Tag: 2

7 Reasons to Shop With 7 Reasons

You’ve laughed with us, you’ve cried with us, you’ve watched us, you’ve read us, you’ve heard us, you’ve written for us, you’ve tweeted with us, you’ve got engaged with us, you’ve had a baby with us and probably other stuff too. And now, in a new and exciting development, you can shop with 7 Reasons. And here are seven reasons that you should.

1. Be Unique. Everyone wants to feel distinctive, unique and a bit special. And, if you purchase a 7 Reasons t-shirt, the chances are very high that it will actually be unique. After all, how many people are you likely to bump into in your local pub wearing the same Haystack Poking Patrol t-shirt as you? And even in the unlikely event that you did meet someone else in a pub wearing that same t-shirt, you could just say, “Hello Marc” and I’d probably buy you a beer. You’ll be unique or you’ll get beer. That sounds like a good deal.

2. To Marvel At The Emporium. The 7 Reasons team have (amongst other things) expertise in web design and the retail sector. You might think that this would make putting together an online shop easy. But you’d be wrong. Because in typical 7 Reasons style, the one with the retail background did the web design and the one with the web design background is in charge of the retail side of things (and did everything else). So if it does crash or start randomly giving away free merchandise you’ll be there to witness/benefit.

3. Because Our Wares Are Really Jolly Good. I didn’t have anything to do with the design of the lemon t-shirt (God or Darwin, depending on your viewpoint, designed the lemon and Jonathan Lee did the rest), so I can say this. It’s bloody brilliant. Look at it! Just look at it! It’s really a beautiful piece of design. It’s a pop-art pie-chart in lemon. Who wouldn’t want to wear that, other than the abjectly wrong and gits? No one.

4. Innovation. Because the product range will grow as we think of more things to add. We’re already looking into producing 7 Reasons Inspirational Beer-Mats, calendars and fridge-magnets, so you’ll never know what you might find there: A 7 Reasons horse; a 7 Reasons handbag; a 7 Reasons his and his voodoo doll set; a replica 7 Reasons sofa. Anything. Or if you don’t find what you want, you might eventually, because…

5. We’re interactive. We can’t think of everything. We’ve tried and have gotten distracted by girls and tiramisu and things. But we love great ideas and, if you’ve thought of something you’d like to see in the 7 Reasons shop that isn’t there, you can email us and, if we think it’s a good idea, we’ll look into making it. And we’ll probably put your name on it too, unless it’s something really small – or embarrassing – in which case we won’t. Or if you have a really long name like Bartholomew Constantine Washington Penderghast the third, we might not. But if you’re called Jennifer Aniston we definitely will, and that’s a promise.

6. Incentive. Has any other website ever encouraged you to invade a country? Yes, probably, but only evil ones. We’re nice chaps though, and we’d like to encourage a more benign, civilised, conquest: So the first five readers that are photographed standing atop the Eiffel Tower waving a Union Flag and wearing one of our France Invasion t-shirts will get the money they spent on the t-shirt refunded.*

7. Because We’re Very Excited. So excited, in fact, that we spent a couple of hours putting this post together about our shop and forgot to include a link to it. So here it is (this is the link). Now go and shop till you drop! Or at least until your arms are very full and you feel a little faint.**

*We can sometimes tell the difference between the Blackpool and Eiffel towers and we’re also quite good at spotting things that have been photoshopped so no tomfoolery, please.

**I – Marc – would like to thank my colleague Jonathan Lee for all of the effort that he put into the shop and the merchandise (and for fielding slightly ranty emails about World War Two font styles and spacing without ever losing his cool). Never let it be said that he doesn’t work very, very hard indeed.

April 8, 2011
7 Reasons Ireland Didn’t Beat England At Cricket Yesterday
If you’re a cricket lover, or if you’re following the Cricket World Cup (which isn’t really cricket) and you’re English, you might be happily going about your March 2^nd business right now vaguely aware that you seem to have had some sort of strange and improbable nightmare last night. And you’re right. It is still Wednesday and you’ve had a bit of a funny dream. I know I have. Here are seven reasons why.

This didn't happen. You dreamt this.

1.  It’s Too Conflicting. The English, as popular opinion would have it, love an underdog. And it’s true, we do. There’s nothing that the English like to do more than cheer on plucky minnows. We love to see Italy do well in the Six Nations; we love to see Scotland do well at football; we love to see Malta do well at absolutely bloody everything and, had Ireland been playing any other nation yesterday (except Malta), we would have been cheering them on with cries of “Play up, Ireland” and “Hurrah for the Patricks”. But they weren’t playing anyone else. They were playing us. And we were the overdog. This was somewhat conflicting. Because it was nice to see the plucky Irish do well during the cricket, it was heart-warming even, and to someone who fancies that he has some modicum of appreciation for the game, it was enjoyable. But then it slowly began to look like they might actually beat us and suddenly the thin veneer of being a fair-minded Englishman that appreciates a fine performance (even by an opponent) began to dissipate and I realised that I wasn’t quite the sporting chap I imagine myself to be. I discovered that I am, in fact, the sort of Englishman who would happily don a pith helmet and mow down colonials with a Gatling gun if it meant a victory in war or sport for dear old Blighty. No one needs to find that out about themselves when they’re trying to enjoy the cricket. I started the match as a good, upright, moral chap and finished it as a cruel, bloodthirsty, avaricious monster. Albeit one with a nice hat. But this can’t really have happened, because I’m certain that, at heart, I’m a thoroughly nice chap.

