Man has been raising money since the dawn of time.
It all started with Jesus being bet that he couldn’t be killed, buried AND come back to life. He took that bet and started going round the local villages asking for sponsor money, rattling down dem neighbours with his charm and natural-born charisma. Three days later, with a pocket full of sponsorship money, he walked away and donated it all to the burly orphans of the holy mother and disappeared. What a guy (I believe that’s how it went down, I don’t really remember much from R.E. at school).
Since then everyone has wanted a piece of the action. There are so many many MANY good causes out there. If you can think of something or someone having a hard time then there will be a charity in its name, winking in your general direction and hoping you will slip something in their back pocket. With this in mind, how could you ever choose which to help, which to slide the burden onto your manly shoulders? My personal advice would be to spin a wheel or flip a coin.
For the whole month of April I am walking for women.
*comedy voice* why can’t women walk for themselves?
Well, comedy voice, the fact is they can but I am also walking for them, with them. I’m stepping into their shoes and loaning my legs to do a good thing. It’s not all altruistic though because I get fresh air and exercise in return for my walking. It’s all for selfish reasons. All I was hoping for was a bunch of people staring at me whilst I walked and it is paying off big time. I wouldn’t do it unless I got something out of it. Call me a sociopath all you like but that’s how I roll and you’ll all have to deal with it. Oh, how I am such a good at the walking too. You’ve not seen walking until you’ve witnessed my awe-inspiring thighs crossing your path.
So stop your grinning and drop your linen, give me / they / them money now by using the link and being a good guy. I feel almost as inspirational as the time we did that exercise and I ate biscuits in ‘Nish 3’.
Warning: this post contains gratuitous scenes of exercise. Viewer discretion is advised.
This boy has been running now, jogging now, a bit of a mix of the two since the start of the year. Rogging arounds wrong so let’s stick with junning. I’ve been junning since January. I have dabbled in it in the past however nothing substantial. I suppose with a lot of things collapsing in on itself it’s only fair that one tiny thing in my life prevails in a positive and optimistic fashion.
Cut to Thursday night though when shit got real.
I prefer junning at night because there are less people around to point fun at the tiny shorts I wear. The temperature is at a steady balance, much better than slogging through ice and snow anyway. I start my jun and headed off in the direction of my route. This route has been planned to perfection i.e. it features very little uphill bits and mostly flat or downhill bits.
There is a housing estate close to where I live that I do a couple of laps of to warm up. As I approach the edge of it I’m feeling the juice, I’m feeling the jun through my veins so I decide to speed up a bit. Down the first street, right at the end there is a footpath which curves round a corner down to the next street. Bounding like a chopper I go, I approach the curve and this is where it all goes wrong.
There was no slow motion here, no events slowing in my brain or anything like that. It was a short, sharp pinch in the eyes as far as my recollection of events goes. One moment I was junning away, the next I’m lying on the ground with scrape marks on my legs and blood staining the palms of my hands.
Some little dear had left their scooter in the middle of the path, something which you couldn’t see because it was round a blind corner. Unless I had leapt 2 or 3 feet in the air I was going to hit it every time. Not a full size scooter, no no, something someone just out of toddler-dom would use. I have no concern for myself, my god, I must check that my electronic life partner is still okay! The phone is nestled snugly in my jacket pocket, safe and sound. I stagger to my feet to assess the damage under a dimly-li lamppost.
Now this is exactly the kind of thing that I would do to myself; I am no stranger to injuring myself in unusual circumstances. What really sealed it as an ‘Ian’ moment though was just as I turned the corner and collided with the scooter a teenage boy was walking up the path from the opposite direction. He daren’t touch me, for obvious reasons (following Bovona guidelines to a tee) but asked if I was okay which was nice. As I stood up to brush myself down and turn to start running again he called for my attention. To my confusion and astonishment the boy brought over the tiny scooter. “You forgot this.” Luckily the violently sarcastic part of my brain was sleeping at the time.
