Dear all
Sorry for the lack of email last week, things started to snowball and I found myself unable to sit and write it all out.
Monday started with an odd bit of news, I am a tramp! I should probably explain that a little more… As part of the Rob must Die challenge, a friend of mine contacted the author Stuart MacBride He has agreed to write me into his next novel which is due out at the beginning of next year. the main dead person in the book is a Polish person and my name isn’t Polish enough so I am being written in as a dead tramp!! A natural causes kind of death without an autopsy, but a form of death nonetheless.
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Earlier in the year somebody challenged me to do a 10k run, the catch here was his donation will double if I manage to beat him over the distance. Already outlawing the obvious of simply doing his knees at the start line I have to get training. Anyone with any tips for a non-runner let me know. I can swim for ages or cycle forever just can’t run unless there’s a ball to chase as I get bored so quickly. The event we have entered is in Brighton on the 26th October – wish me luck, I’ll need it.
Saturday saw me complete a lovely challenge, Richard’s Cousin set me the task of doing the Monopoly pub crawl. As she is a student she was worried that she wouldn’t be able to donate a great deal so came up with the idea of making a donation of 20p in the pound for the amount I raised on the day. Setting off in our lovely crawl tee shirts (thanks Matt and the lovely people at Mantis World) we left Old Kent Road and wandered through Monopoly’s streets – top hat in hand.
It was great fun, but at times a little like herding cats. Trying to get a group of increasingly drunken people in and out of 26 pubs was getting tougher and tougher. To speed things up the genius idea of shot rounds came about and the group was introduced to a new drink called Lemon drops. It’s basically a shot of vodka which is followed by biting a slice of lemon which has been dipped in sugar. They are surprisingly good and made it possible to get through a few pubs quickly.
Should you wish to have a go at it, this website provides a really good start point – although sometimes it is good to change pubs where local knowledge can steer you to a better bar (a good case in point being Dirty Dicks at London Bridge or not to end at The Tottenham on Oxford Street and instead go to the Phoenix just off Oxford Circus)
To finish the day a few of us went downstairs at The Phoenix for their Sin City night which has a Country & Western theme, walking down the stairs to the strains of the Duke’s of Hazzard theme tune I knew we’d found the right place. this lead to a a ridiculous amount of dosy doing and swinging partners. I have to say thanks to the promoter of the night who after hearing about what we had done in the day and the other challenges this year refunded the entrance fee I had paid and told me to add it to the collection.
In total the pub crawl raised £202 which was £197 on the day and £5 from the taxi driver on the way back, the challenger is donating a further £45 and I’ll chuck in a couple of extra quid which makes it a nice £250 donation for a great day out. Pictures from the day can be seen here.
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Last Tuesday I went to Walthamstow Dogs with a couple of friends to make a visit before the doors are shut forevermore. I only include it in this email as one of the people who had originally said they’d come in the end couldn’t make it but asked me to stake a tenner on the one dog in the first race and if it won all the proceeds would be given to Twothousandandgreat unfortunately several thousand people also had a similar idea of going to the track before it closed which meant actually getting a bet on was in some cases impossible. I was one away from the window when the hare started running and the dog I would have backed did win. As I was at the window for the next race I did put down my friends bet. This time however the fairy tale didn’t come true as the 1 dog failed to make an impression on the race.
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Saturday was supposed to be Tell a Joke Day but I wasn’t feeling particularly jovial as I had to come in to the office to catch up with some work. I did find the time to catch up with a friend on Messenger through the day who I told a series of increasingly bad jokes to – but I don’t feel I have done enough to count this as a strange day, so I am going to have to fit in another before the end of the month.
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Sunday 17th August was National Thriftshop Day – I wasn’t 100% sure how to celebrate this as the concept of thrift shop doesn’t exist quite as it does in the US. I could have taken thrift to mean cheap and gone and genuflected before the might of Lidl or Costco, spent time walking around a poundstore asking the staff how much each item was (Funny for the first 2 times – after that they start getting angry) but then decided it was more about second hand. I visited a couple of the local charity shops in my local area before traveling up to Camden to visit the stables market where there are hundreds of thrift stores.
Starting with the goal of buying the best possible thing with £10 I went through dozens of shops. You could easily waste days in some of these places. The old toy shops were incredible. I found myself going had that, had that, had that so many times and now seeing that they are collectors items. (This goes way beyond the ubiquitous star wars figurines but into the realms of top trumps, big trak and hundreds of other items. I never considered myself spoilt as a kid but I realise now, how much superfluous crap I must have had.
Some pictures of thriftshop day can be seen here
In the end I plumped for something which wasn’t technically from a thrift shop or technically under £10 but it does bring me onto Monday which was Bad Poetry Day. In a comic store I found a series of figures from Tim Burton’s Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, which are beautiful poems about characters like Stain Boy and Match girl.
For Bad Poetry Day I asked people to email me a verse of bad prose. I had about a dozen peole send me poems which can all be seen here. If people can have a read of them and let me know which is their favourite I’ll mail them the rhyming dictionary as their prize.
My personal fave is the bad Haiku:
Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
refridgerator
As a postscript one of the poems had magical powers… Big Dog actually came true. The star of the narrative (Big Dog) had gone missing last Thursday but after having a poem written about him on Facebook he indeed turned up in Gareth Gates’s apartment block. (you’ll have to read it for that last sentence to make sense.)
I’m now trying to convince the author of the poem to write a verse about a certain bearded fellow making it to £10,000 for Macmillans by the end of the year as she appears to be able to make things happen with words.
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Lastly but by no means least, We have a date set and in the book for the John & Yoko Challenge – it will be happening on Friday 3rd October at the beautiful Garrett room of the Troubadour which can be seen here - It’s an amazing place and I am so happy to have them behind me on this challenge. The e-bay page will go up in this week and i’ve got to get press releases out about this ASAP in order to get as much promotion out of this as possible.
For those who are unaware of the challenge – I have to spend 24 hours in bed – the catch is I need a Yoko and I do not get to choose who it is. The person who bids the most to share the space for 24 hours in an auction wins. I’m not 100% who or why anyone would want to do this which is why I need to get support from all angles.
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Keep on challenging me and I’ll keep on accepting
Rob / Devani
