Middle Raged Podcast – Episode 11 Transcript

This is the transcript for episode 11 – if you’d like to listen to it, rather than read it, all episodes are available on this page.

Hello and welcome to this Episode 11, let’s say Season 2, of the Middle Raged Podcast.
Me, Adam Eccles, and my co-host, Keith A Pearson.
Hello, Keith, it’s been a while.
We’re back!
We’re back, back in business.
And…
It’s in the last of us.
It’s been a while, but that was because of reasons.
And…
We’re like a dose of thrush, aren’t we?
just when you think you’ve got rid of us, we’re back.
We’re back, back in business.
We’re recording in the evening.
This is new for us.
That’s it.
Very new.
It’s dark outside, and we’ve had a day already, right?
So we’re not suffering from morning apathy.
Probably now got like evening apathy instead, so…
But it should be interesting to see how our energy levels wane as the episode progresses.
By the end of this, we’ll be falling asleep at the mic, which can happen.
See late night DJs, right?
They’re all drawing into the…
Do you think we should change our tone to make it more sort of late night radio-ish?
Hang on.
Have I got a button for that?
Adam’s got a new toy, everyone.
Yeah.
I can’t see what they’re…
Apart from his flesh light.
Right.
Enough of that.
Cut.
Can I just say, though, we were talking off air before we started recording.
We said, isn’t it good that we put so much effort in to try to make this as professional as possible?
That’s right.
We do.
But I think I need new glasses because I can’t read what it says on my little thing.
That’s what comes with middle age, mate.
Yes, Middle Raged, Middle Age, right.
You need a hearing trumpet before long.
What’s that?
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
So yes, it’s been a while, but we’re going to say that this is now season two of the Middle Raged podcast.
Season one, you can go back and listen to those first ten episodes and they’re solid gold, right?
So go and listen if you haven’t already.
And even if you have, I hear that that’s a thing as well.
So you can’t get enough of myself and Keith.
Then there’s lots of hours of us ranting into the world.
Droning on.
That’s right.
But now listen, we’ve got new material.
Yeah, we have.
But before we get started, right, I just wanted to, I heard something the other day, and I thought that we should prove, I heard that AI can now generate podcasts, like on the fly.
So you give a prompt, something like, you know, I don’t know, talk about the political situation or whatever, right?
And literally, that’s it, and you probably choose a couple of characters.
But then it completely generates everything, and you know, it sounds like a quite terrible podcast, but still, it’s a podcast.
And so I thought that we should prove to our dear listeners that we are not AIs.
So I’ve got, you know those-
If any proof are needed.
Who would invent an AI, and spoke the crap that we-
Well, this is it, right?
But you know those capture tests that you get, right?
So I thought we’d have an audio version of a capture, right?
So, you know, they’re always about like traffic lights and bicycles and road crossings and things, right?
So I’ve tried to be in the spirit of that, but this is to prove that you are not a robot, right?
So, Keith, when sitting at traffic lights, someone who is next to you or behind you and revs their engine aggressively is known as what?
An impatient prick?
Yeah, you could have had Bellin, Dickhead, Twat, etc.
But yes, good choice, right?
Okay.
So, cyclists who refuse to go in single file, even when going up a hill on a narrow country road in front of you are known as?
Or, I bet we’ve got some cyclists who listen.
I’ve got to choose my words very carefully.
It’s a middle-aged man thing, isn’t it?
It’s just, yeah.
But, you know, they just won’t pull over and you can’t get by them.
No.
So, what do we call them?
Oh, you bounders.
There you go.
That’ll do.
Polite.
Fair enough.
Okay.
Good stuff.
And, you know, we’re gonna leave the, I think listeners evaluate if you think Keith is a robot based on these answers.
So, which one of these is not a road crossing?
Zebra, Pelican, Chicken, Puffin, Toucan.
Chicken.
Thank you.
I was waiting for a cat there.
That sounded too easy.
But the chicken does cross the road, right?
So, anyway.
Hold on.
Whoa, whoa.
Do I get a degree for that?
I’ve heard the degrees.
They’ve dumbed down degrees, I hear.
So.
Yeah, yeah.
Possibly.
So, next question.
Like, you often see this just on its own.
Are you a robot?
Oh, that’s just a question.
Yeah.
just, are you a robot?
It sounds to me like one of those things that said that, you know, you get these paradoxes of like, if somebody lies and then you ask them if they’re a liar, you just say, am I a robot?
Are you a robot?
Do you remember Metal Mickey?
Yes, he was a legend.
Saturday afternoon TV.
In the 80s, I believe.
Something like that, yeah.
It did sound a bit like Metal Mickey.
No, if you were a robot, who would you be?
Crichton.
Crichton.
Oh, yeah.
Classic.
That’s a good call.
Yeah.
But so I’m going to take it that you’re not a robot then.
You’re saying that you’re not.
I would probably go for optimus Prime.
I tell you, is he a robot?
Probably, yeah.
Kind of is, isn’t he?
Yeah.
I just like the name.
Fair enough.
There was a point I thought I would call my first born.
optimus.
Nice.
Yeah, but I was vetoed on that.
Yeah, it doesn’t go down too well.
Okay, so last question then, which is your favorite Pop-Tart?
Oh, I can’t stand Pop-Tarts.
I wouldn’t even know what flavor they’re, strawberry?
There you go.
Okay.
So we’ll start here.
So you could have had Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Debbie Gibson, Sam Fox, Melinda Carlisle, or Martika.
That’s a bit rude, isn’t it, calling them tarts?
Well, you know.
Kylie’s not a tart.
I’d like to say that.
Tasty.
Anyway.
Very, very tasty.
So listeners, do we think that Keith is a real human or an AI-generated robot?
Let us know.
Thank you.
Right.
And on social media, yeah.
Now, I also have a confession to make.
Over the last part of our downtime, I’ve been doing a server upgrade.
I’ve had to switch hosting company and that moving load of websites and emails, and I may have actually accidentally lost all of the emails for Middle Raged.
Oh, no.
This is the first time you’re hearing this.
I thought, well, do it live on the pod, then you can’t get this in there.
I didn’t know that happened or that there was such a server involved.
So if you have emailed us and you’ve not received a reply, that’s probably why.
So I apologize.
And I think now we’re probably better off saying, if I say probably one more time, I think we should just say, get in touch with us via X or Facebook.
because I think everyone’s on one of those two platforms, aren’t they?
Probably, yeah, definitely.
I mean, I actually, I’ve said this before, I deleted all of the social apps off my phone, right?
So I only get to them occasionally, but I do get to them.
But yes.
Yeah, we’ll be way more responsive.
Yes.
By that we mean we won’t ignore you.
So feel free to reach out on our socials and say hello, and let us know what you think.
Yes.
There you go.
All right.
Good.
So with that fun over, we’re moving on to our roasting session, right?
So this is where Dear Listener, who is a benefactor, will donate the price of a coffee or so, or three or whatever, on buymeacoffee.com/middleraged.
That’s it.
That’s it.
So go there and donate the price of a couple of cups of coffee or whatever.
And then for that, you’ll get us taking your name and making it into some kind of character that might be in one of our books.
May not be good, may not be bad, may be quite horrific.
You might end up dead or worse.
But nevertheless, you get to just, based on your name, no other factors will come up with a character for you.
So if you’d like that and if you’d like to support the pod and make us do more of them, or maybe you want to pay us to stop.
How much do you have to pay to make us stop?
There’s probably going to be about eight grand at this point.
Wow, you really don’t value yourself, do you?
Eight grand, four grand each.
No, no, for me, for me.
Oh, okay, right.
I’ll just keep whittering on on my own.
Anyway, what was I saying?
Yeah, so our benefactor this episode is Evelyn Wagner.
And we’re going to probably have to discuss or even be informed.
How do we pronounce that correctly, right?
Is it Evelyn or Evelyn?
I don’t know.
We don’t know, do we?
We’re just going to be inconsistent.
Yeah.
And is it Wagner or Wagner or some other?
Can I, at this point, I should probably, I’ve done it again.
We should do like a swear jar thing, right?
And if I say probably, I should have to put a pound in a jar or something.
I’ve lost my train of thought.
What do I say?
Yes.
So when I first messaged Adam, he asked who our benefactor was so we could organize the roasts.
And when writing it, when writing our Evelyn’s name, Evelyn, Evelyn, I did a slight typo and I wrote Evelyn wanger.
And I have to go for a good 10 minutes.
