Middle Raged Podcast – Episode 7 Transcript

This is the transcript for episode 7 – 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 seven of the Middle Raged Podcast with me, Adam Eccles, and my co-host, Keith A Pearson.
Hi, mate, long time no speak.
Good morning.
It has been a while, hasn’t it?
We should firstly apologize, I suppose, shouldn’t we?
I suppose.
It seems to be a theme of the podcast as we start off apologizing and groveling and whatever.
But we have reasons, we have reasons.
This is something we do in our spare time and spare time as people probably know is sometimes very hard to find, right?
So life, family, stuff, all got in the way.
And so, yeah, we’ve been a bit hardy.
Distracted.
Yes, yes, distracted.
But here we are now.
So you’re welcome.
We’re back.
We’re back rocking and rolling with you.
Yeah.
I didn’t miss this.
Yeah.
So sorry about that, but yeah, here we are.
So.
Okay, and I hope that we’re feeling, we’ve built up the rage.
It’s sort of been festering.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Yes, I’ve got a boiling over, boiling over.
Frothing.
You know that horrific smell of milk when it sort of boils over on the stove and then burns on the thing.
Yeah, it’s what it’s like.
Who is, that is such a period thing to say.
Who’s boiling pans of milk these days?
What are you making with this pan of milk?
I suppose you’d be making-
Horlicks.
Yeah, or was it Ovaltine?
Ovaltine.
One of those things.
And it’s gonna be in the evening, isn’t it, when you go into bed?
Yeah, in this era of cappuccino makers and-
Microwaves and stuff, yeah.
Yeah, and very expensive coffee machines.
I don’t think, please let us know if you still boil a pan of milk on a stove.
Or make, actually, do you remember those, so we go right off on a tangent to start with, those eye level grills you used to get on other cookers to make cheese on toast.
Yes, yes.
I would love to have an eye level grill, to be honest.
You know, a gas one, not fucking electric, but yeah, gas eye level.
Yeah, cheese on toast is not the same without that device.
It’s called a salamander in the catering world, and when I was a chef, we had one in the kitchen.
And yeah, you make creme brulee and stuff under it as well.
But yeah, they’re brilliant.
I would love to have one of them.
When did they go out of fashion?
Why?
I would guess late 80s, maybe early 90s, they stopped making them.
I don’t know why either, because if you think about it, the fact it was at eye level made it perfect.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know whose eye.
Probably not.
Because it was gas, your toast browned evenly.
That’s it.
Whereas with electric, it follows the elements.
You tend to get scorch marks down the middle.
I stumbled across somebody the other day.
I’m not going to call them a friend.
I won’t even call them an acquaintance now, but they said that what they do is they bung a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, and then they microwave the cheese and then spread it on.
Fucking heathen.
That’s, what?
That’s their version of cheese on toast.
That is not cheese on toast.
Fuck that.
Microwave, what, like on a plate or in a bowl or something?
Yeah, you grate the cheese into a bowl, microwave it and then spread it while it’s still malleable, I suppose, because that shit turns rubbery very quickly.
Well, you’re not getting the sort of, yeah, you’re not getting the browning, the way it goes a bit crispy around the edges like you do under a grill.
That’s sort of insipid sort of, you know, like prison food.
But it’s a good example of how things have actually, we say that there’s progress, but in a lot of areas, things are quite regressive.
The I-level grill is definitely better than, even the sort of state of the art ovens that we have.
You know, we have an oven that microwaves and grills and does fucking everything.
But yeah, it can’t do cheese on toast as well as that I-level grill that I had growing up.
Yes, agree, and the grill that you have sometimes on the top of the oven, fucks that.
I’m not going to crouch down on the floor to make my cheese on toast, no, no, no.
So if you still have an I-level grill, I’d love to hear your thoughts about that.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
And you can stick your air frys.
We need chip pans, don’t we?
Bring back the chip pan.
When was the last time you heard of a good chip pan fire?
They used to be a regular occurrence, didn’t they?
Burned down the house.
Always had a damp tea towel at hand.
Yes, yes, you need that.
Well, we really have gone off tangent.
Should we talk about some people who’ve been very kind and have to buy us a coffee?
That’s indeed, yes, indeed.
Speaking of chip pan fires and coffees and stuff, yes.
So two lovely listeners have donated on buymeacoffee.com/middleraged, I think.
That’s the one.
Yeah.
So thank you very much to Dave King and Laurel Whitlock.
We’re very grateful.
Thank you very much.
And what do you get for those donations, buy me a coffee?
You get a slight roasting.
And a deep sense of satisfaction one would have.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, definitely.
You’re the reason the pod continues.
So if you want to become one of those folks who’s a benefactor to the podcast, you can go to, as I say, buymeacoffee.com forward slash Middle Raged.
And keep this shit ad free.
Oh, God, yeah.
Yeah.
The last thing is I think is reason enough, really.
There’s nothing worse than when you’re doing something, listening to a podcast and then suddenly you’re not able to fast forward.
You’ve got to listen to, I don’t know, a 60 second information broadcast about incontinence pads or something.
Mattresses.
It used to be mattresses a lot of the time.
That’s sort of stock now, the mattress.
Supplements.
Bloody supplements.
Honestly, there’s a supplement for everything these days.
Really?
So should we crack on with the roasting, which there is no supplement for, I understand.
May I kick off?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Please do.
So can we start off with Dave King, who went to buymeacoffee.com and bought us a coffee.
So I don’t know why, but I could not get past the beginning.
Dave King has to start with the word big.
So Big Dave King.
Now, I can see Big Dave King as a character.
I could imagine him selling VHS Smut from the back of a full Granada in the mid-80s.
Oh, God.
We’re going to have a bit of overlap here, but carry on.
Let’s see how far this goes.
And we should tell you, listeners, we never discuss, we talk about the names, but we never ever actually go into detail.
So this is independently.
So we’ve both come to a similar conclusion about Big Dave King.
So Dave was selling smut out the back of his Ford Granada in the mid-80s, and then his business grew.
And in 1990, he’s actually saved enough money to open his first sex shop.
Do you remember when they were a thing?
Virtually every provincial town had at least one sex shop.
Painted black windows, darked out, and very seedy sort of chipboard.
