Memories (approaching the grey hemisphere)

It is now only two days until I pass into official middle age, two days before it all comes crashing down upon me. Actually that’s not true. I have long since been comfortable with my transformation from hip thirtysomething into a forty year old man. I’m sure that forty year olds have a lot going for them and, if not, then I’m here to shake things up for them.

I started reminiscing (even more than usual) about my youth and decide to record some of the lessor-known facts in case anyone was interested. They are in no particular order and most of them are probably not worth hearing anyway. Consider yourself warned:

Dad’s Army

I watched a lot of television as a child. A lot. I spent most days flicking through the TV guide circling what I wanted to watch in the upcoming week. On weekends it was worse, starting around 6:30am for the kids TV, taking a little break around lunchtime when the “adult” programs started and then coming back in the afternoon for more cartoons, sitcoms and anything else. The BBC repeated tons of sitcoms over the weekend and I was there for them. In my tiny child brain I would sing, “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Kipling?” when watching the opening for ‘Dad’s Army’. Don’t ask me why, it doesn’t quite scan properly (which may explain a lot of my efforts at writing poetry) and there is absolutely no correlation as far as I’m aware between the beloved cake-maker and the murderous dictator.

Wizards

Later on I wanted to be a space cowboy but earlier on in my life I wanted to be a wizard. This may have been spurred on by what I read in ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. I would steal various shampoos, conditioners, bubble baths and sometimes things from the kitchen cupboards (the bathroom was next to my bedroom so it was easier to sneak in and out with my effects) and mix them together to create potions. Did I have a proper cup or beaker to do so? No, I used the top of an old toy that had broken off. It was as curved green pot thing that was supposed to be the top of the tree. I think my mum noticed things were oozing out of the back of the small wooden desk in my bedroom so they broke in to look at what I had been doing. It seems as though I had also mixed in a dead spider to my current concoction to, I don’t know, heighten the potency of the potion. Needless to say I was politely asked to stop.

Showing off

I did a lot of showing off. I had three other siblings to compete with, I had no choice. Right? Right. I’m glad we’re on the same page. During the summer holidays my dad would “borrow” a video camera from the school he was working at and we would make home movies of varying quality, mostly terrible. In the quieter moments I would use the camera to record whatever I thought would be a good idea at the time. Once I made a stop-motion video of my pink dinosaur killing himself by jumping off the end of my parent’s bed, and when I say stop-motion I mean practically still shots with huge jumps in the middle rather than painstakingly moving the dinosaur into the next position. The crowning achievement however was the time I recorded five minutes of me narrating a fictitious race between… well that part is lost to me. It was a race though because I was doing my best Murray Walker impression. I was young and I had a cold so my enunciation was pretty terrible. I moved the camera wildly from side to side saying whatever came into my head. The film is notorious for one line that my brother and sisters still bring up to this day. I cannot tell you what I am actually saying because there is no substitution in the English language that would explain it yet I cannot fully believe I would say what I said at the age of 6 or 7. What did I say? Sigh. “I wanna see some boobies!” I didn’t fully know what boobies were at that age so why I would want to see them is anyone’s guess. It’s baffling knowing that it’s me and not being able to understand what I’m trying to say. The answer is lost to time.

Entrepreneur

One more before I go. I had a knack of trading things at an early age. In primary school I would take the toy or thing that came in the box of cereal and I would trade them at school with other kids for toy cars. I didn’t want the cereal toys, I wanted their toy cars and for some reason the other people thought this was a fair trade. In secondary school (you may have heard this one before) I would take the lunch that my mum had so carefully put together and sell it to someone in my form for the price of a school dinner which, I believe at the time, was £1.30. I did this every day so I came away with over a fiver a week to add to my pocket money pile. I used the money to go into town at the weekend to buy video games and CDs. My mum wouldn’t be home until after 5pm on a weekday so I would come home and eat bread (about a quarter of a loaf) and cereal to take away the hunger pangs I was feeling. She didn’t find out about this until I was in my twenties. I ate so much bread I believe it may have contributed to the intolerances I am now experiencing as an adult man, plus it made me round and chubby like the Pilsbury Doughboy from all the extra carbs.

H-A-L-L-U-M-I

Back in July 2020, Ian was carrying out some gentle archaeology among his possessions, which had begun to settle in accreted layers like sedimentary rock. In the midst of a rich stratum of shopping lists and half-finished song lyrics, he stumbled upon a miniature Sacred Book, and reported this to the Beans.

The booklet runs only to four pages in a bigger book that is otherwise full of other tat, and records the events that took place in the Magic Lantern pub in Whitley Bay (which later became a Harvester, and is now, of course, a Miller and Carter). In-depth scientific analysis of the occasions on which all three of us were in Newcastle, cross-referenced with the visits that had not produced a full Book, suggests that this was likely to have been in 2009.

We begged Ian to scan in these pages so they could be added to our collective store of wisdom on the Beans. We implored him. We offered him trinkets and prizes and financial incentives in discreet brown envelopes. But he resisted, and no scan was ever made.

Well, I don’t know about you, but my patience ran out, and it ran out at about 6.30 this morning. So I took the dodgy photos he had posted to the Beans, straightened and corrected them, and produced decent quality images of all four pages which I have now added to the Beans, bypassing the whole sorry business of Ian having to scan them. I have titled this new book “H-A-L-L-U-M-I”, that being the first thing written in it.

Its four pages contain an amazing number of in-jokes that survive to this day:

Wexford and the cheeses
Chris’s scrodsack of change
The science of warms per air

So, there it is, a lost slice of history, saved for the benefit of the nation. You can find it in the Books section.

Where has Kev been?

You know the deal, I disappear for a while, then I come back full of beans then disappear again. Its a story as old as time. Well this time you may be forgive for thinking that I’d just been too busy doing a masters degree or looking after kids or some other made up nonsense, well no. Not this time.

For the last 5 and a bit months I have in fact been trapped down the character hatch. I know, I know, you’ve both told me to leave it shut, but sometimes the curiosity gets too much for me.

Now those of you with a keen memory may remember the last time I went down there, got stuck and was abandoned by Ian who was too busy demanding ham I had no means to provide. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but no. I opened the hatch (with a pack of ham in my bag just in case) and sank down into the Old Beans.

I spent a few hours wandering through the ornamental gardens, had a picnic by the Zorse monument and whiled away another hour or two doing a sketch of the bell tower in charcoal. The tower’s looking in quite bad shape these days, and you can just make out the corpse of a recently deceased zorse leaning against a wall.

Anyhow, I was just about to come back home when I heard that sound… you know the one… The sound of moody guitars, breaking glass and arty poetry that could only mean… Pete Doherty. He spotted me immediately, he had the mad faraway glint in his eye of a man who’d been forced to exclusively eat zorse meat for 13 years, and he was pissed. In both senses. I think he’d worked out how to distill zorse piss into a kind of hooch. Anyway after chasing me round the great hall, the gardens, across the old Loinsford campus and back to the clock tower he eventually caught me and pressganged me into forming a new band with him and doing a tour of the forbidden lands, (the Cockall Archives, the Saint Kingdom and the Savannah of in-jokes).

The band was just us two, and all I could play was the recorder and the demo button on the keyboard. It was awful. Pete wrote some witty satirical lyrics about Ian’s love of ham and the fall of Chris Industries, and off we went. We played 700 gigs, mostly to empty rooms. Occasionally the zorses would come by, and then quickly leave, but mostly to empty rooms.

For whatever reason, when we returned, Doherty was sated. His anger subsided, the punching stopped and he just wandered off into the mist surrounding in the Loosh Vestibule. I was free. I made my escape and resealed the hatch. I’ve learned my lesson (for now), and I’m back. Hopefully.

Nish lives on

I decided I was too “hairy on the go” and needed to cut down on a bit here and there. The most obvious place was the top of my head so I decided to go for a haircut.

Modern life dictates that if you do not have a preferred barber or hairdresser then you have to choose the one that’s most convenient for you. I have tried a number of places over the last few years and can’t quite settle on one. They’re all fine, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing too special to go back to though (apart from the one where they gave me lots of coffee and made a huge fuss over my haircut however it cost twice as much as usual). There are two barbers near my work so I opted to walk past both of them, gauge how many customers were in each and select the one that was the quietest.

I meandered into the barbers with a queue of one and a half in front of me (the half was already in the chair and almost done by my eye but then spent another ten minutes having very little to nothing done to his bonce) and took a seat next to a glass cabinet of hair supplies and accessories.

It was a warm day so I stared nonchalantly out the door and around the room. It was then that my attention was immediately brought to the collection of items a little above my eyeline:

There it was. Nish Man hairspray.

