Danish Blue Cheese Soup

Try this at home!

• Danish Blue Cheese – 1lb
• Milk – 2 pts
• Onions – 2
• Fuse wire – 1 Small roll
• Eggs

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Enjoy.

The Secret Life of TV Adverts

Actually, it’s a little known fact, but the miserable-looking bloke on the Mondeo advert, you know, the one set in Venice, is actually a Salesman for Buitoni – in their Condiments Division.
The reason why he looks so miserable is that the air conditioning system in his car has been installed with a “Parmesan Filter”, you know, like a pollen filter.

The expression which we see as misery, or sadness, is actually nausea, because he can smell Parmesan cheese everywhere he goes in Venice, and it reminds him of sick.

He smiles briefly when he sees a little girl – but this is for sinister reasons..

There’s a bit in the advert where a barge sails past full of newly-weds, and the crowd are throwing handfuls of what appears to be confetti over them…..
Well… It isn’t confetti………..

When he gets back into his Mondeo, the smell disappears because of the Parmesan Filter, and so do his feelings of nausea!

You even see him inhale and smile as he sits down and grabs the steering wheel and drives off into the Parmesan-free sunset.

Things you people wouldn’t believe

In the news recently…

Robert Spring, 76, a retired sperm-counter from Harrogate, was reported to be “comfortable” last week after buying a new armchair.

Pubic health officials in Penge are said to be “suspicious”, mainly due to the fact that the overpowering smell of Parmesan coming from the local factory smells like something else.

Mrs Josie Leftleg is said to be helping Police with their enquiries due to a lack of switchboard operators at the local nick.

Things I claim to have seen

A Sea King Helicopter Manual – which was quite hard to read!

Peter Hook, out of New Order on a step-ladder inhaling Mustard gas next to a very super speedy snail.

A couple of odd racoons laughing at the rarity of choice in the third world.

A John Inman lookalike cursing the day he was born.

The latest offering from Pickwick – “Mood Music For Manic Mormons”.

A photo of Norman Wisdom’s Arm.

Some old galoshes.

A man suffering from a really bad headache because he tried to wear a Dutch Cap.

A massive Richard Briers strawberry head lamp.

Things people have told me are true

Apparently, the local hospitals are full of people who tried to imitate Michael Barrymore when he was on Gladiators.

Last week I failed my recent unsuccessful attempt to land my Hindenburg at London Piccadilly.

YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

One (not) to tell your kids at Christmas

There’s a story I heard about this bloke who used to stuff turkey-meat up his bottom.

When asked why he did this he replied, “Well I can’t stand eating the stuff, I’ve got to get rid of it somehow!”

 

Psycho Man – Slice 2

I invited some friends round last week for my birthday. They bought some vodka, rum, cheap plonk – and someone I had fallen out with years ago. I forget what it was about – but I remember being VERY annoyed – and we hadn’t spoke since.

Anyway, with it being my birthday, and he had got me some very nice cufflinks – he suggested that we bury the hatchet.

SO I DID..

IN HIS FACE!

Then I DISEMBOWLED everyone in the house with a CLAYMORE !!!!

Psycho Man – Slice 1

This bloke was bragging to me in the pub the other day.

He was going on about how, after having a hot curry the night before he would sit in the bath and play motorboats (“PHUTT! PHUTT! PHUTT!”).

I wasn’t very impressed with him.

I grabbed him by the shirt and said;

“D’ya wanna play MOTORBOATS?! DO YOU!?

Well get yourself round to my house NOW…. I’ve got an outboard motor in my bath!

PLAY MOTORBOATS…!? PLAY MOTORBOATS…!?

GET IN MY BATH AND YOU CAN PLAY MINCEMEAT!!!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

Then I think I blacked out….

Inside Office Head – A Users Guide

He wouldn’t let it lie, either.

“They have been described as the bastard offspring of Salvador Dali and Morecambe & Wise..”

Jonathan Ross leaned back in his chair, I leaned back in mine. I was sat about 350 miles away from the studio in London where Jonathan Ross was about to interview rising comics Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. It was about an hour before the start of their second series on Channel 4, in the autumn of 1991.

 

16 (1985)

From about seventeen years old I had been dabbling in writing songs. What I had mistaken for a bottomless well of inspiration was merely the hormone-fuelled manifestation of a love starved teenager’s quest for an answer. I don’t need to tell you what the question was, I’m sure you’ll have your own memories of this time in your life, and don’t wish to be reminded of it!