They were called really strangely like private shop.
And I remember as a kid walking past, I was like, hmm, private shop.
I wonder what’s in there?
Just had an air of mystique about it.
Certainly has an air of something.
Rows and rows of silicon dildos.
I mean, how many do you need?
So Dave opened his first sex shop, and then by 97, he had four in the Greater Hemel Hempstead area.
Brilliant, yes.
Yeah, so he was almost a bit of a pawn baron by that point, certainly in his local area.
Pawn baron, I like that.
And it was good, but by the end of it, obviously, like a lot of businesses, the internet came along, and by the early noughties, his pawn empire had been decimated.
And in 2006, the last of the shops closed, sadly.
But Dave took this in his stride.
He dropped his big moniker and rebranded himself as David King.
And he’s now an Anglican priest.
But he lives in constant fear that one day, one of his former customers might wander into the church and recognize him.
And his sordid past will come back to bite him on the ass.
That would be a shame, yes.
Christ.
I’m curious now how or what you’ve come up with about Big Dave.
So, slightly similar, but yeah.
So, Dave King, I reckon, he runs a greasy spoon cafe circa 1983.
Oh, yeah.
In Dover, right?
And near to the ferry.
And it’s mostly catering to truckers, you know, coming and going from France.
And it’s called Kings of England.
Oh, that’s good.
Top branding.
Yes, very.
It’s a tiny little cafe, right?
You know, the usual fare, all day breakfast, full English fry up, eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, tomato, black and white pudding, mushrooms, fried bread, butter toast, capa strong tea, one pound fifty, mate.
Cheese on toast.
Yeah, absolutely.
On an eye level grill as well.
And the eggs are cooked in like two inch deep lard.
Lard.
Breakfast of champions, right?
I want to go to Kings of England.
Yeah, bloody good.
I mean, it’s good value, solid food.
Nice big strong cup of builder’s tea, you know, dark brown.
Of course, this would have been before the advent of environmental standards and where you actually get a rating.
Yeah, no, there’s no hygiene at all, right?
He has to wipe around with bleach every couple of weeks is fine.
Fine.
So, but that’s his front business, right?
There is a back room in the cafe that not everybody sees, right?
And he does a bit of smuggling in and out, right?
Fags, booze, you know, from France.
I saw it was cheap booze, cheap fags, little bit of drugs here and there.
But, you know, the main thing that this back room is known for in the darker parts of mainland Europe is the only place in the world where you can get a particular type of psychedelic cheese that he makes himself, and it’s a Kentish psilocybin blue.
Wow, you went up a mountain with this, didn’t you?
Yeah, well, he’s a bit of a connoisseur, right?
So he makes this cheese.
You can buy a half pound block for five quid, right?
Or for six fifty, he’ll make you a psychedelic ploughman’s.
Oh, they’re being the kings of England and Kentish psilocybin blue.
Excellent.
Oh, that’s very good.
Well, there you go, Dave.
You’ve been suitably roasted.
And I think that they were.
Take your pick.
Do you want to be a porn baron in Hemel Hempstead or a purveyor of psychedelic ploughman’s in Dover?
I mean, it’s all in the mid 80s.
I mean, it’s just an 80s type of name.
Same Dave King.
But does lend itself.
He could equally have been a lower league footballer, straight manager.
So it’s quite a long chin.
No led man’s beard.
Now a less ubiquitous name is the second lovely listener who paid for two coffees.
And that was the lovely Laura Whitlocks, and that’s W-I-T-L-O-X.
So not a particularly common name.
So I’m going to kick off with this one, because in my mind, I could see Laura Whitlocks as probably in her early 20s, joining a girl band called Vixen with three Xs.
Oh, that kind of band, right.
This would have been in the early noughties, I’m guessing, when girl bands and girl power in their heyday, I guess.
And Vixen, they enjoyed moderate fishnet.
A lot of fishnet and, you know.
Yeah, I’m seeing that.
Leather Basques, overly sexualized, we’re going to go with, exploited one would argue.
And they enjoyed moderate success, unspectacular.
They had four singles that made the top 40 and one that just about crept into the top 10.
And it was that, yeah, it was, you know, mediocre.
But at that point, Laura decided that she wanted to leave the group and start a solo career under the name Laura Locks, a game with three Xs.
Nice.
And after a string of hits, Laura sort of tired of the fame game and she decided one day to actually give up her career completely, when against her wishes, her record company granted permission for one of Laura’s biggest singles, Hard Man, to be used in an ad campaign for a new male impotence drug.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Yeah, that was the end.
That would do it for you, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, it was too much.
So Laura just completely, you know, she just, that was it, walked away and she now lives in Belgium where she runs a tantric sex clinic.
I don’t know why.
Excellent.
Excellent.
He’s never explained.
No, well, yeah.
Probably need to flesh that one out a bit.
That’s what she said.
Well, fair enough.
I went a totally different way.
Of course.
This is a crime drama romance book that I saw Laura Whitlock in.
And Laura is one of the world’s leading volcanologists, which is in itself strange, right?
Because she’d never actually seen a volcano in real life, up until she’s called in to assist with a murder investigation in the wilds of Iceland.
So she was one of the world’s leading volcanologists.
Her expertise was needed to help prove that the natural pyroclastic lava flow had been diverted towards a man’s house, right?
Killing him, burning him to death inside, which, you know, pretty horrific.
It doesn’t sound like an easy thing.
It sounds like a very, very convoluted way and possibly very dangerous way.
You’ve got to have patience to be that kind of killer.
But with Laura’s help, they did prove that, you know, somebody diverted the flow and this man was inside his house and yeah, there was an eruption and he was burnt to death, though, sadly, pretty horrific.
Did you get as far as motive?
No.
Are we just going to go, he’s a serial killer, a very patient serial killer?
Volcano killer.
Lava man or something.
Didn’t go down that route.
But so while Laura was in Iceland, she actually falls in love with the brother of the victim.
And he’s a sheep farmer called Thorstein Sigmundsson.
You know, big good Icelandic name.
And ultimately moves to his hovel shack, where she lives out her days finally studying the volcanoes that fascinated her whole life.
So they’re all around her there in rural Iceland.
