Can you believe that one of the defining moments of my life, and probably of yours too, was ten years ago today? The New Beans didn’t exist back then, so I didn’t record this for posterity as a blog post. The ten year anniversary seems like a good time to put that right.
Author: Criss Crimz
The last moment of March
This is what you get for posting in the last hours of the month.
Oh, sure, we’ve all done it. You think you’ve got a few more days to make another post, and then wham! It’s the 31st already and the minutes are running out. It’s like Geoffrey Chaucer himself put it: the Bean Counter waits for no man.
Anyway, I felt like I was on safe ground. The one year anniversary of the last podcast post had been and gone, and up my sleeve I had a nice little routine to post. It was going to be a transcript of a “missing” podcast episode. Stage directions indicating scuffling noises and someone eating something crinkly, a false start to asking a question, someone mishearing something. The subject would be along the lines of “what’s the longest you’ve had to wait for the next episode of something?”.
Anyway, I hadn’t written it yet, but in preparation I listened to Gravestones on my way home from work. That would be about two hours ago. In the intervening two hours, Kev has only gone and put another podcast up, hasn’t he? Unbelievable.
So the wind has been comprehensively extracted from my sails. Never mind. There’s four minutes of March left, so I will change course quite abruptly. It’s been a fairly middling day at the end of a fairly rough week, and this made me laugh. Let’s all watch this. Here’s to better times, and silliness, and listening to a new podcast episode on the way to work tomorrow. Thanks Kev. Even if it threw a spanner right in my stupid works.
Jolly Good: more free gingerbread
If this is a new tradition I am all for it.
Last night I stopped off at the station on the way home for a sandwich. I get home late when I’m doing a day shift at work so a quick butty on the train is perfect.
Anyway, I selected my butty and went to the counter. The nice lady rang it up on the till, and then gestured to a stack of gingerbread men all piled up on the countertop. “Would you like one of these, free of charge?” she asked.
Why, yes I bloody would, thank you very much. I would love one of these free of charge.
I cannot help noticing that this gingerbread windfall comes almost three years to the day since my last free gingerbread incident. It cannot be a concidence. I am looking forward to my next free gingerbread man, which I expect to be offered in late March 2026. I’ll put a picture here when it happens.
Fame at last
My job sometimes involves me being awake in the middle of the night and doing strange things.
One strange thing I’ve had to do lately is find ways of making phone calls to Australia on behalf of some people at the other end of the country. Normally, you see, OJ Borg does the overnight show on the wireless, and he has a mobile phone in Australia that he rings every day at 2.15am. He then has a chat with whoever answers it, and he asks them to give it to another random Australian in time for the next show. Lately, though, his phone system has not been allowing him to call Australia, which is a real disadvantage for a feature of this kind.
Our involvement in this madness – making phone calls to Australia in the middle of the night – has escalated steadily over the last month until it reached a point where they wanted to explain what was going on to their audience. So I was asked if I would mind explaining.
I didn’t mind, though I was very tired and not sure I was making much sense. That is why this happened.
Then, half an hour later, it was time to make the call. I didn’t say a lot because it wasn’t connecting and I was busy pressing buttons and checking things because I was very worried I’d done something wrong, but I hadn’t, it was just that the mobile phone in Australia had no signal.
My agent will handle all requests for signed photos. Also, I am now taking bookings for the panto season.
Not Kev
A little while ago, in the comments thread of another post, Ian and I were musing about how we could get more material from Kev on the Beans, and Ian suggested we use AI to churn out some generic Kev-like material for a new “Not Kev” account.
Unfortunately there just isn’t enough genuine Kev blog material to feed in to an AI to teach it what it should be writing, so I suggested padding it out with a load of Jilly Cooper novels.
Anyway, long story short, I got ChatGPT to write us some “Not Kev” blog posts and, while they have turned out with a fairly heavy Jilly Cooper influence, they’re still basically decent enough to be posted under Kev’s name without anyone noticing the difference.
I’ve actually got three of these ready to go, but I think this is the best one.
Four Word Reviews: Funky Dory
You know how, occasionally, something you’ve never experienced before is somehow just what you expected? That is how I felt when Rachel Stevens’ debut solo album, Funky Dory, went into my CD player. I more or less remembered the lead single, Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, but apart from that the main thing I knew is that it was a solo album from the best one out of S Club 7. Rachel Stevens evidently wanted to sound a bit more grown up now that she had thrown off the shackles of the other S Club 6, and it was 2003. Put those things together and you’ve got exactly what this sounds like.
A terrible goodbye
I don’t check the undertaker’s window very often, which means I don’t really keep myself abreast of all the latest undertaking fashions. That’s on me. It’s my problem and I’m doing what I can to address it.
Recently I paused at the window of an undertaker in Petersfield – a wealthy market town in the Hampshire countryside, so not exactly the haunt of the trashy or the tasteless. I expected that what I’d see through the window would all be sombre and reverent. But no: undertaking fashions have moved on, and I have been left behind. It turns out that even in the deeply traditional home counties countryside, picture coffins are now a thing. They had a window full of them.
Cardboard picture coffins.
Emergency bean grab warning
I don’t want anyone to be alarmed by what is about to happen.
Several terrible things have happened lately, you see. One is that I haven’t been able to review the album Funky Dory by Rachel Stevens because the only CD player in the house is a portable drive that connects to my laptop by USB, and my laptop is from the future so its USB ports are all the wrong shape, and I have somehow managed to lose all the adapters I ever owned. Some new adapters arrived yesterday.
Another terrible thing was waking up this morning, looking at the calendar, and realising that February only has 28 days. I thought it was probably around the 22nd anyway, which it isn’t, but the shortness of the month leaves me with only today to make another three posts if I’m going to maintain my years-long streak of full bean counts.
Anyway, this post is here to give you fair warning that it’s going to be a bumpy ride today, with new posts landing on a very tight schedule as I try to hit the full four posts for this month. (This post is also here to count as one of the four.) Good luck everybody.