This is the transcript for episode 9 – if you’d like to listen to it, rather than read it, all episodes are available on this page.
Hello and welcome to episode nine of the Middle Raged Podcast, with me, Adam Eccles, and my co-host, Keith A Pearson.
Good morning, Keith.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Morning.
You were…
You could ask me if I’m right on you.
I wasn’t.
I was gonna say, I think my lawnmower chap has turned up, and that’s not gonna go well for the podcast recording, but if you hear loud tractor noise type thing, then just ignore it.
I’ll try and get it out.
For fuck’s sake.
Like, what a time.
Thanks.
Oh dear.
Can you hear it?
Kind of.
Shit.
He’s not using a fly mow, I’m guessing.
Big sit on.
I’ve got a huge…
Erection…
.field behind the house.
So yeah, big sit on tractor thingy.
Okay.
Anyway, he’s gone round the back.
Right, sorry.
That’s what she said.
Right, so where are we?
So yeah, episode nine, hello and welcome, and yeah, good morning.
We could have probably edited this out, but I think we should leave it in.
Yeah, well…
Just keep it real and all that.
Keep it real, yeah.
Yeah, the game…
People think I’m probably like Lord Adam here with my staff doing the garden, but no, it’s just too big for me to do.
Do you not have a ride on the lawn mower yourself?
I haven’t, no.
I’ve got a strimmer, a fancy strimmer, but yeah, it would take about three weeks to cut the grass with the strimmer.
Anyway.
Truck to man aside.
Yes.
Well, yeah, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
So…
We always start, we seem to start every episode with an apology.
I know, should stop doing that, right?
I mean, it’s been a while because of reasons.
We’ve been busy, right?
And I believe you’ve been editing something that may come soon.
Editing my latest novel, the 18th one called No Easy Deeds.
And as I keep saying, it is such a tedious, long-winded process that takes about four weeks, four or five weeks, like long, long periods of staring at words on a screen and hating every one of them and rewriting and tuning and polishing and, I don’t know, spending 30 minutes looking at one particular…
Did you ever get that, where you look at a word and you think, after a while, is that even a word?
It just…
Yeah, I know, yeah.
Word, that is funny.
If you repeat a word over and over, it’s suddenly, at some point it’d be, yeah, it’s like, what the fuck is that?
It just doesn’t make any sense anymore.
So, yes, and you get, reading back your own book over and over and over, you get word blindness.
You just cannot see blatant typos and things.
And all those little gags that you put in, that you made you chuckle at the beginning, when you’ve read them 10 times, of course you don’t get that payoff.
So it’s just, by the time you’ve read it, and of course you know all the twists, all the turns, all the gags, all the little bits that a reader will hopefully enjoy.
You don’t get any of that.
So you just, it’s the most mind-numbing slog.
But anyway, so hopefully in a week or so, everyone will get to read it themselves.
Good stuff.
I can’t wait for that.
Yes, right.
So here we are, episode nine, and we’ve got a couple of roastings to do.
We should, these are both triple coffees.
Wow, six coffees.
Six coffees in total.
Nice, we’ll be climbing the walls.
Yes.
As they say.
If not already.
But yeah, thank you to two people.
I don’t know if I should say this or not, but I happen to personally know these two people for various different reasons.
But it’s put me a little bit of a disadvantage because we’re not supposed to, what we’re supposed to do here is give you a character from a book just based on your name, right?
So I’ve tried to blank out the people and just focus on what their names might be, right?
So we’ve got Claire Foley and Dan Rackshaw.
So thank you very much to both of you for your donations.
Thank you very much.
So shall I kick off with Claire?
Come on then.
I’m waiting for this.
It’s a tricky one, Claire Foley, isn’t it?
It’s, so I don’t know why, but I had visions of Claire working as an admin clerk in a finance company for 30 years, and she was then made redundant.
Oh dear.
And she got a sizable payoff.
Now think about Claire.
She was an obsessive fan.
She always has been, obsessed with the sitcom, Only Fools and Horses.
Huge fan, massive, all of the sort of paraphernalia, memorabilia, loads of stuff.
She lives alone, obviously so obsessed with it, that when she gets her money, she actually buys an old pub that’s basically just closed down.
A bit rough around the edges.
And she decides to rebrand it as like a Only Fools and Horses themed pub.
She even changes the name to the Nags Head in a homage to-
The Nags Head, I was trying to remember.
Yeah, Nags Head.
So she spunks her entire Venunzi package on this, and she then goes for a relaunch, and she even gets Sue Holness to officially serve the first pint.
You know, she played, I think she played Marlene, didn’t she?
So she’s really gone big on this.
And anyway, it creates a real buzzer, and she tries to sort of recreate the original Nags Head, style it wise, and she says there’s lots of her memorabilia in there.
She even gets an old three wheeler, Robin Reliant van out the front.
She really goes to town on this.
And it does create quite a buzz of excitement amongst Only Fool’s fans.
And the place is packed for months.
Right, lovely.
And Claire makes a small fortune from food and drink sales.
Even their menu is Only Fool’s themed.
Pineapple chips, triggers, triple cooked chips, the Del Burger, Oisie Bolognese, that sort of stuff.
So Claire is living the dream.
After her 30 year of dull admin work, she is now the life and soul of the Only Fool’s community.
Unfortunately, what Claire forgot to take into account is that everything Only Fool’s is covered by copyright.
So the copyright holders, the people who hold the license, the rights to Only Fool’s sued her, and she lost everything.
Oh, Barlow, all right.
No happy ending here.
Shame.
Although she did end up living in a council flat in Peckham.
Oh, Christ.
I mean.
So a slightly bittersweet ending.
It’s a come down, isn’t it?
I don’t know where or why that could happen.
Nelson Mandela.
Towers or something, isn’t it?
There we are.
So that was my, yeah, that’s my little subplot for Claire.
Hope you enjoyed it, Claire.
Let me know.
Good stuff.
All right, well, I went this completely different way.
So this is a dystopian future sci-fi space opera series.
And this is book one, right?
It’s a cross between Red Dwarf and Alien, which I think you’ll like.
You know, it’s for fans, for fans of it.
It says on the back cover for fans of Red Dwarf and Alien.
So Claire Foley is the reluctant captain of a freight hauler that takes massive loads, like 20,000 metric tons of deep frozen parsnips and other root vegetables to a colony deep underground on a distant moon of a god-forsaken planet.
And the ship that she’s on is called the Jolly Green Giant.
So she’s the captain, but it’s basically an alternative to prison time, right?
As the journey takes 18 years each way, maximum speed.
And basically, they don’t really expect her to make it back.
So she’s sent on this punishment trip, really, because she’s a dangerous criminal on Earth, and a menace.
