Adventures Of Dennis

Dennis recently posted this picture on the Taylor st. Facebook page:

I know you're super-jealous, back here in cold, rainy London, but wait until you see where else he has been!

A SAFARI IN KENYA:

 

The GRAND CANYON

 

 

The NORTH POLE (a bit cold, here)

 

 

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S 2009 INAUGURATION CEREMONY:

 

 

The MOON:

 

 

CHILLING WITH JOHN F KENNEDY AND HIS KIDS AT THE OVAL OFFICE:

 

 

WITH GANDHI ON HIS 1930 'SALT MARCH' AGAINST THE BRITISH SALT MONOPOLY AND UNFAIR TAX LAWS:

 

 

WITH THE CAST OF SUCCESSFUL 1970'S US TELEVISION DRAMA 'DYNASTY':

 

 

 

 

We all love you Dennis - see you soon :)

 

 

 

Reasons to leave Taylor st...

Right, that's it: Can everybody stop leaving Taylor St. please?  It's getting ridiculous.  I've come up with a simple checklist of what are acceptable and unacceptable reasons for leaving. Please check and plan the remainder of your unrelentingly-banal life accordingly.  Ta.

The following are acceptable reasons for leaving Taylor St.:

• Death

Though still expect angry phone calls from Michal up to two weeks later, demanding to know why you haven't shown up for work at Canary Wharf.

You've been bitten by a vampire and are now a member of the undead:

Although, just come work at Bank.  You'll never have to worry about seeing the sun, anyway.

A very short list of careers, including:

An astronaut:

 But only for a country with proper space program, none of this "European Space Agency" nonsense.

 

A researcher looking for a cure for a major world disease:

 

Options include cancer, malaria, Swine Flu, and whatever causes people to like Coldplay.

 

A superhero:

Maybe Batman.  Batman would be cool.

The following are NOT acceptable reasons for leaving Taylor St:

Your visa has run out:

 

Come on guys, not good enough.  Two words: "Sham. Marriage."  Enough said...

 

Leaving to open your own coffee shop:

Don't even think about it. Andrew will find you, and he will crush you.  Then make a tasty espresso with your remains.

Leaving to start your career in 'the media', or whatever.

 

Sorry, not good enough.  London has two many hipster-y types as it is.

Extra Super Special Double Bumber Edition!!!!!

Right, better write some actual Bank goings-on, I guess:

Here are some pictures, and I've written captions above them.  It's up to you to decide if they're true or not.  HINT: They're ALL TRUE.

Zombie Jim Morrisson came to Bank to pull espresso shots. He got caught in a bush, but he still kicked ass:

 

Ross loves coffee so much, he has it for breakfast.  As in as a foodstuff, not a beverage.  He eats it with a spoon. It kind of freaks me out, actually.  Seriously, that guy is weird... Where did they find him?

 

 

 

Richard made a lovely sign for our Movember campaign.  Two-word review on our moustache progress?  "Car Crash".  Enough said. We're getting plenty of pity money, though!  Who needs self-esteem?

 

 

Ross models his fake moustache.  This is an artist's impression of what it will look like in 2042.  That's why it's upside-down.  He's in space.  It's a space-stache.  Made of lasers.  It has definitely has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I took the picture the wrong way round and I couldn't be bothered to fix it.

 

 

Ok that wasn't exactly 'Bumper', but it's Friday evening and I'm tired! Sorry!

Coming Up: Extra Super Special Double Bumper Extended Edition!!!!!

I fail at blogging.  I fail hard. If you were to compare my level of failure to something in history I reckon I'm about tied with Neville Chamberlain's failed policy of appeasement with Germany leading to World War II...

 It's not that I don't want to, I just can't handle the commitment.  For most normal people, spending half an hour once a week on a task would be perfectly acceptable.  If I do anything for more than thre or four weeks at a time it feels as if I've been asked to clean out the Augean Stables...

So to make up for that here's SUPER SPECIAL DOUBLE BUMPER EXTENDED EDITION!!!!! of the 'weekly' Bank update.  That's FIVE exclamation marks, mutha-fuckas... That's how sorry I am.