I chuckled to myself and I did consider thinking, should I leave that like that?
because that opened up so many opportunities.
Or Evelyn wanger, I could do, I could really do some mischief for that.
And that’s unfair.
Probably unfair, isn’t it?
because obviously, you know, it’s not Evelyn’s name.
So it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the roasting, wouldn’t it?
Yes.
So yeah, we haven’t gone with wanger.
No.
10 things.
All right.
So, okay.
What’s your roast?
What I did come up with.
Okay.
Now, my story begins with a middle-aged chap.
We’ll call him Jim, who after the breakdown of his marriage, he moves into this ramshackle house on the windswept Cornish coast, if you imagine, sort of the desk of that house.
Yeah, so I know it.
Wuthering Heights type thing.
Right, lovely.
So he’s sort of consigned, now this is starting to sound biographical, consigned to the living the rest of his days alone.
He spends his days working as a bookkeeper.
Oh dear.
And then in the evenings, his hobby is writing letters of complaint to the BBC.
And he literally will complain about everything from the…
Yes, sir…
.the intro music to the news at 10, to the font used on the BBC Weather app.
just every day.
That’s what gives him a little bit of joy, gives him something to keep going.
Nice.
Good to have.
Anyway, so he’s been living there a while, and then one night he’s visited by a benign ghost called Evelyn Wagner.
Nice.
So now, what I was doing, Queen, the name conjured up this sort of image of a hauntingly sad soul trapped in the afterlife until she can finally break the chains of her former life.
Oh dear.
Right.
Are you liking this?
Yeah.
So, I mean, it is, isn’t it?
I’ve never written sort of gothic-y horror type stuff before.
Yeah.
It is a bit Wuthering Heights, isn’t it?
Yeah.
The knock on the window.
Is that?
And it’s dark outside.
Maybe that’s what it is.
It’s the dark evenings.
Maybe it’s just changed my…
Well, it’s nearly, um…
It’s nearly pumpkin day, isn’t it?
Yeah.
God, I wonder if that’s it.
Um, right.
So after initially shitting his pants, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, gradually gains enough confidence to talk to his ghostly housemate.
Nice.
And it transpires that she used to live in the house.
Of course, yeah.
obviously.
Now, unfortunately, those years were not happy as Evelyn was married to a spiteful man.
I hadn’t thought of a name.
We’re calling him Dick, I guess.
Dick.
Dick.
And he treated Evelyn appallingly.
Bastard.
He would force her to hand wash his filthy underpants while…
I don’t know where I got this from.
He dined on the finest Audi foods, whilst poor Evelyn lived on a diet of pot noodles and unripened bananas.
I suspect that kept it regular, if nothing else.
There’s some nutrition in the pot noodles.
It’s hard to find, but it is there.
I would say the plastic container probably has more nutrition than the actual contents.
Right.
Right.
Sorry.
Chapter 3.
One night, Dick came home from the pub drunk and in a fit of rage about a stubborn stain in his favorite Y-Fronts.
He lost it and he stabbed Evelyn to death with a kitchen knife.
Bloody hell.
I know, he’s taken a dark turn.
And then obviously to cover up his crime, he buried her in a shallow grave in the cellar.
Yes, as he would, yeah.
Which is how she came to become a ghost.
Yeah, now unfortunately, I decided to write this at the very end of the working day, and what I hadn’t taken into account is all my creative juices had been sort of exhausted.
So I don’t really know where the story goes after that.
Well, I mean, she’s a benign ghost.
Perhaps they build a relationship, and I mean, I don’t know how long ago this was.
must have been fairly recent, right?
Well, I thought it might be a good idea, because we can, you know, you need to leave the reader with a bit of a, something, let their own imagination.
But it did raise a few interesting questions, like did Evelyn and Jim live happily ever after?
Hmm, well, as much as you can with a ghost.
How deep does a shallow grave need to be before it’s no longer shallow?
I don’t know.
Three feet?
Probably, yeah.
After that, it’s quite deep.
Three feet.
It’s a lot of digging in the cellar as well.
Yeah.
And finally, can you have sex with a ghost?
Ah, that’s a good question.
And one that probably needs further exploration.
There’s probably a gag in there, but I have to say, I’ve just drained my creative juices, so it’s escaping me at the moment.
Indeed.
Well, if you have had relations with a ghost, that’s not a place.
I think there’s probably people who think they have, you know, and would swear.
I seem to remember on one of these weird channels about, it was probably a YouTube video or something, about somebody who was assaulted almost on a nightly basis.
When I say assaulted, I mean, like…
Sexually assaulted.
Sexually pen-rated by a spirit.
Thanks.
I don’t know if it was ever proven, though.
Would you have then ghostly…
I mean, you wouldn’t have to worry about contraceptives, surely?
Probably not, no.
Probably not.
You never know, though.
Right.
That’s an interesting food for thought.
So thank you, Keith.
Well, I went a different way, slightly, slightly.
So I think that Evelyn…
I’m going to say Evelyn, because that’s what…
I have a character in one of my books called Evelyn as well, so I’ve always thought of it as Evelyn.
So if it’s wrong, sorry, let us know.
But she is a serial widow, you know, a widow for sort of money.
And she’s married a lot of very old, very rich men for profit.
She’s age 32 and already had five husbands pass.
And she died of old age, naturally, no, nothing, nothing nefarious.
She maintains nothing illegal has happened and they all entered the marriage, knowing exactly what the situation was, right?
obviously, she’s very pretty and attractive and these old men are…
How old are these men?
Oh, you know, 80s, 70s, 80s.
And she just, you know, wears them out, I suppose.
Oh, okay.
So she’s basically bringing them to death.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, fair enough, you know, we’ve got the money.
So, but number six husband, her current husband, still alive, Sir Thomas Albright, aged 87, has a huge fortune, but he also has two daughters who are both much older than Evelyn.
And obviously, they can clearly see what’s going on here.
And they think they’re going to be friddled out of their inheritance, so they hate her, and they’re trying to undermine everything, right?
But the irony of this story is that both of them are also serial widows.
But they have been known to use the odd homemade concoction, let’s say, to aid the progression of those widows.
Oh, like in the Oval Team.
Indeed, yeah, a little bit of hemlock or something in there, right?
So, yes.
And so this is the hilarious black comedy of how Evelyn gets away and takes the money and runs.
So there we go.
So it was a happily ever after for Evelyn?
I think so, yeah.
Did she just stop marrying and boffing?
After that.
Yeah, I mean, after six of them, and you know, a decent amount of money, she’s basically retired and probably gone to a hot climb to live a life.
I guess one 80-year-old penis is pretty much the same as the next.
I don’t know.
I really don’t know.
If you’ve seen a lot of 80-year-old penises, let us know.
Please don’t, actually.
I don’t know, maybe you work in a hospital, and therefore you know about that stuff.
Wouldn’t it be awful if we got paid in a care home, and then we got a barrage of people sending in dick pics.
Yes, sir.
Oh, remember, it’s still firm.
Excellent.
It’s a great umbrage.
Moving on.
Yes.
So, let’s get to the meat of the Raged pod, and what are we enraged about this episode?
Oh, it’s been building up and up and up.
And to be honest, I had a quite a long list of potential rages that I could have run with.
However, a new one entered the fray this last Saturday.
And I’m afraid there’s a bit of a backstory here, but I’ll keep it brief.
So, I don’t, I’m not, like you, I don’t really have a particularly sweet tooth.
So I don’t, I never have desserts, puddings, call them what you will after dinner.
Right.
However, at eight o’clock, I will have a cup of tea with either, and I alternate for variety.
I’ll either have a Kit Kat, Oh yeah.
Or three custard creams, and I just rotate through them.
And that, thank you.
That just sates my need for something sweet.
Plenty.
Now, I order all of this stuff from Amazon, and it comes automatically every few weeks.
Well, custard, hang on.
Let’s dig into that.
You can get custard creams from Amazon?
Yeah.
Fucking hell.
Well, technically, it comes from Amazon Fresh, which I think is something to do with Morrison’s.
Oh, see, I don’t live in this world as automatic.
Well, I have certain stuff where I have like, well, it’s your fault for living in the arse end of the world, isn’t it?
I have to go and get my own business.
Yeah.
Well, it’s great.
And it means I don’t have to go to the shop, but it’s things like I have bottled water and cereal and toilet rolls, all the stuff that you just can’t be asked to carry to the car.
Yeah, right, right.
That’s interesting.
So that just gets delivered every two weeks.