So her crimes include arson, fraud, inciting unrest and riots among the masses, cybercrime hacking, and several unproven counts of murder.
So they sent her off, right?
Most of the crew are cryogenically frozen with the parsnips, but she’ll occasionally defrost somebody, like Christmas turkey for a bit of company.
But after 10 years or so, on this boring trip, nothing happens for 10 years, the ship develops engine trouble and is forced to land on a nearby asteroid for repairs.
So they land and they’re repairing and it seems to be okay.
But it turns out that the thing they landed on is not an asteroid.
It’s actually an alien craft, incognito.
And they’ve been unwittingly piggybacking on this alien craft.
And it powers up and opens a wormhole in space and flies through.
And the jolly green giant finds itself thousands of light years from Earth with no way of ever making it back.
I can’t get you into this to be honest.
Surviving on past lives alone, can Claire make friends with vengeful aliens or steal their wormhole technology?
Will she ever make it back home or does she even want to?
You’ve got to write this.
This has legs, I reckon.
Yeah, so this starts the adventures of Claire Foley and the jolly green giant.
I would read that a hundred percent.
I think you found your calling there.
Space Opera.
Oh, why not?
Let’s change them from time travel.
There we go.
We thought that this segment of the show turned out to be an alternative career avenue.
There you go.
So anyway, Claire, I hope you enjoy a lifetime of pastness in deep space.
So we’ve also got to thank Dan Rakstraw, who also dropped us three coffees.
It’s buymeacoffee.com forward slash middle raged, and you will receive an equally eloquent roasting.
Although I think I may be slightly undercooked, Dan, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
So I thought initially, I started going down this rabbit hole, because Dan Rackshaw sounded to me a lot like a grizzled New York cop.
You can hear it, can’t you?
Dan Rackshaw.
That’s the worst American accent ever, but forgive me.
But I thought, oh, it’s a bit of a cliche.
And by that point, I’d wasted 20 minutes, and I was running out of time.
So I took a sort of bit of an about term, and I thought, oh, okay, I can see Dan Rackshaw in one of my novels as the UK’s, officially, the UK’s oldest male stripper, aged 81.
Right.
And he’s actually in the Guinness Book of Records.
And he still performs once a month at a pub in Croydon under the stage name of Big Danny Rackshaw.
Nice.
And because of the novelty factor, he’s quite big on TikTok.
Oh, yeah.
So yeah, he does it.
I mean, the place is sold out for his shows.
I mean, punters literally flock from far and wide to enjoy Danny’s act.
And marvellous is surprisingly live physique.
And perhaps less surprisingly, his pendulous balls.
Right.
That’s it.
That’s all I’ve got.
Sorry, Dan.
That’s wonderful.
Is it mainly women who turn up or just a mix of people?
I don’t know.
I didn’t get that far.
To be fair, once I’d actually come up with it, it’s not something I wanted to keep in my head particularly long.
I know.
Yeah.
Well, fair enough.
Don’t let that creep into your mind’s eye because you will never be able to get rid of it.
Indeed.
Unless it becomes true, we’ll never know.
I don’t know how old Dan is, but maybe we’ve just peered into the future.
God, do you imagine?
If Dan gets 81, then this is actually what he’s doing.
Fair play to him.
Yeah, fair play to us for putting it out there.
Predicting.
This could be the thing that Dan had on some sort of bucket list.
I mean, we’d be a mime person.
Most people would learn to play the piano or run a marathon.
Maybe Dan’s is to display his pendulum balls in a pub in Croydon.
Swing them back to and fro.
There’s nothing stopping him doing that.
Well, the law, maybe.
If it’s you, I hope you’ve got something a little bit more savoury lined up for Dan.
A little bit, yeah.
So, I thought about this quite a lot, and so I settled on this, right?
So, Dan has a Las Vegas show called Rag Straw’s Shop of Delights.
You know, a stage show.
And this is an audience participation show where there’s packed out theatres, and he calls on people, seemingly at random, to ask him for a delicacy or confection or some kind of curio from a time and place in the past.
And then they’ll counter up something like, no, let’s go to a bakery in France in the 1800s and get some kind of pastry that was only available then and there, or maybe a portion of chips from the Grimm Chippy in Camborne, circa 1991, or even an original artwork by one of the old classics.
So they come up with these crazy ideas.
And so after some theatrics, where Dan programs the time and place into this computer, a shimmering portal appears on the stage, and Dan jumps through, and you can sort of see into this world, and he runs around, gets whatever it is that he’s getting, the pastry or the portion of chips, and he comes back shortly after with the item, which he gives to the participant.
Too much applause.
And the illusion, it seems so real.
I can smell the boulangerie air of France, or the musty antique shop, or the vinegar and congealed ketchup stench from the grim chippy, right?
And so it’s a very popular act.
It’s like, wow, how does he do that?
People think it’s a conspiracy, that all the people are what they call the Stooges.
But no, that’s not it.
The catch is that it isn’t an illusion at all, because that would be way too complicated, right?
Instead, Dan actually has a device that really does open the portals.
So yeah, he really is going to get in those pastries.
And it’s all been real.
So it’s disguised as a trick.
The catch here is that the portals only stay open for a few minutes and uses a huge amount of power.
So it’s kind of ideal for a stage show, but not much use for anything else.
And so that’s why he found himself doing this, right?
But Dan’s career ends when he inadvertently gets stuck in 1837, because there was a power cut at the theatre whilst he was trying to grab a bowl of gruel from an orphanage workhouse after a vegan woman from California who’s obsessed with Oliver Twist requests it as his show.
So the portal closes, and he’s stuck there, and nobody knows how to open it back up.
So Dan has to live out the rest of his life in the 1800s.
In France?
No, in London.
Oh, in London, okay.
You know, like in the Oliver Twist type.
Sort of the Dickensian London.
Yes, Dickensian London, because she’s all into this, please sir, can I have some more?
So he goes and gets her a bowl of gruel.
Probably ends up eating it, I would imagine.
Poor bastard.
Okay, so Dan is now stuck in 18 something or other.
Yes, 1837 I reckon.
With nothing but his outfit, his probably, the bowl of gruel, all of a twist.
There we go, slightly, yeah.
Went a bit sci-fi fantasy there.
Excellent.
Good stuff.
So, thank you very much again to both Dan and Claire.
Indeed.
Hope you enjoyed your entertainment there.
Good stuff.
All right, so let’s get on with the show.
Right.
So, my rage point in this particular episode, and I have to be very specific here, it’s, so I was originally going to be barbecues, but then actually dawned on me, it’s hosting barbecue.
Hosting barbecues, right.
Now, I thought about this, the only way I could sort of compare it, it’s like, I suppose, masturbation to a degree, in as much as if somebody else is doing it, it’s fantastic, but…
What, in front of you?
