After the “success” of Friday’s walking audio Dollop, it’s time for you to once again come with me on another audio walking adventure, as I take you down the mean streets of Sheffield. During our journey I tell you a story about an odd experience with a taxi driver, and I conduct a social experiment with members of the public.
Download the audio version here
Today I accidentally knelt on my phone and severely cracked the screen. I was surprised to note how calm and unbothered I was, baring in mind that bits of the screen were starting to flake and fall off. I merely brushed them onto my desk and put them in the bin, before coolly returning to my phone to inspect what was left of my screen. I was surprised by my level of Zen-like collectedness and coolness. Perhaps it’s the therapeutic influence of all those cats on Saturday. If so, then it was well worth the £5 and the salad stealing. Maybe we could drag Trump to the cafe for a day and see if it can sort him out a bit.
Apple have tested the Iphones for durability by doing tests that involve dropping them from a variety of heights, and there are bold statements that brag about their resilience, seemingly supported by videos with titles such as, “An Apple iPhone survives the ultimate drop test, plummeting 9300 feet out of a plane.” There are loads of these videos: people encasing their phones in ice, people dropping their phones from the top of really tall buildings, and even one where the phone is dropped from space. I suppose the idea is that if the phone can survive a drop of over 9000 feet, then it can survive anything. However, this is far from the truth. Granted, if you are the kind of person who is clumsy enough to drop your phone from 9000 feet, then it’s reassuring to know that Apple has you covered; but if you’re the kind of reckless buffoon who does something really stupid like kneeling on their phone for half a second, then I’m afraid you won’t be so lucky. I think I might join the geeky tech reviewers, and set up my own YouTube channel reviewing phones, only I will focus on putting the phones through their paces when it comes to being knelt on for half a second. I accept that it won’t be as exciting and dramatic as dropping a phone from a plane, but I would argue that it is more practical, and that more people are likely to briefly kneel on their phone than drop it from 9000 feet, or accidentally freeze it in ice for a week. I think Apple could do with sorting out their priorities a bit.
In Dollop 95, I mentioned that I’d done an interview with the Big Issue about The Young’uns. That article has been released today, as I discovered due to a tweet which declared that they had an interview with Dave Eagles from The Young’uns. I cannot understand how they’ve managed to get my name wrong. I emailed the answers back to them via david@davideagle.co.uk. I have a signature at the bottom of my email that includes my name, David Eagle, my website, davideagle.co.uk, and my Twitter name, @thedavideagle. Also, at the very top of the document I sent them, in bold letters, it said, “answers by David Eagle, The Young’uns.” Even after all those clues, if you still weren’t entirely sure, a second’s-worth of Googling would soon tell you that I am called David Eagle. So how and why have they abbreviated my first name and pluralised my surname?
On my first day at my office job, about six years ago now, I was given my own email address. Great, I am officially part of the team, I thought. Except, my email address started with, david.eagles. I immediately notified the person who had created my email account, but she didn’t seem bothered about changing it, and so I was just stuck with it. At first, whenever people referred to me as David Eagles, I would correct them. But I communicated with so many different departments and people from different organisations, that it became too time consuming and tedious to keep putting them right. Also, it was getting people confused. I was getting phone calls from people complaining that I hadn’t replied to their email, and then I’d discover that the reason was because they’d emailed david.eagle instead of david.eagles. I mentioned it to my managers several times, but nothing ever got done about it, so in the end I decided that it would be a lot easier if I would just change my name to David Eagles. So while I was at work, I was David Eagles. I mean, this job had already managed to rob me of my dreams and my sense of optimism and hope, so they might as well rob me of my identity too.
Another thing that the editor at the Big Issue has somehow managed to do is get the name of our podcast wrong. It is down as The Young’s Podcast. You’d have thought that the most cursory of reads would have highlighted this mistake; given that the name of our band is The Young’uns, it’s unlikely that we’d call our podcast The Young’s Podcast. I don’t know how they’ve managed to make this mistake, given that I wrote the answers. The answers were typed up by me, and so all they had to do was leave what I’d written in tact and it would all be accurate. I’ve checked the email I sent them, and this is what I wrote: “listen to our podcast, The Young’uns Podcast. I’m sure you can work out how to find it. You seem like a clever bunch.” But for some reason, this is how the published article reads: “listen to our podcast, The Young’s Podcast. I’m sure you can work out how to find it. You seem like a clever bunch.”
Well, they’ll have to be even cleverer now, as they’ll have to deduce that this information is incorrect. If you type the Young’s Podcast in Google then you are unlikely to find it. You get Jimmy Young’s Podcast, the Young Entrepreneur Podcast, Kirsty Young’s Desert Island Discs podcast, Young Lion’s Dancehall Reggae Bashment (DRB) podcast, Tim Young’s Contrast podcast, etc etc. If you do type Young’s Podcast into Google, we’re not even in the first 100 search results, and then I gave up after that.
