(10 hours) #17 Wall paper - SLEEPY Boring Objects (Jason Newland) (5th October 2021)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Boring Objects. Boring Objects. So, I only listen when you can safely close your eyes and I am both making the podcast and streaming live on Facebook at the same time.

So, I'm banging the microphone as well. I'm streaming the podcast. Or streaming myself recording the podcast.

Yeah, so there you go. So, I hope you're well. As you can see, if you're watching on Facebook, or I will share this on YouTube as well, that I've got two microphones and I always feel the need to cough whenever I'm making a live recording.

Brilliant. So, I've got two microphones. The one on the right is for the podcast.

The one on the left is for the video. So, hopefully it should be good. Because it's not a Let Me Bore You To Sleep recording, I won't be saying anything and talking to anyone that comes on.

But hello to everyone that does watch live. So, I suppose the question for anyone who is listening or watching live, is the volume? Is the audio okay? In fact, is it better than it normally is on a live stream? So, I've got this camera, I've got this new setup. So, oops, a little bit of feedback would be good on that.

Anyway, I should get on with the recording. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to give Ben, who's watching live, I'll let you choose the boring object that I talk about. See, there's a benefit to watching me.

So, Ben, who's watching on the live stream, you choose the boring object and I will talk about that. That will be my boring object for the day. But you will need to choose soon.

Because I can't just sit here saying nout. Oh, a little bit of gas came up from the Coca-Cola. Wallpaper.

Okay, wallpaper. Well, I haven't had a lot of experience with wallpaper. I think, I remember in the 70s, there used to be wallpaper.

So, nowadays, I don't think people have wallpaper anymore. They just seem to paint the walls. Now, admittedly, I've not been in every single person's home.

But from my understanding, is I don't think people use wallpaper anymore. Now, when I was a kid, wallpaper would be everywhere. You'd have wallpaper on the fridge and the cooker.

Even you'd send your kids to school with wallpaper, covered in wallpaper. It was, everything was wallpaper. In fact, I remember the first day of school, in high school, we'd get all our books, like the exercise books that we wrote in, and we'd put wallpaper on the outside of the cover of the book.

Anyone do that when you're at school? Very strange. I'm thinking that maybe the school just bought too much wallpaper when they were decorating the school and couldn't think what to do with it. Well, we don't want to chuck it out.

I don't want to get rid of it. It was expensive. I've got an idea.

Why don't we get all the kids to put wallpaper on their books? Yeah. So, Ben's trying to distract me from what I'm saying by writing stuff. So, thanks, Ben.

I'm going to, I'm trying to think what I, I can't remember the wallpaper in, I can't really remember much about the wallpaper in anywhere I lived. What I do remember is when I was a kid, we didn't so much have wallpaper with patterns and stuff like that. We would have wallpaper that was that chip, like wood chip wallpaper.

So, it'd just be lumpy because you could pick the little bits off. It'd be lumpy and you put it up, then you just paint it whatever color you liked. And in one of my rooms, it was, I think I had yellow and then maybe it changed it to blue, but kind of a light pastel-y blue-ish.

Yeah, I'm sure it was yellow first because I remember I used to wake up sometimes in the summer and it was just too bright. I had to put shades on before I went to bed because when I'd wake up and open my eyes, it would just be, it'd be a shock. It was just too bright.

And that's when I decided when I was about 10 to have blue wallpaper because I thought it might be a little bit less visually intrusive or traumatic to my eyeballs. But then I'd wake up and think I was in the ocean or that I was in the sky flying. I had a bit of a weird imagination back then.

I remember I used to play with toy soldiers, but I didn't get them all fighting each other with guns. I'd get them all doing Kung Fu. It's true.

I used to have Kung Fu with lots of dialogue, more dialogue than what you get in an actual movie. That's one of the things I used to enjoy doing. Yeah, there was an ongoing relationship between the different, and they weren't soldiers, they were more like little action men, but little figures that used to, they used to be able to fight.

They'd have their arms like that. And they're just like, you know, I'd get them punching each other, which I guess in retrospect was a bit violent, violence. But I enjoyed it.

And I'd be in bed and sit up in my bed and I'd have this big old party going on with all these different soldiers and they'd be arguing. And sometimes, I remember one of them said to me one day, shouldn't you, he said, shouldn't you be talking about wallpaper? I said, what do you mean? He said, well, this is a podcast about boring objects and you're supposed to be talking about wallpaper, but you're talking about toy soldiers and playing with them in your bed.

