At last, now that limelight-hogging shark is out of the way, I can achieve the fame and notoriety that is deservedly mine!
I’ll show him! Bloody talentless hack… I’ve got more cooking savoir-faire in one of my whiskers than he has in his entire seabound body!
If only this had happened sooner! Perhaps my career could have been saved before my looks were savaged by old age!
Now quiver before me, mortals! I shall be your queen! Your beautiful, culinarily blessed queen!
My, who the blazing heck is this, in front of some kiwi juice and a bottle of tequila? It’s only that dude, Ewan The Shark! And he looks like he is about to speak…
Welcome one, welcome all, to Cocktails With Ewan “The Shark” Cruise. Or should that be Ewan “Cruise” The Shark. Probably more appropriate.
As you can see above, I have placed 4n ice cubes into the cocktail shaker, where n is a coefficient determining how icy you want your cocktail to be, which I see, has efficiently enhanced your determination to make a cocktail.
This is the hardest part to execute. Put some tequila into the cocktail shaker.
I really hope that you are managing to keep up with this.
Whereas the previous step was the hardest to execute, this step is the hardest to photograph. Whilst holding a fluffy shark in one hand, a carton of kiwi juice in the other hand, and a camera between your teeth, pour some kiwi juice into the cocktail shaker. How you hold the cocktail shaker is up to you.
Shake your cocktail. As anyone knows, there is only one proper way to shake a cocktail.
And it’s not inside a washing machine.
Pour the cocktail into one of those really groovy tumblers just like they used to have in the ’50s in America. It is essential that you use one of these tumblers, as this drink is useless without the kaleidoscope effect you get when you are draining the last drops of your drink and staring down the barrel of an empty glass.
Presto! Witness its majesty! Witness its charm! Witness its unsettling murky green colour!
Witness the flavour. Delicious.
*Ewan will return…*
Me: “I want to… uhm… put you in a box… with… uhm… lots of toothpaste in it.”
Her: “Mmmmm…”
Me: “And I want to… uhm… tie you to a banjo.”
Her: “Ahhhhhh…”
Me: “And… uhm… put you next to the radiator and throw foxes at you.”
Her: “Oooooh…”
What’s this in the drawer of my new coffee table? It’s a shark called Ewan, and he’s going to show me how to reinforce it!
These drawers just ain’t strong enough. The bottom bit slots into some grooves that are just a few millimetres deep, and once these drawers are laden with magazines, that base bit will buckle and fall through. We need reinforcements!
Here is the drawer that we are about to reinforce, alongside one I prepared earlier. Get ready for the ride of your life!
Measure twice, cut once. Or, in our case, measure once, draw a pencil line on the piece of wood once, take it through to the kitchen once… whoops, I’m getting ahead of myself…
…put some newspaper down once (pleases the sharkette no end). Sawing is definitely a job for someone with opposable thumbs, so Pete did this bit.
When you are finished sawing, put the saw on the work surface rather than leaving it on the kitchen floor. I learned this the hard way. Note also that when you pick the newspaper up, it will be covered with a dusty reside, created whilst sawing. This dusty residue, created whilst sawing, is not too dissimilar in colour and texture to sawdust.
After checking that your pieces of wood fit, apply a thin line of wood glue to the edge that will be your vertical…
…and a thin line of wood glue to the base. Assuming that gravity points downwards in your region, make sure that your drawer is upside down when you do this. There is no point reinforcing the top of the drawer. Also make sure that your thin line of wood glue is close enough to the edge of the base that it will make good contact with the piece of wood, when you put it in place.
Put the wood in position and press it firmly into place. For every hour that the glue says that it needs to dry, allow four seconds. This drawer is ready to put back into position in a rip-roaring one minute, thirty six seconds!!!!!!!
That’s “car” meets “saga”. Sorry, bit obscure.
It is commonly known amongst everyone in the whole wide world that my car key has a problem. The moulded plastic bit that should hold onto a keyring is worn and cracked, and so under extreme forces, the key can separate from the ring entirely.
Today, a co-worker gave me a lift to the bank, and since we were passing very close to the castle I stopped in to get my mobile phone, which I had forgotten to bring that morning.
FFwd to later on that afternoon. I remove my keys from my pocket (they were probably interfering with my karma or, more likely, my right testicle). Or, should I say, my key (that’s singular, there).
Like a finely honed analytical machine, my brain leaps into life and replays the last five hours of film. Maybe the key fell off somewhere in the office? Five minutes later, we can discount that possibility.
Maybe the key fell off when I parked the car in the car park this morning? Ten minutes of scrabbling in the dark later, we can discount that possibility.
Maybe the key fell off when I was sat in my colleague’s car? I borrow his key, and perform a quick hunt. No joy.
My colleague gave me a lift home tonight, to my warm house, and my spare car key. And who was waiting for me on the doorstep when I got home?
Kevin Spacey.
Last week’s fiasco with the car required me to replace the radiator at a cost of approximately £100 + VAT + labour + VAT on labour (no doubt). It also meant that I needed to arrange transport to get back to my home and then back to Karen’s at the end of the week. It also meant that I needed to arrange transportation into work, which consisted of one train journey and 100 miles in one of our company’s cars, which I had to be insured on, and which I generously filled up with diesel at the end of the week, even though it had only been half full when I had picked it up.
