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.
9 comments on “H-A-L-L-U-M-I”
In my defence I didn’t do it because I forgot.
That’s a pretty cast-iron case you’ve built for yourself there. When this case finally goes to court (?) I’m going to need a crack legal team to crack the case wide open and even then their crackness might not be crack enough to crack your cast iron defence.
You’ll do plenty of cracking but it’ll do you no good. Nobody can crack my defence. Nobody.
It certainly seems that way. Perhaps I’ll give it up, retire from the old legal business and go run a bed and breakfast in rural Pembrokeshire. I reckon I can at least crack that.
You could crack that and then maybe crack some eggs to make me a cracking omelette for breakfast. I’m very hungry.
I’ll make you any kind of omelette you like for your breakfast, if you’ll give me a five star review on tripadvisor. It’s vital if I’m ever going to build this B&B into a viable business.
Of course mate. You’ll have five star ratings each and every month whether you like it or not. Your B&B is going to soar like a great soaring thing. A kid on a sled? A bird on fire? Yes, something patriotic like that.
How about a kid holding a bird riding a burning sled? That’s what I said I was aiming for when I was on Dragon’s Den.
Nobody invested.
A true visionary is never understood in their own time. I would have given you at least a pony had you come on and told me about the kid holding a bird riding a burning sled.