Precious

fish fingers

Hola. Hope you are well.

The first thing I have to report is that I’ve had no further sightings of Les Dennis in the last week, in fact I’ve not seen any former game show hosts.

Having worked 2 whole days the previous week, I had a well deserved week off last week as it was half-term and schools were off, woohoo! But I am in a local school working as a classroom assistant, for at least 3 days this week, and probably longer as the person who I’m covering is off sick and likely to be off longer than the 3 days. So in some bizarre twist and I’m not sure how it’s happened but my work now depends on people getting sick. In some ways I’m like a one man pharmaceutical company, although at least pharmaceutical companies produce products that make the person get better, I just step into their job.

 I did  however use my week off productively (sort of)  and did something I’ve not done for a while. I did a comedy gig. Me and my mate Adam, (an unknown actor) decided to team up and perform as a double act, the 3 Prong Attack. The premise is a little bizarre, we play two former hospital radio DJs from 1999, who think they are bigger than they are, but instead of returning to the airwaves have decided to do their radio features in front of a live audience. I’m not sure how we think these things up, although we did have a hospital radio show circa 1999 and we do think we are bigger than we actually are. As you can probably tell from the above description, there was plenty of scope for this not to work and don’t think it hadn’t crossed our minds on many occasions, including at the beginning of our set when we were performing a rap to bemused faces. But I have to say we got away with it, as people seemed to laugh throughout our set in the right places. I can’t help thinking we were helped by performing infront of a really good audience, who seemed up for all kinds of comedy, even 2 idiots pretending to be DJs. Laughter being a natural drug, we are now talking about doing other gigs. I’m sure we will knock it on the head as soon people stop laughing and start staring.

In other news from last week, we bought 60 Fish Fingers, solely because they were on offer. If you bought 1 packet of 20 you could get 2 other packs free and they weren’t even the cheapo fish fingers. So how could we resist such an offer? Well we couldn’t and we didn’t, even though we already had 17 fish fingers in our flat. This did mean that for a small period of time we had 77 fish fingers in our flat. Surely no one has ever had that many fish fingers in one household before. Feel free to let me know of your fish finger exploits or let me know what things you have stockpiled in the past, cheers.

And Finally…. ‘Her With One Permanent Job’ and I decided to have a quiet Saturday night in, so we got out a DVD, ‘Precious’. For those that haven’t seen Precious it’s about one girl’s life as she tries to overcome, incest, rape, physical, verbal and emotional abuse, poverty, illiteracy, obesity, HIV and having Mariah Carey as her adviser. I think we might go out next Saturday.

Til next week, stay safe!

The children are our future

Hola. Hope you are well.

I also hope you all got through Valentines Day unscathed. On last week’s blog post I asked if women actually like Valentines day, from the comments I got and having spoken to my female friends it would appear women are just as unenthused by it as men. Ok, I’m not saying get your wife/girlf nothing, but it would appear women will be happy enough with a card and food. Take your other-half to a restaurant, if the recession hasn’t hit your pocket or a maybe a take away for the rest of us. Should anyone be interested, we had fish & chips. Please note guys this is isn’t a scientific survey, so if next year you give your wife/girlf a card and a take away and she doesn’t appreciate it, don’t blame me, as it’s quite clearly your fault for listening to an unknown comedian.

I also mentioned last week that I’ve now got my CRB clearance, I’d also registered with a couple of teaching agencies, so I was ready for the madness that is work, or so I thought. On Tuesday, I got a call from one of the agencies at 8:40 in the morning, sending me to work at a nursery. This did surprise me, firstly as at the time they rang me I was about to do some washing up, as I thought if I was required for work that day they would have rung me before this. And the second reason I was surprised is because when I registered with the agencies I did say I didn’t work with really young children. But as it was my first job with the agency and because the nursery was only a few stops on the tube from where I live, I accepted the job. I got to the nursery and got shown round, I say got shown around, what actually happened was the woman pointed me to things without moving from her spot, a master of efficiency. To be honest the day wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The worst part was in the afternoon, when I was assigned to feed a young girl (about 1 yr old) some green mush. This could have gone one of two ways, she could have just eaten the food making me look good, or she could have burst into tears. Naturally she did the latter, and I can’t help thinking she knew exactly what she was doing. What was quite good, is the fact the children get to nap early in the afternoon and after they wake up, they get to have a sing-song. I couldn’t help thinking they should introduce this in everyone’s place of work, I’m sure it would make for a happy workforce. 

Also last week, I joined another library, which means I’m now a member of libraries in 4 boroughs, Manchester, Trafford and since moving to London, Lewisham and Southwark. I worked out that if I wanted I could get out 50 books in total. With that amount I could open my own library. I shouldn’t say that not even in jest because the way this government are trying to close libraries it might give David Cameron ideas.

And Finally… Arguably the most exciting thing that happened to me last week was seeing Les Dennis wandering around, minutes from my flat. I don’t know what he was doing there and I didn’t get to speak to him, or do that noise that happens when people on Family Fortunes get the answer wrong. But despite this it was still quite exciting. Feel free to let me know if you’ve ever  met or seen Les Dennis, maybe we could set up some kind of group.

Til next week, stay safe!

Love Hurts

Stephen Wolfram

Hola. Hope you are well.

For the last few Mondays I’ve mentioned what appear to be made up nonsense days, such as, ‘Happy Monday’ (the happiest day of the year), ‘Blue Monday’ (the most depressing day of the year), ‘Sickie Monday’ (the day most people were likely to call in sick). Well today is another such day, ‘Valentines Day’ (the day men buy cheap tat, in an attempt to show their other-half they love them). Surprisingly, I’m not a massive fan of valentines day but that might be because I’m a man, but I also suspect women don’t really like Valentines day either, they just like to see us men squirm. If you are a woman reading this feel free to confirm or deny this.

