We’re back and this time we’re trying to decode the mysteries of some raisin brunch bars, like a right couple of lads. Yeah.
What’s the expiration month and year?
David, it’s over to you.
Clompotition time (again)
Category: Abodes
The best home owner job
We talk a lot about what it’s like owning a house. Kev has been renovating and expanding his vast property empire for many years now, of course, while I have been steadily improving our premises with the aid of a toolbox large enough to use as a double garage. Now that Ian has joined the home owner club we have been doing our best to gently and constructively guide him in his new duties.
But I sometimes think that all too often we discuss the downsides: the amount of maintenance work, the unexpected costs, the speed with which nature will reclaim your carefully tended garden as wilderness. So I thought it might be nice to talk about the good bits of owning a house, because some of the things an Englishman has to do to look after his castle are actually very satisfying.
I will open the bidding with pressure washing.
Pressure washing is brilliant.
I love my pressure washer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t taken it out for a spin for about 18 months. Then, the other day, we’d had a drain unblocked and the drainage gully running through the paving down the side of the house needed clearing of all the crap that had built up, so I got the Kärcher out of the garage and fired it up. And once it was out, that was me set for the afternoon. Everything got jet washed.
The best part was discovering that the paving stones around the front and side of the house actually have a colour, as pictured above. I spent a very happy hour effectively colouring them in.
ABOFB: Nip to the loo
Welcome to back to a breath of fresh beans, this week we’re just going to nip to the loo, don’t worry, not literally (we did that before we started recording).
Suggestions in this pod are:
- Weird
- Posh
- Nosy
- Espionagey
Mortgage statement
Massive Bankers Plc
Mortgage Centre
High Interest House
Cashola Park
Nottingham
NG1 8JU
Dear Mr. Marshall
ANNUAL MORTGAGE STATEMENT
| Product | Absolute Swizz Bankers Rate Fix v9 |
| Mortgage Number | 1563786454 |
| Property Address | Force It Up Your Richard Hampshire Near France |
OVERVIEW OF YOUR MORTGAGE FOR THE PERIOD 23 JANUARY 2024 TO 23 JANUARY 2025
| Opening balance | £205,466.54 |
| Repayment 23 January 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 February 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 March 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 April 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 May 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 June 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 July 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 August 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 September 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 October 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 November 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Repayment 23 December 2024 – thank you | –£1325.63 |
| Interest charged | £7208.44 |
| On Time Repayment Fee | £2101.03 |
| BOE Interest Rate Above 3% Penalty | £883.97 |
| Monthly Direct Debit Fee | £1783.88 |
| Non-Dollar Transaction Surcharge | £1326.10 |
| Window Tax | £604.14 |
| Massive Bankers Plc Christmas Bonus | £2000.00 |
| Remaining balance | £205,466.53 |
If you require help with your mortgage or making repayments, log in to our online banking portal using your customer number, account number, unique password, three letters of your passphrase and a weird plastic calculator thing. Our AI bots are waiting to help you but will never pass you on to a human being.
Yours sincerely,
Ava Pricey-Holme
Chief UK Mortgage Account Executive Officer
DiJaBringaBeer
I know nothing about the owner of this house.
I know nothing about the owner of this house except that they named their house this.
Imagine coming up with this.
Imagine coming up with it and thinking it was so good, so funny, so enduring in its humour that it wouldn’t just bring you joy and laughter in this one moment where you thought of it, but it would continue to bring you joy and laughter for years to come.
Imagine thinking that it would bring joy and laughter to other people if you stuck it on the front of your house.
Imagine applying to the Royal Mail to change the name of your property. Applying to the council to have it amended in their records. Speaking to people at every bank and utility company who have your details to explain to them, and spell out letter by letter, your brilliant joke, so that it would appear on all the post addressed to you.
Imagine going in to Timpson’s and asking them for a rustic wooden house sign in sustainable pine with bark surround and telling them that this is the word you want them to engrave into it using three-inch-high letters in Chancery Bold Italic.
Imagine that.
Midlife Crisis
I’m not sure if a building built in the 1500’s can be said to be having a mid life crisis in 2024, but if it can, then this one is. Like a post-divorce Michael Gove popping up in an Aberdeen nightclub, Temple Newsham is entering it’s “rave stage”.
We visited on Sunday and it was off it’s tits on something. The whole garden had been filled with mysterious lights (and hairy balls) and it had put it’s loudest attire on to have a good old boogie.
Fair play I say. Happy New Year all!
WFH
My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.
The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.
Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.
| Activity | Duration |
|---|---|
| Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet | 0h 30m |
| Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings | 0h 45m |
| Check emails | 0h 10m |
| Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post | 0h 10m |
| Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website | 1h |
| Do Guardian Quick Crossword #16972 | 0h 15m |
| Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop | 0h 25m |
| Dog arrives in room, play with dog | 0h 30m |
| See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit | 0h 20m |
| Break for lunch | 1h |
| Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break | 0h 10m |
| Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit | 1h 30m |
| Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes | 0h 45m |
| See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks | 0h 15m |
| Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday | 0h 30m |
| Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence | 0h 30m |
| Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog | 0h 30m |
| Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording | 0h 40m |
| Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful | 0h 20m |
| Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift | 0h 5m |
| Log off | 0h 5m |
Everybody has a house now
We have reached a momentous landmark in the life and times of the Beans Massive, which is that all of us – every single Bean – now owns a house.
To commemorate this occasion, I have had three beautiful portraits specially commissioned, that each recreate the atmosphere and excitement on the day we moved in to our houses.
Please enjoy these fine works of art. If you would like the original to frame and hang over your fireplace, get in touch and we can discuss terms.