Timolsky in need

No, you aren't dreaming. It's a new blog.

You're right, I've got a lot of explaining to do. What sort of time do I call this etc? Well, I'm sorry. I'll get round to writing about those missing two months of blogs at some point. Anyway, can't we just let the past be the past, especially when it's in the name of charity.

Tonight is Children in Need. A very worthy event, and a time when all of us should stick our hands in our pockets. I mean, to donate.

Over the years I've been at the forefront of fundraising. No, they didn't send me to Africa with Lenny Henry or anything like that, just that I've always been in jobs where promoting charities is super important.

Hence the picture on the right. Yep, that's me dressed as 'Arty Beat' to help launch the British Heart Foundation fundraising at a previous job. It wasn't supposed to be me. The bloke in question got stuck in traffic so, with 5 minutes notice I was asked if I would step into Arty's shoes. His enormous shoes that make every step feel like you've got children hanging off your ankles. Obese children at that.

As I was bundled into the shoes, red leggings and finally the actual heart bit, the woman from the charity told me "Remember, you can't say anything.". To which I replied "OK." and she immediately got angry and said "NO! You can't reply". To which I found my only way of communicating was to simply wave my hands around, my hands which were now giant foam gloves that felt like I had a turkey on each fist.

Anyway, I spent the next 10 minutes standing next to the CEO of the company I worked for, whilst he made a speech and I had to stand next to him and look interested. Quite hard to emote from inside a giant muscle on legs. I found shifting from foot to foot and occasionally putting my hands over my mouth did the job. In fact, that was pretty much all I could do - cover my massive mouth up. I then spent 10 minutes whilst people came up to me and tried to talk to me. No-one knew who I was, so under the cloak of anonymity I got mischevious. Following people around the office, doing basic admin tasks like photocopying, going in the women's toilets - that sort of thing.

Eventually the real mascot man arrived and I was taken into a room to be 'de-hearted'. When they took the costume off I was sweating like never before, feeling that I was actually having a coronary - ah, the irony.

Anyway, that was the most extreme thing. The same year, I made up my own face to look like Pudsey bear for a photoshoot. I daren't show you the picture as I can't draw, let alone apply stage make-up, so I looked less like Pudsey and more a clown who'd been involved in a massive industrial fire. Still, it got in the paper.

As did the final thing I arranged. And this is something I really am NOT proud of.

One year I saw a date in an online charity calendar called 'World Food Day', so I decided we'd support it and do a photoshoot. So I arranged for three people to dress up - an Englishman in a bowler hat with a sausage on a fork, a girl in a stripy jumper with a french baguette and a chap in a sombrero with some mexican food. Lovely, great picture, celebrating world food, fancy dress, bit of fun.

Except, it turned, out, World Food Day was actually a day about raising awareness of starvation in the world, and how we shouldn't waste it. So a photo of three national stereotypes laughing with food probably wasn't the best thing to send to the local paper was it?

50% off this blog, this week only, oh and free garlic bread for the first 50 visitors.

Remember email? Remember that eh? Excited when it arrived weren’t you? Old friend getting in touch? Amusing picture of cat on motorbike? Details of your online order for a replica medieval broadsword? Oh the innocence.

That was email when it started wasn’t it? All lovely and exciting. Nowadays it’s become a different story.

I’ve written before about the amount of spam my first hotmail account had and how I’m now careful what I sign up for. And, yes, the constant sales pitches for Viagra and free iPods and rocket powered trousers don’t seem to trouble my new email anymore.

But what does make up 90% of my mail these days is offers. Now, that would be a good thing – I like 50% off food (which is what most of them are about) but I’m getting almost daily reminders that I can eat my own weight in chicken at Nandos AND get a free drink. Every other day Pizza Express tell me that if I eat some food then it’ll only cost half the price (although they don’t mention it costs approximately £29 for two drinks to go with it). And I’m fed up hearing that a Debenhams sale has some things at almost 70% off – yes, 70% off very cheap things.

