Sandwiches Corner

Eee, when I were a lad, Mr Men books only went up to number 39, Mr Slow. Take a peek at the back cover of any recently published tome in the series however, and there are apparently 46. The reason for this being creator Roger Hargreaves passed on in 1988, after which son Adam carried on the good, lucrative work; fair enough, but the last, and definitely least entry in the series (Mr Good, a halfhearted featureless white body with a crap green hat) is not kidding anyone that he’s a real Mr Man (if such a measure of ‘Mr Manliness’ can be made, and I believe it can).

However, there were 2 books in the series not even published in English. I know, I was amazed too.

Mr Crosspatch (or ‘Monsieur Bagarreur’) is just a fucked up perversion of all-time MM icon Mr Bump, so we’ll gloss over that. This is the guy who’s rocking my world: Mr No, or far more charmingly, Monsieur Non.

NO.

Now there’s someone for the kids to look up to - a bastard Frenchman who embodies negativity to such a degree all he just says no to the damn lot of it.

A new hero is born. A $200m Hollywood reimagining in which Monsieur Non is transplanted to LA and is helped by humble bistro-waitress Kirsten Dunst to get back in touch with his positive attitude surely beckons.

Obviously not though. Just a cool Neubauten video to brighten up yr day.

Yay! It’s the greatest economic depression in the history of the known universe! Coupled with the average Cornish wage being barely sufficient to rent an abode large enough to raise your arms in, let alone swing any kind of animal around, it’s unsurprising that any opportunity to snap up a home of your own that doesn’t involve working until the age of 400 or blackmarket vital organ trafficking (how much am I bid for one kidney, a bit manked up?) is likely to snag a few takers.

Desperate times these may be, but I’m still not handing over my lifetime savings of £17.45 and a bag of shiny buttons on the strength of a promise made by a weirdo on a billboard.

Would you cripple yourself with debt buying a house from this man?

There are 2 main reasons I find ‘Andy Parsons’ - if that is his real name - somewhat dubious.

a) “Owning your first home has never been easier”? Really? Maybe in some parallel dimension it has, one so absolutely contrary to our own that dogs shit rolls of fifties and Mr. Tickle has just been appointed governor of the Bank of England. But probably not here.

b) You look fucked, man. What the hell where you drinking last night? Is it cheap? Where do I get it?

Scope yourself out a good cave now and get a shotgun, that’s what I say. I’m hoarding every last bag of Monster Munch in mine, in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, so if you were thinking of popping down the shop for a bag of Pickled Onion, forget it.

Schmap! is a pretty cool interactive mapping service which includes slideshow photo sets to illustrate places of interest and similar popular attractions.

There is a fourth edition coming up and one of my photos is up for consideration to illustrate metropolitan animal-caging facility, London Zoo.

Why not make the editor’s life a misery by bombarding them with relentless emails of support for my depiction of bovine beauty? Go on, if I get my picture included, I’ll chuck a big party on Gorilla Island.

If you were to picture Land’s End in your mind’s eye, it may summon the image of a rugged, windswept panorama of natural beauty, perhaps bring to mind the myths and legends of Celtic folklore, or give cause for contemplation as to what it means to inhabit this peculiar island of ours. I would lay good money on the likelihood of whatever vision you might conjure up not normally involving Dr Who – and that’s because Dr Who has absolutely no connection to Land’s End whatsoever.

"What the fuck am I doing here? What's that big blue thing? God, my legs are fucking killing me"

Nevertheless, here it is, just as you didn’t expect, an enormous plywood Tardis-shaped cash cow presumably for the benefit of not only the BBC (who are already skating on thin ice as far as my licence contribution is concerned – and that’s just for their occasional employment of Lenny Henry - which yes, does also include when it’s for charity), but also for the owners of Britain’s most south-west extremity based family time-killing jamboree.