Anyway, there was clearly some sort of glitch in the Matrix because I didn’t receive my Kit Kats.
Bastards.
I know.
Now, as it happened, though, all was not lost.
So I don’t have to build up any tension here because I had to go to Sainsbury’s anyway to buy bread.
because I can only get it in Sainsbury’s.
It’s a very specific type of bread.
People don’t need to know this, do they?
It’s just unnecessary detail.
Is it gluten free?
No, it’s high protein, low carb, low.
Two pound ton of loaf.
It’s very dense.
Yes, you put it with your fridges rocking, you can put it under one foot.
Yes, seriously dense.
I don’t know where we’re going with it.
So I thought, okay, all is not lost because I’m going to the supermarket anyway, I can pick up some Kit Kats.
No problem there.
I would not have to break the custom cream Kit Kat rotation, which would have just messed everything up.
I don’t know where you’re at.
I’ll be having it.
Is it Monday?
Is it Wednesday?
Tuesday?
The only way I know is whether I’m having Kit Kats or custom creams.
So for the first time in, I don’t know how long, I ventured into the confectionery aisle at Sainsbury’s in search of said Kit Kats.
What I found there, it shook me to my core.
Really?
because what I discovered was not just, now let’s just talk about Kit Kat.
The humble Kit Kat.
Which up until I think fairly recently was available in two formats, wasn’t it?
The two finger or the four finger?
Do you have a preference?
We’re going to have to do that, can’t we now?
I’ve lined it up.
I’m not going to take the bait.
So, I mean, I tell you what I have in my cupboard right now is an abundance of what the, what are they called?
Fun size, fun size Kit Kats.
So they are-
What the fuck is a fun size?
One stick, isn’t it?
There’s two.
I mean, I don’t think you could go down to one.
That wouldn’t be a Kit Kat anymore, would it?
Yeah, that would be a Kit.
Yeah, or a cat.
But they’re smaller, they’re not as long, and maybe not even as girthed, you know?
What’s-
I can’t remember.
Wide?
Yeah, there you go.
But anyway, I have lots of those.
So yes, I mean, but one of them, I think, yeah, one of them is probably plenty for me.
The two-
So a two-stick Kit Kat, which I think is less than 100 calories.
So if you just fancy something, just to take the edge off you, you know, you got a bit of a chocolate crepe.
It’s just a classic, isn’t it?
It’s all it has been.
The classic, yeah.
Classical.
So your only option really was to go two-finger or four-finger.
And then at some point, they brought in the chunky.
Now, I can never see really the point of the chunky.
What did it bring to the table that you couldn’t achieve just by eating two sticks simultaneously?
Is it just more chocolate or something?
I don’t know, I’ve never had one of those.
No, I can’t, I probably have, but I don’t remember.
I mean, it obviously didn’t leave a lasting impression because that’s why I’m back on the two sticks, back on the tradition list.
I like the two sticks.
So you can imagine my horror when I stopped at the, what I expected to see was like a shelf with various confectionery on, and there maybe the occupying maybe a quarter for half a shelf would be the Kit Kats.
It’s a whole fucking display, mate.
What?
Top to bottom.
Now let me run through this.
Okay.
So my research, what I didn’t realize is that Kit Kats were now available in dark, dark mint, orange, white, and white chunky.
What?
And then they were in various different packs.
You can buy them in 12s and 6s, and basically there’s just every fucking connotation you can think of.
This is, you see, yes.
This has set me off on something of a rant.
So that annoyed me.
As it would.
And what annoyed me more is I also bought the orange ones.
I don’t know why, I just felt they were on offer.
I do know why they were on offer.
And I thought I would buy them just to see.
There you go, so we get you.
See, hang on, so the chocolate is still normal brown, but presumably there’s some sort of…
I think, they’ve just put some orange flavoring in the chocolate.
Ah, it’s like they’re not, there’s not like, cause it’s just Kit Kat, I mean, so chocolate wafer.
And a wafer.
That’s it, isn’t it?
Yeah, so I think they put a bit of orange.
Okay, into the chocolate, right, gotcha, gotcha.
So anyway, I tried one, and it was a huge disappointment.
There’s no need, it doesn’t need to, the orange doesn’t bring anything to the table.
You’ve already got something, which I think is is confectionery perfection.
In its simplicity, it doesn’t need to be pissed around with.
So that was a disaster.
Yes.
So I gave all five to the dog.
He’s not dead.
He’s not, I’m joking.
But then I, so I did some further research, and I’ve discovered that not only are the aforementioned flavors, but you can also buy in white chunky, peanut chunky, biscoff chunky, biscoff chunky.
Now that’s not a porn name.
I don’t know what it is.
Hey, I’m biscoff chunky.
Birthday cake.
What’s that?
Birthday cake?
Right, and chocolate frosted donuts.
So they’re actually giving these things flavors of actual other confectionary products.
You know, this is something that has freaked me out for a long time, actually, just now you mentioned it.
Like, you can get bubble gum flavored ice cream and ice cream flavored bubble gum.
And this is something I noticed in my youth.
It’s everything just, everything is everything.
You can’t have everything being everything.
Like, just leave it.
Ice cream.
If you want a chocolate frosted donut, right?
You’re in a supermarket.
Do you buy A, a chocolate frosted donut, or B, a KitKat flavored, or sorry, a chocolate frosted donut flavored KitKat?
No, that just doesn’t make any sense.
And they never taste like this.
Of course they don’t.
I mean, somebody’s got this idea of what a chocolate frosted donut tastes like.
I don’t know how they extrapolate that taste, and then, you know, put that into something else.
But some, you know.
I wouldn’t know where to begin.
Yeah, that’s weird, isn’t it?
But it’s just too much.
Exactly.
It’s too, far too much.
But my investigation did not stop there.
Oh, wow.
So let me bring up my spreadsheet.
So the humble McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive, another staple, I would say.
Yes.
Okay.
Back in the day, what were your options?
You have it or you fuck off.
Isn’t it?
It’s a rich tea or a Chocky Bickie, and there’s no options, isn’t there?
Okay.
Or a Jammy Dodger.
The McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive was available with milk chocolate or dark chocolate.
Okay.
I’ve never been one for dark.
Okay.
So my dear old mum used to favour the dark chocolate one.
Right.
So that was the only one I ever would occasionally eat growing up, was the dark chocolate one.
Right.
So I was, you know, now they’re available in, ready?
Okay.
Classic Caramel.
I don’t like Caramel.
It’s got no place in a Chocolate Digestive, has it?
In a Twix.
Right.
Yeah.
There you go.
Or a Caramel bar.
Yeah.
Not in a Digestive.
Double Choc, which is basically a chocolate digestive biscuit covered in chocolate.
Right.
Gingerbread.
Oh, again, by fucking gingerbread.
With chocolate on it.
Yeah.
It gets worse.
Gold.
Fuck knows.
Gold.
Always believe it.
Sorry.
Oh, dear.
We should go back to Mornings.
So gold, honestly, it does get worse.
Strawberries and cream.
Hang on.
Inside a biscuit?
No, it’s just the flavor of it.
It’s just they’ve made a chocolate digestive flavored with strawberries and cream.
Not actually with the cream painting me.
I’ve been food coloring in either the biscuit or the chocolate ones.
Is it pink?
No.
It must be.
No, no, no.
Oh, okay.
That is ridiculous.
Yeah, it gets worse.
Cherry Bakewell.
Now, this one really annoyed me because I do like a…
If I’m going to break, and I do occasionally break my routine on a weekend.
That’s the cream we do, yeah.
I will have a cherry.
I do like a Cherry Bakewell.
Right.
But is that Mr. Kipling?
Mr. Kipling?
Mr. Kipling.
Yeah.
Cherry Bakewell.
I quite like one of them.
Nice.
And they have shrunk.
I mean, I’ve come to have one.
It’s barely…
I mean, you could stick one in your mouth easily.
Right.
In one go.
Oh, yeah.
No problem at all.
No pile intended.
Only social etiquette prevented me from doing that.
Right.
It’s the sort of thing that the vicar comes round and there was a cup of tea.
Yeah.
Cherry Bakewell.
So you can’t be scarfing down a whole plate of them, can you?
In front of the vicar.
Tempting.
Right.
Cherry Bakewell.
Again, I just, I can’t envisage.
So here in rural Ireland, we’re not allowed variety, obviously, because that would be too tempting.
Is that in the gene pool?
Yeah.
Oh, dear.
