Author: Ian “Air Travel Regulations” McIver

Avatar Lemon’s Day Out

What makes a great day out? Smashing weather? A choice picnic? Celebrity endorsements? Whatever you think is right is probably wrong. The thing that makes a great day out is lemons.

There is nothing more satisfying than chucking a lemon up into the air and catching it. There is nothing better than taking a photo of a lemon doing something a lemon should not be doing (waaaaaaaaaaaaay!). Wherever you look there are millions of people out enjoying their summer holidays yet they’re doing it without the benefit of lemons. Our scientists predict that holiday satisfaction levels would increase sevenfold should people choose to include a lemon, or multiple lemons, in their activities.

As a test run I recently took a lemon into town when my sister came to visit. My lemon joy levels peaked higher than previous lemon levels have ever reached. It was quite a day. Given how cost-effective lemons are, I am hoping to start a kickstarter campaign to supply lemons to the poorer regions of the UK IN THE HOPE OF… sorry, in the hope of upping the ante in the lemon department, which sounds like it should be rude but it’s not.

When is the last time you took a lemon out? Respond below and share the joy of the citrus fruit that is… Lemons!*

*has clearly said the word far too much and thus attempts to remove it from his vocabulary

Avatar Hedge Mayonnaise

Wham! Smack! Pow!

Kevindo Menendez comes back and hits you like a sonic anchovy.

Where has he been? What has he been up to?

That’s none of your business. What is your business though? I can tell you what your business is. Your business is the new tasty condiment he is bringing out RIGHT NOW.

Do you like bush? Do you like creamy eggs? Then you’re going to love Hedge Mayonnaise! All the great taste of horticultural white mush in a tiny, convenient plastic bottle.

Kevindo Menendez takes only the best eggs, only the greatest green leaves and some other things that go in regular mayonnaise to make his stunningly beautiful Hedge Mayonnaise. It’ll cost you no more than a selection of paper pounds and boy is it worth every tiny penny of your hard-earned schmackeroons.

Eight out of Seven people prefer it to actual food.

Get it now!

Avatar Dedication

Dedication. Say it out loud because you won’t be hearing much of that word for much longer. Why? Because dedication has a new name and that name is Christopher James Marshall.

Lunacy is infectious, much like laughter and most Class A drugs. Lunacy is responsible for a lot of things and I expect when they eventually drag me away, kicking and screaming, wrapped in a My Little Pony sleeping bag, it will be something that I try to pin the blame on in the hope they’ll let me go. When it comes to a lot of my nonsense it’s about 50/50 as to whether anyone else will join in. Some of it is too much, even for me, so I fully understand when people choose to ignore and carry on with their lives. For instance, this morning I was thinking about Loudermilk (again), an old animal’s home for all of Bob Ross’ woodland creature friends and Korean Karaoke (because it sounds nice).

Occasionally though the baton will be picked up and well and truly ran all the way to the finishing line. That baton was a petition to reinstate Monty Don back in the band Beats International. Even though none of that sentence makes sense in the real world, Chris took that petition and got it fully signed.

Two hundred and eleven individual signatures. Two hundred and eleven people. People may scoff that our generation never amounted to anything but I will wave this petition in their faces to prove them wrong. What an achievement. What a level of dedication unheard of in this day and age. So based on this and this alone, the word ‘dedication’ should be replaced with ‘Chris Marshall’.

What a level of Chris Marshall unheard of in this day and age.

You heard me.

Avatar Stop your life! Everyday solutions

What do you do when you want to talk to girls? Do you have a manual that you refer to?
WRONG. Books cannot help. What about some chat up lines?
WRONG. They never work, they’ve been heard a million times before and you’ll sound like a cheese ball. What you need is the Smoochies Inc patented Incense Talk to Girls System*.

In order to cope with the crazy world of women you need a foolproof method. We have your back and we have your method. All you need is the Smoochies Inc Incense Talk to Girls system in your back pocket. Whilst it may look like a picture of incense sticks from the shop I wandered into this weekend, it’s actually the secret to talking to the ladies.

Picture this: you can talk normal people proper but when it comes to the opposite sex you struggle. Whip out the ITG system and you’ve got everything you need. Assimilate the names into any sentence for instant sex appeal. For example:

“Hey Sweet Fig, strap on your Lavender Blue and we’ll be Just Peachy.”

“Oh French Vanilla, you put the Fizzy Pop in my Nag Champer.”

“Girl, when you take me to your Butterfly Garden I am gonna Black Love your Mango.”

There is no way you can go wrong. You’ll be winning with women before you know it. Clear out your diary because you are booked for the next few months, Casanova. And so on. Smoothies Inc – guaranteed (ish).

*Not to be confused with the Smooches Inc patented Girl Talk System.

Avatar Monty Don – Petition Update

Hi Guys

So, I believe that we are all in receipt of the petition, and when I say “the petition” you know fine well which petition I mean. Yes, it’s the one to get my main man Monty Don back up onstage with a microphone in his hand to rip the world in two with some phat beats.