During these periods of adolescent despair I would write, sing and record songs in copious quantities. I recorded about 30 instrumental tracks, which, if accompanied by today’s “Rave” percussion, would compete with the best of them. I was recording this stuff in 1987.

A few years later, the “gift” I thought I had dried up. I had written about 50 pieces of music, most of which were awful, to be honest with you, and I simply had nothing more to say. I’d said it all. All that had happened was that my adolescent melancholy had receded as I advanced into adulthood — and I realised that there was nothing to be unhappy about anymore.

I was never diagnosed, but in retrospect I am confident that during this time I was experiencing manic-depressive tendencies; periods of elation, happiness and over-excitement would be followed by what seemed much longer periods of black, heavy, suffocating depression. I still get the latter these days, maybe a few dark hours at a time, when I suddenly realise that I am “having a downer,” but have no reason to be, yet cannot drag myself out of it for hours.

In 1990 I accidentally tuned into the first edition of “Vic Reeves Big Night Out,” a sort of banal variety show. It was sublime. The humour and freshness of the show seemed to slot into my mind like a jigsaw piece. I didn’t understand why until about a year later.

As I watched Jonathan Ross interview Reeves & Mortimer, I wondered who Salvador Dali was. I did some research, and found out that there had been a movement started up by some artists in Paris in the 1930’s led by Andre Breton, included Dali, and was known as the Surrealists.

Surrealism is the expression, in writing, painting and sculpture of the unreal, the incoherent, and the unexpected, the stuff of dreams.

The amateur psychologists amongst you will be aware that one side of the brain is devoted to imagination, shapes, and where our dreams take place. The other side of our brain is where organisation, rational thought, language, and where many people believe that “intelligence” occurs. This is why it is so hard to describe your dreams to someone else, as we are using one half of our brain, to try and describe the imagery that takes place in the other. You struggle.

When we are children, we are taught to use the “Intelligent” side of our brains, and are measured by our ability to use it effectively. Our “Imaginative” brain hemishepheres are stifled, laughed at, ridiculed and smothered into silence, which is why we get such a kick out of dreaming, because it is so “different” to our waking life.

Salvador Dali said that his paintings were stills from the movies playing in his head when he daydreamed.

This is one interpretation of surrealism.

Surrealist writing runs parallel to surrealist painting, and is more rewarding, in my opinion.

This is the like seeing a movie, then reading the book of the movie, and coming to the conclusion that the movie could have been as good as the book — but wasn’t.

Back Projection? Shurely there is shome mishtake!

This is because when you read a book, you experience the thoughts of the good guy as he gets the girl, imagine the blistering heat of an exploding Harrier Jump-Jet, you smell the smell of burning rubber as the secret agent takes a corner at 90 miles per hour in a car chase.

You read a book, and you have the best special effects studio in the world working flat-out to provide you with the most vivid images you could ever experience without actually being there. This is your left brain at work. When you go to the movies, you are only seeing the film producer’s imagination at work. He or she is limited by budgets, time constraints, actors and actresses who absolutely will not jump off that cliff, no matter how much they are being paid.

In short, writing allows YOU to think yourself into the images conjured up by the writer, immerse yourself completely, and almost dream.

When I was asked to put together the page layouts for the first Grapevine, I decided to try my hand at surrealist writing. It was a bit sketchy at first, I must admit, but I enjoyed writing the first Office Head immensely.

In 1995 I entered a BBC2 scriptwriting competition. I didn’t get anywhere with it, or you would have heard about it by now.

Maybe the world isn’t ready for the alternate realities I dream about, yet.

I shall keep writing, and enjoy the knowledge that someone out there is enjoying my hobby, now I have found an outlet for my creativity.

Office Head 7 – Unfinished Sycophant

After many long hours of contemplation – I decided to take up the local mallard’s offer – and I was to regret it for the rest of the week.

After having the artificial beak sellotaped to my face, I should have suspected something was afoot, and a webbed foot, at that. But – NO! I just blundered blindly ahead – and let the men from “Ducks ‘R’ U” finish my transformation.

Not even a good monkey costume.