Unreasonable reaction: WHAT THE F*CK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, LAD? DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT F*CKING SCOOTER IS MINE? F*CK ME, I COULD BARELY GET ONE OF MY TOENAILS ON THERE LET ALONE A FULL F*CKING FOOT. I’M WEARING SHORTS, I’M OUT JOGGING. WHY THE F*CK DO YOU THINK A F*CKING 37 YEAR OLD MAN IS SCOOTERING AROUND AT 9PM ON A THURSDAY F*CKING NIGHT? DOES THAT SOUND SH*TTING PLAUSIBLE TO YOU?
Panting through the stinging in my hands, I merely said that it wasn’t mine and thanked him for his concern. There I was, stumbling in front of a member of the public only for him to believe that the situation was that much worse because I had embarrassed myself by failing to use a scooter properly. Remarkably my legs were fine, a gash on one knee and nothing more, so I carried on with my jun.
This is getting too long. I did consider that perhaps this was some kind of cosmic karma for something else. A balance had to be made by me making a tit of myself. The day after I was in agony. Some bruising to my right side meant breathing, coughing, you know, any kind of movement caused a little jolt of pain to explode under my ribs. I am on the mend after a few days of rest and hope to be back junning later on this week.
I’m so lazy. Look at me and be uninspired. Just look at me, one big ol’ slobbery mess. I haven’t looked this bad since that stage in my teens when I was gelling up my fringe; a tidal wave of greasy hair fixed in place. God, what was I thinking? It was aggressively bad. Now is worse though. Since the lockdown all I have done is indulge in everything I can get my chubby paws on. I find myself daydreaming about desserts. You know in cartoons when hungry characters start hallucinating? Last week I looked over and where Reuben should have been was a roast ham. It is time for a change.
As Kevin has confessed that he has a soft spot for the doggos, I have done a thing and signed up for a sponsored walk. In May I will be raising money for guide dogs by walking up and down my flat. Yes, it sounds insane and I reckon that by the end of it I may have finally crossed the line, gone through the looking glass. Is it worth it for the doggos? Of course it is. I plan to walk 100,000 steps to get some much needed cashola / dough ray me / fresh bread for Guide Dogs. In order to keep it realistic, I have set a target of £100.00 which would be enough to buy a kit for one guide dog trainer.
It takes 52 steps to walk from the front door to the window in the living room and back again. Based on my poor grasp of maths, I will have to do this 1,924 times in order to accumulate the aforementioned total of 100,000 steps. I have a full week in order to pin down this sucker, which means if I can manage about 275 times each day that should be enough.
If I had Kevin’s legs, which we all know are thrice the length of a normal person’s legs, I would be able to get from front door to window in a handful of leaps. I believe that would make the process a lot more tiresome so I am grateful for my small leg span and smaller step count.
Nobody is rich at the moment. The world is in chaos. I say this sat wearing an Adventure Time hat to keep the hair out of my eyes (my fringe has seriously lost the plot, it needs a chop). Am I still in my pyjamas? What day is it again? The point is that if you can, please sponsor Chesty at the link below:
If you Google “pouring beans”, we are number 3 in the listings. And rightly so. Bronze is a fitting medal considering the effort we put in here.
The top two results are both websites describing an activity called “pouring beans” which is a lesson used at Montessori day nurseries. Since we do very little bean pouring here, and the pouring of Montessori beans is clearly more popular than we are, I think it’s time we examined this practice. I also think that if we put the pouring beans activity on our Pouring Beans website we might get bumped up the listings.
Here is the full guide for you to try at home.
Age
2½ to 3 years
Materials
Two identical jugs, beans, tray, mat
Aim
To pour the beans from one jug to the other and then back
Learning outcomes
Concentration! Patience! Hand-eye co-ordination! Hand control! Eyes! Beans! Pouring the beans!
Instructions
You… I mean, you get the kid to pour beans from one jug to another. If you want to make it more complicated than that, there’s some more detailed instructions here, but I expect the kid will lose interest before you finish explaining it and go and run around for a bit instead.