No, I mean, just, you know, there’s cheese and onion, or there’s ready salted or whatever they call it.
It’s just, you know, and there’s maybe salt and vinegar, but you don’t have all of these fantastic flavors.
I don’t think, I mean, but I think that’s a good thing, because what you’re getting is the best.
The established classics.
The classics, yeah, yeah.
But you’ve not got prawn cocktail, but I guess that’s a bit, is that a bit too sophisticated for the Irish palate?
I have actually, yeah, I have seen prawn cocktail, but in the drinks aisle, for example, there’s Coke, there’s Coke Zero or something, I don’t, yeah, all right, and then there’s some orange drinks, and there’s some lemonade.
That’s your fucking lot.
There’s none of the fan, there’s not cherry Coke, there’s not vanilla Coke, there’s not, I don’t know, ginger Coke or whatever.
You laugh, like, I bet you there is a ginger Coke.
It could be, yeah.
So I was in America recently, and you know, the world, there’s everything, everything, everything you can think of and more.
And, you know, and then come back here and there’s very little.
But yeah, it’s probably is, just, you know, for the best.
That’s just not complicated.
I mean, you’re not going to a supermarket and think, oh, I’ve really fancied the chocolate digestive that tasted of cherry Bakewell.
You’re not just doing that, are they?
If you want a cherry Bakewell, buy a fucking cherry Bakewell.
I mean, they’re literally in the next aisle.
That is a bit weird that they feel the need to diversify into these.
These are called brand extensions.
Yes.
And I’ve saved the worst till last.
Oh, God.
Right.
Hold on.
Let me just prepare myself for this.
Marmalade on toast.
Hang on.
What?
Yeah.
That’s what?
That’s a biscuit.
That’s an actual flavor.
Chocolate digested.
How?
Marmalade on toast.
I completely not.
What?
Marmalade on…
Wow.
What does it even taste like?
I mean…
I was going to say, did you buy one and try it?
No.
God, no.
Scary, is it?
Right.
So, is there anybody in the world here, or pod world, any listeners heard of tasted marmalade on toast chocolate digestives?
When you say it, it sounds ridiculous.
It is absolutely fucking stupid.
That’s…
I mean, I don’t know, fucking egg and chips, rich tea or something.
I don’t get it.
Garlic ice cream.
I mean, just because…
I mean, here’s the thing.
obviously, it’s not made of real marmalade and toast.
So it’s some sort of synthetic e-number.
I mean, when I was a kid, e-numbers were the pain of the world, right?
I mean, it seems that e-numbers are black.
We don’t call them e-numbers anymore.
Artificial shit.
I mean, that’s essentially all it is, isn’t it?
And it’s just none of it.
But they must have a sit around at McVitie’s or wherever and go, right, what can we come up with now?
Yeah.
And it’s just more and more ludicrous stuff.
And you think, rather than doing this and pissing around with classics, just make something new.
I seem to remember back in the 70s and 80s, the launch of a new chocolate bar was a big thing.
Right.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
If there was like a new contender.
And I seem to remember, there was one, Star Bar.
Yeah, I think so.
That was new.
I don’t know if I’ve had one of those, but what still to this day pisses me off, right, is when they changed the name of Marathon to Snickers.
Let it go.
I think you did that on the last podcast.
Yeah, probably.
You’re still bitter.
Why?
Why did they do it?
I don’t know, but you have something that’s good.
I remember the Drifter Bar, which was a bit like Twix, but they swapped out the Biscuit for Wafer.
Yeah, that’s a mistake.
Very keen on that.
That’s gone.
But no, they keep pissing around.
And I’m just going to run through just two others, if I may, because these aren’t also, yeah, there’s more.
No, this is not more.
These are two other, I would say, stalwarts of the perfectionary aisle.
The first one is Jaffa Cakes.
Now, I’m just going to run through this here, and you can gasp after each one or at the end.
You will gasp after the last one.
Right, so you’ve got the original orange.
Winner, all day long.
Love that.
Raspberry, fuck off.
Cherry, no.
Passion fruit, what the fuck?
Pineapple, ugh.
Love pineapple, but not in a Jaffa Cake.
Lemon and lime.
Hmm, okay.
Strawberry.
Strawberry doesn’t work with dark chocolate, does it?
No, that’s, yeah, because it is dark, isn’t it?
Yeah.
Blackcurrant.
Oh, no, no, no.
Banana.
Ah, no, come on, jesus Christ.
Banana.
Last but not least, buckle up, cola bottle.
Oh, yeah, you heard me.
Cola bottle.
Cola bottle.
So again, they’ve taken some light as a child.
Yes.
Who didn’t love a cola bottle?
Yeah, yeah.
Did you have fizzy or non-fizzy?
I like the sour ones, yeah.
Okay.
Do you still buy them?
There’s some in my cupboard.
Of course there is.
Yeah.
But the cola bottle has no place in a jacket case.
No, that’s just stupid.
No, no, no, no.
Can you imagine what that tastes like?
Probably synthetic.
Yeah, well obviously synthetic.
But again, the fizzy is in there, yes, unless they’re actually grinding up bottles of-
Glass, plastic.
Probably has got some plastic in it.
Oh, I know.
I mean, yeah.
Some of those you could get away with, but it’s a Jaffa cake.
It’s a Jaffa orange.
That’s the whole point of it.
There’s no need.
Yeah, there’s no need.
No need for all of this extrapolation.
And I’m just going to run my, but the last one, because this one, I thought was particularly egregious.
Right.
because it relates to my favorite biscuit, the Humble custard Cream.
And just when I thought they couldn’t dick around, you can get custard creams in orange.
Oh, really?
I don’t know.
Chocolate, that’s just a shit bourbon, surely.
Yeah, that’s not good.
No, no.
Lemon, don’t know.
Strawberry.
But now the two supermarkets are responsible for these.
Tesco’s do rhubarb and custard flavor.
And Sainsbury’s do something called the custard cream twist.
And their flavors are strawberry and cream, peaches and cream, apple pie and gingerbread.
That’s, see, that’s those are not custard creams anymore.
No, they’re just different biscuits.
Different flavors.
There’s no custard in it.
I mean, what the fucking hell is gingerbread?
Literally gingerbread is a biscuit.
Why would you put a biscuit inside?
It tastes like another.
God.
People, you know, if we go to a shop where they make sandwiches for you, where there’s lots of, something like that, right?
So you go in and you ask for a sandwich, right?
People, I used to stand behind people getting the sandwich and they say, I want a brown bread sandwich, please.
I’m thinking like, what the fuck is that?
Does that mean you want three slices of bread with brown bread in the middle?
Anyway, sorry.
So yeah, but that’s what makes me think, like gingerbread custard cream, is that, is that like two biscuits jammed together?
I don’t understand.
Essentially, all I’ve done is you’ve dropped a bit of ginger essence into the cream or the…
No, you see there…
That’s my croak, ladies and gentlemen.
You got a frog there.
Yeah, no, that’s sort of thing should be illegal.
You know, it’s going against the grain of what made them, the stalwarts.
And it just seems desperate, you know?
Is the biscuit market shrinking so badly that they have to have marketing?
Or did they just go to some marketing consultancy and they said, look, what you need to do, lads, is nobody cares about your custard creams anymore, or you need to diversify and have, you know, ridiculous flavors.
Otherwise, you’re going to lose the market.
You’re going to become, you know, nothing.
I think this is the inherent problem, and this is really going to start sounding like old gates.
It’s just the whittling down of everything that was once held dear.
It’s just undermining these sort of classic traditional things.
Yes, yeah.
And basically making these sort of pastiches of them.
I mean, I know it’s a biscuit.
I can probably over-egg it.
Fucking leave the custard cream alone.
Yeah, no.
Can’t we have anything?
This is it.
You don’t need to, don’t need to.
Look at Tunex, you know the Tunex tea cake?
Oh, right, yes.
They have been making the same thing, the tea cake, probably, I don’t know how long, hundreds of years, let’s say, a long time.
And I don’t see any fucking gingerbread versions or…
No, they do the wafers as well, which I also do like the tea cakes and the wafers because they just, as you rightly say, they just…
They make one product and they know what they’re doing.
You don’t need to piss around with it.
Yeah.
The day they put fucking strawberry in there, I don’t know.
Boycott.
What do you call it?
Iron brew.
They probably put iron brew flavors in because it’s up that way, right?
They make them in Glasgow, whatever.
But yeah, it could happen, couldn’t it?
Yeah, that would be the end, I think.
The end of tunnock.