It’s the people running ‘The Lost Labyrinth’ next door I feel sorry for. Spend years building up a cave-oriented attraction and what happens - here comes Auntie to piss on your chips. Fair enough though, I wasn’t paying to go in either of them, even with the promise of a full scale animatronic diorama of William Hartnoll punching Peter Davidson in the nuts, mainly for abusing time-travel to return to a point just before lunch in order to steal his sandwich, but also just because he was a bastard.

Other attractions on display include a genuine Cornish rescue helicopter, mounted at such an angle as to suggest a plummet into the icy coastal waters is imminent, an impression aided by the admittedly effective decision to enhance the realism of the scene with two pilot mannequins, each disturbingly slumped over their controls as if having suffered simultaneous airborne heart attacks, which if I was capsized in the Atlantic or stuck up a cliff face, would seem to be just rubbing my face in an already trying situation.

Recovering from all the excitement whilst perched on one of the many finely crafted benches available, I actually overheard a fellow visiter grumble: “you come all the way here, there’s not even a lot to see, and the Dr Who merchandise is terribly overpriced”. Hopefully, someone involved in the planning of future attractions at Land’s End may happen to read this, and the penny will finally drop – what the people of Britain want is not staggering natural beauty, carefully preserved flora and fauna or the opportunity for calm reflection and contemplation whilst enjoying the diversity of local wildlife in it’s natural environment – what they want is cheap, pointless tat peddlers by the dozen, and as close together as possible, so they won’t have to walk too far. Slap down a Primark and a Maccy D’s and you’ll really be coining it in.

You may as well go on holiday in Croydon town centre, you fucking moron.

Having bought my first iPod recently after finally succumbing to the pressure to validate myself as a 21st century human being by irritating fellow commuters and standing in shop doorways shuffling though my collection of ultra-rare Hungarian bassoon concertos, I did find myself wondering if I might eventually run out of places to ensconce such items whilst ‘on the move’, what with today’s hectic, non-stop 24 hour lifestyle and so on.

Obviously, manufacturers are alert to this, hence the attempts to cram as many features into every device as possible, meaning the average mobile phone not only allows me make prank phone calls to anyone across the globe at the drop of a hat and to text my therapist 300 times per night, but can also alert the authorities to my precise position on the globe to within the nanometre, suggest a suitable accompaniment to dinner based on my blood alcohol level at that time and whichever toastie I may be having that evening, emit a miniature grappling hook at high speed to assist in the scaling of moderately sized buildings on a whim, and even create a pan-dimensional whirlpool vortex simply as a mobile crapper for when caught out in the wild (an enormous waste of energy I know, but I just can’t resist that tiny reel of loo roll it spools out afterwards.)

Unless you’re a jogger or middle-aged German tourist the bumbag, or fannypack as our American cousins would have it, should remain firmly out of the question. As is so often the case, for all our trumpeted technological sophistication, it’s nature that suggests the most obvious answer, on this occasion in the ridiculous the shape of the kangaroo. Previously only of interest when kitted out with a pair of boxing gloves and a hideous temper, the kangaroo has come into his own in this gadget obsessed age with the inclusion of a roomy carry-pouch fitted as standard on all models.

Taking the marsupial pugilists as our cue, Sandwiches Corner Surgical Procedures are now happy to offer a unique lipo-bagging service, in which we use powerful domestic hoovers to rapidly remove excess fat from the stomach and hip area, before flipping over the remaining skin flap and artfully stitching up the sides with a colourway of your choice, leaving you with a handy repository for those can’t do without items that you wouldn’t want to, in fact can’t, leave home without. Never misplace your belongings on the train again! Forget the worry of leaving incriminating evidence at your next crime scene. Your skin-tote can be fully customised by an in-house artist with a tribal pattern, meaningless foreign phrase or celebrity portrait of your choice, and is guaranteed roomy enough to carry anything up to the size and weight of an average car battery, although capacity may vary dependent on initial weight.

Prices from £10,000.