Total cost – I’d estimate nearly £300.
This morning, whilst putting a last minute christmas card into a big shiny red pillar box, I noticed that my right tail light wasn’t working.
I popped round to the garage to get a replacement 12V 5W bulb for £1, which I fitted myself in about 12 seconds.
Conclusion: if I can find a way to cool a naturally aspirated petrol engine using only light bulbs, I may be in line for a Nobel prize.
Merry kiss-mouse, people. If you find a mouse on your windowsill, give it a kiss. The odds of it transferring a disease to you are sufficiently small that it is worth it for the joy that you will get when you see the smile on its little mousey face.
And remember, keep your mouth closed when you kiss mice. Though they like a big sloppy Frenchie with tongues as much as the next rodent, you should be conscious that they also like warm, damp holes in which to make a nest, and once a mouse gets under your tongue it can only be coaxed out by dangling small cubes of Gouda from your nose.
As soon as the tree goes up, I can stop feeling festive again. It’s a great relief. Then all the tinsel and lights just become another way of decorating the flat – totally meaningless, no significance whatsoever. That’s how things should be. All things should be insignificant. Even the important things. Less ego.
Some of the things that we do will be bigger than other things. Sometimes we will find ourselves passing our days working away on one small project after another, and sometimes we will be confronted by something enormous, something so big that even when you stand back you can’t see all of it at once. And then you have to break it up into smaller pieces, like the squirrel.
Mmmmm, cubed squirrel meat…
At first, you will find that your pan will contain a few small cubes of squirrel. It will be a big, empty pan, with some pieces of squirrel in the bottom. Daunting.
And then, it will start to look like a pan full of squirrel cubes, but with some space in it. Less daunting, but still incomplete. Don’t fuck up now. You’re not out of the woods yet.
One day, if you are very, very lucky, you will be the proud owner of a pan full of squirrel, all succulent and tender, fresh from the tree. And then you can cook your squirrel, enjoy your squirrel, devour your squirrel.
Devour your squirrel.
Oh, and by the way…
…the answer is: a canary that has been held up to an industrial sander.
**Drying Is Fun**
ISDN 6-666-666666666-6666666666666666666
This book, by popular childrens’ author Spudchop Tagliatelle, is a must-have for parents of children suffering from post-shower-towelphobia. Witty and beautifully illustrated by popular childrens’ illustrator Robert Crowsfeet, it adopts a patronising tone that the children will mistake for sincerity, yet the parents will recognise as sharp piss-taking out of this pathetic affliction.
*Also by the same author:*
* Chewing Properly Before Swallowing Is Fun
* Waiting Until You Are In The Toilet Before Relaxing Your Appropriate Muscles Is Fun
* Keeping Out Of The Fucking Garage You Little Shit Is Fun
* Well-formed HTML Is Fun>
There are a wealth of good reasons why I have not been around here much lately, and I really do owe you all an explanation.
Once there was a farmer who worked the land. He had three sons, called Aaron, Bbron and Ccron.
As he grew old, he decided that he would need to work out how to divide up his land between his sons when he finally became too old to look after the land himself.
To Aaron, he gave a marker pen. He said to Aaron “Aaron, shove this marker pen up your nose.”
To Bbron, he gave a paintbrush. He said to Bbron “Bbron, take this paintbrush and ram it where the sun doesn’t shine.”
To Ccron, he gave a bucket of cow shit. He said to Ccron “Ccron, I always hated you, ya fucking wanker.”
His sons stared at him in disbelief. “But father, ” they said “How does this help you to decide how to share up the land when you get too old to look after the land yourself?”
He replied “Fuck you all, you bunch of pussies! I’m selling the farm and retiring to the Isle of Wight!”
His sons were shocked. “You fucking twat.” they said.
He could only reply “Fuck you.”
The drive back from Mallory Park lead us very close to my old Uni, so I took Karen for a quick tour of the world which I once inhabited. Firstly I drove her past the house where I had lived three doors down from the fish and chip shop, and then we doubled back and drove onto the campus. I was consumed with nostalgia. I didn’t realise until we walked past a ground floor kitchen that it was five years to the day since my first day there. All the freshers were sat around having their first-night meetings with the resident tutors, like I had done five years ago that day.
Whenever I move house I lose ownership of my memories. I don’t know why this is, but everything that I have ever done seems to have happened to someone else. The images still exist clearly in my mind, but I am no longer the central character. I know that the events took place, and I was surely present, yet not there at all. I guess that it has something to do with environmental triggers. I have been living in my current flat for over a year, and in that time the same thing has happened. Flatmates have come and gone, I’ve switched jobs, I’ve moved the furniture around in the sitting room. All this combines to leave me feeling like a different person to how I did a year ago. Though I definitely remember being there a year ago, my face has been erased from my memory so that I can’t be certain that it was really me in the picture. I have to rely on logic to deduce that it had to be me – it can’t have been anybody else.
But for that half hour, surrounded by the residences and the grass and the trees and the lake and the launderette and the sports centre and the geese, all the memories belonged to me again. It was definitely me. I was there.