All I can assume is that they’ve put it through a spellchecker and it’s corrected the name. So all they have done by spellchecking, is make the article less accurate and misspelt. I’d already spellchecked it, and it was all fine. I have employed Jools as my secretary (A lovely in-joke there for the old time dollop fans).
There may be people reading that article who’ll assume that it was me who made that stupid mistake, and they might then jump to the conclusion that, if I’m stupid enough not to be able to spell my own band properly, then it was probably me who also wrote my own name wrong. Well, I’m putting the record straight here: it’s all the Big Issue’s doing, not mine. I think you should all boycott the Big Issue and refuse to support any of the homeless people who sell it, until I am given a written apology, and it better be spellchecked properly. Perhaps when they see the devastation and hardship they have caused among the homeless community, they will come to realise their wrong-doing, and address their failings. If a few homeless people have to die in the process, then so be it. It is a small price to pay for ensuring long-term editorial integrity.
P.S. That was David eagles who wrote that last bit, whereas David eagle would not encourage any such thing, so if you found that last bit offensive, address your comments to David.eagles@theyoung’s.co.uk.
Downloadthe audio version here
The Kitty cafe was enjoyable, although probably as a one-off experience. Disappointingly though, there were no cats zooming around in wheelchairs. The house rules didn’t do much to make the human diners feel welcome. The first line of the rules basically told us that we should remember that we have entered the cats’ home, and that we should be mindful and respectful of that at all times. We were also informed that the cats weren’t there purely for our amusement. We then got a list of things that we weren’t allowed to do: no picking up the cats, no pulling the cat’s tail, don’t push the cats off chairs, don’t prod or poke the cats. I was starting to think that this would be no fun at all. I mean, I’d come all this way, and I wasn’t even allowed to pull the cats’ tails or knock them off chairs? We were also told not to feed the cats, yet there was a sentence later on which informed us that our food was our own responsibility, and if the cat’s jumped on our table and snaffled anything, then that was our own look-out.
We were then charged £5 upon entrance, which was simply a fee to sit in the cafe, and didn’t cover the price of food. When I first entered the cafe, I didn’t begrudge this £5 charge – after all, wheelchairs for cats can’t be cheep – but the fact that there wasn’t a wheelchair-bound cat present made me feel a bit cheated out of my money. Perhaps if I’d paid a bit extra they’d have let me pull a tail or two or knock a few cats off some chairs. If you do go to the Kitty Cafe, it might be worth enquiring. Also you might want to check in advance of going whether they’ve actually got any feline wheelchair users currently in their care.
When we arrived at our table, there was a cat lying on the chair at our table which I was meant to sit on. I knew that it was frowned upon to knock the cat off the chair, so I considered that I might be standing and eating, while the cat sat on my chair, and probably stole my food. But then I realised that there was nothing in the rules about not sitting on the cats. I remembered that the rules had stipulated no prodding or poking, and so, not wanting to break the rules, I made sure that there were no sharp objects in my back pockets that could potentially come into contact with the cat, thus causing it to be poked, and then I sat down. The cat quickly vacated my chair. David Eagle one, cat nil.
I met all the stars from yesterday’s Dollop: toffee, muffin, marmalade, pumpkin. I thought about trying to get a photo for the Dollop of the four cats standing around me, or perhaps I could have the cats lying on the table, while I held a knife and fork poised over them, as if I was about to eat them. But I couldn’t think of a way of getting all four of them in this pose, without breaking several of the Kitty Cafe’s house rules.
I managed to eat most of my food, before a cat bounced onto my table and ate the rest of my salad. I only got into trouble once from a member of Kitty Cafe staff, as I forgot about their “no stroking with your mouth full” rule. Ruth got into trouble for leaving the table before the cat had finished her meal, which apparently was terrible manners.
We overheard a bit of a spat between one of the diners and a member of Kitty Cafe staff. The man must have yanked one of the cat’s tails, because the waiter bounded over and said, “get your coat, you’ve pulled.” Unless the man had actually been propositioned by one of the cats, and the poor bloke, in spite of his complete sexual disinterest in cats, was forced to go upstairs to the cats boudoir and make love to it, which may have been one of the rules written in the small print section. I would have asked, but I didn’t want Ruth thinking that I was interested in having sex with cats, so I remained silent on the subject. I can always go back another time.
So, if you don’t mind sharing your food with a load of cats, and being treated as a second class species, where cats rule the roost, then the Kitty cafe is the place for you.
No, I am being a little facetious here, it was actually quite fun, principally due to its novelty value, and the staff were very hospitable. Although, I have to say that, otherwise I’ll be breaking one of the Kitty Cafe tenets which stipulates that anyone who speaks ill of the Kitty Cafe shall be hunted down and set upon by a pack of ferocious cats.
