Avatar 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.

Avatar Not What You Think

Look at this:

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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.

Avatar The Cheek of It

This completely took me by surprise!

 

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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.

Avatar 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.

Avatar 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.

Avatar Meter readings

Things are busy because I’m moving house. The last few weeks have been really busy and I don’t have much time for a lot of the things I’m supposed to do. I’m meant to make four posts a month to the Beans, of course, but that’s been hard to do this month. And then there’s all the house move things to sort out as well, like arranging council tax and getting rid of the boxes new furniture came in and dealing with the gas and electric suppliers.

Luckily, today I had a brainwave: what I need to do is combine things to get through my to-do list faster.

That’s why I am using this Beans post to notify British Gas of my meter readings. If you are British Gas, the information you require is as follows:

Gas: 10857 29
Electric: 29080 3

If you are not British Gas, I hope you enjoyed reading this important information all the same. Thank you.

Avatar A narrow escape

I’ve been worrying about this for literally years.

Some time ago – I don’t know, let’s say in 2011 or 2012 – I was in my flat and I was multitasking. I thought myself pretty cool at the time. Task 1 was sharpening some kitchen knives by swiping the blades through my little knife sharpener thing. Task 2 was watching something on TV – chances are it was QI XL on Dave. I could literally do both those things at once. I was amazing.

To achieve this state of advanced productivity, I positioned myself in the kitchen of my flat, facing the TV, using the backrest of the sofa as my workbench.

Some time later – weeks, or months maybe – someone came over to my flat and asked me “what are these?” I followed their gesturing hand and found that the “these” in question were a number of incisions – knife wounds, no less – in several places on the top of the cushions at the back of my sofa.

Trouble is, it’s not my sofa, is it? No. It’s my landlord’s sofa.

I have been silently wondering how the seemingly inevitable conversation would go, and whether leaving it until I moved out, years later, would make things better or worse. Do I plead ignorance? Or do I admit everything and hope that honesty is the best policy?

Last week, fortune smiled upon me. The people moving into my flat after me will bring all their own furniture. They don’t want a sofa. Our new flat is unfurnished and we need a sofa. My landlord has a sofa that they no longer want.

And so I now find myself in legal possession of the cosmetically-damaged sofa, without having to explain its slightly damaged cushions to anyone, and having got away with my careless crime scot-free.

A narrow escape.

Avatar New flat

If you’ve been tapping my phone calls or you have psychic powers, you’ll already be aware that Elena and I have now concluded our search for a new home, a process that scoured the whole of south-east England and involved evicting a large number of people whose homes we thought we liked but then – tragically for those involved – decided weren’t quite right.

The Beans must, naturally, get the exclusive scoop on our new lodgings, so this post is here to present all the key details. Unfortunately no photographs of the dwelling are available at this time, but I am able to present the floor plan, as drawn up by the estate agent.

Floorplan

The main things we were looking for were space, lots of natural light, easy access to a station, and sufficient bathroom facilities. On the last point we had already ruled out apartments with just one bathroom on the grounds that, if we both needed a wee at the same time, it might start an argument. We then wondered what would happen if we had a dinner party and everyone wanted a wee at the same time – clearly some sort of ugly fracas or kerfuffle would ensue.

We were, therefore, delighted to find a home that anticipated this requirement – and, thanks to extremely innovative placement of its toilet facilities, it also has the advantage that during a dinner party everyone could simultaneously micturate without leaving the room and therefore without needing to interrupt the flow of the conversation. And of course, when there’s only the two of us, we can more or less go to the toilet wherever we are without having to move.

We look forward to welcoming you to our new home once we’ve moved in. Please bring your own toilet roll.