No, I mean, to you.
Right, I’m sorry.
But doing it yourself is just a completely different experience, isn’t it?
So, and I think it’s the same with a barbecue.
So, if…
I mean, obviously, it depends on who invites you and who’s at this barbecue.
Reminding them to come to your barbecue.
Generally, there’s no masturbation involved.
But if you go to a barbecue and you’re sat outside in the sunshine, drinking a cold beer, someone’s serving you food, it’s quite pleasant, yeah?
I think we can probably agree with that.
Pleasant company.
All very nice.
Now, flip that over.
You are the one responsible for hosting the barbecue.
Yeah.
And I think people underestimate what an absolute fucking ball ache hosting a barbecue is.
It’s okay if you’ve got just one or two friends coming over, but any more than, say, I don’t know, half a dozen people, and it is a nightmare.
Catering, yeah.
I mean, that’s, yeah, full on.
So I’m now into the realms of where the various rage points are within this sort of whole event.
And there are so many.
And I was thinking through, firstly, I have a fundamental issue with the whole concept of barbecuing, because ultimately I have a kitchen that’s perfectly equipped with all appliances, all that I know how to work, that function perfectly, that cooks stuff exactly how I like it.
All of my utensils and pots and pans and accoutrements and everything is at hand.
So now I have to go into the garden where there is nothing, take everything out with me, and then there is the barbecue itself.
Now, I know some guys, and it is a man thing, isn’t it?
Really, they will go into a garden center and they will salivate over a thousand pound bloody grill king or whatever these things are called.
And I know guys are into it.
I just do not get it.
I just don’t understand the appeal whatsoever.
You are cooking meat over flame, which inevitably means that everything gets covered in fucking fat.
So anyway, let’s roll back a bit.
Sorry, I was raging ahead.
Let’s start with the general concept of a barbecue.
First, you got to make sure the garden is spick and span, which inevitably means mowing the bastard lawn, which I hate.
That in itself is a ball ache.
Make sure your tables and chairs are out, de-spider them, wash off all the bird crap.
That in itself is a pain.
So you’ve got all of that set up.
So there’s an hour or two of your day gone for starters.
Then there is the acquisition of food and beverages.
So you get into a situation where you’re trying to cater for everyone’s, the start of the drink, because you know that there will be some prick who will go, oh, do you have any ginger ale or some random, any tomato juice?
No.
So you end up having to try to cater for people’s weird, there’s beer or there’s wine, right?
Drink it or don’t drink it, I don’t care.
Then you get into the food.
Now, at any other point in your life, do you ever, and I’m asking you this as a general question, sit down to eat six sausages, four burgers, four kebabs, and your own body weight in potato salad?
I mean, I’ll give it a go.
But when it comes to catering for a barbecue, people go mad.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Because you’re not used to it, right?
So it’s go crazy, get everything, 500 burgers, 2000 sausages.
It’s like parties, I suppose, as well.
Like just pineapples on sticks and all that stuff.
But the difference being with barbecues, this stuff’s expensive.
So you end up buying, like, I don’t know, do you think they might like steak?
Yeah, probably, fuck off.
And then chicken on skewers and prawns on skewers.
It just goes on.
And before you know it, it’s 25 quid ahead.
And you can’t charge people.
I mean, trust me, I’ve tried.
There’s pushback.
People don’t generally like being charged.
So you know you’ve got to bear the cost.
And there is, I think, some level of one-upmanship with this.
If somebody’s invited you to a barbecue, you sort of feel obligated to at least offer up a similar fare, if not perhaps slightly better.
So you end up going to a butcher’s and a hundred quid later, you’re coming out with your bags of bloody sausages and God knows what else.
And the whole thing.
So you’ve got the cost element.
So you’ve had to go out and buy your ginger ale and fucking craft gin and whatever else, and then all your various bits of food.
So that’s the first bit.
And so there’s the preparation time, the garden, the buying of the expensive stuff.
And then you set and see if your guests arrive and you give them a drink, and you’ve clearly by that point already realized you’ve forgotten something.
Some caramel sort of saying, I like, I don’t know, some obscure bloody wine that you don’t have any of.
Paper cups and paper plates and napkins and all of that crap.
Well, you can’t use that shit anymore.
You’ve got to have proper outside wear.
A separate set of cutlery and plates and stuff for using out in the garden.
Do people now buy rugs?
You buy rugs for outside.
What?
Yeah, seriously.
There’s going to be people listening to this, and I guarantee that we’ll have a rug outside.
That is utterly bizarre.
Isn’t it?
I mean, who comes up with it?
Surely the point of a rug is to protect the floor beneath it?
Yeah, or insulation or noise-deadening.
Are these to sit on?
No, people have furniture on them.
Literally a rug.
It’s almost like a carpet for the outdoors, for your patio.
This is getting very weird.
But somebody at some point must go, do you know what we need to do is come up with a rug that people can use on their patio.
Right, why stop there?
Let’s have the tally outside.
The cost of patio, I mean, there was a day that you would go to a Texaco and buy a plastic patio set for 25 quid.
You know, those four chairs and it would have a parasol.
Okay, granted, it lasted six weeks if you were lucky.
Yeah, blow away.
But that was it.
I mean, it was just cheap and cheerful and that would do the trick.
But now you’ve got to have a rattan set.
You’ve got to have these sofas and a dining table and a parasol.
And it’s almost like the garden has become an extension to the house.
And we just don’t have the weather here, do we, really?
For maybe two or three weeks in the year, if that.
Yeah, if you’re lucky.
So you’ve got all this really expensive kit outside.
We live next to a nature reserve with a lake, and it attracts a lot of birds.
Dropped into the garden.
And let me tell you something now.
If you’ve ever seen a goose drop one from 300 feet……I mean, they’re damn busters.
The splat that makes when it hits the patio is impressive.
Imagine dropping a haggis from 20 feet onto a stone floor and that gives you some sort of idea.
A raw haggis.
Slap.
Beautiful.
Yeah, so you’ve got all of that going on.
And I haven’t even got on to the cooking yet.
And it goes back to think, you have an oven and a grill that heats from above.
So if I want to cook burgers, put them under the grill, 10 minutes to size, job’s done.
You put them in a barbecue, and of course, because it’s heating from below, all the fat is…
Would you…
Okay, let me throw this back.
Are you a traditionalist?
Would you go with charcoal and all that crap, or would you go gas?
I would probably go with the charcoal stuff.
Because I reckon if you’re going to gas, then just fucking cook it inside.
Because that’s your cooker then, isn’t it?
What’s the point of having that outside?
Because it’s just the same as your indoor cooker, basically.
I mean, I like cooking with gas.
I haven’t got a gas cooker now, but if I could, I would prefer to cook with gas.