And it’s a happy ever after, apart from the chap who got burnt to death, and the killer who they finally caught.
I like that.
I’m not sure that there’s enough meat on that for a novel.
I can see a few plot holes if I’m honest.
Well, it’s a short, it’s a novella.
Somebody’s going to write that on there at some point.
I mean, you can see the cover.
It’s a bleak Icelandic landscape, and there’s just this lone woman standing.
Scandinoir, I think, is a genre, isn’t it?
Obviously, that’s Scandinavia.
Iceland isn’t part of Scandinavia, is it?
I’m not sure about that.
No, maybe not.
It’s connected to Denmark, but I don’t know.
Nordic?
Nordic, is that?
Yeah, Nordic Noir.
That’s Norway, though, isn’t it?
That’s got to be part of it.
We’ll go with that, though.
I think we know what you mean.
Yes.
Crime drama on Iceland’s rural volcanic shores.
It sounds, if I’m honest, mate, shit enough for the ITV to pick it up and turn it into a six-part drama.
I’d watch that.
Yes.
Laura then, I don’t know where would Laura, Laura’s probably from the UK in that case and she’s called in to help the Icelandic people.
Because obviously they didn’t have anybody in Iceland.
Who knows fuck all about volcanoes.
Yeah, because that would, you know, why would they?
Yeah.
Slight, yeah, I can see that.
This is how television works though, isn’t it?
Fish out of water.
The obvious.
No, she just has to go and eat the weird fermented shark and you know, all of that fun stuff.
So.
I think you were very gentle with Laura there.
And I think she’ll be very pleased with, with, with certainly yours.
I’m not so sure about mine, but.
I hope so.
Either either way.
We’ve you were either in Belgium or Iceland, Laura.
Which do you prefer?
Yeah.
There we go.
Let us know.
Thank you very much for your donations.
Thank you very much.
Right.
So I suppose let’s get to the meat of it.
Rage, Middle Raged.
What are you raged about today, Keith?
Socks.
S-O-C-K-S, right?
Yes.
Just for clarity, that’s not some weird lisp.
Socks.
Now, I think that one of life’s simple pleasures is putting on a brand new pair of socks after you’ve had a shower.
For me, that’s up there with, you know, freshly laundered bed linen.
It’s just one of those great feelings.
However, this experience is, I think, blighted by the sock industry.
So let’s just start for a little bit of background.
Do you know the average man’s shoe size in the UK?
I would say something like a size nine.
You’re absolutely on the money.
And what about a woman’s average shoe size?
Oh, you’re on the money.
You know your feet.
I think we’ve just established Adam’s fetish.
Jesus Christ.
Interestingly, up until, I think it was a decade or so ago, the average woman’s shoe size was five, because that was my initial guess.
It’s now six, so women’s feet are getting bigger.
They’re getting bigger.
Interesting.
So is this a worrying trend, women?
Are you finding that you’re getting to bed one night and waking up the next day and your…
Shoes don’t fit.
Your kitten heels.
I don’t know why I said that.
I mean, your kitten heels.
Your shoes aren’t fitting?
It’s also the complication that for some unbeknownst reason, women’s clothing of all kinds, sizing, just seems to completely vary from brand to brand.
And, you know, even within brands, they just don’t make any sense.
I wasn’t aware, until my daughter mentioned it, that we go into a shop and we buy a pair of jeans based on the waist measurement and the inside leg.
Right.
Women’s come in like just small, medium, large.
They don’t have that ability.
They don’t have that same sort of measurement system or fucking pockets in jeans.
What the hell is that about?
What the fuck is that about?
That’s ridiculous.
Anyway, which I just thought was weird.
But now I’m going off-piste there again.
So women’s feet are getting bigger, which is not necessarily the subject of my art this week.
It’s like a Morrissey song, isn’t it?
Women’s feet are getting bigger.
Smiths.
So if your feet have got bigger over the last two decades, please let us know.
Don’t know why that would be a thing.
I was going to suggest a reason, but probably best we don’t go there.
So anyway.
So the average shoe size for a man is nine, right?
Socks are available in two sizes.
Okay, six to eight and a half and nine to eleven.
Which means that for most people, you’re either buying socks that are too big or too small.
Why isn’t there a sweet spot in the middle there?
And for women, their socks go from three to five.
They don’t even get half.
And then six to eight.
Because, yeah, so if you’re five and a half, and you’re good.
Yeah, where do you go with that?
That’s a bit, that’s like the, say I’m a size nine.
So I have to buy socks that are nine to 11.
I always find, you know, there’s nothing worse than that.
There’s too much material at the end of the toe.
That is brutal.
Yeah, I fucking hate that.
Yes.
So you go down to the smaller size, and then you find, this is another aspect of it, that either your feet suffocate, you get chafing, or, see, I have quite, and this is the whole issue with socks, right?
I have quite, how can we put this?
My calves are fairly, I’m going to go with defined, okay?
So genetically, right, I don’t go to a gym and just purely work on my calf muscles, but I seem to have genetically fairly meaty calves.
So what happens is I buy socks and then I literally get DVT after wearing them for about four hours if I go down to the smaller size.
So I’m basically left with two options.
The saggy excess material of the larger size or cutting off circulation to my calves by going for the smaller size.
That is a dilemma, isn’t it?
Neither is ideal really, is it?
And I’m sure it’s the same for women.
Probably, yeah.
I mean, I don’t know what size socks I buy because it’s a rare thing that I do.
I tend to buy like in bulk.
I don’t like going into shops, so I’d sort of order online.
And the last time was H&M.
And then I’d dole them out, right?
Like, do you have airport socks?
Do you know what that is?
Oh, no, I don’t.
I rarely go to airports, so I think a sock dedicated for that would be a bit…
So, yeah.
So, when you go through security, right?
There is always a risk that you have to take your shoes off going through an airport.
It’s a pain in the fucking arse, but, you know, security, whatever, right?
So, you need to be confident that your socks are presentable, I suppose.
Okay.
So, yeah, so special category of socks is the airport socks, right?
These are ones that you have absolute confidence in, right?
So, these aren’t in general circulation?
You go through, they’re put in a drawer.
Yes, they’re in their own special airport clothing drawer.
