A can of baked beans in tomato sauce is a deadly weapon far more effective and innocuous than a can of rape spray. You heard it here first!

A woman is walking home late at night carrying a tin of baked beans in a plastic shopping bag. Step1: Man accosts lone female in the street. Step2: Woman swings the beans around in a wide arc over her head several times until a suitable velocity is reached and then smashes it down onto the intruder’s head. Step3: Impact knocks the intruder out stone cold and squirts cold beans all over his face and neck. Step4: Police arrive on the scene and want to know what happened. Woman states that she went to the mini-market to buy some beans for her dinner and was attacked on the way home.

CASE CLOSED.

DT

Why haven’t chip shops caught onto the idea of curried mash? I have now been in secret possession of this simple recipe for twelve hours and it’s quite frankly burning a hole in my pocket!! I feel like I am doing a disservice to the builders of Britain if I cling onto this any longer. I added curry powder to some pretty dour looking boiled spuds last night (I add curry powder to anything that looks dour, food being a popular one) and upon stirring in the sprinkles to over-boiled spuds created an oil painting of some considerable ambrosia!  Chips and curry sauce – stick em together and … curried mash. (Why does chip shop curry sauce always have a stray pea floating in it?)

DT

Is there a painless way to carry shopping bags home? I’m talking of course about those plastic bags that take about one million years to degrade in landfill and near cripple you for the brief time you come into their working life. Tally up the work/life balance here – they are made, work for about half an hour and then spend a million years in a subterranean retirement home. In contrast, organic hemp bags lead a full career and are retired with military honours.

There’s a major realization a mile from Tesco’s that your fingers are blue and the last time you remember feeling them was about half a mile ago! At the one mile point, doubts start to creep in about getting the bus after all. You’re too povo to buy a car and thought you’d brave the pain to save £1 bus fair. At the two mile point you’re fully committed and you start to think of ways to spend your £1 saving to take your mind off the fact that gangrene has set in from the second knuckle. You’ve got no mates who would be willing to pick you up, and can now openly consider yourself the saddest loneliest bastard within a two mile radius of the supermarket. So, you start to swap bags around, chuck the soup in that bag and displace the weight. This helps for about ten minutes until you stop again in that bent-over crunch position by the side of the road trying to separate skin from plastic. It’s worse if you happen to be with a woman; well my woman to be precise. I get comments like “come on tuff guy,” or “do you want me to take one for you?” The standard male ego response to this attack on the size of my genitals can only be “I need to balance the weight luv…. I’m Okay!” I am a f**king liar – go ahead and tell her you are dying here by the side of the road like road kill in silent a prayer to the God of public transport to deliver a minibus.

DT

Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t like ice cream? Who the hell doesn’t like ice cream? Are these people even worth knowing! Put them into the same slush pile as those freaks who don’t like chocolate or chips.

I am an ardent lover of chips and chocolate, but give me ice cream or take away my soul. It’s a genetic inheritance on my father’s side of the family. My dad eats ice cream by the tub in one sitting. Then again, the man can eat three layers of a biscuit tin in an afternoon. I ask you – at what stage does a man become a glutton. Ask any kid whether their father eats Kilimanjaro-size Sunday roast dinners each week, and the answer much be found in fatherhood. Fathers are obviously hungrier than the fatherless. All that running around playing soccer in the garden and constructing mail order trampolines on a Sunday afternoon builds an appetite that only a tub of ice cream can satiate.

In admittance my own ice cream addiction, the discovery of Ben & Jerry was a milestone on the vanilla pod highway. There is nothing B&J have done with ensembles of food that the rest of the confectionary industry hasn’t already done. They just did it with the king pin of all delightful sweet things – ice cream. Things have distinctly never been the same again. Their ice cream appeals to the child in all of us – cookie dough straight from momma’s wooden spoon. Ohmygod… I am ten years old again buried in the cloth of my momma’s gingham apron lost in the oblivion of a cookie dough rainforest. Here’s the deal – If you don’t like ice cream, than you were denied a childhood. I will feel sorry for you whilst I lick my spoon and excavate great chunks of chocolate pieces from my tub. Get a life!

DT

The Hard Rock café I was eating in today had a pink Cadillac suspended from the roof directly above me. There’s surely no way it could fall, but I still couldn’t enjoy my curly fries for fear of it landing on my head. I then made myself laugh at the thought of my own obituary – ‘hit by a pink Cadillac whilst eating curly fries.”

When you think of all the freak accidents that happen every day, there’s an administration clerk at the registry of births, deaths and marriages that has to record them onto death certificates. The term ‘death by misadventure’ is very appropriate to me being squashed by a Cadillac with curly fries poking out of my broken skull.  

DT

The emphasis is on “look” gay as opposed to being gay, or even acting gay.

I am an espresso-drinking straight man who happened to catch a reflected glimpse of myself today in a café. My entire frame is wrapped around a tiny little cup, and unless I tape in the little finger to a bigger one it involuntarily sticks out and makes me look gay. My clothes are too crap to be an aristocrat or a gay man, so at best I can pass myself off as metro sexual.

The general rule is the bigger the bloke, and the further away from Paris he happens to be sipping an expression – the gayer he looks. Gay men and theatre directors should be the only men drinking espresso in the UK.

DT

As the advice goes, how do you actually go about meeting someone at a supermarket? Which aisle is more amenable to love? There is something very romantic about dairy (cow’s tits, milk maids, etc) so I would personally opt for midway down the cheese and margarine aisle. Single people have cats, so look out for the cat food in their trolley.

 Have you noticed the basic flaw in this theory – people do not speak to each other in a supermarket, so unless you’re stacking shelves and someone asks you where the gluten free pasta is, starting a conversation could be tricky. You’ll need a better icebreaker than ‘can I help you carry your cheese,’ or “haven’t I seen you by the McVitie’s biscuits before?”

Real supermarket love is offering your ticket at the deli counter or making eye contact in the dried fruit section. In a world of consumables and bright lights eye contact is king. Dress for the occasion. Walking past the bleach dressed in a backless ball gown might be overstretching the limits of subtlety, and will make you shiver uncontrollably by the frozen peas.