The brick

Recently I moved into a new flat, as described earlier. It’s nice. It’s got bedrooms and a kitchen and a balcony and some toilets and all that sort of thing.

Next to the front door, out in the hallway, it’s got a brick.

The brick is painted yellow.

The brick is mounted on canvas.

The brick is inside a perspex display case.

When you look down the hall, every flat has a yellow brick in a perspex display case to the left of the front door. We asked the landlord (who owns the building) why this might be the case. They said they weren’t sure, and they said it might be an artistic thing, and they said they think the flat number might be painted on it.

The flat number isn’t painted on it.

It’s just a brick.

How much stuff I own

Moving house is many things, principal among them a pain in the arse. But it is also a golden opportunity to put everything you own in one place and see how much of it there is.

On Friday, I took this van (with exciting tail lift on which I rode up and down a number of times):

I then inserted into it all my shite:

The amount of stuff I own is therefore precisely the amount of stuff you see above, plus the clothes I was wearing and a Peugeot 207.

I hope this has been as informative and satisfying for you as it has been for me.

Northwards

We all knew it would happen one day, and now it has. I am moving to the North.

Not the North of England, of course. No. Don’t be silly. The commute would be interminable. No, “the North” clearly means “North London”, as anyone safely cushioned within London’s self-obsessed bubble will tell you.

This important change will bring a number of new and exciting features to my life.

I will be commuting to work on a London Tubular Train (described previously on the Beans here, in case you are not familiar with this novel mode of transport).
I will be living in a district of London known as “Ruislip”, which is a complete mystery to me apart from being the setting of every single domestic sitcom of the 1970s. I will therefore be mostly wearing beige flares and a pudding bowl haircut upon moving, and will likely make borderline racist double entendres towards my neighbours to a soundtrack of slide whistles and canned laughter.
I will be closer to the actual North of England than before and reaching me from the outside world will involve significantly less time hacking through the impenetrable jungle of London.
I will no longer have a toilet in every room. (This will be inconvenient but I will have to get used to it.)

I await your warm congratulations on this momentous news, but am realistic about the fact that the state of the Beans lately means I’m basically talking to myself here.

Frankenstein’s sideboard

If you read the papers you’ll already know that Kevindo Menendez – now properly styled Lord Chang of Micklefield – recently sold his former home, a palatial residence that he had spent most of his life enlarging and expanding to a size copiously documented here in the past.

A property of that magnitude, crossing numerous county and parish borders and easily visible from space, naturally fetches a handsome price, and so the estate he has now purchased with the proceeds is one of the largest in the world. I understand it has its own representation at the UN and is a member of NATO.

I was recently offered the privilege of visiting this magnificent residence where I helped Chang himself assemble new furniture.

Ikea do not sell furniture even nearly big enough for this new house, and their normal wares would look like miniature dolls house furniture in its cavernous rooms. That’s why we took several flat-pack kits and re-engineered them to build this behemoth.

The people from Guinness have not yet visited – or rather, to be strictly accurate, they came as soon as we called but they are still travelling up the driveway and are due to arrive a week on Thursday. But we fully expect this unprecedented masterpiece of joinery will be officially confirmed as the largest sideboard in the Western Hemisphere when they finally see it.

Not What You Think

Look at this:

What you’re looking at is a blackboard located at my local IKEA which I recently visited. Now I am mostly an open-minded person but I am quite averse to worshiping characters of any kind, whether religious, fictional, good or evil, when I am browsing home furnishings.

I can only imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue if someone got down on their knees and started to worship a fallen angel near the sofa department. That I do not want. If I am going to spend two hours of my life on a Saturday afternoon slowly walking around the various sections of IKEA I would rather try to avoid a small group of people clustered around a statue or photo, with fire in their eyes, bowing up and down.

Luckily for me, they were done by the time I passed.

Do yourself a favour; steer clear of furniture-loving Satanists.

The Cheek of It

This completely took me by surprise!

Now I am used to receiving abuse from family members, close friends, clients, the general public and the occasional letters through the post, but this is a new low. I was recently walking past a new development of houses and what did greet me upon turning my viewing eyes to the right? A sign in the window as above.