To be honest, I’m getting a bit annoyed.

The annoyance comes because now I can’t make a purchase without first checking if there’s an online code. If I order a pizza over the phone and don’t quote a code I imagine they put down the phone and say “He wants to pay full price!” before falling about laughing in heaps of mozzarella and dough. Same online, “If you have a code, please enter it now” pops up and I’m googling things like ‘discount voucher for underpants purchase’ which leads to 15 mins of fruitless searching and often losing the will to both live and buy pants.

And now, in ‘the real world’, I genuinely worry I’m paying over the odds for everything. It’s like going in a shop and buying something that you know is £5 but giving them a tenner and saying “THIS MUST COST TEN POUNDS” before running out of the place without taking your change.

In short, I feel like an idiot, and there’s seemingly no voucher code that can make that go away.

Lies, lies and a fake videoplayer.

I've never been that good at lying - untruths I mean, not stretching out horizontally on a surface (I'm great at that). There aren't many occasions I'm called upon to do it, and then it's usually to protect someone's feelings through phrases like 'Oh, what a beautiful baby' or 'I definitely think you should cut the green wire'.

So I thought I'd come clean with my deceptions to which you can decide whether I should be forgiven or not:

- I've told boring people who have sat next to me trains that my stop was coming, to which I've got up - gone out the door and walked down a few carriages before getting back on.

- Once or twice I've also pretended to be an answerphone when someone has rung me up - that's quite easy, if you can say 'Hi, I'm not around at the moment, leave a message' and come up with a convicing beat-box style beep. You can get away with it quite well if you can not laugh when people start leaving the message.

- When I was 7, a child boasted to me that he had a video player. Thinking on my 1982 feet I told him that our family had one too, but that it only recorded the programme you were watching at the time, and the TV had to be on. He questioned this and I remember just saying that it was a special one from Japan. Yes, a special one, that was techically useless. I might as well have said it ran on sticklebricks and had a remote control made out of toblerone.

- I also recall claiming, as a child, that I hadn't been playing with my father's razor and cut myself but that 'I was trying to cut excess string off a balloon' and that it was the only sharp thing handy. I got away with that.

-At University I managed to avoid being beaten up by a Coventry thug who wanted to kick the proverbial out of me by adopting a vaguely convincing accent (based on Richard Beckinsale in Porridge) and claiming that I actually ran the music counter at the local Woolworths, rather than being a sponging student. Somehow I got away with it.

As the years have gone by though, I've realised that my lies are nothing compared to the world-class, olympic level liars out that. My favourite was a chap at school claimed he couldn't go swimming with the rest of the boys as 'whenever I smell chlorine I get a nosebleed'. So whilst we were all diving for rubber bricks and being told to tread water by a fascist swim teacher, he sat behind the glass chomping 10p Wham bars and cola bottles. I remember that several of us got suspicious of his 'chlorine allegry' and when we had a vial of the material in chemistry lessons, ran towards him with it to see if it was true.

The same chap went on to claim that he had written a 32 part tv cartoon series, based on the Aliens from the film Aliens that a US TV network was interested. He also said that people got cancer from Skittles (the sweets, not the UK version of 10 pin bowling). I'm not sure any of it was true, what was though - was that he had bad BO and massive sunken eyes. He couldn't decieve us about that.

Anyway, it's people like that who make me realise that my lies are rubbish and that I'll never be a world class liar.

Unless I just made him up of course...

A man of letters

Amongst my tasks at work, apart from being hilarious and handsome all day long of course, is the editing of an internal magazine. By that I mean a magazine for employees, not a magazine created within the human body.

Last week I helped a team member wade through the post for the magazine. We'd had thousands of pieces of correspondence, mainly because we'd run a competition to win a trip to Disneyland Paris and that sort of thing really seems to get the stamps flying.