From metaphorical pain suffered by men to actual pain suffered by me. For a couple of days last week I was in great discomfort in my chest area. I’m not sure what caused it, but my self diagnosis narrowed it down to trapped wind or I must have put out a muscle. The only problem with the last prognosis is that I’d like to say it must have come after I’d been lifting heavy weights at the gym but in reality the pain came after I’d been rigorously scrubbing the shelf of the grill. If this was the cause of the pain, it would have to be the lamest injury a man has suffered in the history of the planet. Having said that, it did bloody hurt.

On last week’s blog post I mentioned  my CRB woes, well today I can officially announce to the world, that I’m not a perv, as both my CRBs have cleared. I can’t help thinking the ‘fun’ starts here, or as Morrissey put it, ‘I was looking for a job, then I found a job. And heaven knows I’m miserable now’. Or as ‘Her With One Permanent Job’ put it, “Now you don’t have an excuse not to get a job”. I must admit that had crossed my mind.

Onto other stuff. I often get given CDs, because not only am I a mover and shaker in the world of comedy, I’m also an influential figure in the music industry. Anyway, I was flicking through my CDs and noticed I had 2 copies of Plan B’s album, ‘The Defamation of Strickland Banks’ and so as a treat, I thought I would give it away to a reader of this blog. So if you’d like the album, all you have to do is be the first person to write a comment via the comments button saying you would like the CD. Once you’ve done that, you can email me, emailjuliandaniel@yahoo.co.uk with your postal address and I will send it out to you. I wonder if in some parallel world Plan B is giving away a copy of ‘How To Dump Your Girlfriend’ via his blog.

And Finally… I was flicking through the Saturday Guardian magazine and saw an article about Stephen Wolfram, (See Pic at top of this blog post), I didn’t read the article because it was all techy stuff. But the pic of him did make me think he looks  like one of  David Walliams’ comedy characters. Feel free to make up your own minds.

Til next week, stay safe!

Lost Profits

orange peel

Hola. Hope you are well.

Last week I mentioned it was ‘Happy Monday’ (the happiest day of the year), this coming 2 weeks after ‘Blue Monday’ (the most depressing day of the year) well this Monday is ‘Sickie Monday’. The day most people will call in sick with a fake illness. I have no idea how or who works this out. So if you are the person behind this please show your workings out. I’m surprised ‘Sickie Monday’ didn’t coincide with ‘Blue Monday’. It would appear that people went to work when depressed but not 3 weeks later, odd.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was having CRB trouble (the criminal check clearing me to work with children). The initial problem was that despite the fact I had one it wasn’t portable so I had to get a new one, at my own expense. I was tracking its progress on the internet and saw it had been sent back to the agency as there must have been a problem with the form. I therefore let the agency know this and they said they would contact me when the form came back. I hadn’t heard back from the agency for over a week, so I rang them and they said they hadn’t received the form. After 2 weeks I rang again and they still hadn’t received the form. So I thought I would be pro-active, I’d heard successful people use this word so I thought I would try it. So I emailed the person at the agency who deals with CRB applications and said when the CRB does turn up scrap it as I would process it with another agency. The next day I processed the new CRB with the new agency, at my own expense. The next day I received an email from the original agency, saying they had in fact received my CRB form and had corrected the mistakes and had already sent it back to the CRB people, a few days earlier. Of course if I had known this I wouldn’t have processed the second one. So I’ve gone from having one CRB clearance but which wasn’t portable to three, two of which are portable.

Other than my bureaucracy problems, I having been taking in a bit of Art. Here in the sophisticated south, they have a promotion called ‘First Thursday’ where galleries open their doors late giving more people the chance to see the exhibitions. I have to be honest at this point  and say I have a very basic understanding of art. When I say basic, I mean I look at a piece of art and go, ” I like that” or “I don’t really get that”. For example, one of the artists had drawn pics of her dog (now dead) and I could see they were drawings of a dog. However, in another gallery there was some orange peel on display. To me that’s not art, that’s littering. As it so happened before going to these galleries, I was a bit peckish, so I had a banana but I couldn’t find a bin after I’d eaten it so I put the skin in my coat pocket. On seeing the orange peel, it reminded me of the banana skin in my pocket, so I decided I would add my own touch to the display. I didn’t  really but I was a little bit tempted. It would however have been quite embarrassing getting chucked out of an art gallery. Imagine if  I had been charged for criminal damage? Not only would I be the lamest felon in Britain, it would also severely muck up my chances of passing my 2 CRB checks.

And Finally… At christmas my brother gave me some money as a present, quite a lot of money (£60) but I didn’t think we were doing the whole swapping of presents, so I just got him a bottle of  wine for him and his missus. The wine by the way was considerably less than £60, so this put me in an awkward position. I decided I would give him back the money but yesterday was the first time I’d seen him since Christmas, as ‘Her With One Permanent Job’ and I went round to his to watch football.  Afterwards he gave us a lift back, this was when I gave him back the envelope of money. With this being London, he got out of the car to give ‘HWOPJ’ a hug goodbye. About an hour later, I got a call from him saying he couldn’t find the money and that he thought when he opened the door to get out of the car the envelope had flown out. My natural instinct was to think it must still be in the car, but I still went outside to check. And there was the envelope on the floor meters  from where the car was parked, unopened and the money still inside.. This was made more remarkable not cos there are a few chancers in our area but because it was a really windy day, so for the envelope not to have moved was unreal. But what this ultimately means is that I’m now a bottle of wine down from the Christmas experience.

Til next week, stay safe!