arse shavings, child-wept tomatoes. Silly oil and three whole lemons – £15.00

Charred and badly-burned damp sewer wood wrapped in posh ham, silver spank noodles and basil wet bags, disgusting reduction – £24.00

Crab, leftover curtains, nose hair and avocado bruschetta, fingered aioli – £19.00

Mains

Duck cocks, pissy ash puree, wilted bin mugs and breakfast pan juices – £30.00

Smoked sorcery eyes, chorizo and beach cable risotto, poached eggs barely audible – £42.00

Spaghetti with handcuffs, flange, chilli garlic, cracker dust, leather concave bisque reduction – £35.00

Lunch specials

Roasted fly thighs, dolphin panache, bat shit chasseur sauce on a crushed Henderson suit bread – £26.00

Buffed fish, hand cut bastard nugget portions, sinister tomatoes and Enya thermidor height sauce – £30.00

Limp bollock dross and balls, savage pasta bound in Napoli drippings, topped with existential phone nubbins and a space rollercoaster – £27.00

And for desert? I am sorry, Monsieur and Madame, desserts are sadly off the menu for this evening but I am sure that I may be able to find something in the condemned freezer next to the warm raccoon cage. Let me get back to you on that one.

The dancing monkey

There are many complex and bewildering technologies to master in my new job, but probably none more complex or bewildering than the robotic dancing alarm monkey.

Alarms go off quite regularly, you see. We look after technical things, lots of them, and the technical things are all wired up to an alarm system, so when something goes wrong it comes up on a screen and an alarm goes off. Then we press a button to make the noise stop and see if anything needs to be done.

The alarm could just come out of a speaker. That would certainly make sense. Instead, though, it’s been wired up to an animatronic monkey with inbuilt speakers. He makes the alarm sound, and he dances from side to side while he makes it. By such means the announcement of a potentially catastrophic system failure is made delightfully charming. This is, with no danger of overstatement whatsoever, one of the best things about my job.

If you have a need to make noises in your job, I would recommend getting yourself a dancing monkey. You won’t regret it.

The balcony

In my new job, I work on the third floor of an old building that has many useless architectural accoutrements and doodads. They’re all things the architect thought would look nice back in 1932, but which now serve no purpose at all, and perhaps they never did.

One of the useless things is a balcony that runs all the way along our side of the third floor, just below the windows. It only seems to be there because someone decided that this side of the building would look a bit more interesting if there was a balcony on it. It’s a very long balcony – perhaps as long as two or three double decker buses parked end to end, or maybe as long as a fireman’s hose, if the fireman’s hose was the same length as two or three double decker buses parked end to end.

It doesn’t look to me like a balcony that I was meant to go and stand on. It’s not very wide, for a start. You could stand on it, and walk along it if you weren’t planning to swing your arms about too much, but you couldn’t put a chair of any kind there, at least not in such a way that you could actually sit on it. The wall along the edge is only just waist high, so you’d feel a bit exposed on it as well.

None of that means that I don’t want to stand on it. Unfortunately, I can’t, because none of the windows open wide enough and the doors – we have two sets of double doors that would open on to it – are locked. The doors are also blocked by some furniture and other piles of tat.

I don’t know why I want to stand on the balcony so much. It would be cold and unpleasant and dangerous, and there would be nothing for me to do once I was out there. There’s no good reason to stand on the balcony. It’s not even a balcony for standing on. That’s why the doors are locked. They aren’t doors for walking through. But none of that changes the fact that I want to stand on it, just for a little bit, just to say I did.

One day it will get the better of me. One day I will climb out of the window. And on that day you will know I made it because you won’t hear from me for a long time, and it will be because I got stuck on the balcony you’re not meant to stand on, and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. And it will be worth it.

The Face Update – Round Two

What you didn’t know is that secretly I wanted most of my face to be a giant mouth.

Hello and welcome back to my face. Nice to have you back. I have hinted at the technological advances in previous messages (in fact, there’s been a lot of bants about my visa/volto) so without further ado I present you with My Face Version 2.0:

1. Original Eyes – the original but not necessarily the best, as my prescription gradually gets worse with each opticians appointment.

2. Viewing Eyes – for my viewing pleasure.

3. Peering Eyes – the ones my peers are most jealous of.

4. Seeing Eyes – the best sight that money can buy (or chin boobs as someone once referred to them as).

5. Glimpsing Eyes – I’m sorry, was that a cat carrier full of empty beer cans? Let me take a glimpse.

6. Spotting Eyes – still a good back up pair when peering is out of the question. They have been moved from the top of the ear to underneath so the ear itself now also looks like a face. Handy.

7. Looking Eyes – guaranteed to help when trying to choose between buying one unnecessary thing and another unnecessary thing.

And now for the upgrades:

8. Noticing Eyes – when you can’t quite believe what you saw and need a second opinion.

9. Perception Eyes – or percepting eyes, able to perceive things for what they really are.

10. Mysterious Eyes – for confusing people and running away when you’ve forgotten to bring your wallet to the supermarket.

11. Triple Eyes – when you want people to believe you have psychic powers, the triple always steals the attention in your general direction.

12. Poker Eyes – nobody will call your bluff when you’ve got these babies on show.

I was hoping to have more at this point in my life yet I am still very happy with all my sets of eyes.

Look at me (ME!) and be inspired.

Episode 10: The trouble with wasps

A new episode I hear you exclaim with glee. With an increasingly erratic release schedule, this surprise new episode includes Chris, Ian and Kev rambling incoherently about:

Bees vs Wasps
Ian’s money management
Jams and Chutneys
The pickle conundrum.