I mean, fortunately, I mean, the custard cream is, it’s generic, isn’t it?
I mean, there’s no, there’s not a brand per se, it’s just the name of a biscuit.
Any old dick can come along and murder his wife and then fuck around with the ingredients to a custard cream.
Yes.
Yeah, they’re both quite open.
But it does make you wonder what the fuck McVitie’s are thinking coming up because they’re responsible for the crimes against the digestive and Jaffa cake.
Yeah.
And I do wonder who’s buying them.
And so whoever’s one would assume it’s a parent or it’s necessarily a parent or you’re getting home and going, here we are, I didn’t buy, you know the Jaffa cakes you love, that you’ve been eating for years, you know, the ones with a smashing orangey bit.
I think that was the term, wasn’t it?
Yes.
Well, I’ve got you some with cola bottle flavor.
Who wants that?
Who the fuck is that?
Disappointment.
Have you noticed they do this now with fucking lagers as well, like putting stuff into them?
Saw one the other day, peach.
Who wants peach lager?
Well, I haven’t seen that.
Wow, what?
No, this is starting to creep in.
Oh, good grief.
That’s scary.
I mean, they do it with ciders now.
I mean, there are literally 500 different types of cider, aren’t there?
I mean, you can get, God knows how many different flavors.
Is it because…
It’s fair enough.
Yeah.
What does it call them?
What were those?
Remember those…
Yeah, Alco Pops.
Alco Pops.
You know, in the 90s, it was like, you know, kids don’t like beer, so how can we get them shitfaced?
Let’s get them…
Now you can buy fucking lager with the lime already in it or with peach, or God knows what else.
No, no, peach lager doesn’t sound good.
Like in Belgium, you can get nice beers that are sort of flavoured, but they know what they’re doing there, right?
They’re not just fucking around.
Is it controversial just to say, I want a lager to taste like lager, I want a Jeff cake to taste like a Jeff cake, I want a voice that works.
Yeah, just keep things simple.
Like, yeah, car shaped car, dog shaped dog.
just keep it all simple.
I hate those cat shaped dogs.
So, yeah, I guess my rant is basically just companies pissing around with things that don’t need pissing around with.
just there comes a point where there is no longer an evolution of products.
They’re just pissing around with them.
They’re not making things better, are they?
It’s not like, you know, these manufacturing mobile phones or cars or whatever it may be to make them better.
It’s just we’re dicking around with these things for the sake of it.
Yes, yes, it’s not, it shouldn’t be happening.
We’re not going to do Middle Raged passion fruit.
Are we?
The night is young.
It would be, I think it’s akin to say going into the, whatever that is, in the Louvre in France, Paris, and saying, going up to, and say, look, the Mona Lisa, I think we should be bringing her up to a bit of a spin.
Give her a push up bra and a pair of wacky glasses or something.
Yes.
just to make it.
She’s been the same boring old woman for hundreds of years or whatever, right?
Yeah.
You can bring her bring her up to up to date.
Yeah.
We’re bringing some branding people.
Blah, blah, blah.
No, it’s job.
Yeah.
Photoshop.
All things.
Things are classics for a reason.
It’s because everyone loves them as they are.
They don’t need to be touched.
That’s it.
Good stuff.
All right.
Well, I’m going to go completely different way.
And I’m going to start with an anecdote.
Not an anecdote, but it’s sort of an aside, right?
So are you familiar with the Icelandic goddess Björk?
Björk.
The singer?
Yes.
Yes.
I am aware of her work.
Yes.
So she’s, I’ve seen her play twice.
Big fan.
Isn’t she a nutter?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Probably.
Yeah.
But you do have a thing for nutters, don’t you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do.
So she’s a bit of a mental.
But you know, so in the 90s, there, you can find this on YouTube.
We might put a link in the thing if you really want to, but you can Google it, right?
There’s a short video where Björk is talking about her television and it’s very sweet and innocent, I would say, right?
Where she’s sort of, she’s learning about the insides and what makes the television, old tube television, right?
And what it makes it work and how that shows her all the nice things that she’s watching on the TV, right?
because in Iceland, I have a fever dream here.
I did, sorry, Björk, is this before she had that meltdown at an airport?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
She was very young in this episode, in this thing.
Okay.
Yeah, so it’s very sweet and innocent, like I say, right?
But anyway, what I’m getting at is at the end of this rant about, or not rant about, discussion about the television, right?
She says, you shouldn’t let poets lie to you.
And I’m actually going to just go.
You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.
So, do you hear that?
Yeah, yeah.
I’ll do it again.
You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.
Right?
So Björk is telling you, you shouldn’t let poets lie to you, right?
So I’m going to take that, and I’m going to modify it.
And my thing here, right, is that you shouldn’t let washing machines lie to you.
No, it was a lovely, complicated intro, right?
But washing machines, absolute bastards.
And I’ll tell you why, right?
So, you know, the one I have here, I don’t know whether it’s how old it is or it’s vintage, right?
But it has on the front a display that shows a time, counting down time, right?
You press the buttons, you choose a program and it tells you theoretically how long that’s going to take, right?
But that timer is a liar.
It’s absolute butthocks.
You know, it says, the one I choose usually is one hour, 45 minutes, right?
But there is no, it must be…
One hour, 45 minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is it because of heavy staining?
That’s one of the shortest ones.
That’s why I choose it, right?
Some of them are like three and a half hours.
I’m thinking, what is it doing in there?
So, but it’s no, it’s nothing.
There’s some sort of temporal anomaly in that timer, because it’s something, you know, you go back in one hour and it’s still sitting there on 16 minutes or something.
And so you come back in 16 minutes, it’s still there on five minutes.
And then that last minute, when it finally gets to that last minute, that minute is a fucking hour long, right?
And that just, why?
How is it so wrong?
Like it’s, don’t they know how minutes works?
This is clear, this is a clear, clear issue.
cause I mean, yeah, my one does the same.
It will just go, it does the other way though.
You’ll be there, say they’re looking at it again, three minutes, and they’ll go, that fuck it, I’m done.
just doesn’t go to zero.
just boom, boom, click.
Well, you’re lucky there, but yeah.
So you shouldn’t let washing machines lie to you, is what I’m saying, right?
And then I don’t understand why it’s so wrong, because this is presumably, you know, they make the programs, right?
But they make, they must know how long they take.
And so if it’s an estimate, why put a number up at all?
And just for it to be so completely wrong, I just don’t get it, right?
So that’s the first-
I like to think that ours is possessed.
It just, oh, it’s basically one of the family just likes to do its own thing.
Yeah, yeah.
So it’ll go, oh, three minutes, fuck it.
Fuck it.
It’s done, there.
Look, I won’t wait that long.
So then you’ve got all these programs, right?
Does anybody know what they mean?
You know, there’s all these complicated numbers and descriptions and, you know, if you’re doing silk or hand wash or, you know, all these weird…
Silk.
Like, does anybody…
You choose one, I do anyway, I just choose the one.
That’s my fucking wash.
I’m not washing weird things that need special programs, and especially the ones that take three and a half hours.
I’m just like, how could it…
I don’t think it’s…
Do you think you still separate whites from colors?
I haven’t got any whites.
None?
You’ve seen me.
All my clothes are the same color.
Makes it easier, right?
You don’t wear tidy whiteys, then?
Go commando.
No, but look at the option, variables here, right?
You’ve got a spinning, what’s it called, cylinder, where you put the stuff, and you’ve got water, which comes in and probably heats up, right?
And then you’ve got the soap, whatever soap stuff you choose, right?
That’s it.
And I don’t think that these programs I’m doing inverted commas here, they’re all, this is lies.
It’s just lies that they’re just spinning around and going back again and spinning around.
There’s no, it doesn’t, there’s no fairies that come out of the washing machine and do something different if you’ve put it on one of these weird…
Doesn’t it spin the other way?
How does that get the dirt out?
I don’t know.
I just think it’s bollocks.
I think all of these programs, they’re there just to make you think that there’s something scientific happening, but in fact, it’s just spinning.
It’s just time.
Yeah, just spinning one way or another, putting water on it, and that’s all it does.
And again, we don’t know.
We’ve only got their word to go on.
Even the temperature is any different.
Exactly.
You’re not measuring that temperature, are you?
Like it says, 40 degrees or whatever, 60 degrees or whatever.
Is it?
I mean, maybe.
Maybe it’s roughly that, but it’s certainly not.
It’s not a science.
The TV adverts for these things, there’s scientists in white coats and all that.