2.  The Irish Don’t Even Play Cricket. I know about Irish sport; I’ve seen it. There are essentially three major sports there. They play football, like we do, but with muddier pitches. They play rugby, like we do, but with muddier pitches. And they play Gaelic-bloody-hurleyball-thing – a sport I once saw on Channel Four at three o’clock one morning in 1997 – which is essentially a mass-brawl in the mud which may or may not have sticks and a ball. And a net.   None of those things even remotely resemble cricket, which is a game played in England, where children are given bats, balls and club ties at birth and spend almost every minute of every childhood summer – except when they are reluctantly dragged away to a tartan picnic blanket and force-fed cucumber sandwiches, orange squash and those Mr Kipling cakes that resemble gaudily coloured plasticine and make your teeth hurt – playing the game of cricket. And then when we grow up many of us carry on doing exactly the same thing, but with Pimm’s instead of the squash and if we’re very lucky, picnic sex. Though the infernal sodding cakes are still there. We have cricket, if not in our blood, then certainly in our souls and in our psyche, it’s a part of our national identity. We are prepared to play cricket from birth, it shouldn’t be possible to just to turn up with a horse and beat us at it. Which is good, because it didn’t happen.

3.  There Was A Horse. I’m not going to knock Kevin O’Brien’s knock*. What he did yesterday was superb. He went out to bat and did what every young boy (and grown man and woman and just about everyone who’s ever had any sporting ambition/interest/has even seen a blade of grass) has ever dreamed of doing: He took a game by the scruff of the neck and improbably – almost impossibly – won it single-handedly, against the odds. It was amazing. He was magnificent. Unlike Irish people, however, I have seen Kevin O’Brien play before, and I know this. He’s essentially a lumbering big, ginger horse in a cricket uniform. Of course he’s going to be able to slog the ball around on a flat pitch, he could probably hit balls to the moon. What we needed to counteract him was a backfiring car. They always put horses off what they’re doing, I’ve seen black and white films and read Edwardian novels, and I know of what I speak. It’s just not possible that England’s enormous – and legendarily meticulous – backroom staff consisting of hordes of people with laptops that studied P.E. at university didn’t consider this tactic, not possible at all. As the saying goes: If you fail to prepare, you prepare to get spanked around the ground by a big ginger man-horse. And that’s what happened…er…didn’t happen.

4.  It Isn’t Mathematically Possible. The Ireland cricket team represents both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. So England were playing two countries out there yesterday, and you might think that would put England (us) at a disadvantage but wait! The acronym ECB is short for The England and Wales (and some South Africans) Cricket Board, so Irelands two nations were in fact playing our three nations, all of whom are individually better at cricket than them. It’s not mathematically possible that they should have won, or geographically or historically. It’s just not possible at all, so it can’t have happened.

5.  Available Talent. That Ireland don’t have any sort of cricketing pedigree is self-evident. But that’s not to say that Ireland is completely lacking any cricketing talent. That would be crass and simplistic. Because there is Irish cricketing talent out there. For there is a man born in Dublin who would get into just about any one day cricket team in the world; a man who won three senior cup titles for Catholic University School; a man who has a ODI batting average of 38.03; a man whose batting shimmers with inventiveness and audacity; a man whose bold stroke-play and natural ease with a bat is admired the world over. And that Irishman’s name is Eoin Morgan and he plays for fecking England!!!! Their best player doesn’t even play for them! He plays for us, so they can’t have won at all.

6.  The Reaction. Do you know what the reaction in England to the Irish victory was last night? From people that don’t follow cricket as closely as you or I, people with children and lives and things, people that the news was only slowly filtering to by yesterday evening? The ones that I spoke to all reacted in exactly the same way with the same question. They asked, “Do the Irish even have a cricket team?” Every last one of them asked this. And in Ireland, I have no doubt that they were all asking, “Do we even have a cricket team?” I had to explain this defeat to a Frenchman last night – A MAN FROM FRANCE – and do you know what his first question was? I’ll tell you. It was, “Do ze Irish even ‘ave a cricket team?”   I can’t begin to tell you how painful this conversation was. It was several minutes before I was able to turn the conversation to the efficacy of the Maginot Line. Several long minutes. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we were playing a team yesterday that doesn’t exist. And they beat us.