And yeah, I mean, those big barbecues with the gas tank underneath, right?
I mean, that’s a serious piece of equipment.
Yeah, we’ve got one.
I don’t know why.
And to this day, I paid 600 quid for this fucking thing.
Christ!
It’s got like a…
You look at it and think, well, you start off going off thinking, I’m spending 300 quid and not a penny more.
And then you look at it and think, well, this one’s got a side burner.
And you think, well, what the fuck do I actually need a side burner for?
Then you start listing the various things.
You know, some prick will want, I don’t know, onions.
So therefore you’ve got to start somewhere to fry your onions.
Oh, I see.
And then this one’s got like a rotisserie.
I think, oh, would that be useful?
I mean, who’s cooking chicken at a barbecue?
I mean, that’s a recipe for disaster, isn’t it?
Yeah, yeah.
No, you’d want to be careful with that.
Yeah, have some food poisoning.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming.
So yeah, that’s how I ended up at 600 quid.
So I’ve got this monstrosity for barbecue, which is a gas one.
And of course, because you know, your flames from below, so you’re cooking anything that’s got fat in, which is virtually all meat.
Of course, it’s splashing and spitting.
And you can’t really get involved, can you?
You know, there’s everyone sat down, all chatting away, drinking, having a lovely time, and you’re there.
And of course, because it’s, you know, you’re having a barbecue when the weather’s good, it’s already hot.
You’re standing over this sort of big griddle thing, sweating profusely, jabbing at various bits of meat, which will cook at different times.
And then because you fucked everything up, you end up having to serve it all up.
So like, here you are, guest, here is a plate containing enough meat that would shame an abattoir.
Yeah.
Some of it is raw.
Some of it is cremated.
But I’m doing crisp.
Most of it is inedible.
Lovely.
But it was all very expensive.
Well, enjoy.
Yeah, I just want to say something about potato salad here, right?
Because that is the sort of stalwart of the barbecue life, isn’t it?
And I don’t get it at all.
I don’t fucking want potato salad, and I don’t think they belong in salads.
What is called potato?
I think it’s just one of those things you know.
It’s just a weird…
I don’t know who came up with that, but potatoes and salad, those shouldn’t go together.
Salad is supposed to be leaves and stuff, isn’t it?
If you’re going to put spuds in it, you might as well just have a plate of chips.
It is one of those things, it just gets purchased.
And normally in a bucket, you end up with way too…
I would guess that 90% of all potato salad ever purchased ends up in the bin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or somebody, one of the attendees will be like, oh, I make a great potato salad, I’ll bring that.
And then they bring this bowl with cling film over it, and it’s been in the back of the car for an hour, getting warm.
And you’re like, yeah, okay, thanks Mildred, and we’ll put it out and see if anyone wants it.
Just don’t…
I don’t know, potato salad should be made illegal.
And then you’re on top of that, you have all these things that you have now, dips, which are a thing.
Pumice, don’t know what that is.
Well, I do know what it is, but why it needs to be part of a barbecue, I have no idea.
It’s not really, yeah.
It just goes on, doesn’t it?
I mean, it’s just, before you know it, not only have you got this sort of abattoir’s worth of meat and fish, is prawns a fish?
Fish.
Oh, prawns, yeah, okay.
They’re a constellation, aren’t they, we believe.
So we’re not going to, but you’ve got a shitload of meat, you’ve got all of that, you’ve got more sort of salads and dips and sticks and nibbles and crap.
Bread and stuff.
It just…
Buns.
The bun, yeah.
And why do you end up buying eight people turn up?
Why do you think that you’re going to need 32 burger buns?
Who is eating four hamburgers?
As well as the, you know…
Salad and everything.
Six kilos of salad.
It’s just…
Oh, I don’t know what goes through our heads, but it’s this paranoia that you don’t want people to leave hungry.
So you go…
I mean, imagine if you went the other way, right?
And there was like three burgers between eight people.
That would be extremely awkward.
To be honest with you, if somebody said come around for a barbecue, and there was just a couple of bags of crisps and beer, I think I’d be quite happy.
Yeah, yeah.
I don’t need…
It’s just…
Okay, so we’ve established that all of that is a massive ball ache.
So eventually you finish cooking, and you get to sit down for five minutes.
But then you have to clean this thing.
And they are designed as such that none of it fits in the dishwasher.
Of course not.
So you’ve got no choice but to…
And this thing, which is like a meter and a half long by a meter…
I mean, it’s like a half a barrel.
It’s just enormous.
And every square inch of it is layered with grease.
You’ve got a drip tray underneath, which is…
Even though this thing costs 600 quid, it’s just too small.
So every time it fills to within 2 or 3 mil of the brim.
So your options are wait till it solidifies, and then spoon it.
Or you’ve got to try and walk it, detach it, and then walk across to find some receptacle.
And then the cleaning of the barbecue, that in itself is another 2 hours.
Because the temptation is to think, fuck it, I’ve had 6 beers now, I’m just going to leave it, and it will never get done.
So the next time you come around to using it, the first thing right off the bat, not only have you got to clear everything else, you’ve got to clean the barbecue.
And it’s mouldy at that point.
Of course.
So you know that you have to clean it afterwards.
And the only thing I’ve found that actually makes it terrible is a jet wash, which you can’t be doing it any good.
I was going to suggest that, but that’s going to blast it away, isn’t it?
Because presumably it’s not made of stuff, it’s not like a car that you can clean.
No, I think realistically, just a normal garden hose on full pelt will probably be about where you need to be.
But it’s not very easy to do when you’ve got guests around.
And of course, you’ve got to wear…
I tend to wear an apron and a full head mask, like a welder’s mask.
What?
Splash back.
Oh, okay.
Have you ever tried hosing out a…
I haven’t, no.
I have to say, no, haven’t done that.
It’s not as satisfying as you’d imagine.
It goes everywhere.
It’s a mess.
And you never get all the grease off.
You’ve got to really get into it and scrub it.
I don’t know what else to say.
I mean, honestly, it’s fucking horrific.
Is there any element of this that you’ve gone, oh, actually, you know, this seems like a good thing, a nice thing to do.
Something that would only enjoy the way to spend your limited amount of leisure time.
Exactly.
I haven’t ever hosted a barbecue.
I don’t think so.
I can’t think of any.
I don’t really know anybody.
So, yeah.
I mean, I think I bought a barbecue at some point, used it once just for myself and family.
And it didn’t go particularly well, and that was that.
And then I put it back in the shed, a little tiny one, a charcoal.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, then you’ve got…
I suppose the gas option is going to be a lot better than in that case, right?
Because you can just switch it on, and there’s your heat, right?
But with the charcoal, you have to put kindling in or something, and then you end up pouring a load of petrol on, because, like, for fuck’s sake, why isn’t it catching?