Another audio only Dollop (have I learnt nothing?) only this time I actually do manage to get around to talking about the Kitty Cafe.
Today’s Dollop is an experimental (with emphasis on the mental) 3 dimensional audio Dollop.
Download the audio version here
While browsing Twitter today, I noticed that a few people were tweeting with the hashtag, RemoveALetterSpoilABook. I don’t know where this hashtag came from, but nevertheless, it set my mind thinking, and here are some ideas of books that would have a very different feel if just one letter was removed from its title.
The Holy Bile
A heavily abridged version of the Holy Bible, edited to only include those passages that reference bodily discharge in some way. Here are a few example passages. These are genuine biblical quotes.
“Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. And the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not pull the sword out of his belly; and the dung came out.”
“Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother. But what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD; so He took his life also.”
“Yet she increased her prostitution, remembering the days of her youth when she engaged in prostitution in the land of Egypt. She lusted after their genitals – as large as those of donkeys, and their seminal emission was as strong as that of stallions.”
““When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.”
“’If there is a man who lies with a menstruous woman and uncovers her nakedness, he has laid bare her flow, and she has exposed the flow of her blood; thus both of them shall be cut off from among their people.”
These are passages that you probably won’t come across too often if you go to church, as it’s not the kind of subject that a vicar would want to do their Sunday sermon on, just before he and his congregation head home for a lovely Sunday roast. But this book is the ideal gift for anyone who loves reading about blood, gore and shit, but wouldn’t read the bible because they hate all that boring stuff about being nice to one another.
The Da Vinci Cod
While away on business, the controversial and widely contested fish communicator, Turbot Lingdon, receives an urgent late-night phone call. Ling ling, ling ling, goes his phone; it’s Mr Lingdon’s idea of a hilarious joke. But this phone call is certainly no joke, for his good friend, dilettante fish communicator and owner of one of the world’s largest fisheries, has been murdered.
A couple of days later, Mr Lingdon receives a letter, written to him by his recently murdered friend, which predicts his own murder and outlines the reason for it. Accompanying the letter is a computer disc which features a series of fish communication recordings. Mr Lingdon and his friend claim to be able to interpret what fish are saying by analysing the pattern of their swim. The letter had intimated that he was receiving some highly interesting messages from the fish, in particular the cod, yet he had been unable to fully understand what they meant. But recently he had been sent a death threat that warned him that, unless he stopped meddling in things he didn’t understand, and quit his job at the fishery, he would be killed.
After days of painstakingly analysing the fish messages on the disc, Mr Lingdon finally uncovered that the messages were spelling out the name’s of paintings by Da Vinci. After weeks spent Consulting these paintings, and constantly rereading the fish messages, he begins to slowly decipher hidden clues within the paintings, which seem to be referring to the location of a vastly important religious relic, hidden for centuries. But he needs more information from the fish. The person who murdered his friend must have discovered what he was doing and therefore killed him in an attempt to keep the location of this ancient artefact hidden, or possibly to discover it for himself first.
So, under the cover of darkness, Lingdon breaks into the fishery, in order to have a clandestine conversation with the fish. But Mr Lingdon is not alone. He reels in horror at the sight before him: hundreds of fish are being tortured by a man, who is shrieking at the fish to swim and to reveal their secrets about the hidden relic. But the fish, despite their interrogation, are refusing to comply. One of the fish, a cod, is being slowly cooked by the evil man. The fish is still alive , but his seconds are numbered. The man has a pike fish in a tank and he is screaming at it to reveal where the location is, or his friend will be cooked to death. But the tortured cod being cooked in the pan begins to swim an impassioned, defiant swim, and when the man looks around, he is horrified to see that the cod’s dying words to his fish friend are, “don’t tell him pike.”
What will happen? Who will uncover the ancient religious relic first? And how many fish will die in the process? Find out by reading, the epic, Da Vinci Cod.
My other offering is, The Lion The itch and The Wardrobe, but if I start going off on a long ramble about what that could consist of, then I’ll never get anything done today.
I’ve spent the day looking for some samples and songs I need for The Young’uns In The Mix. I knew I had them on a CD somewhere, which I was convinced would be housed in the shoe box full of old CDs that resided underneath my bed. So I got the old shoe box out and began to search through the cDs. Hours later, and I still haven’t finished my rifle through the shoe box, because I got distracted by the contents of each CD.
On one of the CDs was a load of diary entries from when I was at University. Even though these were personal diaries, I still wrote them in proper sentences, and used some rather flowery language and big words at times. I also included jokes and even gave each entry a title. I’ve wasted an entire day looking through these old entries, and as it’s getting late and I’ve still not finished today’s Dollop or done anything else, I thought I’d share one of the entries with you.