It’s bollocks.
It’s all bollocks.
They’re just making it up.
And again, washing machines are lying to us.
All of those programs are lies.
You just choose the one that’s quickest, and that’s it.
I guarantee you that the clothes won’t get any cleaner after a certain point.
I say I’ve always done a, I can’t remember what they call it, but it takes 45 minutes.
I think they call it an economy wash or something.
So 40 degrees, 45 minutes.
Boom, done.
Or 43 or 48 depending on how long.
The temporal anomaly, yeah.
Yeah.
But that’s it.
It’s just.
Yeah.
And you know, you’ve survived and your clothes are clean, right?
So, I wish I had a 45 minute one.
I don’t.
That’s weird.
Maybe you should buy a new machine.
Maybe.
But that seems like.
You’ve only just upgraded from a twin tub, though, haven’t you?
Bashing out.
Back here in County Clare, we have to take our stuff down to the beach and wallop it with a rock.
Anyway.
When was the last time you went to a laundrette?
That must have been in the 80s.
Do they still exist?
I think so.
Yeah.
Well, you see those, there’s machines now outside Tesco’s actually.
Something like huge, huge washing machine, laundrette thing, but it’s sort of automated.
I suppose you could put something in that’s too big for your own home one or something.
But like a duvet or something.
Yeah.
Person or something.
Right.
So trying to get rid of evidence or something.
I don’t know.
Laundering money or something maybe.
But yeah.
Laundrette used to be a thing, I suppose.
Maybe they are.
If you think about it, it was a feature.
I don’t watch EastEnders.
I haven’t watched it for years.
But I know it used to be a feature in that, didn’t it?
The cafe, pub, and then Laundrette, and these were like…
That’s where you’d meet, you know.
Yeah.
Can you imagine having to, I mean, having to carry your dirty washing and then sit, mind you, just sitting around in a room for two hours, doing nothing.
It might appeal, you know.
just people watch, I suppose.
just watching them stuff it around.
Remember that advert where…
The low-key humming noise.
It’s probably warm in there, right?
Yeah.
Homeless people sitting around.
I can’t tell what.
I quite like the sound of it.
That’s an advert where…
Any laundrettes.
I suppose you’ve got to actually take some washing, though.
Well, you don’t have to.
Have you seen Fight Club?
That’d be weird, though, wouldn’t it?
If you want, if I just sit, I just want to soak up the ambiance.
just like the fella in the advert, you just take your kicks off and fire them into the thing.
What would be worse if there was happened to be a young woman in there and she was in the process of drawing her smalls?
She’s that there, watching her undercrackers go round and round.
Well, I’m sure it’s happened.
If you’ve…
If we don’t keep to schedule and this next episode doesn’t appear in two weeks, you’ll know why.
Author arrested.
I’m not sure what crime that would come under.
Well, yeah, weird.
Sorry, I’m dragging you away from your…
The programs, the lies, yes, the time and everything.
Once you get through all of that, my one is…
But I think this has happened on the live.
I don’t have a huge amount of washing machine experience, but I’ve had a few over the years.
You work in tech.
Yeah, well, yeah, but don’t wash clothes.
Anyway, they have an auto-locking door these days, right?
Yeah.
That didn’t used to be a thing, right?
You used to be able to just open the door anytime you wanted, and water or stuff would come out.
And if you do, then fine, right?
That’s your choice, right?
But now, you’re not allowed.
The door locks.
And the one here, you have to, even if you turn it off, and even if it’s empty of water, you just can’t open that fucking door for like 60 seconds, probably a little bit more because it doesn’t.
This is problematic when you first start, that you hit the floor.
You turn around and you realize you’ve dropped a sock.
Dropped a fucking sock, yeah, yeah.
And that’s it, you’re fucked.
You can’t get it out.
You can’t open the door.
So yeah, that’s it.
Yeah, so that sock’s got, you’ve either got to wear one stinking sock, save it to the next load.
Yeah, bastards.
But that timer then eventually goes to zero, but then it still won’t let you open that fucking door.
So you’ve got to stand there for another minute.
Like, it’s not long enough to go and do something else, and put the kettle on, make a cup of tea, but it’s enough to just dig a nail into the temple or a paper cup.
Do you remember when Red Dwarf had an episode about Militant Toaster?
I’m wondering if your wash machine just hates you.
Probably, yeah.
Yeah, well, I hate to hear it.
He doesn’t have to wash your pants.
Well, there you go.
You can kind of understand his resentment.
So, you know, that locking door, I don’t know, like, we need a way to override that, right?
just, you know, trust me.
Well, yeah, trust me that I don’t mind if I get water on my floor because I want to put a sock in.
Or it hasn’t even filled up yet.
You know, surely you can tell if there’s water in there or not, right?
You just let me open the bloody door.
Five seconds after you’ve hit the start button, nothing has happened.
He’s just making some weird noise.
Yeah, yeah, doing some shit, making up the time anomaly that is going to blast out at you.
Yeah, let me open the door, right?
So that’s another thing.
Washing machines are just bastards, right?
I’ll skip over a couple of things, right?
But very quickly, if you wash your duvet cover, right, with all your other bedding, somehow that duvet eats all the other stuff.
It just eats it, and then it’s all inside, and then you can’t get to it, and maybe it hasn’t even washed properly, right?
because it’s now inside, and you’ve got to pull it out, and then it’s too big to unroll it, and then it’s all on the floor, and now it’s dirty again.
A fucking bastard, right?
It’s even worse in a tumble dryer, because what happens is the duvet cover eats everything, and in the tumble dryer, and it’s just this ball of linen.
And it’s wet then, because it hasn’t, yeah.
Oh yeah, the outside is scalding, and then your actual duvet cover is singed, it’s so hot, and obviously everything inside is still wet.
Lovely, lovely.
So there’s that.
Then did you know this?
If you shut that door when it’s not in use, it goes moldy inside.
I am aware of this.
Yeah, what the fuck?
because I suppose it’s damp and stuff, you need to leave it open for I think 12 hours or something.
obviously, I’m gonna be watching that clock.
So there’s that, it goes moldy, it eats the duvet cover, it’s just everything, right?
But now, this is, this I don’t get, right?
So you take your laundry to the washing machine in a basket, presumably, right?
Don’t just carry each individual sock.
So you’ve got a laundry basket.
I don’t understand why you can’t put that directly in front of the washing machine, right?
because if you do, you now can’t open the door because it’s in the way, right?
So why don’t the laundry basket people and the washing machine people get together, talk about the height of the orifice or the height of the basket and come up with a plan here?
because every time I do, I plop it down in front and it’s full.
You’ve got to stand there as well and bend down.
There’s another thing is that the thing is too low, right?
I’m too old to be bending down like that.
Why isn’t it higher?
But yeah, you put your basket down, you can’t open the door, so you have to pull it away or tip it a bit.
It’s just so bad.
It’s really got your go, isn’t it?
It has, yeah.
All right.
So skipping over, getting long here.
But so I only wear black stuff, as I said the other minute ago.
And I don’t know if you know this, but you can only really wash black jeans once.
Like ever?
Yeah, because after that, they’re not black jeans, they’re gray jeans.
So if you want to have black jeans, you have to wear them once, twice, whatever.
Wash them once.
That’s about your limit.
After that, no matter if you buy the special detergent for colors or blacks even, and there’s a program again on the thing for dark colors, none of that makes any difference.
You wash your black jeans and they’re immediately gray bastards.
And yeah, look, at the end of the day-
Did you not buy gray jeans then, or was it just-
Well, I mean, that’s what I predominantly wear because I can’t buy a new pair of jeans every day, right?
So I have to save the fancy ones for special occasions.
When you say fancy, you mean the ones that haven’t been washed?
Yeah, well, the new ones, yeah, brand new out of the packet.
Oh, okay.
I was gonna say, if you ever see Adam in a pair of particularly black jeans, they don’t stand downwind of you.
A is commando, B, they haven’t seen a washing machine.
There you go.
That’s what you need.
So, just to summarize this, right, I think there’s a lot of improvement that could be done here.
But basically, I mean, look, we’re in the era of artificial intelligence, right?
And you can pretty much do anything you want to.
And yet, washing machines are stuck in this era of, everything seems to be a bit clunky.
The times don’t make any sense.
The design seems to be awkward.
And it just seems to be changed, haven’t I don’t think we know about it, unlike the fucking custom cream.
Yeah, there you go.
Everyone in there, what opposite dick around with washing machine.