And I said, what are you talking about? He said, with a podcast.

I said, what? What's a podcast? He said, oh, I forgot. It's only 1979. Podcasts haven't been invented yet.

Excuse me. Sorry about that. I said, it's okay.

It's fine. Bit of a weird thing to say though. I was beginning to think that you're just trying to distract from the fact that you were losing that fight.

And he said, I never lose. Never, never, never lose. I said, okay, fair enough.

Don't want to argue with you, but I'm just saying this. Seems as if you was trying for a distraction there, trying to go in a different way. And I said, you know, they see certain that I said, and the other soldier said to me, can I ask you something, Jay? And I said, yeah.

Okay. He said, when you do these voices and you have these conversations, I said, yeah. He said, why don't you have, why don't you put different voices on? Because I don't know who's talking.

If it's you or the other soldier, I don't know, because it's the same voice. I said, why is everyone complaining today? And he said, well, I'm not complaining. I'm just pointing out something I've observed.

I said, well, you've got a different voice. He said, well, I don't really got a different voice. I've just got a bit of a different accent, not really a different voice.

I mean, this would be a different voice. I said, yeah, I know that that would be a different voice. Oh, this would be a different voice, wouldn't it? Yes, this would be very, very, very different.

Yeah. What's with all the voices all of a sudden? Can't we just play the game of me bashing you together? Which is the point, which is the thing that I enjoy. And, you know, and then the first soldier said, well, I really think we should get back to talking about wallpaper because otherwise your audience might get a little bit annoyed because, you know, they've they'll be looking forward to hearing you talk about wallpaper, maybe for years.

And now that they think you're going to talk about wallpaper because it's the title of your podcast and and then you're just talking about soldiers and toy soldiers having conversations with them. And I think it might be a little bit confusing if nothing else. I said, OK, fair enough.

The thing is, though, I can't think of anything to do with wallpaper. And the second one said, well, doesn't normally stop you, though, do it. I said, what do you mean? We don't really know about anything.

We just talk about it like it's, you know, like you know about it, but you don't. You just make stuff up. Do you mean I make stuff up? I do not.

Oh, I think you do. OK, wallpaper is. That's why I should choose my own titles, I think, rather than let someone else choose, because I can't I don't know anything about wallpaper.

I mean, I had wallpaper. I had a trial, man, I tried to put wallpaper at once and it's awful. It's hard.

And I think I move. Yeah, it's one of the flats I moved into. I think it might have even been the very first flat I moved into when I was 16.

I had this flat above the chip shop and. Yeah, I've got some wallpaper and. It was messy.

I agreed to never discuss it again. I kind of agreed with myself to never mention it because it was just embarrassing the mess that I made. It was something that should never, ever be.

It was like in my brain, never attempt this again, please. So I haven't. That was the whole story, really, about that.

So I remember peeling wallpaper off when we moved into a house with my family. I moved into this house when I was about eight or nine. I can't remember.

I think it's about 1979 we moved in there and it was a big old house. It was big. There was one, two, three, four, five, six.

No, wait a minute. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven bedrooms. There was one, two, it was two dining rooms, a lounge or a lounge in a. What was the other thing? No waiting room.

A. I think it was called basically my dad knocked it through to make one big lounge, but half of it had a big table and a piano for some reason. And that's, I think he had a bar there as well at one point. And we used to have a Christmas tree in there, but not all year round.

And there was a toilet downstairs. Then there was another kind of dining room and then the kitchen. And then there's, yeah, then upstairs, straight ahead of the stairs, there was a room, which is a bedroom.

Then there's a bathroom. Then there's another toilet. So there's a bathroom with a toilet in it.

So you have three toilets, but you need that when you got 5,000 children. And then there was a room, which the next room was my room when I first moved in. It was quite a good size room.

Parents lived next to in the next room. And then my little brother lived in the box room because he was little. He was only, and I say box room, it wasn't tiny, but he was.

So he lived in there for the first, probably for about two or three years. Ah, that's interesting. It's not interesting, but upstairs, my older brother lived and then my oldest brother lived in the other room.

And then the last room, which is also a bedroom, we used as a playroom for all of us. And we had a snooker table, table, tennis table, interchangeable. So it wasn't just, there wasn't enough room for both.