7th April 2006. When The Chips Are down
We went out this evening. We started in Wetherspoons. We all wanted food and so were intending to take advantage of Wetherspoons’ beer and burger deal for £3,99, which as well as comprising a beer and a burger, also comes with chips. However, not today, because they had ran out of chips! So we attempted to haggle with the man at the bar and asked if he would supplement the chips for onion rings, but he refused to acquiesce. Perhaps we should have punished this man’s unjust intractability by going elsewhere, but we’d already bought drinks and were very hungry, and so, despite our collective disinclination, we paid an additional sixty pence on top of the £3,99 in order to get onion rings. So Wetherspoons were well up on the deal, given that they’d got more money out of us and didn’t have to provide chips. And to add salt to our wounds, the obstinate barman will probably get rewarded for his unscrupulousness. His seniors will likely see this as a job well done.
But there was further insult to be added to injury. When our meals arrived, we had each been given a mere three and a half tiny onion rings. This was hardly a worthy substitute for a portion of chips. This meant that one onion ring cost about 18 pence. And a half?! A bloody half?! They actually had the cheek to snap the fourth onion ring in half. Tick tick woof woof, I hear the sound of watchdog!
After our night out, we were feeling hungry, due to our miserly meal earlier. While many of the less street-smart students were no doubt concluding their nights out with a takeaway, we craftily took advantage of the newly opened casino deal, where, in a bid to seduce you into gambling, they furnish you with complimentary sandwiches and chips. As long as you don’t actually gamble, but look as if you might gamble at any minute now, then a plentiful prevision of sandwiches and chips will be yours, for free. And all you have to do to avail yourself of this deal, is to be a member. And it costs nothing to become a member. So it’s completely free. But, you can get even more food for free out of the casino, as long as you are shrewd. If you order sandwiches and chips together, then you get just that, but if you order sandwiches first, and then once they have arrived, get chips, you get crisps with the sandwiches as well. Sandwiches, crisps, and chips! All for free!
Sadly, it seems as if this isn’t a very good week for chips, as the casino had also run out. We considered asking for onion rings as a substitute, but we thought it might be prudent to avoid bringing too much attention to us, lest they cotton onto our scam.
There was a group of girls on the next table who got chatting to us. I think they were impressed by our rebellious ways, noting how one of us would periodically sidle over to one of the machines, pretend to gamble for a minute and then come back, protesting loudly about how the casino had won again and taken more of our money, and saying things like, “Oh well, I guess there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” This was designed to convince the casino staff that we kept coming back here time and time again, and keep getting seduced by the free food into gambling and losing. This meant that we’d be heartily welcomed back next time.
A few of my friends were getting on really well with some of the girls, and a number of them left together. It was now just me and my flatmate, who is in a relationship, sitting at the table. Everyone else had left with the girls. I might have gone into a deep brooding depression that, yet again, I had been completely ignored and dismissed by the girls, while my friends had been successful. I might have felt sad, unattractive and lonely, were it not for the fact that they had all, in their haste to leave and have sex with each other, left most of their sandwiches on their plates, the idiots. I ate my way through them, imagining how pissed off and jealous my friends will be when I tell them about all the free sandwiches I ate last night, which they could have enjoyed if they hadn’t been so foolish as to leave with those girls. How they will rue their reckless decision. And so, I left the casino, in the knowledge that, in the great game of life, I am clearly a winner!
Baring in mind that this is a diary entry, I am very much writing as if to someone else, as if I have an audience. After all, why did I bother to explain the whole casino scam in great detail, given that I’d already knew about it, because I was the person writing about it? Perhaps a subconscious psychic part of me knew that one day I’d be embroiled in a challenge to write a blog everyday for a year, and that some days I’d be stuck for ideas or waste the day looking for things on old CDs, and so I wrote the diary entries as if I was addressing an audience, so that I could paste it straight into my blog years later. Well done me. I’m sure that I also had the foresight to realise that failing with those girls would be funnier than if I succeeded, and so deliberately sabotaged my success with them. It is a little bit disconcerting to note that, just like in these Dollops, I spent quite a lot of my diary making jokes about being unpopular with women. Maybe nothing much has really changed in those years. Maybe I’ll discover other similar subjects cropping up in my diaries that I’ve talked about regularly in these Dollops. Perhaps I wrote an entry about kettles. I’ll keep you posted as I continue reading.