Extending the activity
Use smaller grains. Use bigger grains. Use smaller jugs. Use bigger jugs. Do it without jugs. Do it without beans or jugs and just imagine it. Sit in silence and think about beans. Just sit in silence. Just be quiet. Why can’t you be quiet. Now go back to pouring beans.
Variations
Use different beans or rice or dice or something else.
I’ve spent the evening doing this and I can confirm three things.
It’s relaxing for the first two or three minutes.
After the first few minutes you start to get very bored, and then shortly after that you begin to lose your mind. After an hour I had named all the individual beans and was taking register while they tipped from one jug to the other.
The version of Pouring Beans that we’ve been doing, that is less directly bean-related and more about blogging, is far more enjoyable and deserves to be first in the Google search ranking.
It’s coming home, apparently. That much is now received wisdom. But what does this mean for you? Please read and memorise this important guide for your own safety.
Beans Laboratories have conducted a range of scientific tests* on Sport and have raised the Sport Threat Level to “Steady On”, its highest level since the 2012 Limpety Pinpicks.
This means that there is an exceptionally high risk of sport infiltrating your life. Already cases have emerged of Beans delegates participating in sporting activities that are gravely out of character.
Mr. Kevindo Menendez has been observed viewing a World Football Cup Soccer Match on his widescreen television. During this period of time he also verbally expressed interest in the score and outcome of the match.
Mr. Christopher 5156 has made social media posts claiming to have physically attended a “Tea Twenty County Cricket Tournament Game”, in which he alleged that he found the experience enjoyable.
These horrifying stories may not be isolated incidents – it is possible that further Sport contamination has taken place which has not yet been reported to the proper authorities. You are strongly advised to be on your guard against all types of sporting activity; to avoid listening to any music recorded by the Lightning Seeds between 1994 and 2000 (note that this renders their debut album “Sense” technically safe to listen to, though the track “Life of Riley” may remain hazardous due to its continued use for football compilation sequences on TV); to avoid all balls and ball-shaped objects, including oranges, onions, apples, bapples, but not Papples; and to remain indoors as much as possible.
* Scientific tests included dipping Sport in potassium chloride, whizzing it around in one of those spinny centrifuge machines you see scientists using on TV, and setting fire to it.
What’s the biggest slide you’ve ever been down? I am asking because I have definitely been down a bigger slide than you and I am planning to smugly win this.
I have been down THIS slide.
It’s part of the weird red metal lumpy thing that was built for the Limpety Pinpicks in 2012. It takes 40 seconds to go down it and I spent a fair amount of that time saying things like WHEEEEE and AAAAAARGH and WOOHOOOOO.
It drops a total height of over 100m, which is the equivalent of a slide going down to the ground from the 30th floor. It is bigger than the biggest slide you have ever been down. I win. Ha.
I went for a walk yesterday and explored a park near me that I haven’t been to before. There’s a lot of places near me that I haven’t been to before, because I only recently moved to Royksopp.
It turns out the park contains normal park things (grass, trees, vandalised benches, bins mostly full of water from when it rained). It also contains four mysterious lumps. If I described them to you they’d sound like hills so I am including pictures here to make it clear that they are not hills, they are mysterious lumps, and there are four of them.
A series of lumps
They are all different heights and they are perfectly circular, like weird pyramids. You can climb them all if you want to. Three are just grassy and you have to scramble up but one of them has a spiralling path to the top. It’s surprisingly tall – not that West London is particularly hilly, but it’s higher than all the other hills you can see and most of the buildings. You can see out to the countryside south of London, and to Canary Wharf, and to a little thing on the horizon called the Crystal Palace Transmitter which I have seen somewhere before.
The signs explain that, far from being lumps, they are actually mounds. I was very glad to have the mystery cleared up in this way.
Please use this thread to share stories of any intriguing lumps, mounds or protrudances you have witnessed lately.