The only way we are going to get this up and running is with the backing of the people. I know that all of his fans have been crying out for this for years and it was only recently that some brainiac had the right idea to start a petition, and get the ball rolling. We need to roll that ball quick and hard, like the effort needed to stretch a weasel. We have to put that weasel right in there, no pre-stretching or pre-preparation at all, and get it stretched like there’s no tomorrow. If that weasel is going, it’s going and there’s no going back. If that ball rolls back then we need to smash it into next week, whether using the weasel or not.

So, like the weasel, and maybe the ball, we need to get the word out to everyone. I want to see Twitters, people, I want to see a rip curl of emotion driving this down the throats of every single name in your list of followers. I want to see Facebook posts, Instagram instas, Linked-In sausage link notifications and postcards sent to a PO Box address that doesn’t exist.

I have never felt so strongly about anything in my entire life. I feel as though I was put on this earth to make this happen, and the only way it can happen is with the support of people like you. Without you there would be no you, so keep you-ing and I will keep me-ing, and with any luck by the end of the summer we will have achieved our goal.

All of my eyes, and I do mean all of them, are on you to sort this mother out. Bless you and all your tiny hand socks of joy (what?).

Avatar Stationary Harassment – Part 2

Following the harrowing experience I encountered in Asda car park last year HERE, there is another dog looming on the horizon who clearly has something against me.

The kind of job that I do involves a lot of checking windows. I mean I love windows me, even if it wasn’t part of the job I would happily peruse lists and lists of properties with the same postcodes of the people I know to see who has got the correct certification and who hasn’t. Some people have hobbies, some people spend hours looking at double glazing; that is my life and I am sticking to it. What greets you though as you load up the lovely FENSA website is this (apologies for the poor quality photo):

What is his problem?

The woman is happily discussing getting new windows, possibly for her semi-detached house that desperately needs refurbishment work because the rest of the street has already done it and it she had to wait for her aunt’s inheritance to come through before she could pay for everything, and hiding above her shoulder is this grouch, this Grinch, this menace. The prospect of double glazing means that the house will be adequately insulated against the bad weather types so the dog should be actively encouraging this behaviour. Instead he squints and grimaces his way each time you come to the website.

He looks as though instead of serving him doggy kibbles and sweet cheeks for breakfast (I’m not quite sure what dogs eat) he received a massive turd garnished with dandruff. He looks as though he’s been waiting for his PPI refund cheque for over four weeks and the company isn’t responding to his emails. He looks like Eamonn Holmes gave him a right good telling off for not observing the strict kitchen rules, carefully printed on a wooden plaque, hanging over the doorway.

I am doomed to repeat this each and every single time. If you want to have a peek with your peeking eyes, and have the stomach for it, you can witness his face HERE

 

Avatar May Review – a review of May

Well, wasn’t that a nice May? It may (huh huh) have passed rather quickly but it’s fair to say that we all had a smashing time regardless. What did we learn?

We learned a lot about automobiles thanks to the super brain of ocular octogenarian Smidge Manly. Chris finally learned that he isn’t actually any relation to Kelly Jones and is in fact somehow part of the wind family. What kind of crazy reunion will he have later on this year? Can I manage to get past this section without a wind-based pun?

Kevin learned that continually not posting on the beans will leave him with a shameful string of dried-up peas. This kind of legacy is not a good legacy for loved ones, and the gif of the Changlet shaking his head in despair will remain at the back of his mind for decades to come.

I did not learn a thing. What I did was set myself umpteen challenges without properly considering the words that were coming out my mouth and through the tiny letters on my phone. It does mean that I have a full list, chocked full of nonsense, to keep me occupied during those warm summer nights.

Reuben learned that being hit with a cricket bat really sodding hurts. Audrey learned not to leave Reuben and I in charge of her flat when she goes on holiday, for fear of returning to pickle-based games with no clear end to them (which she did, for when she went away the second time this month she got her brother to keep an eye on it). At least one of us is learning.

Take a deep breath. By the time you let it out its already be June.

Avatar What is a Mandolin?

A wise person once asked, “Where is my mind?” I often find myself coming back to this question as a reference point during the day because I know where my mind is physically, however there are times when certain acts of stupidity make me question whether it is really there at all.

You must remember to question everything. Nothing is for certain anymore. If you’d have told me fifteen years ago that I would have a tiny device in my pocket that could download cute videos of cats walking around like human beings at any time during the day I would have laughed right in your face. YOUR. FACE.

Do you know what a mandolin is? If you think it’s a stringed instrument in the lute family then you’d be so wrong I would have to stand on a precipice and tell the world. This is actually what a mandolin is:

It is a small, thin chocolate bar from across the sea, from a world where other chocolate bars clearly don’t exist. Quite what music shops have been selling all these years is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they have all been misspelling it all these years and those instruments of 6, 8 and 12 strings are, in fact, mendolins or mandolines, or possibly something else. If the decision were up to me, I believe a mandoloin would be an excellent name.

Faced with the possibility that all those times I have been getting mandolins all wrong, I have therefore proposed two outcomes to this predicament:

  1. I will write, perform and record a song using the aforementioned chocolate mandolin;
  2. I will eat one of these other “mandolins” you find in music stores.

It is the only way to find balance and harmony between these two vastly different things with the same name. If I am only half successful then the whole thing will be a total loss. If I can achieve both then the sun will come out and there will be a tomorrow to look forward to.

Wish me luck.