¶ Opening Chat
- Hot Bean Summer diet: eat your pulses to get your pulse up.
- Henry has forgotten how to put glasses on while wearing headphones. Stressful to watch. Deskill during the bean hiatus, like an astronaut becomes flaccid after 2 months on/1 month off in space. Katy Perry also suffers badly in Zero G so has had to be encased in a music studio buried deep in the Earth's crust. Can she come out with the Mercury Prize? Is she eligible? Mercury prize mainly for milliners and dentists. Also, Katy Perry isn't British. Milliners mostly make headphones now (the hats of the ears).
- Henry is going balder, making for a more slippery surface when putting on headphones, but his beard remains bristly and strong, so perhaps the 'phones could hook onto his jaw?
- Henry's glasses woes: he can only see things that are close through the bottom of the glass (too complicated). The middle area is for viewing a kaleidoscope vortex or the face of heaven. An arm fell off Henry's glasses 6 months ago and the optician loaned him a spare arm while the new arm was on order. Opticians as a dark, unregulated art.
- Sitting GCSE/driving text should be done every 5 years. Mike knows someone who sat an Ancient Greek GCSE as an adult and did so well they reset the mark boundaries for all the kids. Ben feels he would smash GCSEs now with only a bit of work (big sigh from Mike). Both Henry and Mike bollock him for this tragic middle-aged 'university of life, mate'-ery. Ben insists he could smash Geography GCSE tomorrow, which Mike finds rude and insulting to those currently suffering through their exams.
- Henry got a C because he thought tortoises were amphibians. Instagram has been serving Henry a lot of tortoise content in its 'short films' algorithm. Pam barking in background because Henry's chat is a bit 'Telegraph opinion piece' and she's currently trying to subscribe Mike to that paper.
- The Telegraph's clickbait headlines target Henry and The Times targets Ben because it can sense his middle-aged 'common sense can get you through GCSEs' musk (smells of smoked, scotched Battenberg). Always adverts for stories by middle-aged women with much younger lovers. Where does Ben fit into that narrative? Must be the Saab, or perimenopause doing weird things to men now (probably a stretch). The woman in the story is shagging her way through the Greek Islands in order to smash her Ancient Greek GCSE and Professor Winklestein's grandson.
- Getting back to the mother strand. Henry assumes everyone is watching the tortoise videos he is served because he grew up in a linear TV environment where we all watched Tomorrow's World simultaneously. No water cooler moment where everyone knows how Rockalina the tortoise is getting on. Everyone in their own emotional microclimate.
- Second springs for the 50-year-old tortoise, Rockalina, and Ben's 50-year-old woman in The Times. Rockalina saying 'Yes!' to everything, including being the puck in the World Series final of ice hockey.
- Now fully back to the mother strand: Henry's glasses' legs debacle. You couldn't write it. Or you wouldn't if you wanted a job in publishing. Good luck getting a job writing the e-numbers on a packet of fruit pastilles. Henry's glasses legs falling off/being replaced is a bit Trigger's Broom. Henry considering going more chunky, e.g. like Elton John, who has a range of glasses now at Specsavers (you have to exit sideways using the trench) which you try on behind a piano (the glasses come up through some dry ice).
- Henry could go for the round, James Joyce-looking glasses but he can't run away from his head shape. The structuredness of glasses shows this up, similar to hats showing up that your head is too small for your body. When Henry is changing at the beach with a 50s curtain around him, people assume he's a sandwich board and start reading the special offers or telling people 'cheese pastrami' if the letters have fallen off.
- An illustrator can draw a bicycle or a person, but a person on a bicycle is too difficult. So glasses are the same as a bicycle: something that humans were never meant to know (an aide has just run into Keir Starmer's room). Henry shouldn't have been trying to explain this to the optician, especially when it's Bernie Taupin, he's a busy man. This all ties to a new jingle: The Illustrator's View.
¶ Topic Chat
- Is Exeter the world's only rural city? Mike does know a Sean who he likes a lot (same Sean?). Henry wonders if Sean might be 'shorn' because that is the first thing that happens to those born in Exeter before going out into the world (also people called 'depelted'). Is St Davids in west Wales the smallest city?
- How to define 'rural'? This was Ben's dad's job vis-à-vis how many pharmacies were needed per square mile. Rural = fewer pharmacies but bigger suppositories (like a tank shell). Rural if (1) there are ticks and (2) some creatures you shouldn't walk behind (including pharmacists, who will lash out).
- Indiana Jones and the Massive Suppository of Doom. Henry imagines the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark but a warehouse full of suppositories: Arse-gos/Argos (a long way to get to that punchline).
- Wild Camping is in the zeitgeist in Devon because a Dartmoor landowner (feudal tosser) just lost a case where he tried to stop people camping on his land.
- Henry realised how much wilderness the UK has when watching a documentary on red squirrels (Ben saw one only last week). Mike's two facts to tell children: grey squirrel origin story and the phases of the Moon. Henry couldn't believe Cumbria was full of huge expanses. Ben wonders whether Henry had his eyes shut when travelling between Glasgow and London, but they were in fact rivetted to Dostoevsky's heft.