It’s a box.
It’s a cylinder, a white, heavy bastard thing.
It’s messy.
It gets clunky and grimy and goopy with all that crap you put into it.
Or you have to, you have to actually wash your washing machine.
Did you know that?
I have to say, cleaning out that, what is it that goes in fabric conditioner that within a week or two turns to, I don’t know.
It’s disgusting.
Yeah.
It’s nasty, nasty stuff.
But yeah, so, like look, in the future, I hope that there’s just this elegant, refined device.
You put your clothes in, you press one button, and it just washes the clothes, does what it needs to do.
AI has taken over, right?
It figures out what it needs to do, and then just text me when it’s done.
Don’t make up stories.
Yeah.
Actually, if you could put it away as well, that would be brilliant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It’s a ball like.
But at least just text me when it’s done, right?
cause I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna trust those timers.
They just don’t, they’re lies.
They’re lies.
Can I add at this point, just a supplementary white good grime?
And this is the heat pump tumble dryer.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We’re told that we have to get heat pumps, heat pump boilers for our houses.
Okay.
Very expensive.
Blah, blah, blah.
Over gas boilers.
But for a while now, you’ve been able to buy a heat pump tumble dryer.
Now, this isn’t the same as the what I’m thinking.
I thought you meant the condensing.
No, no, no.
This uses a heap.
Don’t ask me about the tech, but basically they’re much more, they use far less electricity than a conventional condenser or vented tumble dryer.
Right.
Now there’s a trade off though.
If you put your washing on on a Tuesday, you better not be wanting to wear anything before Wednesday off.
just fucking takes, maybe I just got a shit one, I don’t know, but it just is slow.
You could chuck something in the tumble dryer and it’d be dry within like 25 minutes.
Yeah.
Not with these things.
I mean, you’re looking minimum two hours.
Really?
Maybe if you put, going back to the duvet thing.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Bastards.
At that stage, you might as well just hang it outside.
I’d just been there and buy a new one.
I mean, honestly, it’s just less hassle.
At my age, I think I just don’t need this in my life.
because not only will it be in there for two hours, you pull it out and of course it’s balled up.
And then you got to detangle it.
Yeah.
Static as well.
Drag it to the dog food.
Yeah.
Put it back into the machine.
Genuinely, I have done that before actually.
The dog had a bowl of food that had been near that.
Without the duvet and it dragged right across the bowl.
Lovely.
Start the whole thing again.
Lovely.
Fucking hell, I was raging.
Yeah.
So yeah.
It doesn’t, it’s not, none of that’s good, is it?
I mean, I hope that this, there’s somebody who works at, I don’t know, what are they, who mine?
Yeah.
Works at Newsy.
Go and figure out how to make the one button machine that just does everything and just stop with all the lies.
Let’s have Björk one more time.
Did Dyson do one?
because they’re normally fairly good on the famous.
I want that.
You would have thought, I’ll remind you, how much would it cost?
Yeah, three grand.
Easily.
The Apple one is $8,000, but.
Yeah, then you got to update it down the line, but it just stops working because it needs a software update.
You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.
There you go.
All right.
Thank you, Björk.
Yes, indeed.
So I think we’re done.
Andic Bombshell.
There you go.
So I think we’re done ranting for today.
Let’s, shall we?
My voice is.
Yeah.
So we have a happy ending then.
Yes, let’s.
So I started learning to play the piano a month ago.
Excellent.
I don’t know why.
I just thought it would be a thing to do that didn’t.
Do you ever get that thing?
Well, I don’t know if you do.
You end up, you spend 20, you got 20 minutes to kill, and you inevitably pick up your phone.
Yeah.
And you start just scrolling.
Whatever, do you know what I mean?
And it’s still too easy.
These little 20 minute, 10 minute things throughout the day start to add up.
And then you sort of look and see how much time you’ve wasted over the course of a day or week.
Yes.
just doing nothing productive.
So Joe, I’m going to do, I’m going to buy an electric piano, and then I’m going to just, if I’ve got 10 minutes spare, I’m going to just sit and plink plonk.
Fair enough.
Do you know what, right?
Surprisingly, the piano is fucking hard.
I’ve heard, yes.
I’ve heard.
because I can’t play.
So, but I have now, I can now, I have mastered Happy Birthday with two hands.
So, hope.
How many fingers, though?
Or are you just slamming your fists into the keys?
Yeah, I think I can do it now with my eyes shut.
Do you know what I always thought, what the place, because when you see pianists on TV, right, let’s say Elton John or Toria Amos.
Elton John, Richard Claderman, Les Dawson.
He’s dead, isn’t he?
Is he a pianist?
Was he?
He played the piano.
Did he?
Fair enough.
Okay.
I didn’t know.
And some others.
Yes.
They’re not looking at the keyboard, are they?
No, no.
They don’t need the color codes and all that, yeah.
And you see like little kids, they’re like eight or nine, and they’re like knocking out a bit of bloody Tchaikovsky or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, fucking hell.
They make it look so easy.
Yes.
So, but you were saying that you make it look hard.
It just is hard.
I mean, I don’t have to make it look hard.
It actually is hard.
Really, really hard.
Yeah.
You’re trying to get your different hands to do different.
It’s like that whole thing about patting your belly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Trying to do that with independent fingers.
Yeah.
Honestly.
I mean, I reckon you probably need to have started this at a much younger age or to be honest, but because I know that’s a time machine.
Yeah.
This is the thing.
That’s why they do my kids.
I reckon I think I had about three or four piano lessons when I was a kid, and I didn’t take to it at all, and the teacher was a bastard.
And so yeah, I stopped that.
But yeah, because that’s when you sort of learn that sort of thing, isn’t it?
And then you probably got it for life, right?
Like riding a bike.
Yeah.
I think there’s a lot of muscle memory.
And it took me a week, teaching the course to an American guy.
And he did mention the word or the term fingering a lot.
And I…
Well, there you go.
So that’s why you were doing it.
You thought it was something else, didn’t you?
I did.
I kept sniggering.
But…
Good stuff.
This is the problem with doing a pod at the end of the day.
Yeah.
Yeah, my voice is gone.
I don’t know why.
I don’t talk to anyone.
But I think I’ve got latent man flu.
Oh, no.
Not again.
We had man flu last time.
I know.
It’s coming back.
It’s coming back into season, isn’t it?
because it’s pumpkin time again.
But it’s not.
It’s just like, you get that tickly throat thing.
Oh, my God.
Not good.
But we couldn’t postpone, obviously.
Not anymore.
That would just look lame, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, it’s done.
Anyway, sorry.
My happy ending is I can now bash out.
So if anyone wants me to play Happy Birthday at a future event.
Presumably somebody’s birthday.
Not a funeral.
Probably not.
It wouldn’t go down too well.
A bit of mordling, wouldn’t it?
Well, I don’t do funerals.
But if you’d like me to come along to a birthday party, my rates are very cheap.
Yeah, I bet they are.
My set is also very brief.
Yes.
You can probably do it twice.
I can do it three times if the price is right.
There you go.
You can tell it’s tizer.
So yeah, I can now play Happy Birthday with all the chords and all the events.
Excellent.
I mean, I would ask for a demonstration, but I think that would probably be too scary.
Copyright issues, right?
No, nobody wants to hear that.
So good.
That’s, I mean, that’s good to have a hobby.
Yeah, exactly.
So what’s…
Right.
So my happy ending.
Now, this is going to sound a bit weird, right?
But I’ve needed some mental health boosts, I suppose.
Let’s just say that over the last while.
But I’m the sort of person for whom these words, right, mindfulness, yoga, all of that sort of thing, they’re just journaling, meditation.
I can’t even say those words, really.
They just make me cringe.
I hear you.
You know what I mean, right?
I imagine there’s a lot of men, of our vintage, probably feel this way.
Or think this way.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s all hippie bollocks, right?
Isn’t it?
So we avoid it, right?
But the need to have peace is still there, right?
Whether you think it is or not.
And so for me, what I’ve been doing, well, I spend a lot of time sat on my ass at my desk, right?
My work desk and my other desk, which is where I am now.
And these had become chaotic, let’s say, messy because of life and whatever, right?
And so I recently had a couple of days there.
And so I was set about tidying and cleaning my workspaces.
And this is ridiculous, right?
But I still continue to sit at my desk a lot.
And now the desk is clean, neat and tidy.
And somehow that filters through to my brain and I feel happier sitting at my desk.
Do you know what I mean?
Is that ridiculous or?