It would appear as though property is now turning its attention to me. I do not know what in particular it had against me and my award-winning personality and, quite frankly, I do not care either. I just wanted to make sure that this issue is brought to light so that others do not suffer in silence.

Thank you.

How Thick Are Ye?

The great thing about television is that now, in 2017, pretty much any idea is marketable. So much so that there are now programmes about watching people get married, watching people having babies, watching people having opinions and watching people watching television. Personally I am looking forward to the programme where you get to watch people watching people watching people watch television, mainly because it might cause the universe to implode. Either that or Alan Partridge’s suggestion of ‘Monkey Tennis’.

My suggestion for broadcasting is called ‘How Thick Are Ye?’. It’s a very simple concept; we take a nice middle class family living somewhere down South who do not know any better: sensible adults, adorable children etc.. They earn a generous wage per month yet seem to spend an awful lot of it in the supermarkets. For whatever reason, they buy far too much food and then throw most of it away.

Our experts would travel to whatever godforsaken county these imbeciles live in to watch them spend £300.00 on a weekly shop and then despair that they have nothing to eat. After ten minutes of pointing out to the viewers just how wrong they are, they then jump out at the family just for kicks. The experts then spend the rest of the programme berating the family for being so stupid and telling them to stop shopping at Waitrose and try somewhere more reasonable such as Tesco or Aldi.

The family are rated on a scale of one to ten as to how thick they are. If they’re found to be less than five, they wake up the next morning to find themselves tied up and all of their worldly possessions have been thrown in a skip, covered in manure and crushed in a junkyard. The now frightened onlookers cradle their children, desperate to change their ways and look at the world in a different light. The experts untie the prisoners and let them return to their empty residence.

It would be a light-hearted one hour programme, perfect for the Wednesday night schedule on BBC1. A life-changing journey for all. I was considering Chris’ favourite Gary Wilmot and Dale Winton for the roles as experts. They’re decent enough to pull of a premise such as this.

A History of Westpoint

When we moved into our new flat, we were moving into one of several blocks of privately-owned flats set in landscaped grounds, which are all inside a gated compound. At the time we thought there was nothing special about it – until the Westpoint Resident Management Association Steering Committee posted a welcome pack through our front door. The welcome pack told us what day the bins were collected and some other practical information, but by far the most useful thing was the history of the flats.

So that we can all share in this learning experience, here is the history of the building in which I now live inside there.

144 million years BC

A 60-metre layer of impermeable Gault clay is deposited on earlier Paeleozoic rocks, forming the geological basis of the ground on which Shortlands now stands. It is this clay that continues to support Westpoint today and stops it being some 60 metres closer to the centre of the earth.

AD 862

Ethelbert, the king of Kent, grants land for a new manor to be called Bromleag. The manor becomes a prosperous market town over the following centuries, known as Bromley.

1858

Shortlands railway station is opened on the new railway line to Bromley. It is not called Shortlands yet and there are no houses nearby for it to serve. Nobody knows why a railway station was built here.

1974

Local building company Arkwright Masonry Erectors Ltd. purchase three handsome Victorian villas in extensive gardens and with fetching period detailing, and demolish them in order to build three big box-shaped blocks of flats and a car park.

1996

Arkwright Masonry Erectors Ltd. go bust when the owner is sued by his own daughter for embezzling company funds to construct a large fiberglass model of the Coliseum encasing her house. The residents of Westpoint buy out the freehold on the site and begin a new era in which there are no grown ups to tell them what to do. The Westpoint Resident Management Association Steering Committee is established as a not-for-profit commercial community joint enterprise partnership.

2002

The front doors to all buildings at Westpoint are carefully sanded down and coated with a slightly darker shade of varnish than before.

2015

Benches are installed in the grounds so that residents can sit outdoors at an uncomfortable slope and in close proximity to parked cars or the bins.

2016

Chris finds himself getting on a train at Shortlands with Chris Addison, stand-up comedian and star of The Thick of It, who apparently lives nearby and sometimes gets a train from the same station as Chris at about 9am.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Abodes