7.  It’s So Weird I Can Only Have Dreamt It. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but it’s fair to say that yesterday was a fairly strange day for me. Here are just some of the things that actually happened to me:
- I purchased Vaseline for my cat.
- I discussed the Ashes with a Frenchman.
- I witnessed a man request “A pint of the lager you have that’s most like Stella” at a bar.
- An Irish team that doesn’t exist beat England at Cricket with an orange horse.
So there you go. All of the available evidence is there and it points to only one thing: That yesterday was a really weird dream that didn’t actually happen. Any moment now I’m going to wake up and it’ll be March 2^nd again and at some point later on today I’m going to listen to England thump Ireland at cricket. It’s going to be great. I can’t wait.

*That’s the first knock-knock joke we’ve ever done at 7 Reasons.**

**The second one will be better.
March 3, 2011
7 Reasons That Series II of Downton Abbey Will Be Even Better Than Series I

Downton Abbey, ITV’s very enjoyable and successful Sunday evening drama has had a second series commissioned. This is brilliant news as it is the best thing that ITV has produced for ages, possibly even ever. And the great thing is that the second series is going to be even better than the first. Here are seven reasons why.

1. The Writing Will Be Better. Julian Fellowes is a terrific writer and his historical knowledge and nuanced eye make Downton Abbey a brilliant evocation of an Edwardian life of privilege. And, as absolutely everything improves with practice and revision, the writing will be even better in the second series: The first time he wrote Gosford Park, it was Gosford Park, which was quite good. The second time he wrote Gosford Park, it was Downton Abbey, which was very good, and the third time he writes Gosford Park, it will be Downton Abbey: Series 2, which will surely be amazing. If they commission a few more series, Downton Abbey will eventually become the best written thing in the history of television.

2. The Opening. The first series of Downton Abbey opened with the news of the sinking of the Titanic reaching the house. Having the heirs to the house die in the Titanic tragedy was a terrific device which acted as the catalyst for many of the storylines. Series two can repeat this by killing off the current heir to Downton Abbey in the sinking of the Lusitania, and then we can begin the search for an heir all over again. Only this time we might get one with a chin and a personality.

3. The Limp. One of the dominant storylines of series one has been Bates’ limp. The consternation that it has caused has resonated throughout the series with many repercussions for both the house’s residents and staff. The First World War setting of season two will offer far greater scope for the characters to be intolerant of the disabled causing, as it surely will, characters to maim themselves fighting the Bosch from a trench. Perhaps a new downstairs hierarchy will develop based on the amount of available limbs a servant has. It’s like taking the limp storyline and escalating it.

4. Maggie Smith. Redoubtable battleaxe, the Dowager Countess, stole the show when she enquired over dinner, “The weekend? What is a weekend?”. The war will provide far greater scope for lofty and disdainful incomprehension, bringing as it will, a whole new vocabulary of dreadnoughts, zeppelins, trench foot, doughboys, big berthas, whizz-bangs and Kaisers. Though she probably already knows who the Kaiser is, “Rum fellow, typical foreign-type, no notion of how to dress for luncheon and abominable taste in hats.” The moment she exclaims, “A zeppelin has bombed Hull? What is this Hull of which you speak?” will be priceless.

5. Conscription. There’ll be great scope for new and interesting characters because of conscription. And, while the third reserve under-butler’s valet’s second footman is away having his head blown off at the Somme, who knows what could happen back at Gosfor Downton Abbey. Any manner of earth-shattering things could occur. Women may have to take on some of the tasks usually performed by the menfolk. The scope for revolutionary gender-role reassignment is immense. Perhaps they’ll find themselves selecting cufflinks, removing lint from a man’s jacket or winding up a clock. A maid might open the front door! Anarchy.

6. Order. The version of pastoral care the paternal Earl metes out to his wards will be tested to the limit in series two, as the poverty and lack of privation that war brings begins to impinge on life at Downton. How will he dispense justice when the newly widowed ladies-maid’s kitchen-maid’s undermaid is caught pilfering part of a silver cruet set? How will he deal with the theft of three of his grouse by a hungry poacher named Higgins (all poachers are called Higgins, I don’t know why). How will he react to the wooing of a ladies maid by an itinerant muffin man? It’s going to be great.

7. Suitors. Once she’s been forbidden to go into nursing by the Dowager Countess, (“Nursing? A lady tending commoners? The moon will surely implode,”) the eldest daughter will continue her Downton life pretty much unaltered, except with more varied suitors. Instead of being wooed by a succession of avaricious dullards in black tie, she’ll be wooed by a succession of avaricious dullards dressed in khaki. And that will wholly justify paying the licence fee for a colour television. We can’t wait.

October 15, 2010