I also like the pertinance of this diary entry’s title: When the chips are down. It works on a number of levels. Wetherspoons doesn’t have any chips, and neither does the casino. Also there is the subject of gambling, which gives another meaning to the word chips. And then there is the fact that I fail to get with any of the girls, and so the chips are down in that respect too. I’m amazed at how much thought went into these diary entries, baring in mind that they weren’t intended for anyone else to read. I probably put more effort into writing them than I do these Dollops. Maybe from now on I should simply release a university diary entry for these daily Dollops. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this excursion into my uni years
Download the audio version here
I think the prize for Dollop comment of the year so far has to go to Chastity Payne, who responded to my plea yesterday to get a Dollop-related tattoo: “OK, I’ve done it. I’ve just gone out and had, “Lie back and think of Hartlepool” tattooed around my left nipple…..in Braille.”
If you are not a Dollop regular then you may be a bit confused. A reminder that in order to get the most value and enjoyment from these Dollops, you should really read or listen to all of them. Preferably, you would read and listen to them, in order to allow your brain to engage with the content on a deeper level. But in case you are not a Dollop regular, then “lie back and think of Hartlepool” is the title of Dollop 102, where I bemoan that Hartlepool has been knocked off the top of the teenage pregnancy league by Burnley. I then reveal my plans to sleep with as many Hartlepool-based teenage girls of legal age that I can in order to correct this, as I am a proud Hartlepudlian and want to get my home town back to the top where we belong.
However, as virile as I might be, I cannot be expected to be the only male who answers to this noble calling. I will need other impregnaters to lend a hand, or if we’re being literal, lend a penis. Sorry if you find all this a bit too smutty, but it’s an important task, and there’s no point mincing my words, as I want the men and teenage girls of Hartlepool to fully comprehend what I’m driving at. So there is no point beating about the bush; although, in a literal sense that is exactly what I’m asking you men to do.
As popular as this dollop is, we are also going to have to reach a wider audience, meaning that we’ll need a proper concerted advertising campaign, to get the people of Hartlepool onboard. We will need posters and leaflets, and I am hoping that Chastity Payne will allow me to use her nipple on those posters and leaflets. I think it is just the thing to galvanise people and inspire them to get involved.
I am impressed that there is a tattoo parlour in Chastity Payne’s local area that can offer such a specialist tattoo. I wonder whether the tattooist did her tattoo in grade one Braille, which requires a lot more dots than grade two. A grade one Braille tattoo would mean that she has paid more than necessary, and gone through more pain than she technically needed to go through. If she’d gone for grade two Braille, it would have been half the price and half the pain, as it is essentially a form of shorthand. If there’s anyone else thinking of getting a Braille tattoo then bare this in mind. Also, she could have saved extra money by incorporating her areola as a Braille dot. It would have served as the perfect letter A. Still, never mind, I’m sure the pain and the cost was worth it, baring in mind that it has made her Dollop commenter of the year so far, and that her nipple will be used to further the cause of Hartlepool.
On Sunday morning, the newly married Sean and Emily went on their Honeymoon to Mauritius. I joked in the best man’s speech that Sean spends most of his life in the company of me and Michael, and that, so rare is it for Sean to spend more than a week away from me, he will probably be all miserable in Mauritius without me and start getting withdrawal symptoms. I imagine he will spend most of his honeymoon dreaming of being back with me in that cramped van, trekking the roads of Britain, then sharing a cramped dressing room in an arts centre with me, before standing around a microphone with me on stage for ninety minutes, and then rounding the day off nicely by us falling asleep in the same bedroom, or sometimes the same bed if someone at the venue messed up the room booking (or if Sean begged the person booking the room to put us both in the same bed and then pretend that it was an accident – I’m on to you Mr cooney; sometimes literally, if it’s a small bed and we both roll over at the same time).
It seems though as if my joke wasn’t that far off the mark, for when checking my web stats yesterday, I noticed that there was one visiter to my site from Mauritius. It is clear that, despite the beautiful senary, the hot climate, and the company of his new bride, he is nevertheless pining for me, as is illustrated by his visit to my website. This is very touching. Fear not, Mr Cooney, we shall be back in that van soon. In the meantime, I will keep you company with my blogs about tattooed nipples, and other miscellaneous bunkum.
Maybe I should have kept quiet about this, as perhaps Sean keeps the fact that he is listening to my Dollops a secret, fearing that Emily will get jealous. After all, I already spend most of my life with him, so she probably longs to have him all to herself for once, without me getting in the way. But she’s already started growing suspicious. She’s noticed that while they’ve been away, he will lock himself in the bathroom for ten minutes every day, wherein she hears the sound of his stifled laughter. She is growing suspicious that the laughter is being caused by the hilarious content he is hearing from David’s Daily Digital Dollop.
So, if you could all just keep quiet about Sean’s clandestine Dollop listening, and refrain from mentioning it to Emily, then that would be very much appreciated.
Of course, there is a chance that it’s actually Emily who is listening to or reading these Dollops. Or maybe both Sean and Emily listen to them in bed, like Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman. I hope they aren’t using these Dollops as an audio aphrodisiac like Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman do. That would be a bit disconcerting, although … actually … hmm … strangely arousing. OK, I don’t know what’s got into me. I’m off for a cold shower and to listen to some hymns. That should put me right.