Would they serve purpose for other such events, like, I don’t know, you know, you’re going away and there’s a chance you might have to…
I’m trying to think of other places where you might have to take that bouncy castle, I don’t know.
Bouncy castle, yeah.
Well, you remember when you were a kid and you’d go to somebody’s house and they have this weird rule about you have to take your shoes off at the door.
I mean, that, I don’t know, I don’t have that rule in my house, right, but yeah, they always…
You don’t have any visitors.
That’s true, yes.
No visitors.
But yeah, as a kid, you probably wouldn’t be in control of your sock purchasing or sock rotation.
Anyway, but yeah, that’s…
No, so the airport sock is very important, you know, just make sure that you have good socks.
The last thing you want is…
If you’re buying in bulk, right, what happens if you buy 60 pairs of socks and you put the first pair on, you go, oh, these are not great.
Well, no, indeed, yeah.
So this is the Amazon way, right?
You need to buy one first, right?
Scope them out, and then if it’s good, then you buy a boatload of them and you shut them in store.
Now, I agree with you.
I think that’s a tactic I’ve deployed myself.
What I find, though, is that you do find a pair of socks that…
So, I actually stumbled upon…
My daughter was going to a shop, and there happened to be…
I didn’t want to go in there.
It was a shop for young people’s clothing, and I’m not hanging around in there.
The police would be called.
So, I wandered into a branch of Lidl, which had just opened.
Was it Audi?
I never know the difference.
Sort of weird smells.
I don’t think at that point I’d ever been in one.
Oh, really?
Because of this fabled middle aisle I’d heard about.
Yes, the middle aisle, yes.
Yeah, which is just a sort of what I can gather.
It’s like a car boot sale.
It is weird, isn’t it?
Just random shit just piled into baskets.
But I found they were selling a pack of six-men socks.
For three pounds.
That’s not bad.
It’s very good.
And I thought, wow, what have I got to lose?
Six pairs.
So I purchased six pairs of these socks.
And they were brilliant.
They fit perfectly.
There was no excess toeage.
Because I’m now going to call it.
Great socks.
But the problem is that that’s it.
That’s why I understand now.
These are not things they keep in stock.
They come and they go.
That’s the problem with little, yeah.
And the problem with socks in general, even if you do find a pair, and you could argue, well, go to M&S.
Well, I think their socks are…
I find they wear out too quickly.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they’re not cheap, are they?
I haven’t been to M&S for decades, I couldn’t tell you, but we don’t have that here.
Well, because I don’t wear shoes in the house, because I’m not a…
Ah, you’re one of those…
This is why I can’t come to your house.
No, exactly.
That and the sign at the door.
There’s no authors or lone men.
Yeah, so I go through socks, and I did find that the M&S ones wear out.
Maybe, M&S, if you’re listening to this, and you’d like to prove me wrong, because it’s been a while, you might send me a consignment of socks.
Cotton Fresh.
Cotton Fresh, is that a thing?
I don’t like synthetic fabrics, generally.
I want everything to be cotton or linen, or whatever the hell it is.
What about latex?
I mean, you’re not…
In the gimp suit.
You’re not knitting that, are you?
Imagine that, a woolly gimp suit.
Christ.
Actually, a woolly gimp mask, I think would be a thing of…
If you’re going to have a character in a book, right, like Jason…
You know, you only need to come up with a new villain, like a real evil sort of…
almost with a supernatural…
I reckon a guy wearing a woollen gimp mask would just about do it.
That would haunt your dreams, wouldn’t it?
It would be terrifying, yes.
Actually, yeah.
I’m not sure.
You’re trying to think of a name now, aren’t you?
We’ll come back to that one.
Damien, I think.
Damien.
That’s been Damien.
Damien.
He sounds like an accountant.
Good accountant’s name.
Sorry, I’ve gone completely off-paste again.
Wally Sox.
Wally Sox.
Do you have Wally Sox in the winter?
No, I do have socks that I tend to wear more in the winter, because they’re just warmer, and then lighter ones in the summer.
My feet are always too hot, so I don’t actually like hot socks, or very insulating.
That’s the myth, isn’t it?
Clothing can’t be warm.
Clothing is just insulation, right?
But anyway, I don’t dress so hot feet.
I don’t like heavy socks.
So yeah, sorry, what were you saying?
Here’s the real nub of this, is why in this day and age, where you can literally go into a fucking coffee shop and have a myriad different types of bloody coffee, you cannot buy socks in your actual shoe size.
That is weird, isn’t it?
I wonder if there’s ever like a, is there a sort of gourmet, not gourmet, what’s the word, artisanal, artisanal sock shop?
Actually, there used to be a thing called sock shop, didn’t there?
There was.
In airports, you’d see them in airports.
Tyrac sock shop, that very niche retail thing that sort of came and went very quickly, didn’t they?
In the sort of 90s, wasn’t it?
Yeah, big thing, pre-internet.
And they were the different colors and patterns and stuff.
I wonder what happened to some of those.
Who was the sock shop entrepreneur now?
Well, I wonder.
I don’t actually have any recollection, but did they sell sized socks?
Good question.
Don’t know.
And I’m sure if I dug around on the internet enough, there would probably be some very small company that does do sized socks.
Artisanal socks, yeah.
But I bet you they’re like 15 quid a pair.
Yeah, yeah.
And I go through socks at such a rate, I couldn’t justify paying 15 pounds for a pair of socks.
I heard once that Charlie, you know, your king, he only wears brand new socks every single day.
Is that true?
I’m going to let you into a secret.
I went through a phase of doing…
They were cheap socks.
I mean, I would stress, but I don’t know what it was, some sort of wiring issue in my head, but for about 18 months.
Yeah.
It wasn’t decadence.
It was some sort of OCD.
So I’m Googling.
There are handmade socks on Etsy.
How much are you?
I just want to be able to go and buy a pair of socks, because you can’t take them back, can you?
Oh, God, no.
You can’t just say, oh, these socks, they’re leaving these indentations around my calves.
Yes, I do get those.
So in the summer, you want to wear, I mean, you don’t, clearly, but say you want to wear shorts.
Christ, Jesus, it would be a dark day, if that were.
But occasionally, I might want to don a pair of shorts, if I’m on holiday, for example.