To be fair, there wasn't really enough room for the snooker table because you had to be like making really weird physical shapes in order to use it sometimes because of the walls, the water in the way, man, the walls, they had, they had wallpaper on, keeping it relevant. And, um, what else? Um, yeah. So I don't know when, but eventually, for some reason, I, I think basically it was, everything was about my little brother.

So he needed a bigger room. Once he got to about four or five or whatever. So he moved into my room.

I moved upstairs into my oldest brother's room and he moved into this, to the, the playroom. So the playroom was gone and my oldest brother lived in there. And that's where I stayed still there now.

I'm not that had wallpaper as well, but I had no, I had a window. I might as well not have had a window because it was facing a wall. Seriously.

My window is facing an alleyway and there's just a wall there. No light got no light in there at all. Apart from just this.

Yeah. I need to light on all year round, but I kind of liked it up there. Oh yeah.

I kind of liked it up there. Um, that's probably my favorite room out of all the ones I lived in as a child. It wasn't big, but it was big enough.

It wasn't tiny. There was a bed, there was room to, I was going to say dance, but not really. I did, you know, I didn't really, didn't really dance.

So that wasn't really a, an important factor to it, but I'm pretty sure I was able to do exercises and a little desk thing, basically a little kiddies thing that I had right all the way through from the age of probably nine to the age of 15. This, like this white furniture, which had a, yeah, there was a, um, a cupboard area for like clothes and a set of drawers for clothes.

And then on the left side, there was this like pull out drawer, um, which you could use as like a desk, you know, you can lean on it.

And then there was places to put books and stuff. And then on my book on the wall, I had a book case. It was a shelf that kept falling off.

I can't remember much more than that in there. That was about it. Apart from when I got to about 14, I had my own television.

Now I could have bought my own television. Didn't even think about it because I was working. I could have saved up, got a TV, but I ended up inheriting a black and white TV from my brother.

I think he moved out, something like that. So for the first time ever, I was bliss, absolute bliss. And I could just watch television on my own without interruptions without anyone else talking without me talking as well because I used to chat.

So I didn't I didn't interrupt myself when I was on my own. But if someone else around, I had to talk. But yeah, it was lovely.

And I remember, I think it was late at night. By late, I don't know how late. But um, I watched Cheers.

And I don't think I've ever seen Cheers before. It's the first time. And I loved it.

I loved Cheers. And got itchy face. Watching Cheers in black and white.

It was just didn't take any of the just didn't change it. Made no difference to me. And I was used to watching.

Oh no, it's a low battery. Really? Blimey. Low battery on my iPad.

I was used to watching stuff in color because we had a color TV downstairs. Hadn't watched a black and white TV for years. Years.

And this black and white telly. I loved it. It was like my prized possession.

I did absolutely love it. Weird, isn't it? I think it was. It was my first sense of independence.

I could finally watch what I wanted to watch on television. In the evening. Now, late afternoon after school.

And at those times when I wasn't doing paper rounds. I could go into the lounge or the living room. Lay down in front of the telly.

I didn't lay down on my back. Obviously, I couldn't see the telly otherwise. Or go like that and it'd be upside down.

But I'd lay on my belly. That's some days where I could lay on my belly without wobbling. I can't lay on my belly without my bum touching the ceiling.

So a weird combination of a big belly and a massive bum. But I didn't have that back then. I was just sort of human shaped when I was a kid.

And I had the option. I could just watch what I wanted. If I wanted to watch Blue Peter or Grange Hill or Mighty Mouse, Danger Mouse.

You know, stuff that I even watched when I was 14. But I watched it with my little brother. But I still loved watching that stuff.

I did. I'm not even joking. I loved watching cartoons.

The Muppet Babies was one of my favorite shows to watch. And I would get my little brother to wake me up to watch it. And I was even still watching it in the 90s when I was in my 20s.

When I was 22, 23. It used to be on on a Saturday morning. And I'd still watch it.

Muppet Babies, means we come to Muppet, Muppet, Muppet, Muppet, Babies. And was it Fraggle Rock that had the trash, trash heap? Trash heap. That trash heap has spoken.

I was watching this thing on Disney and there was this it was like a Star Wars thing. Like a spinoff from Star Wars called Mandolin. And there was this character.

And whenever he was talking, when he finished what he was saying, he said, I have spoken. And it's funny. I don't know, just so silly.

I have spoken. I thought about adopting that within my own life. Whenever anyone says anything and I, you know, ask me a question or I say, I'd like this, you know, done.