Well, I’m back, and I can report that it didn’t work. What can I say, the Lord Is My Shepherd … gets me in the mood every time. Let’s just hope Abide With Me doesn’t come on this playlist next, otherwise I might lose control. No, I don’t know where this bit is going either. Bye-bye.
Download the audio version here
Another annoying thing about winning a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award – on top of the fact that it results in a poor quality Dollop the following day due to tiredness after partying – is that it leads to some really bland and uninspiring interviews. In the pre Folk Award days, we would be asked interesting questions that could generate stories and entertaining answers, but now that we’ve won the Folk Award, most journalists or radio presenters will immediately pluck for, “so how does it feel to win the Best Group prize at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards?” And what is there to say in response to that? It was great, fantastic, brilliant, excellent … I find myself just reeling off loads of superlatives and adjectives that all essentially say the same thing. Because, really, what else is their to say?
Recently I did an interview with someone who asked me this question. I responded with my usual selection of superlatives, there was a pause, and then she asked, “and then you won it again, for the second year running. How did that feel?” Again, what can I say that is interesting, other than just think up some more positive adjectives.
After I’d tried to come up with as interesting an answer as I could about winning for the second year running, she then proceeded to read a list of other awards that we’d won, and then asked me how it felt to win those. I’d completely exhausted my superlatives supplies, plus what did she expect me to say, other than what I’d said in answer to the last two, more or less identical questions? I thought about making a joke about the fact that one of the frustrating things about winning all these awards is that it then leads to really dull interviews where I have to essentially bore everyone about how it felt winning the award. In fact, people will probably get so sick of me blabbering on about the award that they’ll start hating The Young’uns, complaining that all we ever talk about nowadays is the bloody awards. I also thought about making a joke that at least she’d stopped short of naming all the awards individually and then asking me to comment on how it felt to win each one. But I thought that this might make me come across as a bit brash and up-myself, so I just repeated some of my earlier list of superlatives, knowing that I was almost certainly irritating and boring everyone listening.
Perhaps the real reason the Folk Awards voters have given us the award twice in a row is because they actually hate us, and think that the best way of getting us off the folk scene is to keep giving us awards, in the knowledge that it will then result in us having to talk about the awards non-stop on the radio to journalists and presenters, and thus eventually lead to everyone getting bored and pissed off with us. Oh yes, Folk Awards judges, I am onto you, I know your game. You are truly evil bastards!
We got a message on Facebook this week from someone saying: “Loved what you said at folk awards so much I’ve had it tattooed on my chest.” Not being able to see the photo, I had no idea what it was. Had he tattooed the entire speech on his chest? I mean, that would have to be a big chest, plus it would be pretty expensive; we spoke for over two minutes. In actuality, that it was a line from Sean: “Folk could easily be translated into one word, and that word is welcome.”
While I am thrilled that someone has been so moved by those words that they have it tattooed on their chest, I am a little aggrieved that I have written over 100000 words so far with these Dollops, and yet no one has found a sentence from all of that content that has inspired them to have some of my wise words tattooed on their body. I think a good one would be “I wouldn’t imagine it would taste very nice.” Where you have it tattooed is down to you, although, clearly for extra hilarity, you should have it on your genitals. Then, if you happened to meet a fellow Dollop fan who you were attracted to, you could use the Dollop-based tattoo as a way in, helping you take things to the next level.
“I actually love the Dollops so much, I got one of David’s hilarious catchphrases as a tattoo.”
“Really? Wow! Can I see.”
You would then have essentially been given permission to pull down your pants, and you don’t have to feel awkward about it, because they asked you to show it to them. Then, when your love interest saw your genitals emblazoned with the words “I wouldn’t imagine it would taste very nice,” they would obviously find it hilarious, but also potentially arousing. You could then both have a bit of a giggle about it, before you said something like, “I mean there’s only one way to find out.”
“What?” your love interest would reply.
“Whether it tastes very nice or not. There’s only one way to find out.”
You would both continue to nervously laugh at the absurdity of this situation, but it wouldn’t be long before you seduced them into giving you oral sex.
Et Voila, a Dollop-based sex tip for you there.
If you’re a man, you could get a tattoo on your testicles reading, “David’s Daily Digital Bollock.” Obviously it might be quite painful to get your testicles tattooed. It would require a hardcore Dollop fan, and it would certainly require some balls. Hahaha! I am so funny. Come on, I am well worth a tattoo.
