beatworm.co.uk
08/02/2006
Stags and the City
The weekend before last, I spent in London as part of a somewhat premature, but justifiable stag party. I discovered I’m great at growing stupid facial hair, and inventing stupid drinking games. Unfortunately I also discovered I’m terrible at playing them.
Featured participants: Tom, Matt, Susan, Methusalah, Spanky, Matt, Colin, Matt, Rob, Erwin, Alex, Sandy and Trigger.
Special Guest Starring: Tim.
Weekend sponsored by Arkell’s - Wiltshire’s finest beer only sold on trains.
05/09/2005
Haircut
It has been eight years and several months since my last haircut. A change is as good as arrest.
See also webcam
NeXT Stop: interesting facial hair!
11/08/2005
Blue House
At the time we decided to buy the house, the facade was discolouring dirty-brown pebble dash. “We’ll have to paint that.” I told myself, without any real understanding of whether this was practical, or even possible. So we moved in, and the front of the house remained much as it was, bar a spot of weeding. A year passed.
A couple of weeks ago, we noticed a man up a ladder painting the exterior of a house a few doors down from us. A man with a van, and a sign suggesting painter for hire 1 . Enquiries were made, a quote offered that sounded like the going rate, for all I know about it, and a date fixed for early next week. The only thing left to determine was the colour.
I felt very strongly that if one was going to the expense of paying someone to paint your front wall, then it probably ought to be something exuberant. A colour statement. Modern paint technology being what it is, exterior paints are now an array of colours quite startling in scope; you can choose from the majority of shades on the Dulux colour chart. Which we did. I favoured an extreme sunshine yellow or a bold orange, something earthy and ostentatious. The other party favoured light blue. A compromise was reached.
That’s Dulux “Royal Regatta:3″ on the base, and “Royal Regatta:6″ on the highlights. I’d link to their colour chart, but the website is a stupid java gigantic line-noise URL and dynamic effects nightmare. It works well enough to browse though, so go look if you care; not that colours over the web can be remotely accurate. I don’t think any of the paint shops expect to sell gallons of the deep base colours, after trying a couple of different branches of B&Q we had to get them to order some in, it arrived with only a day to spare.
It was mildly exciting getting it done. The weather forecast suddenly turned to week-long downpours in the middle of July right for when we had it pencilled in. Somehow we got away with it. The dogs extracted plenty of entertainment out of having a strange man on a ladder attached to the house front.
The work in progress seemed to become something of a local talking point, with people often stopping to converse with Howard the painter as they passed. A genial fellow, he explained to me that he relied on these passing conversations, along with the sign propped against his van, to bring in most of his commissions. He thought our colour choice made for a good advertisment. Even a week after he’d finished you might sometimes see passers by, suddenly suprised by the hue, stop what they were doing for a couple of beats and gawp before moving on.
1 H. Crawford Painting Service - (0795 0089878) - painting, plastering and rendering
05/04/2005
VHS giveaway
I have boxes full of prerecorded VHS tapes that I don’t think I’ll ever watch again. In fact, I haven’t owned a working video unit for at least a couple of years, and I haven’t yet found myself concerned about the absence. Given the current ubiquity of the cheap DVD format, this collection of obsolete media has very little resale value. I’ve already replaced many of these with DVD copies.
Although still boxed up from the move, they are taking up room in the new house that I’d prefer to fill with other crap, so I’m happy to give any of these away to anybody who wants them. So please let me know if you would like some of my junk! In the unlikely event of a mad rush, let’s just say first come, first served. Here is the list of tapes I found in the first box.