You lose your eyebrows.
Yeah, and then your food tastes of petrol.
And it’s, you know…
I mean, you probably have to start that, like, half an hour before you want to eat or cook.
And then it dies halfway through.
And this is the madness of it, but you’re cooking meat over some prehistoric fuel source that has no…
We invented cookers, because cooking over fire was wholly…
It was a pain in the ass, yeah.
So why are we doing this to ourselves?
And then on top of that, I suppose the upside is it absorbs a lot of the fat.
So…
And then you’re just tipping all that in the bin, aren’t you?
Yeah, the whole thing then.
So maybe there is an advantage in doing that.
But it’s just…
If you want to get together with friends and family, just come round, all right?
And we’ll order in a fucking Deliveroo or something.
Yeah, it’s…
Cheaper?
It’s probably better.
On no point.
I mean, all of the good stuff can be done without the barbecue.
Exactly, yeah.
The beer, sandwiches, salad, even.
All of the good stuff is doable.
Why are you making something which could be quite a pleasant way to spend a lazy, sunny, summer afternoon evening into such an absolute nightmare?
It just begs belief.
It is a weird phenomenon for sure, yeah.
So there we are.
I mean, I think that’s…
I could rage.
I’ll tell you what’s prompted this, just to wrap up.
So my son got married in March and moved into a new place with his wife.
And it’s his birthday in June, this month.
And traditionally, we host a barbecue for his birthday.
So his new wife said, we’ll host it this year because it’s the first time and then there’s newlyweds in our new house.
Brilliant.
Okay.
Honestly, it was such a relief.
The offer was made.
Because initially she was a bit, oh, I know this is a tradition thing.
And I was like, no fucking hell, it’s not.
Take it.
I could not care less.
Please do it.
And then this week, they sort of bowed out, so they can’t host it for some very tenuous reasons.
I doubt they’ll listen to this, but I think possibly they underestimated the factual implications of hosting a barbecue for 10 people.
Anyway, so it’s back to you, is it?
So it’s back to us.
And do you know what?
No, I’m not fucking doing it.
So I go to Costco this afternoon.
I’m going to buy some platters of sandwiches.
I’m rebelling.
So this is not just me ranting, raging for the sake of it.
This is actually me fulfilling my own rant.
So I’m pushing back against barbecue.
I refuse to be…
That should be the motto.
Push back against barbecue.
So people turn up this afternoon, and if anyone’s listening to this, who’s attending a barbecue at my house later, there is no barbecue.
There’s just sandwiches.
And that’s perfectly acceptable.
I mean, if there’s beer, cold beer, then you’ve got nothing to complain about, really.
I think on a sunny summer’s afternoon when it’s hot, a nice cucumber sandwich, I think that’s rather pleasant, soaks up the beer better.
I can sit there the whole afternoon.
Nothing to do.
No waste, no massive wastage.
You can eat a sandwich at 4 o’clock, and then still eat at 8 o’clock.
Be a bit curled up at the edges, but you won’t care by that point, will you?
So that prompted it all.
So I’m just going to end up by saying, I’m pushing back against barbecue.
And if I never hosted another barbecue again, I’d be quite happy.
Saying that, if anyone wants to invite me to their barbecue, rock and roll.
Yeah, I’m more than willing.
So it looks like there’s a fancy barbecue going on Facebook Marketplace at some point in the near future.
We’ll need cleaning before use, because last summer I could not be arsed.
Hose it down.
Use twice.
Lovely.
Fair enough.
So what’s got your goat this week?
Right, so I was trying to think of a way to phrase this, and I’ve tried things like retail censorship or retail nannying, and I think that’s probably what sort of describes it best.
And what this is about is I don’t drink at home for various reasons.
I drink water and tea and coffee and stuff, but not alcohol, because I live in the middle of nowhere, and I always feel like I should be able to drive if I need to, right?
So I don’t, in case of emergency, mainly.
Anyway, doesn’t matter, I don’t drink.
So I buy non-alcoholic beer, and actually there’s a sort of, just as a side thing, there’s been a sort of revolution in 0% alcohol beer, and over the last few years, it’s sort of blossomed, and there’s a wide variety, and I reckon most of them taste more or less the same as the alcohol versions, right?
I’m sure somebody will be saying, no, fuck off, Adam, the real stuff is much better.
Fair enough.
Do you know what?
I was always a big douter, because I know we’ve talked about this before, and I never really understood it, but I tried some a couple of weeks back, and do you know why?
Because I bought it, I love Peroni.
Yes.
Unfortunately, Peroni does not love me.
So I can, and this is, I think, you know, beer drinkers, lager drinkers amongst you will agree, we’ll probably concur with this, that the older you get, and the less frequently you drink, your tolerance to, and lagers have got stronger.
Back in the day, you’d drink Fosters or Carling, it was piss wig, 4%, you could eat eight, nine pints, and probably drive home if you wanted.
After four, five pints of Peroni, I can barely remember my name.
So anyway, I was having drinks, I knew it was going to be a fairly long session at home, and so what I do, I bought some normal Peroni, and then the alcohol free.
And I basically created my sort of this hybrid.
So half normal Peroni, half alcohol free.
Yeah.
And I did try, and I tried an actual bottle, almost indistinguishable.
Yes, yes.
I don’t know how they do it, and I don’t know what’s, there must be some magical process that was discovered, right?
But yeah, the Peroni one is pretty good, actually.
Yeah, and Erdinger is pretty good.
There was something else as well, I can’t remember.
But yeah, I reckon they’re decent, right?
And I do like the taste.
I know some people are saying, you’re fucking kidding, we don’t drink it for the taste.
But I actually do like the taste.
It’s like a placebo effect maybe as well.
Maybe, yeah.
It’s nice just to sit all in the evening and have a bottle of Peroni or something and not have to worry that in case of emergency, I still can drive, right?
Anyway.
It’s a long way to the hospital.
It’s the problem, right?
Anyway.
Can you hear him by the way?
He’s still out there.
Christ.
Anyway.
So this is for sale in my local supermarket.
And it’s outside.
Do you know the sort of corral they have where the booze is?
The 0% stuff is outside of that.
I only learned this myself on my last venture.
I was spent 10 minutes going up and down the booze aisle, looking for the alcohol free lager.
I could not find it anywhere.
It’s not in there.
Why is it not there?
Well, because it’s just basically a soft drink, right?
And this is where the confusion starts.
Because it’s 0% alcohol.
It’s not in the booze section.
And I believe it’s not subject to the license.
They only allow to sell it at certain times and days.
So it’s just a soft drink, right?
But when I get to the self-checkout, which is where I go, because I don’t want to talk to people, it says, oh, we just need to approve this.