And at the end, I have spoken. And then move on. I wonder how many people I annoy in one day.

Loads. It'd be great. That really would.

I might, I might try, I might try doing that. See if I could survive a day. Wallpaper.

Okay, wallpaper. One of my things I used to like, which is weird, is scraping wallpaper off a wall. Now, I learned quite early that trying to scrape dry wallpaper off a wall, apart from being very dusty, is very difficult.

Now, my, when we first moved into this house, I remember scraping the wallpaper off whilst watching monkey on telly. Remember monkey? I just have that memory. I think it was on BBC two.

And again, it's like 1979. Monkey, monkey. And I just remember it was great.

Just checking the podcast. Podcast, iPad doesn't run out. Otherwise, I'd have lost the whole podcast, man.

But if you wet, not just wet, but you have to absolutely soak the wall. All the wallpaper has to be soaking wet and left. So what you could do then is get a scraper.

And you can just scrape strips out of it. And it comes off so easy. And it's fun.

It's enjoyable. And also noticed if I did it that way, I didn't end up knocking chips out of the plaster. Because that's what I do is big, big old holes in the plaster as I was trying to, you know, really get the wallpaper off the dry wallpaper.

And I think some people don't see beyond what, you know, I think they were trying to do it dry. And I thought, no. I think the way I discovered it is I was having a cup of tea.

So I was still on the ladder having a cup of tea. A monkey said something funny. So I squirt the tea out my nose onto the wall.

So I laughed and I thought nothing of it. I thought, okay, and I'll finish the tea. And then I went and that bit that was wet came off easier.

And I thought, oh, now, after the first, after about the first two hours after discovering that, and I thought I'm gonna do this and I'll be able to get the wallpaper off. But I found it a little bit taxing, you know, trying to cover the whole water by squirting out my nose. So in the end, I just got plus we were running out of tea bags because I was using a lot of tea.

Now I got a sponge with some water and I just did it that way. Put the sponge on the wall. I put the water, put the sponge in the water first, wet, and then I put it on the wall.

And eventually it was left it for maybe 20 minutes. And job done. It was really easy.

And it's the same thing when I was a kitchen porter. When I was a kid, working in kitchens, I realized that pots and pans and people that work in kitchens don't seem to understand this, especially chefs for some reason. But then it's not really their job.

Their job is just to cook and to give you if you're a kitchen porter and a washing up give you it to wash need to be soaked. If you if you put water in a saucepan, unless it's been burnt, whatever, if it's just normally being cooked, you know, leave it long enough. Then you wash it up easy.

Try and wash up a saucepan that's bad soup in it all day long. And then a big old saucepan. It's it's just a pot is pointless.

Why do that when you can just put some water in it and soak it? Of course, I didn't try and squirt the water out my nose. I'd learned at that point that it's easier just to get out of the tap. And yeah, the restaurant I worked in had wallpaper.

That is very, I wouldn't say anything bad like is old fashioned, but it was it was old fashioned. It was old. It's quite a traditional.

I don't use the word traditional. It's probably a better word, isn't it? Like I'm not old. I'm traditional.

Yeah. But that's all I can think of with the wallpaper. Genuinely, haven't had a lot of experience with wallpaper at all.

And in my flat where I live now, it's just walls, like bare walls with paint. Ain't no wallpaper. Although I was thinking again, some wallpaper that's soundproof.

There's some that they say that it's like give you the the effect of a studio soundproofing, soundproofing, but in the form of wallpaper. So that might be something I may look into in the future. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I don't know in other words. I don't know.

I don't know. So I hope you enjoyed my in depth observations of wallpaper. Even though technically, I probably didn't really talk about wallpaper much at all, in all fairness.

And yeah, I haven't really looked at the camera much either. To be fair, I've got this light shining right in my eyes. And it's a little bit uncomfortable.

So staring at you now. Don't I keep looking over there? So yeah, that's it. This is it for me.

For the latest, exciting, boring objects. And I shall return another time. I might not do a live stream again, though, because it's a distraction.

I don't know. Although I do plan to do a live stream for the Let Me Bore You To Sleep. Because I think that's quite a good one to do a live stream for maybe.

So I'm gonna go. Thank you for listening. Remember to be kind to yourself because you deserve to be happy.

Lots of love. Oh, my stomach just went. Rrrr.

Bye.