Nice pair of, I don’t know, we’re going to go there.
And what you find is, if you’ve worn socks before you don your shorts and go out, you’ve got these white rings around your calves, the indentations, and it’s just not a good look, is it?
It’s a tourist look, isn’t it?
The sandals are bad enough.
Oh, man.
It’s just, why can’t we just buy, well, okay, I’m just getting frustrated.
I’m just getting pissed off of having to sample different socks from different companies and having that level of disappointment.
It should be a lovely experience putting on a brand new pair of socks after a shower.
That has been marred by the inability of sock manufacturers to produce a satisfying fit of sock.
Proper fit socks.
Yes.
Now I’m with you there.
I’ll tell you what pisses me off is when they fall down constantly.
Yes, that’s the other thing.
I agree.
So if you’re going for the 9 to 11 sizing, you do find that you get the bagginess, which is equally irritating when your socks are constantly falling down.
Is there a worse fit?
I’m sure there are worse feelings, but that’s just one of those things that you think, oh, having to constantly pull your socks up.
Yeah, pull your socks up, mate.
Come on.
Yeah, there you go.
I mean, metaphorically and literally, it’s not something anyone wants.
Remember in school, you probably had special school socks, speaking of categorized socks.
They’re like the knee-high, knee-high ones.
I like a long sock in the winter.
Do you even buy those anymore?
Yeah, you can still buy them, yeah.
I think you can buy their compression socks as well, which you use.
It amazes me how much shit I know about socks.
I really don’t want to.
But you talk about airport socks, you can buy socks for flying.
You’re waiting for a punchline there, weren’t you?
I was trying to think of something.
Like big wings flapping around.
No, not literally flying.
That would be a thing, wouldn’t it?
Adam Eccles and his Wonder Socks.
There’s no cape, there’s no mask.
He just puts on a pair of knee-length socks.
And you know, the worst thing is, that’s all he wears apart from a woolen gimp mask.
That is scary, yeah.
Fighting crime.
Oh my god.
Right, so all I can say is, I’m pissed off with socks, and I want somebody to do something about it, because I’m too long in the tooth to do anything about it myself.
Just make socks in size 9.
That’s what I care about.
Specific sock sizes.
Here we go, individual sizes, two lengths of, yeah, two lengths, so you can have your knee length, or you can have your sort of mid calf length, and then hot and cold, summer and winter.
Hot and cold.
Actually, one other point here, what colour are they?
Well, here’s the thing, okay, do, right, this is really gonna roll me, okay.
You can buy socks, do you know, right, for example, you can buy odd socks, you can actually buy odd socks.
So they’re all these permutations of colours and design, they concentrate on all the aesthetic, no one, the cost of the actual, hey, because I’m zany because I wear odd socks, fuck off, right?
We want, okay, what colours do you need?
Maybe blue, black, grey, maybe a beige colour if you happen to be wearing some form of beige clothing, but maybe five, six colours at a push, burgundy, maroon.
If you must, yeah, okay.
And for the wacky types, white.
You see the white sock man, that’s a thing, isn’t it?
We all wore them in the 80s.
Yeah.
They were the thing.
Remember the fluffy…
Yeah, terelin.
But the, what do you call it, the sort of day glow, day glow socks.
Oh, yes.
Yellow and pink.
Yeah.
Like, and then they were sort of really fluffy as well.
Yeah, those were the fucking days, weren’t they?
They were terrible.
I mean, they were terrible in as much as they didn’t, they added an extra half a size to your foot.
So none of your shoes fitted particularly well.
Actually, it wasn’t dark days, were they?
Because everything was dark.
Yes, that’s right.
Leg warmers, that’s another thing that women used to wear.
Because I’ve often wondered that my calves are, you know, but it’s a perennial problem.
I don’t know if you find this, particularly living in the wilds of Ireland, that you get cold calves.
Not your thighs.
Your thighs are fine.
Your ankles are, you know, are okay.
It’s just your calves.
A bit like a gilet.
I mean, fuck off.
What is the point of a coat with no arms?
Is that…
What?
No.
A body warmer gilet, I believe they’re called.
Oh.
You know what?
You just literally, it’s a padded thing that just covers your torso, but not your arms.
Yeah, so I don’t like those.
When was the last time you went out and thought, oh, my torso is a bit chilly, but my arms are toasty.
I mean, yeah, I always wear a t-shirt.
My uniform is a black t-shirt and black jeans.
Even in the cold?
Yeah.
I don’t care about that.
Yeah.
But I wouldn’t wear a whatever the fuck that thing is.
A gilet?
I can’t see you in one, to be honest.
Yeah.
Weird thing.
Anyway.
Okay.
So I need to wrap this up because I’m now ranting.
Yeah, fair enough.
But so, socks.
Yes.
Sort it out, please.
Sort it out.
Sort it out.
The love of…
So that brings me on to my…
Oh dear.
Rage point.
Rage.
Absolutely rage, right?
You remember the good old days, I’m sure you…
Well, I know you do, right?
Where you were a kid and you went round and you collected glass bottles and you took them back to the shop.
When you say collected, stole.
Stole, yeah, acquired, found.
Liberated.
And they had a deposit on them, right?
So you took them back to the shop and you got, you know…
10p.
10p per bottle, yeah.
Pocket money, right?
Yeah.
It was great.
And you’d buy sweets or fags or hedge porn or whatever with your found pennies.
So, those were the good old days.
So what happened here and on?
Now, this is very specific, I think, to Ireland.
I don’t think this has happened in the UK.
And I’ll tell you what, if it starts to happen, fucking…
Emigrate.
Yeah, run away because this is not good, right?
To Iceland.
Yes, somewhere where…
Just beware of serial killers.
And volcanoes.
So, on February 1st, they implemented this system in Ireland called RETURN.
There’s a dash between those, RETURN.
And it’s a deposit system on cans and bottles.
But it’s not glass bottles.
It’s plastic bottles.
You think…
When I heard about it first, I thought, oh, well, that’s good, okay.
There’ll be an easy way to do this, and it’ll be fine, right?
No, that’s not what happened, right?
What a surprise.
Of course, you can’t have anything nice.
You just can’t have anything nice.