It says, and then a teenager has to come and approve me, a 50-year-old man, buying 0% alcohol beer.
I’m like, why?
Why do you need to do that?
Number one, it’s not real booze.
And number two, for the love of God, just, you know, you know who I am because of my credit card and my club card and whatever, and just calm the fuck down with this, right?
And yeah, it’s just, I’m standing there waiting then, and a teenage girl has to come and tap the thing.
And it says, this person is clearly over 25.
Well, thanks a fucking lot less.
Just, thanks.
But then, you know, I mean, and they do, right?
And it’s not a problem, but just like, why?
Why is that triggering the, that we need to approve it?
They, you know what it is.
You scanned my barcode.
You know it’s not booze.
You’re selling it through, not in the booze section.
So yeah, I don’t know if this happens in other stores, but…
We have this over here as well.
So it’s not, you know, it’s not, we still have that here.
I don’t understand what is, so a 16 year old cannot buy alcohol-free lager.
I suppose not.
Why?
Yeah, exactly.
Why?
There’s no alcohol in it.
Zero.
That’s what it says, zero.
So yeah, why are you restricting that?
Makes no sense, right?
So this is this sort of nannying, babysitting, paternalistic censorship.
And this is what pisses me off, right?
And to expand on it, right?
So we all know the one where you can only buy one packet of headache medicine.
Don’t get me on that one.
Yeah.
And so this only really struck me when I had young children, right?
Because when you have young children, you’re buying Calpol every two seconds, right?
Calpol.
And also you need paracetamol.
And so the first time this happened, I put Calpol paracetamol on the belt.
And now you can’t buy those two things together.
What?
Calpol and paracetamol.
You can’t buy them in the same transaction.
One’s obviously paracetamol, one contains paracetamol.
Yeah.
But so, I mean, this is something to do with, I think that the shops are trying to stop you from killing yourself.
I’m just wondering how many gallons of Calpol do you have to drink, right?
To top yourself.
I think you’ve gone by…
Yeah, or diarrhea.
Death by diarrhea.
That much fucking Calpol.
Like, seriously, guys, I know that this is triggered by a rule that says you can’t buy…
But again, what are you trying to prevent there, right?
I mean, if I really did want to kill myself with paracetamol, I’d just go round and round and round, or to different shops until I’ve amassed enough that I could do it, right?
It’s not massively strategic.
It’s not a problem, really, is it?
If you, God forbid, but somebody was in that mindset, they decided to kill themselves with paracetamol, I don’t think the two-packet limit is a real…
It’s not going to stop anybody.
It’s like so much of these things.
It’s not been thought through.
I mean, is anyone impulse…
Okay, so I’m trying to be sensitive about this because I appreciate it’s a sensitive subject, but has anyone ever stood in the aisles of a supermarket, looked at the…
and just thought, fuck it, I’ve had enough, right?
Something has tipped me over the head.
I’m going to buy 10 packets of paracetamol, go to the self-checkout and then go and eat them in the car.
Has that ever happened?
I very much doubt it.
I mean, it’s when I see the final number on the scanner, right?
That’s when I want to fucking fit.
Anyway, but like, yeah, I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous.
And I’m sure that everybody in Tesco knows that it’s ridiculous.
And yeah, it’s triggered by the computer, right?
It won’t allow that transaction, but somebody up the chain has made this decision.
I don’t know if it’s a law.
I think it is a law, isn’t it?
Now, I can understand, right, if we’re talking about knives or alcohol, actual alcohol, I kind of think, well, okay, you’ve got a point there.
Back in our day, so I remember that my dad used to give me a little note when I was, I don’t know, eight, nine, 10, to go down to the newsagents, and I’d give this note to Mr. Patel, and it would say, can you please give Keith 20 JPS?
And Mr. Patel would duly oblige, and I’d take them back, okay?
I remember going to a pub at 15 and buying my first pint.
Right.
There was none of this.
Now, I’m not suggesting for one minute that 15 year old should be able to go, or nine year old should be able to go and buy a packet of bags.
I mean, who could have, what nine year, what child could even afford cigarettes?
Exactly.
So, but you’re absolutely right.
It is Crept Energy Drinks.
Oh yeah, yeah, I forgot about that.
Yeah, you can’t buy, yeah.
My son is 26, and frequently he tells me that he goes to buy an energy drink, and he is, because he hasn’t got any idea on him, because he’s gone to a shop to buy a fucking energy drink.
Yeah, right.
He can’t have one.
He’s 26, and he’s not allowed to buy a can of Red Bull.
This, this, that’s my next point, right?
IDing people, right?
And this happens a lot.
First time I noticed this was in America, right, was I was probably, I don’t know, in my 30s, trying to buy a pint in the airport bar in Chicago or somewhere, and they’re like, you need to see your ID.
I’m like, are you fucking taking the piss?
Like, I’ve got a beard, you know?
What?
Seriously.
And they’re just like, well, we have to ID everyone.
And in fact, I’ve seen, you know, like a lady who was obviously in her 70s being asked for ID.
No, no, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I’m just like, oh, and they glance at this ID, and then they give you your drink, right?
And I’m just like, why did you need to do that?
And then, oh, we have to.
No, you don’t, right?
You don’t, because you can see with your eyes that that person is plenty old enough, right?
And glancing at the ID proves nothing anyway.
And it’s just this sort of, oh, we have to do it, job’s worth thing.
And this is what I’m trying to get rid of, is this ridiculous notion that you just have to do things because that’s what it says, and everyone needs to just adhere.
And it’s not true, right?
You can push back, you can rebel.
And what do you do with that?
You glance at this ID, then what?
What have you done with that information?
It’s not like they’re keeping it on record.
They just glance at it and give it back.
You’re just serving them a glass of wine or whatever.
I mean, you’re not giving them a ticket to go to Switzerland to end their life.
You’re giving them a glass of Pino, for fuck’s sake.
It’s Craig Juice, lads.
Do you know what, right?
We’ve got election campaigns going on over here at the moment, because we’ve got an election on the 4th of July.
So, of course, you’ve got politicians all over the TV going on and on and on.
And it got me thinking, do you know what, because this all comes back to people who, you talk about the people who make rules, I think there should be some sort of mechanism where you are not allowed to stand for public election at any level, local or national, or EU or wherever, until you have completed a minimum of 1,000 hours working in a public facing role for minimum wage.
Yes, very good.
Yeah, definitely.
Because that would completely transform, you’ve got all these people that go straight from private school to college, one of the same universities, and then out they become a special advisor or whatever, or correspondent or something.
So they get trapped in this sort of bubble, and they forget, so they end up making laws for the rest of us without ever actually experiencing it.
