Picture from Trip Advisor 

For no reason whatsoever I always imagined the town of Arnold to be a bit of a shit-hole, there is no reason why I thought this and today I was delighted to be proved wrong - Arnold is a charming little market town full of small shops and plenty of places to eat and drink. It also has a fair amount of charity shops and I was delighted to pick up four Top of the Pops compilation albums (not affiliated with the BBC series of the same name, I am of course referring to the Pickwick Records series of albums containing cover versions of popular hits of the day) and two new clowns for my collection. Nobody suffering from coulrophobia has ever been to my house but I look forward to the day it happens just for the laugh, especially if it happens to be a bailiff or Jehovah Witness. 

As today felt like a Saturday (despite it clearly being labelled Good Friday) I decided that I would have a breakfast in a cafe and we chose Re:Fresh (not sure why the trendy spelling, it wasn't a pretentious place at all) which sits on the market place within earshot of fruit and veg sellers yelling their wares to all who pass.

This could have been one of the best value fry-ups (although my usual criticism about the bacon being grilled rather than fried applies - it's political correctness gone mad) I have had for a long time. The 'Mega Big Breakfast' cost £3.95 although didn't come with tea, you had to buy that separately, when will they learn? For that price I was presented with two rashers of bacon, two sausages, two eggs, beans, tomatoes (because you should never be made to choose between beans or tomatoes), mushrooms, two slices of toast and a hash brown. Mandi had a brie and bacon panini (when did toasties become paninis?) and a mochachino and the whole lot only came to £9.55. 

The cafe was clean and well laid out although there were perhaps too many tables as the floorspace was a little hard to navigate. Service wise I have no complaints as the staff were great but there is one negative element that I think made a lot of difference. There was a noticeable lack of background music, no CD or radio on and it gave the place a funny atmosphere. Even a bland daytime radio station such as Smooth or Radio Two would have helped.

Due to illness there is no edition of The Sunday Alternative podcast this week.

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April housekeeping

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Saturday Breakfast: We are making a pilot episode of this music and cookery show and we need your help. Your donations will help to get this made.

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@SteveOliver76

Just when I need to try and concentrate on revamping The Sunday Alternative and kicking things into gear career wise, my stupid brain kicks another idea about. I recently set up an account with Audioboom because I wanted to listen to Russell Brand's new podcast series, and I ended up with an account that allows me to upload podcasts, just what I don't really need. At first I pondered putting The Sunday Alternative on there instead of the Internet Archive but I only have a free account which allows me to upload as many times as I like, but only ten minutes in length. At first I thought I might as well just ignore it as I don't have a need for a ten minute long podcast, and I don't really want to start something that isn't on my to-do list.

Then it hit me by accident; I was just thinking how because on a Saturday we haven't been going into town until later in the afternoon, or that I haven't gone into town because I have been spending the day in the office (on a Saturday, no time and a half for the self-employed), we haven't had breakfast in a cafe for a while and I haven't as a result been writing about them. So of course the idea of a ten minute breakfast review came to me, an idea that very few people would be interested in. Or would they? Maybe I would be offering a valuable service to the greasy spoon cafe frequenting world and people would thank me. If people wanted a clue as to where the best fry-ups were to be found, all they would need to do is have a quick listen to my verdict and make a decision based on it. As it seems unlikely that I am going to be offered a food column based on the bits and peices I have written in my blog about breakfasts, I might as well offer the service as one of my ever-growing portfolio of free content in the hope that it will lead to donations. Obviously the donations don't go into my pocket but are used to create entertaining podcasts, short films, comedy sketches and such like. If I go ahead with this idea I will pay for the breakfasts out of my own pocket because I don't expect to be paid to eat delicious but life shortening meals. Also, I won't do breakfast reviews on request and will remain independent and honest in my verdicts.

Another thing, although I haven't been offered a job as a breakfast critic, I did come very close to having an idea stolen. Or borrowed. Not the first time this has happened in Hockley!

An exciting (by 'exciting' I am using the word loosely) detail about this particular podcast is that I have added (or downloaded to use the correct vernacular) AudioBoom as an application on my phone, this means that I can record a breakfast review while the meal is still fresh in my mind. I might get funny looks doing it in the cafe itself but I can record it into my phone as I walk away and people will just think I am talking on the phone and not mental. Because let's face it, recording a podcast on the move about breakfasts isn't the work of a nutter is it? That's as daft as posting an entire blog of photographs of sweets or Disney characters on ice-cream vans. Is it any crazier than photographing cups of coffee? No. This is why I refuse to join Instagram.

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March housekeeping 

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I am trying to raise the money to extend The Sunday Alternative, read about it here.

We also need to fund a pilot episode of a new music and cookery show, read about it here.