Ireland has a magazine called the RTE Guide.  It's a TV listings magazine, published every week. I guess it's a bit like the Radio Times over here.  At Christmas they made a 'bumper' edition with two whole weeks' worth of listings and many other special treats.  It was at least double the size and of sturdier stock than the regular weekly version, built to last the many thumbings of two whole weeks and at that weeks where TV watching tends to be done at a much greater rate than usual.

It'd probably contain an interview with Marty Whelan (who you won't know) and perhaps Teresa Lowe (who you definitely won't know - probably even if you're Irish). There'd be an interview with Dustin the Turkey (don't ask) It might have a picture of Gay Byrne (who?) in a cardigan beside a crackling fire.

We didn't have a whole lot of money growing up, and a glossy magazine with TV listings for lots of satellite channels we coudn't afford, and maybe a Q&A with Bryan Dobson (now I'm being deliberately obscure) was definitely an unnecessary extravagance.  Other families I knew bought it every week, and some, in what seemed like an almost inmaginable luxury, would even have collections of the magazine; an unintended archive containg nothing more meaningful than endless recaps of the week's Coronation Street and Fair City (please don't ask - it's embarrassing)

Christmas was different, though.  Christmas is when even families with tight budgets buy minor indulgences for sheer joy, and the RTE Guide Bumper Edition was one of those.  I can remember tearing it from its plastic wrapper, admiring its considerable thickness, and flicking through the glossy pages filled with  horoscopes, z-list celebrity interviews and other light entertainment nonsense.

I would pore over the pages of listings, noting all the glorious movies I would watch over the Christmas break, working out exactly schedule was needed to maximise the number of good movies one could watch over two weeks.  I would read over and over the listings for the three most important days: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Stephen's Day.  These were given in a different colour; marked out in red or green and adorned with snowflakes to differentiate them from the more prosaic offerings of the Christmas holiday. 

The RTE Guide Bumper Edition was the first real material proof that Christmas was on its way.  Picking out what was to be watched on TV was a sort of dress rehearsal for the real thing: A wonderful thought-experiment which allowed a first visualisation of an event that seemed so monumental and distant as to be largely unknowable the whole way through October and November.  Within those glossy pages was contained not just TV listings, but the very idea of Chistmas.

The RTE Guide Bumper Edition would perform its duties admirably for the two weeks it lay around the house, until it was time for it to be thrown, in its now morose and sorry state, in the dustbin along side the Christmas tree and the cheaper of the decorations.  It's demise may have been inglorious, but for those two weeks it was the undisputed king of magazines:  It was the bringer of Christmas, and it was a stately, serene mercury, confident in its position of arbiter of two weeks of festive entertainment.

I've forgotten to write about Bank, haven't I?  Shit... Sorry about that...  It's coming right up...

Some very EXCITING news...

This week at Gavin and Lucy's Weekly Bank Update we have something very EXCITING to announce

Our first CELEBRITY GUEST BLOGGER!!! Can you guess who it is?  Ross?  Maybe Andrew Tolley?  Maybe Miranda?

Find out later on today!

EXCITING

Imagination Time!

Because I was too lazy to take pictures, this week is 'imagination' week.  So for all our readers (which definitely doesn't solely consist of Lucy and Gavin) here's a chance to use your Imagination and think up your own ideas about the goings-on of Bank this week...   I'll use this red square (which I made by myself in Paint, thank you very much) as an 'Imagination aid' to help things along...

This is a red square
It can be whatever you want it to be
You just use your Imagination

Imagination is a thing
Where you think of a thing
That is not really there
Using your brain

 

This one could be Ross
Making a drink
With an hilarious picture on it
Just use your Imagination

Maybe this one is Richard
Saying something quite funny
That's something that's perfectly possible
So shouldn't be hard to imagine using your Imagination

This one could be Ross
Battling a great tiger in China
Do they have tigers in China?
I don't know.

Maybe this is a picture of the time
James spilled some beans on the floor
That's another thing that might have happened
Or it also might not have happened.

Maybe in this one
I had a little cry in the corner on my own
That would be quite sad
I hope that's not in your Imagination

Maybe this is when I closed my eyes very lightly
And looked directly at the sun
And through the lids of my eyes could see its rays
That doesn't take much Imagination (maybe a good one to start with)

Here's one for you
To practice your Imagination
Just look at the square and think
Of something that's not just a red square

THE END

Trip to James Gourmet Roastery

While we at Taylor St. Baristas are generally quite good (it's always nice to be reasonably modest...) making delicious coffee from behind our espresso machines, it could be said that our knowledge of how the beautiful roasted coffee gets into those delightful purple bags for us to brew could do with some brushing up.  A quick survey of staff came back with results that varied from "the coffee roasts on the trees" to "the roasting fairy waves her magic wand...".


Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration, but although we have some serious roasting geeks amongst our staff, it can never hurt to increase on our knowledge of the whole process.  With that in mind we took up James' (of James' Gourmet coffee) up on his offer of a visit to his roastery in Ross-on-wye. 
After a bus journey consisting of twenty-seven Taylor St. staff oohing and aahing at sheep and hills (quite a novelty coming from London...) we were greeted by James and his staff and soon after we were getting a demonstration of the roasting process:

Put very simply, roasting coffee involves a drum with a large gas burner which heats the green beans up to around 400 degrees fahrenheit.  This produces magical chemical reactions, turning an inedible, useless bean into the product that will, if all goes right, eventually end up in a delicious espresso or sublime flat white.  It's where the magic of coffee really begins...

Some sacks of green beans.  James has lots of great coffees from Central America, in particular Honduras and El Salvador, at the moment:

One of the chief skills of a good roaster is the ability to create a 'roasting profile' for a particular coffee that is right for the type of bean and the brewing method it will be used for.  A roasting profile includes the temperature the beans are roasted at, the length of time, and the cooling process, amongst other variables.  In general, filter roasts are quite light, and espresso roasts a bit darker (but not too dark!)

We were given the opportunity to cup a coffee roasted at a series of different temperatures, to see how temperature affects the flavours of the brew.  This turned out to be one of the most enlightening lessons of the day; we could immediately taste the dramatic difference just a few degrees of roasting makes:

 

Some green beans, and the finished product:

 

Ross, your friendly head barista at Taylor St: Old Broad Street, picked and roasted some green beans WITH HIS OWN BARE HANDS.  If you're keen to try the coffee, we're going to have it as our filter this very week in the shop. If you have any questions about the coffee give us a shout and we'd love to chat about it!

 

 



And finally, I give you Jochem: Serious About Spoons:

Update 2: 13/10/2012

WARNING: THIS POST MAY OR MAY NOT CONTAIN INNUENDO THAT MAKES THE CARRY ON FILMS LOOK CLASSY AND CONTAIN CONTENT PROBABLY SUITABLE ONLY FOR THOSE WITH A MENTAL AGE OF ABOUT FOURTEEN SO IF YOU FIND IT FUNNY DONT BLAME ME

This Friday at Bank, we had a competition to draw latte art elephants in coffee.  DEFINITELY elephants. DEFINITELY.  Not anything else, even though at times there may have been striking similarities (except for Andrew's) Why elephants?  Who doesn't love elephants, especially when they are DEFINITELY not really something else...?

Here's how the night went:

The machine of choice.  The HANDLES are prepared, and the TIP and SHAFT of the STEAM WAND have been cleaned thoroughly and are FOR ACTION:

Jochem's practise "elephant". It's going to be a HARD act to follow...

 

Richard MEASURING UP the competition:

 

 

The first round is drawn.  Looks like some very INTERESTING COUPLINGS.

 

 

 

The night's judges.  Looks like they're having to make some  pretty HARD decisions.

 

Miranda is not impressed by her SMALL SPECIMEN

 

Impressive work.  There's going to be some pretty STIFF competition tonight...

 

 

Oh no! Richard has SPILLED SOME OF HIS FLUID ON THE FLOOR! Who will have to clean that up?

 

Erm, Chee SHAKES HIS EQUIPMENT WHILST JOCHEM WATCHES:



 

 

 

 

Miranda DISPLAYS HER PAIR for Mark:

 



 

 

Andrew got a bit confused about the rules.  Drew a... goat instead:

 

 

Ross TAKES MIRANDA FROM BEHIND:

 

 

WATCHING MY MILKY STREAM very carefully...

 

 





 

Reminds me of my time at the all-male boarding school...

 

 

Ok, I can't do it any more.  They're not elephants, they're penises.  Lots and lots of horrible horrible penises (and Andrew's..."goat"...).  All the shapes and sizes you can imagine.  I think I'm scarred for life... 

 

 

Finally, I give you Adam's work of art...

 

 

 

 

Til next time!