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Somehow on Twitter we got round to talking about times we'd bought chocolate bars or biscuit with one of their ingredients missing. It happens about once every six months. I once (or maybe even twice) got a multi-pack of Trios with no biscuit in them and it was the best day of my life (no offence to my wife and kids). Someone else got an all chocolate Trio which I would actually put as the third worst option. No biscuit was perfect. They would have brought out the Duo.
But it led on to chatting about other occasions the system had been baulked or cheated to provide life-affirming joy - getting money and a choc bar from a vending machine (or in my case, money and condoms from a condom machine as a 14 year old, even though I wouldn't get a chance to use one for 5 more years and even then the woman in question would insist we didn't use one, and it was then another year before I got a chance to use one - not one of the ones I'd got for free I should add).
I used to love playing in the penny arcades as a kld - my mum didn't like it as she feared it would lead to a lifetime of gambling and debt, but she was wrong. I already possessed that gene and so it made no difference if I went on some one-armed bandits.
Or maybe she was worried about the kind of people who hung around in arcades. It's hard being a parent. I am suspicious of everyone around my kids, even my wife. What if she just had them so she could abduct them?
They still let me go in to arcades every now and again and one time on holiday I somehow found a 1p machine that you didn't need to put 1p in to make it work. Maybe I was idly trying out all the machines cos I had no money left and suddenly found one of them worked, I don't know.
Of course I proceeded to empty the entire machine of 1ps and walked out of the arcade with the pockets of my short conspicuously bulging. The figure in my head is 336 one pences, but I am not sure that a boy's shorts could hide that much. It was certainly over a hundred though. It was a fortune to me and could have bought a London flat in the 1970s.
What was interesting about this incident though and part of the reason it really sticks in my mind (not that it needed anything else - this and the Trios are the highlights of my life and they'd better bloody feature in buy funeral) was that I couldn't hide my bulging shorts from my parents. And they knew I was too young for the bulge to be anything but pilfered booty. So I had to confess to them what had happened.
My parents are scrupulously honest and would never steal or indeed purloin anything even in such a moral grey area. Perhaps they were in a rush to get on or perhaps they admired my perseverance, but I remember my dad commenting that maybe it was OK, because the arcades made their living by ripping people off, so this was a deserved win for the little guy.
I got to keep my one to three pounds worth of ill-gotten gains though, though had the arcade manager seen me leaving he would surely have broken my 8 year old legs as a warning to the other kids.
One day George Clooney will star in a film about this caper.
But Jesus, think of all the Mojos I must have bought with that money.
People are going crazy for the nothing-like-the-Beano-fan-club membership packs. And rightly so. It's nice to belong. To discover all the extras you will get for your money (as well of course as the podcast themselves - which you'd be paying well under £1 each for, especially in August when you're getting 21 of the fuckers) please
view this video
Feel free to leave a comment about how thin I look. (I've actually put on a little bit)
If you are already a badger who pays less than £3 and want to upgrade to get the pack then Chris Evans (not that one) has
these instructions for you.
If you are already paying £3 or more a month as a badger then Chris will soon be sending you an email asking you to confirm your address and you will get the pack without having to do anything more.
And I've added loads more of exciting names to the Edinburgh Fringe RHLSTPs (and the average audience is getting closer to 100 - though 200 is what I am aiming for, so buck up and book dudes. Check out
the tour page for guest and ticket links. David O Doherty, Sophie Duker, Jena Friedman and Josie Long all added recently. You can almost certainly turn up on the day for any of these, but weekends and that 2 for 1 Tuesday are selling the best.