I mean, think about it… If someone offered you fifty quid to spend a few hours disguised as a duck, you’d take it, wouldn’t you? Well I did. And here was little old me, temporarily forgetting about that horrible month I spent as a teenager – trapped inside a life-sized otter costume, strapped to a rock at the foot of the riverbank while Johnny Morris cooed into a microphone – trying to convince people that his voice was actually mine! I mean, the bloody cheek of it! I ask you!

Anyway, they do say that “Love Is Blind!” and Peters and Lee did record “Welcome Home”, didn’t they? “They” also say “Money is the root of all evil.”

But I didn’t care! I had the promise of a cool fifty quid – and as many “Terry and June” videos as I could fit into a Triumph Herald to get me through the lonely months of winter solitude in my secret hibernating pod, near the Clock Tower on Morecambe Promenade.

What was Office Head?

Put simply, Office Head was a column I wrote in the staff magazine when I was employed by Reebok in the mid 90s.

It was a fictional journal, set in an alternate reality where inanimate objects talk, and things are never as they seem.

You can read the story of Office Head here.

Office Head 6 – Parmesan Terror

“Itsa all abouta da flavour, ya know?”

I went for a walk in the country last weekend, just to clear my mind and get things in perspective. It had been a strange few months…

Getting a job at the local parmesan cheese facility as a cheesegrader had always been an ambition of mine. Sifting the cheese into granules of different sizes – then grading the grains into different strengths of smell is even more rewarding than I could possibly have imagined!

The week after that I had finally got my name into print in the local rag, writing a column about the oddities of relative probability. This had started off as a short piece about the odds of winning the jackpot in the National Lottery. I said that you had more chance of going to bed with Pamela Anderson off Babewatch, or Trevor Macdonald, depending on your preference, than getting all six numbers. I then printed my prediction of what I thought the winning numbers would be. I also put on my Mystic Meg wig, and managed to convince Richard and Judy that I was actually her.

You might have seen me a few weeks back making some vague predictions about who I thought might win. I said “The .. winnerrr .. works .. innn .. aaa .. paaaarmesan .. cheeeese .. faaaactorrrry .. “. Richard put down his glass of wine and said “Yes, very good, Meg..” but I hadn’t finished! I’d just been speaking very clearly .. and .. slowly, mainly to annoy everyone watching, but more subtly so my mind control technique would work! He apologised, flicked his silly fringe to one smug side, and let me continue.

“What the fack are you lookin’ at, cant?”

Rather than continue – I put on a very high, mithering cockney voice – like Rodney, off Fools and Horses, only much higher. I said, “Dahn’t chu fackin’ stawt, chu tossa! Ahl cat cha nats off, yoo nonce, jas see if I effin dahn’t! Jas shat it, awright, or ahl av ya!”.

He went to speak again, so I smashed his face in with a baseball bat – and turned to the camera, gesturing at the producer to turn the lights down, for atmospheric effect.

“The .. winnerrrr .. looks .. totally .. unlike .. Carol Vorderrmannn ..”

I hope you get the picture I am trying to paint. It was mostly blue – with a surreal black hillock in the middle that soared up very high, but was very thin – and had a tiny motorised oyston running up it, (sorry, I meant oyster – this stuff comes from my subconscious, you know! You should try it, sometime!)

After I left the studios, I tossed my black wig into a bin, and headed down to Camelot – where the National Lottery is run.

I distracted the guard, put on some white gloves and ate the bloke that was wearing them. After this, I stole into the strongroom where they keep all the gubbins to do with the number selection, and interfered with Arthur’s balls.

I headed off home and resumed my job at El Diablo’s (The Devil’s) Italian Foodstuffs, and waited for my plan to come into fruition.

“Yes, that’s cubic inches. I couldn’t sit down for a week!”

Anyway, after all that, I didn’t win the Lottery, but guess who turned up on my doorstep and stuffed my head up her jumper, yes that’s right, Carol Vorderrmann!

The week after that, I spent the whole fortnight as Sean Connery. It was fun, my disguise was good!

“Time for shome new underpaantsh!”

I nipped down the post office to try it out – as the people there are quite short sighted – and I needed to perfect my voice.

“Hellooo!” I said, “Could I haave shome shtaamps pleash?” Ask a policeman if you don’t believe me… Hey I’m good! Anyway, the lady in the Post Office was so convinced, she rang the Police! When they came – I raised my left eyebrow (It has to be your left, or it just doesn’t work!) and looked them in their eyes – which is difficult when there is more than one of them!