In my mind what happened is that our mythical status grew and grew so much that we spread to the outer parts of Europe and Asia. There a large group of Turkeys (Turkians, Turkish? Turkpeoples) decided that in order to spread the word of how talented and funny we were, they turned us into an aerosol. I know it’s not the greatest explanation but what were you expecting, really? It’s me here, everyone.

It’s a legacy of some kind I suppose and one that will make your hair a good hair. I had a look and there are other products available for all your grooming needs including wax, hair wax, hair on wax hair, volume powder, styling powder, hair on wax powder, eye gel, eyebrow powder wax and strong fixative yellow.

Now available in all good barbershops.

Missing, presumed busy

Dearly beloved we are gathered here today to cast a keen eye over the mostly-absent third member of the Beans trio, Mr Kevin Hill.

Hill is not dead or missing after hiking through the foothills of Cheveley or anything suspicious like that. We know that he’s still flobbiting about somewhere, possibly in his lovely house or one of the many, many locations he has to drop and/or pick up his kids from.

He has a made-up job title (at least according to his Linked-In profile) and may or may not still be running some kind of poodle grooming business on the side. Is this what takes up all of his time? Are dogs the reason he doesn’t visit anymore? Expert analysists seem to suggest so.

The important thing is that we remember he is still a thing and remembering is fun. Though he may have abstained from posting anything for the last eight hundred years, though his track record of editing and uploading the podcasts is as sketchy as an afternoon with Vincent Van Gogh, Kevin is still a valuable edition to the team and we all look forward to seeing his cheery little face once again.

A reminder of old reminders

I use the “reminders” app on my phone quite a lot, because I am forgetful. It’s clever because you can get it to remind you about something at a particular time, and then once you tick the reminder to say you’ve done it, it just disappears. Poof! Gone.

Except it’s not gone, it seems. If you open up one of the menus and tell it to show you completed reminders, there they all are. All of them. Mine go right back to 2011.

I had a scroll through and most of them are very boring. Some of them are not. Here are some things I have been reminded to do in years gone by.

I don’t know what most of these mean.

Go to bloody Richmond FFS
Crisps
Windy tomorrow
Hotel?????
Fg
More wontons
Dentist/ear/tip
Post Ian a picture of a fist
R4 debacle
Go go go
Listen to the thing
Look for workman
Brioche and food
Family pictures sending please
Ask about onion soup
Friday
The Hoodie Problem
Mike is going to phone you at 4
Remind Steve to freeze three (3) breaded chicken breast fillets and retain one (1) chicken breast steak in the refridgerator
AAAAAAAAAAAA
Clean crap out of headphone jack
Tinsel, silver: six metresworth
Hello! Sorry for the slow reply, I was at work and then I was very, very asleep.
Eyyyyyy mate
Make some decisions
UKIP weather
Pester Kev
Give Joe ten pounds Sterling
Post to the Beans

Box lid

Recently I was shuffling some nonsense around and stuffing more boxes into the solitary cupboard at my flat in the hope of creating a little more space.

As I was tearing up some old cardboard I found that a young Reuben had doodled on the inside of one of the smaller boxes.

For those whose eyesight is not as good as it used to be, the top has ‘secret files’ and several incriminating piece of information about walruses. Roy Orbortron (the robotic version of Roy Orbison who was created to carry on his musical legacy) is a walrus for some reason and he has changed the words of the classic song ‘Pretty Woman’ to ‘Pretty Walrus’. This may have been done in the hopes of attracting a mate although nobody can doubt the controversial nature of this switch.

But wait! There’s more!

Roy Orbotron (different spelling) also orbits the planet Venus as a disgusting Transformers-esque robot walrus meaning that he must split his time equally between serenading female walruses with his back catalogue and flying around the second nearest planet to the sun. Thankfully he didn’t choose a planet that was further away otherwise he’d never have enough time between the two feats to organise, I don’t know, a summer holiday. Quite why he is orbiting Venus is not explained in the document.

If you have any clearer answers then do let us know. For now, watch out for any suspicious walruses or walrus-based robots who may or may not be flying through the sky and/or playing the guitar (boy this post is exhausting to write).

Beans flashback: Chris gives blood

Can you believe that one of the defining moments of my life, and probably of yours too, was ten years ago today? The New Beans didn’t exist back then, so I didn’t record this for posterity as a blog post. The ten year anniversary seems like a good time to put that right.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Remembering is fun