No, not at all.
Do you know, I think that, I can’t remember who said it.
There was some famous psychologist who said, do you know the first thing, the most important thing somebody suffering from depression could do is make their bed.
Really?
Make the bed?
Yeah.
Something as tiny as that, because you’ve got up and you’ve done something and you’ve improved something, and you’ve just, the room is inherently tidier.
Right.
There you go.
And it’s little things.
I mean, I have, I suffer from a sore throat, obviously, but apart from that, I, I, I’m obsessive.
I go through it every, every week I’ll go and do my whole desk and everything else.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Well, I’m not aiming at it.
Yeah, I should have guessed that.
But no, I’m not like that.
But yeah, but my desks have just become so messy and just a dumping ground for all kinds of crap.
You know, you get some stupid bill or whatever in the post, you think I’ll get to that and you fire it on the desk.
And before you know it, there’s a massive pile.
And then there’s the, you know, the Fisherman’s Friends and the hand lotion and the hands.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Fisherman’s Friends.
Yeah, well, you know, because I had Man Flu the time before.
Oh, I thought you voluntarily bought and ate them things.
Well, not, no, not out of sea, not out of sea.
The Fisherman’s Friend.
Isn’t that one of the, you know, they have also expanded actually just in the side.
I found cherry ones, but then they were not the same, not the same.
You know, the Fisherman’s Friend is like a, and like a bit of wood.
Mentally type thing, isn’t it?
I could really go for some, to be honest.
Yeah, yeah, you think.
Tunes.
Yeah, it’s tunes.
But it’s like a bit of cardboard that’s been soaked in menthol.
And then the cherry ones are absolutely nothing like that.
They’re like sweets.
They’re just like…
Oh, so they’re actually edible then.
Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, so, yeah, you know, you’re a pack of fishermen, they’re all gone dusty and moldy, so they’re in the bin.
But yeah, there was just so much crap all over my desk.
And you know, you could still work, but it became chaotic in my head to sit there, because you look at all this stuff, and every item that you look at is a problem, is something that needs to be dealt with.
And so-
Have you ever heard the mantra, tidy desk, tidy mind?
No.
But are you making that up, or is that a-
No, genuinely not, really.
I may have made it up, but I’m sure it’s a common-
Oh, okay.
Well, then, okay.
So, but my happy ending basically is that I currently have nice, clean, tidy desks and buy osmosis or some sort of, I don’t know, spiritual whatever.
I feel better.
Not, I mean, still going to work is whatever, right?
But it’s better than looking at a pile of problems.
And so, yeah, so look, just if you’re the type of person for whom meditation, mindfulness and yoga just seems like wankery, which I certainly am, right?
But just think about having a bit of a tidy up.
It’s cathartic.
It is.
I completely buy into that.
That reminds me, I need to wash my shoelaces.
What?
Okay.
Is it that time of month already?
I have, I think, something in the region of 20 plus pairs of trainers.
Colors and types.
And every now and again, I like to get them out and take all the laces out, wash them, iron them.
Iron, hang on, whoa.
Iron what?
The laces?
The laces, yeah.
Why?
because once they’ve been through the washing machine, they get a bit kinked up, and then they don’t sit right in the in the eyelets.
I have a feeling.
You run an iron over them, and they’re nice and flat, and make them easier to lace up.
Is it not just easier to buy new ones?
Have I just told people this on a podcast?
Maybe edit this out.
So on my list that I skipped over, I was going to say, who the fuck irons clothes?
because I do not, I’m proud to say that in my 50 plus years, I have never ironed anything, and I am not dead.
Nothing bad has happened because of it, right?
My clothes are not smooth, but it’s okay.
So would you think it’s a bit weird that I, that I have a shower before I go to, literally before I go to the gym, because I’m so paranoid about smelling bad, I will have a shower.
Before.
But literally before I’m put on and I make sure my stuff’s all right.
Go to the gym.
And then exercise for like an hour and 20 minutes.
Another shower.
And come back for another shower.
That seems a bit excessive, to be honest.
Do you ever, do you just smell someone and they smell of like, people sweat in the gym.
Everyone in the gym smells like that.
Dirty sweat.
Do you know that, sort of dank.
Yeah, but you’re not gonna, you’re not one of those.
You’re just not gonna be one of those.
I know, but you can’t, you also, you can’t smell yourself.
So you could smell absolutely horrendous.
Right, I suppose so.
Yeah, so they’re saying, I could never actually take a shower at the gym though.
Oh God, no.
No, Christ Almighty God, no.
Why would you do that?
I mean, that’s like getting your lad out and flanging it around.
because of the time of the day I go, I normally go to the middish afternoon.
The gym is almost exclusively older people, like retirees and like, so, and I have a swimming pool there as well.
So when I go into the changing room, there is inevitably, we’re talking about octogenarian penises, she has just crossed my mind.
I probably have seen more than my face, yeah.
Although I would say I’ve never looked at them in any great detail.
But these chaps do wander around.
Hanging out.
No, I’m out.
I’ll go in there, I’ll use the facilities, but I’m not joining in with this.
No, no, no, no.
That’s too much.
And not to mention, you’ve got all your stuff at home.
Exactly, yeah.
Why would you take all that equipment with you, you know?
And you mean your hair is gonna take an half an hour to fix, right?
Yours would, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, it does.
Fucking.
Do you not wear a shower cap?
That’s very personal.
You do, don’t you?
I try to avoid those because I feel that-
I know you shouldn’t say no.
That’s one step too far, I reckon.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to picture Adam wearing nothing but a shower cap.
Christ.
Send 10 pounds.
I’ll be more than 10 quid.
self-adjusted envelope.
Yeah.
Oh, dear.
You need a range of merch.
Now, I’m just saying.
Right.
Give the people what they want.
Shower caps.
Adam in a shower cap.
If you’d like to see Adam in a shower cap.
No, no, no.
just contact us via Twitter or Facebook.
just the shower cap, I think, is like we could go to a load of hotels, steal the shower caps, and then clog them as merch.
You know, we’ll put the Middle Raged stamp on them.
The, I don’t know, this seems a bit…
Actually, does anyone want, you know, a T-shirt that’s Middle Raged or a cup or something?
If you do, let us know, because we might be able to make them.
Can I just say, though, I went down this route with my authorly stuff.
Oh, yes, yes.
And loads of people said, yeah, we’d love that, love that, love that.
And then so you go to all the trouble, you pull all this stuff, correct it, stick it up on a shop.
Do you have tumbleweed on your spice?
Yeah, that was the sound of my order book.
Yeah, that is the problem with physical items, isn’t it?
You have to actually buy them and make them and then ship them around the world.
Who wants our fucking ugly mugs on a mug?
Yeah, got mug.
Or a T-shirt.
Yeah.
But if we’re going to stick to that late night DJ thing, I think maybe we could get some signed pictures of us in cheesy poses.
Oh, dear.
Oh, dear.
Oh, dear.
Shower cap optional.
Yeah.
We’ve got to pay the hosting bill somehow.
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
Right.
Sorry.
Should we wrap this one up?
Let’s wrap it up then.
All right.
So looking, do get in touch on social media.
Yes.
If you want to reach out.
We do like to hear from people despite being miserable facts.
Right.
We do.
And it’s nice to know that you appreciate it.
And don’t forget, if you would like to be lightly roasted, have a character made up about your name, it’s buymeacoffee.com/middleraged.
And that will stop us from going out to advertisers and asking them to sponsor us.
When nobody wants to hear us talking about, you know, square space and mattresses and whatever.
All right, so.
Or washing machines.
Yeah, washing machines.
Especially not.
And what else?
Nothing, I think, just that the next episode is gonna be dedicated to Sue.
Oh yeah, hello.
She’s gonna be horrified at hearing that, and I am only kidding, Sue.
Number one fan.
Very much.
I would like to think a very avid supporter of our endeavors.
Indeed.
Thank you very much.
You say on Twitter that we would dedicate an entire episode to Sue.
I’m not sure how that would have worked.
Sue’s the irk us.
Yeah.
We find enrage us.
What does Sue find enraging?
I suppose we could base it on that.
Let us know Sue, what really gets you go.
Oh, there’s very minute there.
I wonder what you’re going to say.
On that note, yes.
Thank you very much for listening.
My voice really does give it.
I’m such a martyr.
Send me money and Sue.
And Fisherman’s Friends, right?
So yeah, until the next time, which won’t be too long, we hope.
Stay enraged.
Take it easy.
Bye.