Every penny that I receive via the PayPal button will be used to fund future projects such as podcasts, short films, comedy sketches, documentaries, and more. They will be made available for free online and I will not personally benefit financially. All help is greatly appreciated.

steveEoliver@gmail.com

@SteveOliver76

A dressing gown and sofa kind of a day.

Yesterday was very much an indoor affair as we wound down from the festive whirlwind and decided not to bother doing anything strenuous. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s need to go for a walk I wouldn’t have even bothered to get dressed. My attire for the park was all fished out of the laundry basket and as soon as I returned home I was back in my pyjama bottoms, slippers, and an old Converse sweatshirt that is almost more holes than garment these days but one of those comfy items of clothing that you can’t stand to throw away.

My workaholic tendencies got the better of me in the morning (I say morning, I mean some time after I woke up) and I went upstairs into my office for a few hours with the intention of sorting out the music for the podcast, catching up on my blog, answering some emails (as there were over one thousand unread emails I decided to call my inbox a work in progress) and recording the podcast. I did very little of this list, although I did sort the music for the podcast but I just couldn’t get motivated. As much as I wasn’t to roll up my sleeves and start working again, I am aware that from January 1^st I will be promising myself that I will do some work every single one of the 365 days so my brain wants to build up to that and still be in holiday mode for now.

It wasn’t until I needed to look in my diary for something that I even realised it was Saturday, this week is such a headache for not knowing what day it really is; I had been referring to yesterday by its official name – ‘the day after Boxing Day’, what chance does that give us? By being in my office and working I was not only working on a Saturday but during Christmas week too, what does that equate to if I worked in a shop or something? Time-and-a-half is the norm for Saturday but does that go up for Christmas week? Whatever it is, I’m not getting it for being self-employed and dedicated so please consider this when reading this blog or anyone of the 365 blogs I write (not counting the blog for The Sunday Alternative or the conceptual art/waste of time photo blogs) and giving the PayPal button a little click. It’s also not too late to enjoy and audio book or two from my Bandcamp page, available on a name your price basis, all the money that goes into my PayPal is used for your entertainment.

Time is running out before the collection of Christmas films are packed away with the decorations, so we watched It’s A Wonderful Life yesterday afternoon. Having done so much research into A Christmas Carol my eyes were open to the similarities between the two stories on this viewing, more so than when I’ve watched this film on previous occasions. After tea we set up a coffee table spread of cheese and crackers, pickles, cold meat, and nuts and ate and washed it down with sherry simply because the time of the year permits it.

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Saturday 12th October

I am absolutely charmed by the fact that my new blog about Skittles has had over three hundred page views since I advertised it, but no individual blog reads. This indicates that everyone clicked on the link, looked with disbelief that a workaholic on the brink of a nervous breakdown had time for such idiocy and stepped away. That is exactly the reaction I was looking for and nobody let me down by giving it anything more than studied ignorance. I know that the Skittles blog is much more of a Tumblr thing, but I can’t make head nor tail of it and have added it to the list of Internet related things that I am not a part of.

We had an early night last night, if you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is that at the end of an exhausting week we drank a lot of wine with a big stodgy dinner and that made us too tired to do anything other than fall asleep. It happens from time to time, although if I went back and told my teenage self that one day there would come a day when you didn’t want sexual intercourse due to tiredness he would be devastated.

It was one o’clock this afternoon before I woke up, Mandi had been up since twelve and as it was a rainy day neither of us particularly felt like going into town. It was Goose Fair last week so we didn’t go to town for breakfast, and this week it became two weekends in a row that the quest for the perfect fry-up was forgotten. Actually, it worked to my advantage because it gave me the chance to cook breakfast, something that I really love doing but rarely get the chance to do. I made my potato thing; cubed potatoes, mushrooms and sliced up bacon all fried together in a big frying pan, add rosemary to flavour, and serve with a fried egg on top washed down with two mugs of tea. In an alternative universe I own a café and today a writer and radio presenter came in for one of my breakfast specialties and wrote about how wonderful it was in his blog. The idea of doing a little video series of breakfast recipes is one that I keep coming back to and then forgetting about again. Saturday is the ideal day to indulge in the bigger breakfast as it keeps you going all day while you go shopping, to the football, the cinema, the pub, or whatever else it is that you choose to do on a Saturday.

What we chose to do was absolutely nothing. At half past one BBC2 showed a compilation of songs by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, which I sang along to while cooking breakfast. This was followed by Carefree, a screwball comedy again starring Fred and Ginger, and according to the on-screen menu, this was to be followed by South Pacific. When Carefree ended I quickly washed up the breakfast pots, wiped down the kitchen surfaces, put the kettle on, popped outside for a cigarette, and we were both on the sofa as South Pacific was starting. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to check the information on the screen, so what we ended up in front of was a documentary about the south pacific.

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