Almost two years ago, in July 2022, you might remember that I blessed the toilets at work with a second piece of artwork. Thanks to my efforts to improve the lives of my colleagues, Piet Mondrian’s Composition London 1940-42 has been gracing the gents for the last 23 months.
I now need to report to you an important development. Since 2021 I have been placing beautiful artworks in the toilets, but now it appears I am not alone. Last week, Mondrian made way for a new image, placed there by an unknown hand.
It’s undeniable that the new artwork is a little less highbrow than my choices, but art is for the people, and I am not going to stand in the way of a more populist approach if it increases the appeal of the men’s toilets.
We’ll see how long Werther’s Original Man lasts. When he disappears I’ll collect your suggestions for a replacement with mass appeal, if the mystery curator doesn’t get there first.
As we dwell on what it is to be human, how it is to act and treat others, and other big questions such as these, occasionally you sit down and decide that all of that can be pushed aside for the moment because there are more important things to consider. I mean, I could wax lyrical about the *checks* state of growing marrows in grow bags for hours on end, but who would really take the time to read it? Would you? I didn’t think so.
What you need is something to get excited about. What you need is a big ole’ bag of news that I can throw over you and you’ll drown in all my tasty, tasty titbits of information. I am doing it right now, as you read this; if you try to swim you won’t be able to from all the bumpy pieces of gossip I am using to weigh you down. You may be gasping for air and I am going to squeeze the life right out of you.
Actually, that sounds pretty threatening, so I’m not going to do that. Have a bunch of announcements instead:
Today is 22 June which means nothing but happiness and joy for the good people of America celebrating National Chocolate Éclair Day. Yes, it does sound completely made up and I would imagine that 99% of the population don’t even know that it is National Chocolate Éclair Day but who am I to stand in the way of our overseas cousins? Let them eat anything they want if it means that we can carry on receiving their Lucky Charms and odd flavours of soft drinks
Famous birthdays today include Meryl Streep, Cyndi Lauper and my personal favourite, Bruce Campbell. Keep on tooting, guys
For my personal announcements, I want everyone to know that I try to be as observant as I can be. I took the recycling out the other day and, crossing the street to the communal bins, I noticed a sock on the floor. Hmmm, that looks familiar, I thought, and carried on walking. A few days later with another bag of recycling, I noticed the sock was still there. It had been ran over by a few cars by then, flattened against the tarmac and grubby with muck. It was only then, striding past it clutching my bogrolls and cereal boxes, did I realise that it was my sock. How it got there, I’m not sure, but scientists are doing their best to reconstruct the series of events leading up to this using fancy sci-fi gadgets that I’m not allowed to touch.
If anyone else would like to announce anything then please do so.
The other day we went to a brewery and made some tasty beer. You know that, of course, because if you’re reading this, you were there.
Anyway, I have now published photos of this excellent day in the Photos section, so that the three of us, and Sarah, can see what we got up to all day. It was one of our best days for photography.
I also had a great plan to edit together a video using all the footage we shot on the day, but despite having coined the new catchphrase “get a video”, we seem to have only created three videos. One of them was in portrait and was just me pulling a pint with nobody saying anything, so having skipped that, there were just two videos.
Not to be put off, I made a video out of them anyway. It will only cost you three minutes of your life. Please enjoy.
The other day I went to Tesco in the car. When I parked, I looked across at the car facing me in the next row. I then came very close to voiding my bowel before I realised what it was I was looking at.
Allow me to share this distressing vision with you now.
Can you? Can you imagine a girl band? I bet you can’t. I bet, when you try, all you have is a blank space and the feeling of hopelessness when your favourite steak knife (?) is out of stock and you have to settle for second best.
The ‘imagine’ games were a series of shovelware nonsense pushed out by Ubisoft to capitalise on the casual gaming market that was en vogue during the Nintendo Wii and DS era. Don’t fancy your kids shooting soldiers in ‘Call of Duty’ or smashing deities in the face in ‘God of War’? Get them into some harmless touch screen fun on a Nintendo. They covered a lot of bland topics and you can regularly find them taking up space in charity shops and lining the walls of CEX because parents and grandparents bought them in droves and now nobody wants them.
You start by choosing your name and what instrument you want to play. I went with Fluke, cos I’m cool, and bass guitar, because everyone knows that’s the coolest. You also get to choose one of three genres of music to specialise in so I opted for funk. After some perfunctory story about being in a band and looking for a new member, you start practising. When I say “practising” though I mean engaging in a basic version of any rhythm game from the past 20 years. My band is called The Oppress because funk music is very music about sticking it to “the man” and how much he’s holding us all back. Fluke and the Oppress. Yeah.
The song plays in the background and coloured buttons move across the top of the screen. When the button reaches the circle at the end, you tap the corresponding button with your stylus. The closer it is to being perfectly in the circle, the higher the score you get is. You can choose to practise with the rest of your band mates at home or you can perform… in the library?
This, to me, had “bar in the aquarium” vibes. Do music and reading go together? I get distracted when trying to do both but each to their own, I suppose. I was practising the whopping three songs our band had in the library and getting fairly good scores, however the game wasn’t moving forward so I took the girls to the mall instead.
You can buy instruments, new items of clothing and accessories at the mall like a real mall. As my character is a teenager and we hadn’t done any gigs yet I didn’t have a lot of money so I bought a new top and trousers to complement the funk style the band was going for. Still nothing. I went home to speak to what I thought was my brother but was actually my boyfriend who I never see because I’m either at school or with the girls trying to kick out the jams. Still nothing. With very little options, I went back to the library and performed each song until my score was off the charts.
Success! By smashing the songs, I opened up a brand new place to visit on the map; the park. I also earned some decent cash from performing at the library so I headed back to the mall to buy another bass guitar. I needed my instrument to match my new outfit, of course. It was then that my thirty minutes were up and I decided to stop.
It’s not an inherently bad game albeit one that’s so bland you wouldn’t be able to pick it out in a line-up some six months after last seeing it. If you aim for the lowest common denominator then you’re guaranteed to refrain from offending anyone. It blows my mind that someone will have paid full price for this once.
I’ve been digging around my old boxes of nonsense again because new content doesn’t find itself and bringing old things you’ve forgotten about back into the light is a good process. Right?
FYI, expect more of this over the next month or two.
This page was lurking at the front of one of the many notebooks I used to keep. It definitely wasn’t the genesis of the name ‘Papples’ because Chris and I definitely came up with that when I was visiting and we tossed off the idea of continuing the music making antics of The Office and recording an album. I must have been musing on the mythos, considering the chumblies and trying to develop a chart for people who didn’t quite understand.
It takes a while to comprehend both the genius of the name and the music of The Papples.
I’m not entirely sure why I was developing a gun of sorts to turn good apples to pap apples, then again I am an inventor so it must have come naturally (?). Let’s go with that.
