Butter insurance

Take a moment to think about it. Do you have enough cover for your spread?

You may think that butter is something to take for granted because you can buy it from every corner shop and supermarket. It’s readily available. It’s on the tips of your fingers every single day.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was gone without any explanation whatsoever? What would you do then? Opt for margarine? Would that really do? Are you going to sit your children down and explain to them that margarine is the best you can do?

Here are Butters McButters Inc, we offer the finest butter insurance money can buy. Our lavish offices may suggest we’re all about the profits and satisfying the shareholders with champagne every Friday, but let me reassure you that your butter needs are what’s on my mind 24/7.

What you get with one of our policies is more than your average butter insurance policy; you get peace of mind. If your butter gets stolen, we will replace that butter with a full packet within 24 hours. If we manage to catch the thieves, we’ll give you your butter back… with a smile and a thumbs up. We also cover for many different butter scenarios such as:

Not wrapping the butter back properly so that a bit of it goes hard and weird
Accidentally wasting some of it because someone didn’t put it securely on the fridge shelf so it fell down and wiped a bit on the shelf below
Clowns
Bees
Preparing some fresh toast and going to pick up the butter only to realise your wife used the last of it earlier on this morning and you’ve got nothing left to smother on that piping hot breakfast

Can your insurance company guarantee you for all of this? I sincerely doubt it.

Don’t put yourself in an uncomfortable position; get butter cover now before the worst happens. You butter believe we’re the best in the biz!

No judgement here

I get it.

You’re out with the lads and you’re having a great time. You’ve been on the bevs for most of the afternoon and now the evening. The night is creeping in. You haven’t eaten in hours.

You catch the last bus home and even though your sense of timing for public transport is spot on, by the time you reach your destination your favourite takeaway is closed.

Curses, you think, why must they shut this early? Don’t they want my business? Don’t they want my £2.50 for a bag of chips (or whatever your regional financial equivalent is – we all know rubbish London pounds are)?

Left with no option but to raid the cupboards, your choices are slim. The freezer is practically empty too because you’re due a food shop tomorrow. It’s time to face facts; waiting over two hours for a McDelivery isn’t going to help anything. You’re already whammed and you need something to soak up the alcohol.

It’s time to do something drastic.

It’s time to open that tin youve been saving for an emergency.

You wake up the next day with a thick, brown, meaty rim around your lips and you have no idea how it got there.

I don’t feel so good

I feel a little off today.

There’s a tightness in my chest. The room keeps spinning and I definitely have a temperature. I need to open a window, hang on.

There. That usually makes me feel better but… but not today.

What is it? What’s making me feel… oh no, I’m gonna need to… quickly someone pass a bucket!

*heaving followed by squelching noises*

Oh. Oh no. What have I done?

An ominous warning

Recently we got a new treadmill thing, which allows you to go for a walk inside your house. This is useful for exercise and also for avoiding scenery if the natural world is disgusting to you.

I took a look at the instructions to see if there was any important information there that wasn’t immediately obvious when looking at the four-button control panel (on, off, faster, slower). It told me some vital information about the dimensions and operating parameters of the machine.

And then, at the bottom, it told me something else.

I don’t know what it’s going to do to me. I don’t know what its plan is.

I only know that, in the end, it will win.

Scientist needed

Where’s a good scientist when you need one?

In my many travels as orb parent (and by “travels” I mean walking us both to the local Co-op and back), I keep my eyes open for anything that can be used as a Beans post. Anything. With not much going on apart from feeding, nappies and vomiting, and most of that can be attributed to me, I need a little inspiration in order to keep the raw gold coming from my fingers.

As I was preparing to tidy up the kitchen, I clocked the back of a plastic bottle waiting to be washed out before being recycled. It was then that my peepers saw this:

You what?

Partially inverted sugar syrup? Partially inverted?!

Do they need to twist the space time continuum in order to make sure my porridge tastes great?

I need someone with some kind of degree and a knack for science to explain to me what this means. I refuse to Google this like everyone else.

Never mind Ian, am I losing MY mind?

Most days, when I’m not at work, I take the dog for a walk, and most of the time we go to the same place, which is some woods near us. I’ve written about them before – I like walking in woods, the dog likes having lots of space to run around and bark at squirrels, and they are full of intriguing military wreckage.

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly stopped in my tracks. Following a path through the trees that I follow every single time I go there – let’s say every other day of my life, on average – I saw something I had never noticed before. Can you see it?

About fifteen feet to the left of me, fifteen feet away from a place I walk over a hundred times a year with my eyes wide open, was something I had literally never seen before. A whacking great big concrete pylon.

You literally can’t miss it. It’s huge. I suppose it’s the same colour as a tree and about the same size as the tree trunks around here, but even so, I might miss it once but I don’t see how I’ve missed it every day since 2023.

It looks like it’s been there for decades. It looks like something from the 1940s that’s been disused since before I was born, slowly being forgotten in the depths of the woods.

But I can’t help wondering if that’s true. Has it really been there all along? Or has someone just put it there in the last month or so? Are they trying to mess with my head? Is it me they’re targeting? Is this something I have genuinely never noticed in all this time? Can it be true? Am I losing my mind?

Poetry corner – Guzzle

Hey, all you hip cats and righteous moonbeams, it’s time for a little lyrical medicine courtesy of Poetry Corner.

If you’re looking to let off some steam then this is the place you for. Take a load off.

Here with a creamy piece of beatnik bebop is Trancient Prozac and his poem

Guzzle

I guzzle. I am the guzzler. You can’t stop me.

When I guzzle down my perilous maw,

You really don’t know, you can’t be sure

If it’s ever coming back because of how black

The back of my maw can be.

When I guzzle, you’ll think I need a muzzle,

It goes all over my mouth and hands.

I’m drinking too much like it’s going out of fashion,

A red burping cannon, taking all yo fresh rations,

Right down my maw of tranquility.

Gasp at the gastro intestinal puzzle

That forms the basis of my sweet guzzle.

You don’t need a degree in food expertise

To squeeze the kind of wheeze from these balconies,

But if you can embrace the nurturing bustle

Of a pint of gravy right down to the nuzzle,

I’m sure that with practice you too can hack this

And be one with the almighty guzzle.

Work snacks

You know how this works. Someone in your team goes away somewhere nice on holiday, and they bring back some sweets or something for everyone else. Sometimes it’s just a nice bag of fruity chewy things they picked up at the airport, but there are people who take pleasure in bringing back something unusual that divides opinion.

In our team we have a side table where people sometimes put biscuits and other things to share. (We call it the calorie counter.) This week I came in to work after a few days off to discover it had several interesting things on it. But one of the oddities of working in a department where we all do shifts is that different people are in on different days, and by the time I arrived, there was nobody on shift who had any idea where this stuff had come from.

So I was left to examine it and see if I could work out what it all was. Here is what I found.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Lumpy and/or mysterious