I don’t know, does anyone get any power, any buzz out of going, oh, do you know what, right, we’re going to make it so that every poor bastard has to have their ID checked for no reason, for a product that doesn’t even contain alcohol.
Somebody somewhere made that decision.
Particularly, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Exactly, exactly, and that is the thing.
This is that we’re sort of nurturing this culture of that being okay.
And you know, it’s a step then to the sort of…
Civil liberties issue, really, isn’t it, when you think about it?
Yeah, for the God’s sake, just let people do what they need to do.
It is interfering.
I know you could argue those things are trivial in the big scheme of life, but if you actually think about human productivity, how much of it is wasted?
Yeah, how many times do those teenagers in Tesco have to trot back and forth, back and forth to basically tap a screen to acknowledge that a guy who’s clearly not under 18 can buy some…
Even if it’s…
It’s…
How much time is being wasted?
Yeah, we have an info…
And this is actually looking at it in a sort of broader context, and this is what does piss me off, is that we all have a finite amount of time on this planet, and we spend way too much of it dealing with shit like this.
It is stealing time from us.
Yes, exactly.
Yes, and then we have to rant about it on podcasts.
So there’s one other thing I’ll throw into here, right?
And this is something that I’ve only recently noticed.
I don’t go to the UK often, right?
But I have in the last couple of years been travelling a bit, right?
And something that definitely didn’t exist when I last lived in England, and does now, is that anytime you go into any kind of restaurant, the first thing they say to you is, do you have any allergies?
I’m like, what?
What?
Number one, if I do, mind your own fucking business.
Number two, I know what they are, and therefore I’ll avoid those food products that contain those things that I’m allergic to.
I don’t need you, a minimum wage waitress, to worry about my allergies, and take responsibility for my health.
Just bring me the food that I ask for.
Stop fucking asking me about my allergies.
Do you know how to get around this?
You just say, I don’t know, but I once rubbed Vicks Vapor Rub on my knob.
I had a really terrible rash.
I might be allergic to that.
Just see how that pans out.
Don’t mix the Vaseline and the Vicks.
No.
That can have very dire consequences, depending on what you’re using them for.
Anyway, yeah.
That will certainly stop the conversation.
When the first time it happened, I thought maybe this particular place was too worried about allergies.
But then it happened all over the place, every restaurant I went into.
I’m just like, what has happened?
Why?
Is this legal?
Is this insurance?
I think that, I mean, if you order the prawn salad, and you’re allergic to shellfish, well, whose fault is that?
I’d go with Darwin on that one, frankly.
Surely you know what’s in your food.
You should have a vague, especially, I don’t know, if you’re allergic to eggs or something.
Well, I think it’s your responsibility to know where there might be eggs.
Don’t order soufflé.
Yeah.
Or the egg pasta or whatever.
You should know that.
You shouldn’t give the onus to somebody in the food service industry.
It’s your problem.
You deal with it, right?
It’s wider spread though, isn’t it?
Because if you look at a lot of products, like you look on the jar, on the label of a jar of peanut butter spread, right?
And it will sound as if it contains nuts.
Nuts, yeah.
That really drives me nuts.
If you don’t put in a badum tish there.
Good idea.
I once found a bottle of water, mineral water, and it said something like, may contain nuts.
Fuck off.
I’m just like, are you kidding me?
Seriously.
What are they doing with it?
What is going on in that?
I mean, you’re not doing anything with spring water, is there?
Some bloke might have thrown a bag of peanuts into it.
I guess they’re just covering there off.
The trouble is you get to a point where everything contains nuts.
This is it.
This is it.
If you’re a nut allergy person, right, you must be absolutely fucked.
You just can’t eat anything.
Paracetamol.
Literally living on paracetamol.
One packet of paracetamol a day.
Christ.
I reckon we should just go back to growing our own food, right?
The thing about these allergies, right, is when I was a kid, it wasn’t every other person having a fucking allergy either.
Has something happened in the world that now everybody is actually allergic to something?
Everybody has something.
I think what’s happened is that we have, as medicine and both, if you look at the amount of people that have a diagnosis of some type of autism, or they’re on the spectrum somewhere, which I’ve always thought is a bizarre thing, really, because it literally is a spectrum, isn’t it?
So everyone is on it.
Everyone.
You don’t need a diagnosis.
You just might be a bit more quirky than the next man or woman.
Or you might be a complete…
It is not a psychological condition, such as, say, for example, schizophrenia or acute depression, where you are likely to go into a supermarket and try and buy something to do yourself in.
But it’s this thing of allergy.
Everyone has got some allergy now.
Everyone has got some sort of…
They are on the spectrum, or they have got some sort of psychological disorder.
It is an over…
Over-prognosing?
What’s the term?
Something like that.
I don’t know what it is.
But everyone has got to have something now.
It’s like a badge of honour almost.
Yes, that’s it, right?
This is the sort of…
Oh, my toxic trait is…
You know, you see those fucking memes on Instagram or whatever, or Facebook.
Yeah, my toxic trait is…
And then they’re like putting it out there as…
I’m so quirky that I do this stupid thing, right?
Shut the fuck up.
That isn’t your good point, obviously.
Why are you selling it as if it is?
And it seems like everybody has to have some thing that they whine about, especially vegans, obviously.
If you think about it, right, we’re all allergic to alcohol, aren’t we?
I mean, we are, because you’ve only got to look…
It is technically a poison, isn’t it?
But does that stop anyone?
Does anyone go, oh, no, I’m not allergic to alcohol.
We all consume it, and we all know we’re going to feel like shite the next day.
But are you going to feel any worse if you’ve got, you know, a slight egg allergy and you eat an egg?
It’s going to kill you.
You might feel a bit ropey for a while, but no worse than you will if you drink nine pints of Peroni and six raw sausages.
There’s the very rare people who, you know, have those go into, what’s it called?
Anaphylaptics.
Just need an EpiPen apparently.
Right.
I mean, but they know they have it.
This is what I’m saying is they know, they avoid the food.
They don’t need, you know, Tina in the spoons to worry about their allergy.
They just won’t buy that thing.
Yeah, too much.
Get in the bin.
Stop it.
Exactly.
Right.
Ranted over?
Ranted out?
Ranted over.
So, we like to finish these things off with a happy ending, right, to make it all a bit less depressing.
So, what’s your happy ending, Keith?
So you will appreciate this.
This week, I had to call.
I avoid ringing companies wherever possible.
Oh, yeah.
Bigger companies.
Because there was a time, it’s got to the point now where you actually have to put a period in your diary.
You have to blank out a section of your diary because you think, there’s no way I’m going to, this is not like the old days.
So, there’s half an hour.
If you ring an HMRC, you could be looking at, okay, I need to put aside an hour.
Jesus Christ.
It’s ridiculous.
