Posts Tagged ‘chef’

Well, another year is as good as over, so it seems good and proper to take a look back at 2009. Here we reclimb the highest peaks, replunge the lowest depths, make sense of it all, and post it up on the customskins blog in a conveniently truncated form.

F**K you, we won’t do what you tell us. Unless it’s printing drumskins.

Yes, surprisingly we’ve spent much of 2009 printing bands names on their drumskins; regular readers will recognise this as our specialist subject. Customskins has been almost as popular as Derek Obama this year; we’ve printed 900+ heads for 700+ clued up drummers, which is almost certainly more than Derek has managed. When it comes to band names, it’s been popular to combine an adjective with a first name - this year we’ve had Turbulent Eddie, Terrifying Joey, Hard Way Harry, and James Blunt. Other band names that have raised a chuckle in CSHQ this year include the Fragrant Vagrants and Blazing Grumpy Penguins.

Customskins HQ is the New Hollywood

Aside from printing drum heads, we’ve been terribly busy making a nuisance of ourselves on movie sets. Most of Hollywood has descended on CSHQ this year - we’ve had Clint Eastwood’s new feature, Colin Firth’s new movie, and most episodes of Spooks are filmed in our toilet.

Speaking of which, I never got round to posting pics of the Colin Firth movie on the blog. Here’s one:

We didn’t actually get to meet… sorry, I mean, Colin Firth didn’t actually get to meet us, but I’m sure he’d have found us to be thoroughly decent blokes.

This year we went to see some bands

The advantage of living and working in London is that you have a choice of 100 bands playing every night of the week (accept Sundays, which is when acoustic singer songwriters broadcast their relationship problems at open mic nights). The disadvantage is that 90% of these bands are terrible. The best bands we went to see this year were Frontier Ruckus, who are a quite brilliant alt-country band from Michigan, and The So So Glos, who are a quite brilliant punk rock band from New York City. Both these evenings involved tequila, which is guaranteed to enhance any form of live entertainment, but not necessarily work the next day.

In 2009 we coined some phrases:

Box-furious
Definition: Ultimate anger. Preferably for a slightly irrational reason.
Usage example: “I went all the way to Scunthorpe for the Ipswich Town away game, and then it was postponed. Box-furious, I was!”

Craft Fair
Definition: Something that doesn’t exist.
Usage example: “I went looking for the lost city of Atlantis, but it was all a bit craft fair”

Gaybot
Definition: Girl who accompanies me and Clive on social occasions so we don’t look gay .
Usage example: “How many gaybots does it take to change a lightbulb? Two - one to change the lightbulb, and the other to make the lightbulb not look gay.”

Other significant happenings of 2009

- We were embarrassed in front of the chef
- I ended up in hospital after being stabbed in the stomach at work
- We started a support group with free hugs for thousands of angry people.

If you want to hear the full story behind any of those tantalising items please let me know.

So anyway, that should do it. Thanks to everyone who got in touch with us this year, especially if you bought something. Hope you have a great Christmas, and see you in 2010!