I’ll try and get the photo added to tomorrow’s Dollop. I mean, the photo of the chest tattoo; I don’t have any photos of genital tattoos yet, but when I do …
To say that yesterday’s wedding went without a hitch wouldn’t be entirely accurate. For a start, Sean and Emily were married. Sorry, should I maybe have built a bit more suspense? But that wasn’t the only hitch of the day. One of the guests, an eccentric seventy-nine-year-old, decided to attend the ceremony in a kilt. Forty-five minutes before the wedding, he realised that he’d left it at home in Rotherham. He decided that he would have time to drive back home, get his kilt, and return to the venue in time for the ceremony. He didn’t tell anyone about this. I think, if he had, then they would have pointed out that it was unlikely to take him only forty minutes to drive from Sheffield to Rotherham and back.
At 3 o’clock, everyone was in their seat ready for the wedding to start, which it was due to do at 3 o’clock. However, someone was missing. It was Ian, the man who’d gone home for his kilt; except, no one knew this. As far as we were aware he was at the venue, as we’d seen him only an hour ago. We searched around the venue grounds, went to his room, which was in the venue that the wedding was taking place, but he was nowhere to be found. The registrars had to be at another wedding in the next hour, and so they couldn’t afford to wait around. So the wedding started without him.
He did make some of the wedding ceremony, but just not the wedding part, for by the time he made it back, Sean and Emily had already been married. But at least he got to see Sean and Emily signing some legal documents. Although, no one else was really looking at the legal documents signing, because they were all staring at the man who’d just come crashing into the wedding, out of breath, desperately trying to finish fastening his kilt. He then whispered to the woman next to him – although it was a very loud whisper, probably as a result of his deafness – “Would you give me a hand with ‘me sporran, love?” As she awkwardly tried to help him with his sporran, he loudly whispered, “have I missed much?” I’m not sure if he’d realised tht he’d missed the actual wedding bit of the ceremony, which might explain why he proceeded to get out a massive, unwieldy, antiquated video camera and start filming. At which point the registrar thanked us for coming, we applauded the newly weds and the ceremony ended.
In the best man speech, I told the story about when Sean and I went hitch hiking around the country together in 2005. I documented our hitch hiking experiences on cassette tape, and I’ll probably dig them out for The Young’uns Podcast, and play some bits and intersperse it with some retrospective detail and anecdotes.
This particular incident I mentioned in my speech was about the day when Sean and I had spent an entire day waiting for a lift. We were so convinced that success was just around the corner, and that if we moved to go to the toilet or get some food then that would mean that we’d miss the one person who’d have picked us up, and we’d then have to wait for hours before another ride presented itself. So we resolutely stood at the roadside, convinced that, any minute now … And so we waited … and waited. Eventually, at some point late evening, someone offered us a lift. We managed to get a hundred miles or so further South. So all in all, it had been a really great day, unless you take into account the fact that we’d spent most of it at the side of the same road with our bladders agonisingly bursting and our stomachs painfully rumbling out of starvation. But apart from that …
By the time we got out of the car, it was about ten o’clock. Everywhere seemed pretty deserted. The only place that was around and open was a McDonald’s. We went into mcDonalds and immediately visited the toilet, for a much needed urinate. We were both starving, and given that there didn’t seem to be anywhere else around, I suggested that we got something from McDonald’s. At this suggestion, Sean went off on a massive rant about global corporations and capitalism. He proudly declared that, starving though he may be, he was not prepared to eat at McDonald’s; instead he would seek out a local independent place to eat. I didn’t hold out muchhope of finding anywhere, but given Sean’s adamance, I accomponied him on a search for a local independent eatery.
We walked for over an hour, with barely any energy to do so, given that we hadn’t eaten for hours. There was nothing else open. We ended up walking in a massive circle, and came back to the McDonald’s that we’d left over an hour earlier. I assumed that, given that we’d done all we could, surely our only option now was to eat at this McDonald’s. But Sean wholeheartedly refused, and proceeded to give me another lecture about global corporations, and proudly declared that he would wait until the morning and then support the local bakery by eating there. We were both ravenous, and this didn’t help our mood, and so we stood in the doorway of McDonald’s, loudly arguing with each other about whether to eat there. I said that I said that if there was a local bakery open, then I’d be happy to eat there, but the fact that there wasn’t meant that we might as well eat at McDonald’s. We didn’t have a choice. But then he retorted by saying that we always have a choice. Our voices were getting louder as our argument got more heated. I tried to reason with him by stating that the people who work at McDonald’s are local, ordinary people, and that by eating at Macdonalds we would be supporting these local workers. I suggested that he should focus on this aspect. Sean countered this by bemoaning the low wages that these people would be getting, and how he didn’t want to support such an infrastructure. I responded by pointing out that he had no idea how much the staff at his precious local bakery were getting paid. The argument went on for quite some time, growing louder and more intense.