- Henry has wild camped in Scotland. Mike wonders if this was intentional as wild camping feels like something Henry might do accidentally and rebrand later (along with Steve's wild drowning experience). Henry's friend Raymond (everyone who moves to Scotland is given a friend called Raymond) took him wild camping on Arran, which Henry loved despite giving less than a shit about tents and metal things that screw into each other and maps showing icons that represent trees. Cartographers as failed illustrators.
- Mike associates camping with extreme discomfort after being forced to wild camp as a small child somewhere north of Inverness. Sleeping in body bags scared of your head being pulled off by a lynx/someone dressed as a lynx. Was Henry's Raymond a lynx in a human costume?
- Henry fell in love with the Highlands in a deep way, but a way in which he'd rather not leave his car, or ideally, helicopter. Don't love that woman enough to walk up her, especially given the number of midges that come out of her mouth.
- Henry's mind was blown by some very mid countryside when Ben drove him back from Machynlleth this year. Basically just a field. Even brownbelt will do it: only see two Ryman's from here!
- Ben went to Britain's most remote pub, by boat only, in the Highlands. Had a crap, inaccessible venison burger in a stale bun (of course it is) and then left the pub and saw a golden eagle. Henry is getting eagle stuff sent by the algorithm along with the tortoise stuff so he knows golden eagles have been seen in Birmingham using the canal system.
- Mike's wild camping as a 9-year-old was not fun because they were being toughened up and fighting over rifles, perhaps being trained by the IRA, to kill rabbits. Was it a Falklands War or Cod War recruitment drive?
- Henry did Forest School Camps (the opposite of Mike's experience: he probably fed a rabbit or put on a musical of Watership Down with a happy ending). One of his seminal anecdotes comes from this time, which he already told part of (the cat lat stuff) in the September 2022 London live show (audio available to Sean Bean tier Patreon members) and part of (his mum sending him a letter, onto which he cried all over his mum's news of Pinter's latest pause in the London theatre) in extra-beans-october in the extras for the 2022 mail episode. Henry tells the latrine (lat) story again. Mike wouldn't have had a modesty curtain when he had to go to the toilet during his horrific wild camping experience. Henry made a deal with his arse: hold it in for a week. By the end of the week, there was a ship's mast/Pez head on a stick situation on a long walk and Henry was told to do a 'cat lat' (= just shit on the ground over there). People walking by were smelling the stench of hubris.
- Mini plug in the name of independent cinema. Mike saw 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' and it was superb. Ben didn't go because he was offered maternal trifle at his auntie's birthday party at the same time as he had a ticket for the film. He chose the trifle.
- Mini plug for the Beans' tour: the Glasgow gig is now on sale.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
- Emails section begins, with no email jingle, at 48:15.
- Paddy built a kitchen from scratch, listening to the Beans, with no injury but did cut off a finger while listening to Beef and Dairy Network 2 years ago. Because it was a Bob Trescothick-heavy episode (Mike's character in Ben's podcast), only Henry is blameless. The finger was reattached without a knuckle.
- Hugo works in Westminster (Rifkind? Divorced at 50 and is being shagged bandy by 20-year-olds) and once saw Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber leave an apartment building with his small dog (was he hiring a room by the hour?). Hugo Googled 'Andrew Lloyd-Webber + dog' (you shouldn't do this) and found the dog is called Mojito and is an emotional support dog needed because of the critical shoeing the Cats film received. Can this be placed on Judi Dench's shoulders (also Idris Elba and James Corden)? This would be one notch off high treason.
- Autumn emails about the fifthwedback10mins episode and the rhino costume marathon runners. When Autumn ran the London marathon, at the bit where the costumed characters went over Tower Bridge in high winds, Autumn was able to overtake them all, laughing away, while being broadcast on Eurosport and the BBC. Lovely name, not such a lovely person.
¶ Jingles
- Lewd Content (11:03)
- The Illustrator's View (first play) (20:49)
- Bean Machine (21:21)
- Digestive Tract Talk (43:43)
- Patreon (53:53)
¶ Notable Quotes
- It's the millinery nepo babies again.
- I'm varifocalling. It's so complicated. No one's ever managed to explain it to me.
- At 50 I divorced. And now I'm getting shagged bandy by 20-year-olds.
- She's loving life. She's getting buffed from all angles.
- In a rural area, a pharmacist is something growing out of a farmer's neck.
- It's not the first thing you think of for a holiday: "let's go to an expanse".
- Are you presented with your Raymond or do you have to find your Raymond?
- It's not that I don't give a shit. It's less than that.
- Gather round! Put on your rabbit skull helmets.
- Sorry, everyone, but if you will put 'wild camping' in the Bean Machine. Thank you, Sean!
- The more knuckles you take out, the closer it gets to being a useless, flaccid, hand sausage.
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- Two points of admin: (1) no longer any benfit to joining on the 1st of the month (Henry asks to leave during boring admin chat) and (2) don't sign up using the Apple app as that costs you and the Beans more.
- The Sean Bean Lounge Amateur Production of Starlight Express (27 patrons)
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Bradley, the Music Director and Conductor of the Niagara Symphony Orchestra, sends a piece thought up while listening to the hamsalad episode. Ambient Spa Music but instead of rain and water sounds it's bacon frying (Henry wishes he didn't know this, but Mike is fully in favour of a Meat Spa).