I said, “Loook, dammit! I only came to getch shome bloody shtaamps – what’sh the crime in thaat? D’you knoow who I aam? Anyone want a game of golf?”

They apologised and left me be, scratching my chest wig in confusion!

Two weeks later, I sank into my bed, exhausted after a fortnight of unrelenting feats of sexual athleticism with various elderly ladies who were convinced that I was the great Connery.

Pheww! Never again.

I couldn’t believe all these strange things that were going on – not a single talking inanimate object in sight – I needed to get back to my backwater of reality.

What was Office Head?

Put simply, Office Head was a column I wrote in the staff magazine when I was employed by Reebok in the mid 90s.

It was a fictional journal, set in an alternate reality where inanimate objects talk, and things are never as they seem.

You can read the story of Office Head here.

Office Head 5 – The Search for Snuff

I spent a few hours on my veranda last night, puffing at my magic pipe, contemplating terrorising pike with my fierce swimming. After a few minutes I was BORED STIFF!

I saw a thick piece of cheese walking past the wall at the bottom of my garden. I called out to it to try and catch its attention. This didn’t work.

I then remembered that most cheeses are deaf (except Brie, which you can smell a mile away, apparently), and they communicate by blowing snuff at each other.

I remembered that I had an old box of snuff in my pantry, left to me by a depressed pilot in his will… well no, actually, I stole it from a tiny moist steam iron which wafted its sleepy way past my lounge window a couple of years ago.

So much snuff!

The snuff was in a pouch around it’s neck, I enticed it into my house by waving a burnt sparkplug under its beak until it couldn’t resist the temptation to enter my living room. I convinced it that sparkplugs were much more valuable than snuff, I think I ripped the steam iron off, actually – I still feel guilty about it.

The steam iron relinquished the snuff after umming and aahing, tapping its little claw against the outside of its denim catsuit, puffing steam out of its baseplate and so on. I realised afterwards that I didn’t really want the snuff after all, and hid it in a nook in my pantry.

So, two years on I had finally found a use for the snuff. I loaded it into a straw, with the intention of puffing it up the garden, to attract the attention of the thick piece of cheese.

AAACHOOO!!

After the first sneeze, which was quite explosive, a piece of liver shot out of my nostril.

AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! (etc.)

Three hours later, I had finally stopped sneezing, and my vision had returned.

The thick piece of cheese was patiently sat near my feet. It saw that I was in a position to communicate with it, so it blew some more snuff at me.

Removing Enlodged Snuff can be Painful

AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! AAACHOOO!! (etc.)

By about three o’clock in the morning, my eyesight had returned, and there was a waist-high heap of liver at my feet.

I popped my eyeballs back in, looked around, and saw a note scrawled on a piece of J-Cloth.

It said, “If you can’t handle talking to cheese, don’t bleedin’ bother next time.”

I think he was right, don’t you?

A Tiny Penguin

I recently noticed that there are some tiny wax penguins living at the bottom of my garden. Now you might be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with that?”.. Or maybe not.

The point is, these penguins are not only small and made of wax, but they also possess the necks and heads of giraffes, which makes them very ungainly, and inevitably quite attractive to predators. They would have made quite a tasty snack for any passing buffalo or sharks if I hadn’t erected a string vest fence around the perimeter of their habitation area. Apparently, their mating call gave Judy Garland the idea for The Wizard of Oz – but I’m not really convinced.

If you think you’re missing out then don’t worry, because several film crews from the BBC and BSkyB are popping down over the next couple of weeks to capture their bizarre lifestyle for posterity.

If you keep your eye out, you may see the Pengraffes orbiting Lancaster and Morecambe between 11:43 and 11:44 each working day.

When practising my fish-haunting swimming in Windermere this weekend, I didn’t look where I was going, collided with a Cockney windsurfer, and sank to the bottom of the lake.

The late Barbara the Mallard

I was rescued my a kindly old mallard, called Barbara, who pulled me to the bank and administered beak-to-mouth resuscitation! He then charged me fifty quid for wiping some slivers of liver off my vest. Cheeky get!! I couldn’t afford to pay him so I bludgeoned him to death with a Twiglet and ate his liver with Favvah Beans and a fresh Chianti.

FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF! FF!

What was Office Head?

Put simply, Office Head was a column I wrote in the staff magazine when I was employed by Reebok in the mid 90s.