And within that pile of post lay some wonderful examples of gift-wrapped gags that were better than anything I could write. So I thought I'd steal them anyway and pass off the work as my own:

- Bad spelling. Cataclysmically bad spelling of what should have been 'Disney Colleague Competition'. 'Disknee competition' (I hope that was a joke), Disney College Competition (I wouldn't trust a Disney college, they'd have Mickey Mouse degrees) and one that was just addressed (without anything else) to 'Disney' - we must be like Father Christmas, it just finds us.

- Cheating. We stated 'no multiple entries' and could only spot one bit of cheating. And frankly we couldn't have missed it. 3 entries. All written on the backs of Old Christmas cards. Did they disguise their handwriting? Nope. This woman had her own labels with her name on stuck on the cards (she'd clearly done this before.) Like a deranged serial killer who just can't change their method of killing.

- Postcards...in envelopes. People sending in competition entries on postcards, but putting those postcards into envelopes. Honestly. I think we may need an awareness campaign of what postcards do. My only guess? They didn't want the postman to find out the answers, a bit like covering over your school work with your arm in case that smelly kid tries to copy.

- Postcards...of randomness. Entries on postcards depicited such diverse sights as: (a) A 1947 British Horror Film (b) A greengrocer showing off cabbages and sprouts (c) Myleene Klass being shot out of a cannon into a disused canal(although that may have just been something I photoshopped)

- Erm. The wrong idea. In amongst the post there was one completed wordsearch puzzle with the name and contact details of the person who had done that. Now, we do have a wordsearch puzzle in the magazine, yes. But there's no prize for it. I had to assume that the sender had either been a bit confused or just wanted someone to check his answers and that he hadn't cheated. I think I'm going to send him a prize anyway, possibly a bumper book of wordsearches.

- A photo of 12 people eating charity cheeseburgers that were the size of birthday cakes. Sorry, not a photo, 6 photos. As brilliant as it sounds, I have to find some way of printing this.

Still, whatever turns up in the post these days that isn't a bill or a kebab shop leaflet (we get 4 a week at home now, it's like they've spotted my belly) is something to be thankful for. So, Letter writers/competition enterers of the world, I thank you.

After all, as this blog proves, it isn't easy to write stuff that people will actually read.

Musings on a sausage factory regulation

Recently, for a whole variety of reasons, I’ve been asked some quite bizarre questions. No, not the police wanting to know if I’ll ever follow through with my threat of shooting Myleene Klass out of a cannon (seriously though, that woman has taken the simple task of reading an autocue to new lows), the questions have been official ones.

Yes, official questions that seem perfectly sensible when written, but when put into my head sound ridiculous.

Recently we moved house and amongst the questions on the form for my mortgage protection policy, about my health one asked: ‘Have you seen any suspicious moles recently?” Of course it meant skin irritations, but all I could think of was some sort of twisted Tim Burton version of Wind in the Willows. A mole with an eyepatch carrying a sword, something like that.

Another question, I swear, asked ‘Have you ever had a terminal disease and then recovered?’. Erm. It wouldn’t have been terminal if I recovered would it?

Sometimes the questions just set my mischievous nature off.

A while back I was helping my missus fill in a job application (for her current job, before you ask) and I offered to complete the final HR questions at the end, the ones like ‘ Are you qualified to work in the UK’ etc. Thankfully she wanted one more proof before pressing send and spotted that on the question “Do you have any criminal convictions?” I wrote “I DONE A MURDER.” She did get the job incidentally.

Today though, I had my favourite question I visited a sausage factory (there’s a line I never thought I would type) and before I could get in the door I had to fill in a brief questionnaire. Question one, was it my name? Nope? Who I was visiting? Nope. The first question was ‘Have you had a bowel related illness, such as dysentery, in the last 2 weeks?”. Health and Safety, of course, but still a hell of an opening gambit. Try that as an openter the next time you’re on a blind date.

I was hoping, later in the questionnaire, there would be a note saying ‘Please do not touch the bacon slicer…because she doesn’t like it’. Sadly there wasn’t, as this was real life and not a Tom O’Connor joke from 1978. Shame.