So, what they did here is they’ve…
You buy a bottle of drink or a can or something, and it has, after February the 1st, it has a little logo on it.
And if it has that logo on it, there’s a deposit on the bottle.
It’s like 15 cent or 25 cent, depending on the bottle or can.
Fair enough.
Okay, so when you buy…
Is it like a 330 millilitre can, like a regular can of Coke?
Yes, yes.
So, they’ve whacked an extra, what, 15 cents on that?
I think it’s 25 cent on the cans, something like that.
Yeah.
So, if you buy a little crate of whatever, 20 cans, it’s a considerable additional fee, right?
Yeah.
And they charge that.
It’s not on the shelf price.
So, you see, can of Coke, one pound whatever, one euro whatever, actually you get charged plus the deposit.
So, now we’re in the sort of American world where the price you see is not the price you pay.
Yes.
I fucking hate that, number one.
Anyway, so what they did is, rather than have a human who takes your stuff back and gives you pennies, monies back, they’ve got these machines in every shop, which it’s like this monolithic huge thing that needs space.
And in the bigger shops, they might have a couple of them or a few of them.
Smaller shops, they just have one of these things.
So it’s a big lump of a thing with a hole in the front.
And you are supposed to put your bottles into this thing, and it scans the barcode and then takes the thing into its depth, crushes it, and then it will give you a coupon for all the bottles that you’ve returned, right?
So you can then get the money off your next batch of shopping.
But I mean, that all sounds theoretically okay, but there’s a lot of problems with this.
And the first time I used it, I was like, are you fucking kidding me?
This is absolutely horrific, right?
So first of all, you’re storing…
Well, actually, I should rewind a bit.
For the whole time I’ve lived in Ireland, many 25 years plus, I’ve paid for…
We have to pay for our rubbish collection, right?
I don’t know if it’s free in the UK.
Nothing is free.
Currently, it’s part of our council tax, but our council tax is now such a point where in some cases, for some people, it’s more than their actual mortgage.
Jesus, really?
Wow.
Awful.
Right, okay, well, fair enough.
So we don’t have that, but you do have to pay a private company to come and get your rubbish, right?
So you do that.
One of my wheelie bins is a recycling bin.
So you segregate your rubbish into stuff that can be recycled, or compost waste is another one, or just general rubbish.
And so for my whole life here, I’ve been putting my bottles and cans into the recycling bin, which I have to pay for.
So my question to the government or whoever runs this is, what’s wrong with that?
Why am I now being charged extra deposit to recycle my bottles and cans when I was already doing that?
So no idea.
I’m struggling to get my head around this.
Because surely the…
Okay, so I think everyone would begin at a position as we don’t want dickheads throwing cans out of the windows as they drive along a country lane or whatever.
Okay, 100% behind that.
Right.
Is a 15, 20 cent…
Nah…
.gonna stop them doing that?
No, definitely not.
Because they’re idiots, they’re twats, they don’t care.
Exactly.
So realistically, it’s like all of these things, something that’s good intentioned has consequences that…
So you have to drive to one of these shops…
Yes, right…
.with your boot full of…
So even before that, right, you can’t crush the bottles or cans.
You know, you either way, you have a can or something and you immediately crush it.
You can’t do that because it won’t accept them then because it can’t read the barcode.
And it says, this is broken, you have to throw it away some other way.
It spits it back out at you.
So and then you have to convince everybody in your household, don’t forget to put this particular type of bottle or can into a different bin that I have to take to Bloody Tesco’s when I go shopping.
Have they been washed?
Have you got to wash them out?
Well, it doesn’t, I suppose you should, right?
But you ever tried to wash a Coke can?
And how much water are you going to use?
Yeah.
And I have been washing them, but it doesn’t, then you throw it in the bin then, and there’s always a little bit of sticky, right?
So what I’m finding is that you take this bin bag full of stuff to the machine, and no matter what you do, your hands are going to be sticky afterwards.
Yeah, 100%.
There’s going to be dribbles, isn’t there?
Sticky hands and dribbles.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s my autobiography.
That is a…
But yeah, so, and then, you know, first time I did that, I thought, I’ll just go wash my hands in the toilets.
No, fucking toilets are locked.
Fuck off, can’t do that.
So then I had to have a sticky hand the whole…
Oh, bloody time.
Ah, so…
And…
About…
Well over 50% of the time, you go to the machine and it’s got a red screen and stuff.
Sorry, I don’t know why I found that so particularly amusing, but just the thought of you wandering around Tesco’s with your sticky hand.
Did you hold it up?
Did you just hold it out slightly?
Don’t look at my sticky hand.
Picking up bits of fluff and stuff.
However, if a fly happened to pass, look at me, you should be like a hero, and you just put your hand out with your sticky hand and capture the fly.
And everyone around you, all the shoppers who were bugged by this particular fly, would stop and give you a gentle round of applause.
As you bow and then move off through the aisles.
He’s stamping their crush.
Adam Eccles, fly paper.
That took a toll on everyone.
So you’re wandering around with your sticky hand.
The machines, half of the time they’re broken, right?
Or it’s not accepting bottles, or one of them is broken, and then there’s a queue waiting for this fucking machine.
And you have to put the bottles and cans in one by one, and you have to put them in a certain way.
If you put them in cap first, they don’t like it and they spit them back out at you.
So you have to, I mean, so I took a bag last weekend, for example, probably had 70, I mean, it does make you think about how much fucking crap, you know, but it accumulated for a while.
So I had like 70 odd fucking bottles.
And yeah, imagine standing there, putting them in one by one.
Oh, and sometimes they don’t recognize the logo.
Sometimes they think the barcode, sorry, sometimes they think the thing is crushed and it isn’t, and you have to take it out and put it back and it just spits it out and spits it out.
Sometimes they’re selling a product that is from before the crossover and so it doesn’t have the right barcode on it and it doesn’t like that, but they have still charged you the deposit on it, right?
So there’s just literally nothing you can do.
You have to put it into a different bin and your money’s gone.
What happens to the deposits and who holds them?
I imagine it’s the shop, but then they probably have to prove that to the government or something and push it back.
So it could be like a VAT.