It was a fictional journal, set in an alternate reality where inanimate objects talk, and things are never as they seem.

You can read the story of Office Head here.

Office Head 3 – Things Are Never as They Seem – Or Are They?

Hello again!

I’d like to tell you all about my exploits at the five-yearly annual meeting of the Mulberry Bush Murderers Convention (MBMC) – but there is simply not enough space here. Suffice it to say – I enjoyed it immensely, but I’m glad to be back on Earth again.

A dream I had one night on Easel involved many of the things that you all take for granted as ordinary, kids going to school, Ice cream vans – boozy football supporters shouting “OY, COPPA!” until they get arrested, or even worse, arrested.

Where I come from, dreams like these are often considered to be as disturbing, if not more disturbing as the dreams you have on Earth involving Parmesan cheese salesmen, coffee percolators driving buses, old ladies reciting Shakespeare to an audience of dead daffodils, the return of Elvis Costello and the Attractions – or the terrible stinging pain you get if you sit down on an electric fan (OW!).

You know that it’s time to return to Earth when the dreams you have start to get too dreary, and you need to “flip” back to Earth for a while, just to get your idea of surrealism firmly back into place.

The journey from Easel to Earth is surprisingly easy.. You just use the Visualisation technique as you drop off to sleep, and before too long you wake up in your bed on Earth, as if it were as normal as breathing. Obviously the journey itself is quite strange to describe – but, as you will be aware – the latest Guinness advert with my good friend Louis Armstrong singing the soundtrack is quite difficult to describe as well. You see, one day my dream recorder will be invested in and you will all be able to record your dreams, as I have, and transcribe your sleeping thoughts and subconscious machinery into words like these.

This “Chunnel” that people refer to — I mean what, metaphorically speaking, is the bees’ pith-helmet of it all? What has rubbing lumps of cottage cheese into your eyes got to do with driving a train in the dark? You can’t see where you’re going, the smell of whey (WHEY-HEY!) becomes unbearable — and at the risk of getting a “Fatwah” issued on me, I would like to ask you all if you can see any connection whatsoever between roast beef muffins, and a pile of old raffle tickets.

I put this question to my very very dear friend, Paul Weller last week as he is (in addition to being the bored shitless bloke out of the “Feed The World” video) a leading authority on Coronation Chicken Sandwich Filling and it’s uses.

He said, “Wha…? Who are you? And what are you doing sat on my knee in my house?!”

“Me? Oh, I’m the used biro salesman from down the very end of your very street — and very PROUD of it!”

“Used biro sales-”

He broke off at this point, mainly because of a terrible stench of egg (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!), which was rising from a small cranny in the ground near a discarded Michael Bentine puppet in Chiswick, but also to do with a terrible recollection of something from his past that he had obviously blanked out at some stage. He muttered something about pigeons and this filled me with dread and a need to escape.

I did…he didn’t.

Serious Historical Pigeon Holing

In many forgotten corners of the land, the practice of pigeon holing has become almost as popular as Dreft consumption has in the High Street banks of Twickenham. It is a delightful pastime, I am told, and the hours of scraping reinforced concrete off your lounge walls can be quite rewarding as well.

While buffing a paisley hanky to a beautiful shine using the top of a pillar box in my garden last week, I was visited by a few Swan’s Vests that had escaped persecution in the coalmines of Og.

Only 1 inch tall, actually.

Apparently the coalmines were a bit overcrowded with crowds of tiny Elvis Costelli (Plural of Costello, I was assured by the Swan’s Vests). I got angry when they told me this. They set fire to some water after I told them to clear off, and left quite hurriedly, I can tell you!

I didn’t know you could get water to burn, but if you try snow-boarding one day, using your backside only, you’ll see that it’s quite possible.

What’s inside the testcard?

As you read this I will be back on Easel, sipping a Ruby from a worn Goodyear tyre, listening to the magical sound of Hank “Warm!” Marvin playing The Very Best of Test Card Music on my personal hi-fi (It is a VERY long album), and wondering about the exotic lives you all lead back on the planet Reebok. Have a good beehive.

What was Office Head?

Put simply, Office Head was a column I wrote in the staff magazine when I was employed by Reebok in the mid 90s.

It was a fictional journal, set in an alternate reality where inanimate objects talk, and things are never as they seem.

You can read the story of Office Head here.