Millican's magic beans

What kind of sorcery is this..?!

Comedian Sarah Millican is on a 100-date tour of the UK at the moment, and recently dropped in to deliver her Control Enthusiast show to an appreciative audience at The Forum, in Barrow.

One of them had even “missed my regular bingo session” to attend. What higher praise is there? You know you’ve made it when that happens.

Sarah clearly enjoyed herself too, taking to Twitter after the show to say “What a glorious crowd” the Barrovians were. She also included a picture of her “lovely dinner” – a couple of fried eggs, with a pile of chips and beans.

Fair enough – it looked delicious. In fact, it’s making me hungry just thinking about it. I do have one perplexing problem with this gig/food-based scenario though; the eggs and chips are in half of one of those polystyrene boxes, whilst the beans are in the other half. The two half are hinged together. There’s no cross-contamination. Eggs and chips are bean-free. The beans are devoid of egginess and chippage.

It would appear that even though it’s seemingly technically impossible to do this, Millican-can. Congratulations Sarah – you appear to have branched out from the world of comedy into magic tricks as well. Bet you made it all mysteriously disappear, too.

Good to know you enjoyed your tea, and your time in Cumbria.

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 19th of January 2018.

Comments

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog