Lemon’s Day Out

What makes a great day out? Smashing weather? A choice picnic? Celebrity endorsements? Whatever you think is right is probably wrong. The thing that makes a great day out is lemons.

There is nothing more satisfying than chucking a lemon up into the air and catching it. There is nothing better than taking a photo of a lemon doing something a lemon should not be doing (waaaaaaaaaaaaay!). Wherever you look there are millions of people out enjoying their summer holidays yet they’re doing it without the benefit of lemons. Our scientists predict that holiday satisfaction levels would increase sevenfold should people choose to include a lemon, or multiple lemons, in their activities.

As a test run I recently took a lemon into town when my sister came to visit. My lemon joy levels peaked higher than previous lemon levels have ever reached. It was quite a day. Given how cost-effective lemons are, I am hoping to start a kickstarter campaign to supply lemons to the poorer regions of the UK IN THE HOPE OF… sorry, in the hope of upping the ante in the lemon department, which sounds like it should be rude but it’s not.

When is the last time you took a lemon out? Respond below and share the joy of the citrus fruit that is… Lemons!*

*has clearly said the word far too much and thus attempts to remove it from his vocabulary

The price of Ian’s face

What is Ian’s face worth to you? I wonder if you can even put a figure on it.

I can. Today I learned the exact monetary value of Ian’s face when I went to my local sorting office to collect a mysterious item. It turned out it was a letter sent by Ian’s attorney at law, Nicholas Wolfwood, explaining that he was not going to remove his face and send it to me. He hoped that three signed photocopies of Ian’s face, enclosed with the letter, would do instead.

Unfortunately, Ian’s attorney at law, Nicholas Wolfwood, is a cheapskate who had cut a stamp off another envelope and sellotaped it onto this one so that he didn’t have to actually pay for the postage. The Royal Mail is wise to these tricks, which is why they didn’t push it through my letterbox, and instead they put a yellow sticker on it that said NO POSTAGE PAID and I found a grey card telling me to go get it. When I presented myself at the sorting office, I had to pay £2 – that’s two London pounds – to get hold of it.

Whether or not you think I got value for money out of my two hard earned pounds is a matter of opinion. Whether you think Mr. Wolfwood should have coughed up at least 55p for a second class stamp rather than have me pay nearly four times that for the privilege of receiving his letter is up to you. But one thing is for sure. I now know with some certainty that the value of Ian’s face is about 66p, because I got three of them for two quid.

Things not to do

In the last 24 hours I have learned a lot. Here are some things you should not do.

When making a very short journey of just a few minutes in your car, don’t empty your pockets in the normal way, placing your wallet, phone and keys into the space below the radio. You might forget them when you get out.
Don’t time your journey to arrive at your destination – for example, a garage where you’re leaving it overnight because it’s booked in for some work in the morning – eight minutes before they close.
In your rush to get through the door and hand them your car key, don’t forget to take everything you need. For example, when you’ve picked up your wallet and phone and put them back in your pockets, don’t forget to have a look and see if your house keys are still in the car before you get out and lock it.
Don’t wait until you’ve made a 25 minute journey home (including some walking, some waiting for the bus and some sitting on the bus) before looking for your house keys. If you wait that long you will only realise you haven’t got them when you’re standing outside the building where you live and you’re unable to get into it.
Don’t make a 25 minute journey back to a now-closed garage (for example, it’s just an example) because when you get there you will find that your car has been helpfully moved by one of their staff inside a gated and locked compound, and is now tantalisingly visible but completely inaccessible behind an eight foot metal gate with spikes on. If you happened to leave, I don’t know, your house keys in it, you will not be able to get them.
If you decide to ignore this advice, and you are welcome to do that if you want, then at least heed this warning: don’t do all the things above on the one night in several months when your flatmate is three hours away seeing his family and there is nobody at home who can let you in.

If there are any more things you should not do, please rest assured I will end up inadvertently doing them at some point, and I will come back and let you know about them so you don’t have to do them yourself.

Thanks.

Girly handwriting

In the office at work, my colleague Hal is looking at the equipment book and trying to work out who borrowed something without bringing it back. We write the name of the person and the thing they took and the date we expect it back, and normally we can just recognise the handwriting of the person who signed it out.

“I don’t know who signed this out,” says Hal.

“Whose handwriting is it?” says Annie who is sitting at the desk.

“I don’t know,” says Hal, placing the book on the desk and pointing at it. “Have a look. It’s in really girly handwriting.”

I walk over and have a look at the book.

“It’s my handwriting,” I say.

“Sorry,” says Hal, “but it is very girly.”

Mysterious lumps

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.

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.

Wooden Juice – a poem

I am afraid of wooden juice,
I don’t know how it works,
I know of liquid juices and
The taste, the thrill, the perks!
My mind cannot comprehend
How solid juice will fit
Down my neck and throat,
Won’t it get stuck in my armpit?

People say to chop it up,
“That’s the best way to do it!”
But others say that doesn’t do,
“You should just opt to neck it!”

As the days wear on I struggle
As to my final decision,
So I flip a coin in the end,
To avoid further mind collision.
It lands on ‘heads’, I’m doing it,
I’ll drink it down in one!
I tilt my head back slowly
Oh, the process has begun!

I woke up in the hospital,
The doctors say I’ll last.
There’s a jug next to my bedside,
This time I’ll drink it fast!

Report from Bournemouth

This week, my boss sent me to Bournemouth to attend two days of a big meeting where lots of people who all like yellow things came to spend time in each others’ company and talk about what they would do if people who like yellow things were in charge of everything.

I had never been to Bournemouth before, so I thought it would be useful if I presented my findings here for the enrichment of all Beans readers.

Trekkin’ Abroad: More France

I went to France again, this time for two actual weeks. I made a number of important discoveries to supplement the important knowledge I gained on my last visit.

France has almost no vegetables. Eating green things is considered suspicious and even ordering a “salad” in a restaurant will cause you to be served with a steak, a large portion of chips, a thick peppercorn sauce and a single leaf of curly lettuce. This is not a bad thing in itself, but I am concerned that the majority of the French population may be permanently constipated.
My skin, especially the skin on the top of my head which has only really been able to see daylight for the last year or two, is liable to burn even when protected by a hat and a layer of factor 30 suncream thick enough to dip crisps in.
I am suffering pastry withdrawal symptoms.
French kitties who live in flowerbeds in the street do not want to be your friend.
Forgetting to post to the Beans while away will cause you to lose one bean on the Bean Counter. The Bean Counter is unforgiving of holiday time.

I was hoping to gather more information over a two week period, but the French are a crafty people, and ensured I was plied with excellent beers, wines and artisanal ciders, so to be honest I don’t really remember much of it and the four points above are all I came away with.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Things that I did