So essentially they have to pay, minus what vouchers have been issued and then they pay it over like VAT essentially.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So one would imagine that this is going to prove quite lucrative because how many people are going to be, as you say, some of them are not going to go through.
That’s just obvious.
These things and the machinery isn’t perfect.
So maybe 5%.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
And that’s 5% of the people that actually can be asked to get in their car and drive one of these things.
And then what about the people who just think, I just don’t have the time or are you elderly or whatever?
I mean, there are a myriad of reasons why you wouldn’t do this.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
If you get your food.
What happens to the deposits?
Exactly.
The government just keep them, I think.
So yeah, I mean, imagine you, you know, the whole Covid thing, a lot of people, elderly people get their food delivered because they can’t go to the shop.
What are they fucking doing with it?
They just have to throw it in the bin and waste that money because they’re going to be charged.
Yeah, so it’s such a bad system, so badly implemented and I’m absolutely raging about it.
It just drives me fucking insane.
And ultimately though, okay, I mean, put aside all of the issues with it.
Fundamentally, does it actually save on carbon emissions if people are having to make a journey to one of these shops?
No, I mean, it’s ridiculous.
I’m washing them and carrying this stuff and remembering to do it.
I mean, the way I work is, you know, I accumulate the crap over the week and then I go to the shop anyway and then I have to…
But it means that I’m an extra 15 minutes in the bloody shop because I have to do all this crap separately.
I mean, last time I got eight euros back out of it, right?
So it’s a consistent…
How much is your time worth?
Yeah, exactly.
Hopefully more than that.
But, you know, and as I say, I have been recycling my fucking bottles for the whole time I’ve lived here.
So how, why, why is this different?
Yeah, that stinks.
What happens to the stuff I was recycling, right?
Is that not being recycled?
What are they doing with it?
Because I thought that if I put it in my recycling bin, that it was being recycled.
And who’s producing these machines?
Because that sounds like a fairly lucrative contract for someone.
Yeah, so I don’t know, but I heard that they’re like 11,000 euro each, even the small ones.
So like, yeah.
Someone’s made a serious amount of money.
Because this will be a contract as well.
They’re not going to back down next week and say, now this is a terrible idea and it’s not working.
No, no, no, this is in for the long haul, right?
So somebody has made a serious amount of wedge.
Yeah, making these stupid machines.
Yeah.
And in fact, it’s a whole sort of industry now that’s created for no particular reason.
And the people who work in the shop have to deal with it, right?
And it’s constantly broken and people are angry at them and thinking they broke it or it’s their problem.
Of course, it isn’t the Tesco people’s problem, right?
But they have to deal with it.
And then you see them carrying massive bin bags full of these bottles that come in the bottom of it back to some kind of, I don’t know, depot at the back of the shop.
The landfill.
Probably, yeah.
But there’s these other things.
So these machines, when you put the bottle or the can in, you can hear it crunch them, right?
So it’s crushing them.
And as I just said, there’s always going to be sticky stuff in there, right?
So you imagine the works of this machine is going to be full of sugar in the end.
And this just started in the winter here.
Come the summer, those fucking things.
Imagine wasps, ants, bees, whatever the fuck flies, nasty shit’s going to be accumulating there up until…
You would need to maintain, you would need to clean that almost daily, wouldn’t you?
It’s not that happening.
But here’s the thing, the cost of producing these machines, moving them from A to B, running them, how much energy is used to crush a can and then transport that crushed can?
You’ve got to pick them up from all these various places and then take them somewhere.
All of that is energy used.
I wonder if anyone has actually done an analysis to work out what the carbon saving on this is.
No, I don’t believe they have.
Well, I mean, maybe they have, but they engineered the statistics to make it look like they were doing a good thing.
And manipulated, I think.
But this is the problem with a lot of these things is you have, there’s no nuance in it.
If you say, right, well, we’ve come up with this idea that’s going to help save the planet.
It’s going to help curtail the climate catastrophe.
Is it bollocks?
You can’t push back because essentially it’s, this is the idea, we’re going to do this.
And if you don’t buy into this idea, back shit crazy as it might be, then you want your children’s lives to be blighted by, you know, whatever it may be.
You’re killing the turtles, you bastard.
Exactly.
And this is the, there’s too much emotion and not enough common sense in this whole debate.
And I think that is one of the most ridiculous things.
I think I wasn’t completely unaware of it.
I don’t think it would catch on over here though.
I mean, thank God, right?
It’s terrible.
I believe that this happens in some European countries.
And you’d think that, you know, if it was done in, you know, France or Germany or somewhere, Netherlands maybe, and they had a system that we would have learned from whatever the problems with it are, but obviously not.
We definitely haven’t learned anything and we probably just made it worse, right?
Well, maybe the problems were never solved.
Maybe also the problem is the way that you’re conditioned, you know, as a society, and it could take a generation or two to change habits.
But just because it’s…
And the frustration, I think, for everyone is that people are sat around being paid to come up with this shit, to make our lives worse, to make no real tangible difference to whatever problem they think they’re trying to solve.
And the whole thing just ends up with, essentially, just you having less time and less money.
That’s really what ends up happening.
It’s a money maker, right?
I mean, it must be, right?
I was flying recently for work, right?
So I go to the airport…
Were you wearing your flying socks?
Yeah, definitely.
I was, yeah.
Airport socks, yeah.
But imagine this scenario, right?
You have to go through security, right?
And then you’re thirsty because it’s hot in there, blah, blah, blah.
You buy a bottle of water.
Now, it’s horrifically expensive because it’s at the airport.
And then they put this deposit on top.
Now, I’m flying to wherever.
What am I supposed to do?
Bring it back with you.
Yeah.
I have to now take this fucking bottle with me on holiday or work or whatever, right?
Keep it in my bag for a week and then bring it back to Ireland in order to get my, you know…
So I’ve traveled thousands of miles with a…
That bottle has…
Yeah, with an empty fucking bottle, which is sticky or whatever.
This is just so…
No, of course I didn’t do that, right?
I just threw it in the bin.
And then, yeah, there we go, government tax that I’ll never get back.
That’s just for no real reason.
The thing is, what is the alternative?
Okay, so if you’re outside of your house and you want a drink, or you need a drink, because let’s face it, we’re humans, we need to hydrate, okay?
