Pennine Lines w/c 22 Sept 2025
|| Cooler and sunny || Set fair ||
Jim Pope || Kindered
|| Focus On... ||
Cereal Drama
Anyone who’s visited Outside Cafe this summer may have noted there’s a print of this shot on the cafe wall at present. It’s weirdly appropriate that this one hangs in the Peak’s spiritual home of the substantial breakfast, as the rock at the start of this Kinder neo-classic was not the best and had the solidity of milk-engorged Weetabix.
Now, today’s athletes can’t just sit and wait for opportunities to be handed to them in a plate, and the Weetabix-esque rock got Jim thinking….… A few phonecalls to contacts in the big smoke later and before you could say "Riboflavin", Jim was off down the M1 to pitch the idea of a breakfast-based crossover promo to the Weetabix top brass, with Sams Lawson and Pratt in tow as visual consultants and moral support.
Sam Lawson & Jim Pope || Kinder
Ever the details man, and someone with an eye for history and old-school aesthetics, Jim had it all mapped out in a persuasive deck, right down to the finer points of the promotion, including a “Jim’ll Flex It" badge, which Weetabix fans could obtain simply by cutting out five tokens from the cereal boxes, and sending them in along with a photo of their tensed bicep and only £25 in postage and packing. On the day the pitch went as smoothly as a Wimberry headpoint (Jim even improvising his way admirably past a malfunctioning Powerpoint clicker) but when it came to sealing the deal the cereal Execs clammed up. Vibes were clearly off, but the boys were not going to be fobbed off with the old “we’ll think about it and call you Tuesday week” line.
The petit-dejuner magnates hadn’t reconned with Jim’s enforcers asking pointed questions, an intimidating spectacle in of itself given the Sams’ towering stature and combined double-digit ape index. Soon the self-styled “Spanny Inquisition” got answers; apparently the Execs had already green-lit Shauna’s pitch for “Neddy Brek”; an Instagrammable just-add-water high-performance breakfast to tap into the lucrative van-lifer market, which did double-duty as a serviceable cement when made up with hot Volkswagen T6 radiator fluid for emergency hold repairs. Unwilling to compete with their own product in a crowded market, it became clear tyre-kicking was all Jim & co could hope for, and the meeting was a bust.
The boys’ luck was about to change on the way out though, when the security guard in the foyer sensed a kindred spirit in the clearly crestfallen Jim. As a former Stronghold London Fields regular who had been forced to hang up his Solutions after years of upper-arm security ID holder use had left him with a grip asymmetry disorder that no amount of targeted fingerboard pick-ups would rectify, he nevertheless recognised Jim from YouTube, and intimated that there was more to the situation than met the eye. Initially cagey, a dusty 12-pack of out-of-date Tenzing procured from the rear footwell of Jim’s motor lubricated the situation somewhat, and before long the guard was singing like a canary.
Jim Pope || Kindered
It turned out the security community was awash with talk of big-money job offers, NDAs and high-stakes gigs at a top secret research kitchen north of the border, and things had really come to a head when a Weetabix brand-synergy rep, mistakenly added into a private industry LinkedIn chat, reported that big player on the Quakers procurement scene returning from an oat-finding trip to the Central Belt had eyeballed both Will Bosi and Heston Blumenthal arriving at Cairn Lodge services within 20 minutes of each other and put two and two together. The rumour mill went into overdrive; backed by Terrex capital Will was bringing an industry-disrupting Scots-Italian fusion high-protein cereal to market, consisting of nuggets of parmesan in the shape of mini-fingerboards, karabiners, excaliburs, and Adidas Trefoils, each one deep fried in batter. The “Lucky Parms” rumour had sent notoriously risk-averse cereal heads up and down the country into a tailspin; the game was up, endorsements were pulled, and R&D departments mothballed.
However, the boys wouldn’t be leaving open handed. The now-gregarious security guard tipped the boys off that due to an imminent shift changeover in the CCTV office nobody would be paying much attention to that skip out back for the next ten minutes. Say no more…..and with as many packets of now-surplus whitelabelled experimental Alpen commercial samples crammed into the capacious pockets of their Arc’teryx Atom LT jackets as they could manage, the lads were northbound on the M1 before anyone was any the wiser.
There was of course only one global market suitable to launder the gear, and once safely back in Sheffield Jim was straight on eBay.ch to deftly flip the pouches of cutting-edge culinary roughage to buyers in the Helvetic confederacy, and an all-out bidding war ensued. It turned out the faltering Swiss muesli industry had been desperate for an injection of new ideas to lure back the domestic hipster market from avocados-on-rosti, and by close of play oat-and-wheat-based speculators from Basel to the Bregaglia between them had ponied up enough untraceable Francs to fund the carbon offsetting for Jim’s trip to New Zealand, with enough leftover in the Revolut account to treat the squad to a slap-up Full English in Outside cafe, gladly with nary a compressed wheat flake in sight. Good times. And if you’re wondering why every half-decent eatery anywhere from Montreux to Magic Wood is doing a roaring trade in salted miso Dubai granola, and sriracha-smashburger infused porridge over the coming season, then this is why.
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
Wild light in the Hope Valley
|| Fresh Prints ||
A couple of Jim and Ned Grit Blocs classics from the Print Shop to get the psyche up as the temps drop.