Anyway, so, I, like a lot of people our age, take supplements, and because it is a ball like remembering to order them, I do them all on a subscribe and save thing with a very big supplement company, probably one of the biggest in the UK.
And I decided to change the dosage of one, so I needed to update the frequency which they deliver them.
And I’ve been putting it off and off and off, thinking, oh, fucking hell, it’s just going to be, I’m going to have to go into, you know, make the telephone call.
There’s no way to do it online, so no choice.
So I got down to my last two tablets, I thought, I’ve got to ring them.
I’ve got to ring them.
So I picked up the phone, I rung them, right?
Settled down, got myself a coffee, made myself comfortable.
Here we go.
Nothing in the diary for another 30 minutes.
Wrong the number.
Four rings, a human answered the phone.
No way.
Four rings.
So, okay, that’s a shock.
And I explained my situation, thinking, right, they’re gonna put me through to someone, and that department would be on hold.
I’ll be on hold, right?
This is just…
How it goes, yeah.
This is too good to be true.
I said, can you help me with this?
But explain the situation.
Not a problem, Mr. Pearson.
And they got on and they dealt with it.
That phone call wrapped up within about two minutes.
I know.
Holy shit.
This is a fairly big company.
I was absolutely stunned.
I am.
That is weird.
I’m actually stunned that they don’t have a website in the back end instead.
Oh, they do have a website.
I think because they know that their target audience tends to be people, older people.
Who perhaps aren’t so, maybe not us, but sort of boomer generation, that maybe aren’t so converse and get frustrated very easily with that type of stuff.
They just want to pick up the phone.
Fair enough.
But they just thought, and the guy just went through, didn’t ask how I was, which I thought was great.
Yeah, good.
Just hi, you’re talking to Danny, how are you?
Fuck off.
None of your business.
He just dealt with it efficiently, politely, promptly.
And was he or she located in the same body of land as you resided?
I believe so.
Yeah, it wasn’t some distant, of course, it was some distant land.
It was, it was just-
That’s very impressive.
And you think, it’s impressive, but it shouldn’t be, because that’s how things used to work.
Yeah, yeah.
I hate to hark back to, you know, the old, good old days, but because, you know, on the whole life does get a lot easier, things get better.
But there are certain elements that have got a lot worse.
Conversely, I had to contact, I’m going to shame them, premiere in.
I spent over an hour on three separate calls on hold, listening to Lenny Henry repeat the same three recorded messages over and over again, every 15 seconds.
Right.
So that just, that is really the norm.
But that, as much as it annoyed me, it’s that’s the norm.
To the other company, and I will name them, they’re simply supplements.
If they want to send me some free supplements, go for it.
Fair enough.
So yeah, credit to them for actually just doing things well.
The proper way, yes.
If every company had that level of service, and that’s all it takes.
Just get somebody to answer the fucking phone in a prompt manner and deal with your thing.
That’s all we want.
There’s not much to ask for, is there?
Not really.
Anyway, it made me very happy.
So there we go, that’s why I’m happy.
What’s got your chin up this week?
So I only really noticed this today, but it’s actually June is when I first released my first book, right?
So it’s actually six years now since my first book came out, and I thought, oh, that’s nice.
So I’ve been an author for six years, would you believe?
Six years.
That’s flown by, hasn’t it?
I mean, you’ve got a couple of years on me, right, but well, it’s significant now at that point, right?
That’s not just pissing around, really doing it.
And I also got the notification that we get, right, as authors, I’ve sold a book in Japan.
So you’re listening in from Japan.
Yeah.
Wouldn’t that would be amazing?
Not only have they bought your book, but they listen to the podcast as well.
Yeah, well, then.
This one Japanese guy or gal.
So just let me know, because I’m curious.
The first time I’ve sold a book in Japan, and I know they actually read it because it was K-year, so I can see that they read all the pages.
So fair play to you.
And I’ll actually check if they left a review.
Was there a song, was there a band called Big in Japan?
Well, one book, I’m well on my way, aren’t I?
Yeah, okay, maybe not Big in Japan, but to this day and age, right, it never ceases to amaze me.
Every time, every month, I get these things come through like you, and you go through and you think, somebody in Mexico has bought one of my books.
Wow.
And just to thank you, any given time on any given day that someone in some far-flung corner of the world is actually reading the guff that you put into it.
I know, yeah.
It’s mind-boggling, really.
It is, and it’s nice.
It’s a nice feeling, right?
But it is really weird, when you think about it.
The other part of this is that I did a promo last month and actually got Need A Little Time as a, briefly, a number one bestseller in the USA time travel romance category, which was nice.
So, yeah, happy about that.
It’s a good book, right?
I like that one.
Well-deserved.
Yes, indeed.
If you haven’t read that, I would say it’s possibly your best book.
I reckon it could be, yeah.
There we go, definitely a happy moment.
Indeed.
So thanks to everyone who bought those, and thanks to whoever it was in Japan.
And let me know if you liked it.
Actually, if you are, right, that would be a great thing to do.
Should that person be listening?
I think the chances are remote, but imagine if they bought a coffee and then we have to roast someone with a very Japanese name.
That might be tricky, but I’m willing to take that challenge.
I think that would get us cancelled, wouldn’t it?
It might be.
Possibly.
On that note.
So that’s us.
And yes.
So if you would like to do the roasting, get a roasting, it’s buymeacoffee.com forward slash Middle Raged.
Or you can follow us on the socials, facebook.com Middle Raged or Twitter X.
I don’t know what the URL is, but it’s just search for Middle Raged.
Actually, well, I think about this, right?
I did something recently, which I keep doing on and off, right?
I deleted Facebook and Twitter off my phone because I was just pissed off at how I would have this sort of automatic reaction to just open them up and scroll shit.
So I deleted them.
Gone.
And it’s had the benefit of, yeah, not wasting my time.
But I’ve also noticed that I’ve probably got like a 30 or 40% battery life boost on my phone.
Because those things, they run in the background and they just suck the life out of your phone, right?
So especially if your phone is aging a little bit, I would recommend deleting all of that crap off your phone.
And I reckon you will find your battery lasts a lot longer.
I would say he just lobbed your phone in a pond, your body battery would last a lot longer.
Well, there’s that, yeah.
But then you won’t be…
Probably most people listen to the podcast through their phone, right?
So you need to keep doing that.
But yeah, it just goes to show, right?
There’s so much shit happening.
It’s looking up where you live, where you go, what you do all the time, and that eats your battery.
So yes, anyway, that’s us, I reckon.
Thank you for the little tech, tech…
I choked back because I just couldn’t get Dan’s pendulous balls out of my headset.
Thanks for that.
Oh dear.
You want to wipe that clean.
Absolutely.
Right.
Take it easy.
Say goodbye.
Cheers.