In the end, I stormed into McDonald’s and ordered some food, because I felt as if I would pass out if I didn’t get something. Sean stormed in behind me. We both sat at the table, while I ate, and Sean seethed. I offered to share my food with him, reasoning that this would mean that only one of us would have bought a meal, yet he would at least get something to eat. But Sean refused to accept any food, and so we just sat in silence while I hurriedly ate.
We then pitched the tent in silence, by the gates of the McDonald’s, and went straight to bed. I lay there awake for hours, listening to the sound of Sean’s stomach violently rumbling, while he tossed and turned, clearly too hungry to sleep. In the morning he got up early and returned to the tent whistling, for he had been to the local bakery and bought loads of food.
Nowadays, Sean will happily eat at a McDonald’s. I would prefer not to, if there are other options, but there have been times when there are other options and Sean has plucked for the McDonald’s. I mentioned this in my speech and bemoaned the fact that as Sean grew older, he let his principles slip, and lowered his very high ideals and standards. He became jaded and warn down by life, and became happy to settle for less. At which point I hilariously said, “which neatly brings me to the subject of Emily.” I believe it is customary for the best man to insult the bride in his speech.
However, my hilarious joke worked on two levels,because I then tied it into the story of Emily and Sean’s first date, which was at Nando’s, a global chain. I then pulled off another amazing bit of comedy, when I turned to Emily, and said, “it was Nando’s, wasn’t it?” After she had said yes, I responded with, “yes, nando’s. Just chickin.” As you would imagine, the audience went wild, I was lifted into the air and did a crowd-surfed lap of honour.
The other hitch was related to the DJ. The venue said that if they wanted a DJ then they would have to use the venue’s in-house DJ. If this was the Sean of eleven years ago then he would have put his foot down and ranted about wanting to support an independent local DJ, but the modern day Sean simply agreed to this rule.
The DJ didn’t get off to the best start. We all stood around Sean and Emily, ready to watch their first dance.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the happy couple, Sean and Emma,” he shouted. Some people laughed, some people pulled a face at the DJ, others shouted “Emily, she’s called Emily.” I think that, being quite drunk, I found it massively hilarious, and I raised my glass and loudly shouted, “to Sean and Emma.”
“Come on,” the DJ continued, “that was terrible. I can’t hear you. Let’s try again. Raise your glasses to the happy couple, Sean and Emma.”
“To Sean and Emma!” I shouted again, raising my glass and drunkenly cackling. Someone went up to the DJ and told him that it was Emily. He eventually got it right the third time.
“And now, the first dance,” he announced. A hush descended over the room, followed by a loud, cacophonous series of crackles and pops. At first, I wasn’t sure whether this was deliberate, and perhaps Sean and Emily had chosen some John Cage for their first dance, but then I noticed that they weren’t dancing. After about thirty seconds, before the DJ tried to announce that he was having a few technical problems, except the mic wasn’t working, so he tried to loudly shout above the din. The crackling continued, and he nervously started fiddling with wires, while testing the microphone by shouting “one two one two,” and then loudly shouting things at us off the mic in order to desperately stall for time. “OK, while I try and sort this out, let’s have a rendition of For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, for Sean and Emma.” In his flusterment – I know that’s not actually a word, but it should be – he’d obviously forgotten the Emma/Emily debacle from just a couple of minutes earlier. He’d also failed to realise the absurdity of singing For He’s A Jolly Good fellow to two people, one of whom was a woman, and thus not a fellow. Plus their jolliness was being somewhat tempered by the fact that the DJ kept calling the bride the wrong name, and didn’t seem able to get the music on. He valiantly attempted to get everyone singing the song by singing it himself, while he desperately started wrenching wires out of the back of his equipment which made a series of loud banging sounds to add to the din that was already occurring. A few of us loudly joined in with For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, finding the ridiculousness of it all immensely funny.
Eventually he managed to get the equipment to work, and he once again announced that it was time for the first dance. He pressed play and music began to emanate from the speakers. Sean and Emily looked around nervously. It was clearly the wrong song. But Sean and Emily are both in their thirties now, and as already discussed earlier in this Dollop, they have had to start accepting things and compromising, lowering their ideals and standards, which is probably why, after a few seconds of standing there and not dancing, they began to awkwardly move to the music, which was something that I didn’t recognise, and nor did they. So they danced their first dance to the wrong song, and we all stood and watched and applauded at the end, even though we all knew that it clearly wasn’t the right song. In fact, the only person who didn’t know was the DJ, who continued to call Emily Emma throughout the night.
Still, despite a disorganised unpunctual eccentric kilt-wearing old man and the world’s worst DJ, everything else went perfectly, and most importantly of all, they got married, which was the main point really. So, wherever you are, whether your reading or listening, let’s raise a real or imaginary glass and let’s toast the happy couple. To Sean and Emma! For he’s a jolly good fellow!