It’s not…
Yes, you can decide whether you want bloody leucosate or bottled water, whatever it may be, but you need to hydrate, so you need a drink.
What are you doing, unless you’re carrying around some sort of drinks receptacle with you?
Well, people do that, but those are the weirdos.
Okay, think of this another way.
What do you put your, what do drinks manufacturers put their product into that doesn’t have any environmental impact?
I don’t think there is a, yeah, there isn’t.
There’s literally nothing that has zero environmental impact.
So it would have been better if they had said, listen, Ireland, we just need more tax.
We’re going to whack another 10 cents on it.
We’re going to just not going to bother with all these stupid fucking machines and wasting your life.
People have been pissed off and then they just accepted it and moved on.
They could have called it sugar tax.
There’s an idea.
Well, they did that actually.
I was being flippant there because it’s anything that, we want more money to come up because we need to employ more people to come up with increasingly ridiculous ideas.
And all this needs to be funded.
So we need to go, we’re more creative and stupid, brainless.
We really do.
It’s so pissed off with this, right?
It’s so badly implemented, so clearly just a way to rip you off.
And yeah, what happened to, I was already recycling, right?
So you can’t tell me that I need to recycle.
I was, I am.
So they haven’t even solved the problem, or they’ve tried to solve a problem that didn’t even exist.
People were already recycling.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, who wasn’t?
Like you get two bins.
One’s green and one’s black.
I don’t understand the reasoning.
I reckon we could probably spend a whole episode and then some just on recycling.
And indeed, local government edicts and some of the stupid, stupid stuff that is inflicted upon us.
Terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
So anyway, I can’t stand this stupid system, but here I am stuck with it.
What am I going to do?
I’ll either have to just take the hit and pay the tax and put my bin, put my rubbish into my recycling bin as I had been, or I have to go through this stupid ritual.
I’m here like a tramp going through the bin because the kids…
Wading through empty bottles.
Yeah, going finding fucking bottles and pulling them out and then sticky hands, filthy.
You’re like a Womble.
A tramp.
It’s so annoying.
Fuck them.
But there we are.
There we go.
Are you raged out now?
And hereby, from this point onward, you will be now known as sticky hand Adam.
And bear that in mind as is moving on.
If you want to shake my sticky hand.
This is a happy ending, isn’t it?
Yes, this is a happy ending.
With a happy ending and Adam’s sticky hand, there are not two phrases you really want to be using in the same sentence.
That is interesting.
So what we’re saying is next weekend, actually, as we record this on Saturday the 20th, next Saturday the 27th of April, 2024, we’re having a thing.
It’s a Meet The Authors thing.
And it’s Adrian Cousins, Keith and I in a pub in Crawley, which is the reason for Crawley, right?
It’s near Gatwick Airport.
And the Motorway Network.
Yeah, and I can get there easily, right?
I feel that we’re having to explain why we’re holding this in Crawley.
Well, I mean…
It’s almost apologetic.
Sorry.
Sorry we had to go to Crawley.
I’m not sure Crawley is a perfectly nice town.
I’m sure it is.
I’ve never been there.
I think I have a couple of times.
It is a typical provincial town, albeit one very close to, with an abundance of hotels, which I actually was quite pleased by because they’re not ridiculously expensive.
Yes, that is a good point.
So if you happen to be within the catchment area of Crawley or just feel like traveling to come and see us, sit down, have a pint, have a chat, very informal, definitely go and buy us a pint though, right?
That’s important.
And I suppose we can sign books if you bring books because we won’t be bringing books.
We can just rage.
Yes, or it could be, and it’s going to be like a live version of the podcast, I think, with A-June as well.
Yes, that’s a great way of looking at it.
Just rage about whatever.
Definitely.
So it’s in a place called Gough’s Manor, G-O-F-F-S.
It sounds very granduous.
Yeah, and it’s in Crawley.
It’s a nice oldie-worldie English pub, so it’s nice, right?
I think it’s a pub, isn’t it?
Yeah.
Something like that.
Probably should have done some research before we booked it.
Yeah, I suppose so.
I haven’t been there, so hopefully it’s OK.
But yeah, from 6.58pm, very specific, until 10.30pm when they kick us out, right?
And if we’re still around, then we’ll find somewhere else to go.
But yeah, so be there or don’t.
Well, there’s a selling feature.
We’ll put a link in the show notes to…
.with the details, you know, various where the location is and everything.
And it’d be lovely to see people.
It would.
The last one we did was great.
Last October, I think it was, in Birmingham.
So this is the sort of the south version of that.
But a lot less formal and structured and organised or professional.
Yeah, just basically an evening in the pub, talk about books and ask us questions about the writing process, maybe hints of future books and your favourite characters or whatever.
Right.
You get to shake Adam’s sticky hand.
I’m going to bring a hand sanitiser.
Yeah, I was going to say glove.
Rubber gloves.
Another addition to your outfit, which is starting to take shape.
I will be wearing my airport socks.
Yes.
Yes, clearly.
Will you be keeping them on the whole weekend, or will you be changing them?
You never specified if it was one pair.
Oh, no, no, there’s multiple pairs.
That’s a relief for everyone concerned.
No, I mean, because you need a pair going and another pair coming back, right?
So you need at least two, obviously.
You just wear random, you just wear regular socks.
In between.
Unless there’s another reason that you might have to take.
Look, which is…
How bad are these socks that you’re wearing in between?
That you actually have to have?
A warp threadbare?
I mean, yeah, they’re just, you know, everyday socks.
You’ve got a toe poking out.
There might be a toe or, you know, just one of those sort of little nuggets of accumulated cloth.
That sort of bead on them.
Whereas the airport sock is a fresh one, basically.
Okay, well, there we are.
So that will be next Saturday, 27th of April, 2024, 6:58 p.m.
onwards.
If there’s anything else that you would like to say to us, please go to socials forward slash Middle Raged.
That’s right, isn’t it?
Or our website.
Join in the raging.
Yes, say hello.
And don’t forget, you can buy us a coffee if you would like to be roasted.
buymeacoffee.com forward slash Middle Raged.
I think that’s us raged out.
Until next time.
Indeed, I reckon it is.
Say goodbye.