The Wright Diet? We don't think so.

So it appears Emmas Nana isn't the only feeder in Cornwall. It appears our esteemed Gul colleague James also has a feeder in the family, as this picture can only evidently explain.
Dear James - We know you like a Chicken Wrap from the local supermarket from time to time. We know when you visit Bude you enjoy a proper big pasty. But mate, salads... they're not so bad.

James is the manager of the Truro and Falmouth Gul stores. If you're ever passing one of the aforementioned shops, do us a favour and drop him in a carrot or two? Cheers.

Wednesday Guest Blog # 2

www.pachadesignjournal.blogspot.com

Bude's Next Top Model.....

This young hopeful is called David.

He's 5'11" - Dark brown Hair - Muddy Green eye's

Slim physique (says he's a medium!?)

Before being elected Playmate of the Month in the December, 1988 edition of Playboy magazine, he worked as a model in Istanbul, Milan, Paris and Bodmin.
The starting point of his modelling career was when he was only 17 years old in New York City (he played a street urchin in a cheap gangster flick).

He's currently looking for work in the Bude area. He works for very little and posed in our top of the range Vortex wetsuit for just a cup of tea and a flick through some old surf mags.

Slightly temperamental disposition.

Cider from Rogers

I've had a very pleasant few days away, leaving the shop in the very capable hands of Tom and Rachel. Except of course Tom isn't capable - because he's the type who waits until I leave and then goes and throws himself into a surfboard and breaks his head. Never-the-less, I knew the team could take care of things whilst I paid a visit to my favourite cider farm in Mudgley, Somerset.

Roger Wilkins makes around 15,000 gallons of cider each year, and has been producing it since he was boy (and drinking it from the same age.) I've been to visit and do my bit to securing a modest chunk of those 15,000 gallons at least once a year. I even celebrated my 30th birthday on Rogers farm with a bunch of friends, at one of his annual cider hoedowns. I'd like to say it was a birthday I'll never forget, but thanks to the potency of Roger's brew that year, I'd forgotten it within 24 hours. Shame.

I introduced my girlfriend to the delights of Rogers farm yesterday - not just the delicious apple nectar, but also the homemade cheeses, chutneys and a wisened old ferret who wanted her to sit on his lap.

This time I even bought myself a t-shirt which has already been baptised with about a third of a pint of Rogers finest blend (half dry, half sweet - the very best.)

Do yourself a favour - seek it out: Lose yourself somewhere near Wedmore in Somerset and you'll probably stumble upon it. And try not to drive there.

He likes a drink with his clients, does Roger.

Glued in Bude 2 : It's Only a Flesh Wound

It all started with the infamous thought: "Just one more". Fatal! We all know this thought induces inevitable disaster, but Tom just couldn't resist testing it.

Having hopped out of bed at dawn and raced down the beach to get a surf in before another hard day at Gul Bude, Tom thought this most fatal of thoughts.

What followed involved a barrel, a close out, a wipeout, a board, a head and 'gallons' of blood (Tom's words).

Promptly returning home and defying his wife's advice and convincing her that it was merely a flesh wound and he'd be just fine, he headed to work.

An hour later, and after much inspection, I tended to agree with Mrs Tom and advised that maybe he should nip up to A&E and get it checked out.

Needless to say he returned with tales of nurses (male!?), pity, saline and glue.

I do admire his tenacity though; to return to work despite his injury, and being male, is truly commendable, although his head does now resemble that of a scabby mangey dog.

I hate to say it Tom, but listen to your wife in future! And remember always duck and cover!

Rachel.

Mispent yoof

When we were younger and still at university my friends and I stumbled (up to no good) across an old abandoned cinema in the very center of Liverpool while looking for skate-able terrain.

You had to do some quite ridiculous climbing and jumping from the 6th floor of the student digs to get access to an open fire escape on top of the old picture house. Something I'm sure our mothers would have never approved of...

It was AWESOME in there, full on spooky. The last film shown there was Waynes World, the popcorn machines still had fossilised masses of sweet and salty lumps in. In the projection room someone had written "count-down to doomsday" on the wall with a tally underneath, proper eerie. The projectors still had the film reels on. We kept going back and even bought some of those Lazer quest packs from Argos to have full on battles in there!

In the end people got in and started taking drugs in there and scuppered it.

I wish I had some photos of the place.

These pictures me and Rachel found of abandoned theme parks kind of give me that spooky excited feeling back.

I've got to find one of these!

Fetch.

6am spherical doohickey retrieval operations by revered canine on local seafront are... fun.

Nothings gonna stop us now

I started today with a coffee, an almond slice and a bit of Starship.
Took me right back to the heady days of my adolescence where a pre-SATC Kim Cattrall could (unwillingly) morph between skin and bone and fibre-glass and still look good on the back of a motorbike.

I watch my mannequins and I wait and I drool.

Wednesday Guest Blog # 1

http://indiansummervintage.wordpress.com/

The return of Oddballs.

Our friend Chris is, well, a bit odd.

He has odd surfboards.

He has an odd van.

He has an odd haircut.

He wears odd jeans.

He has a business called Odd Socks, run alongside his (not odd) wife Katie.

His dog has canine tourettes, which is a bit odd.

His odd van (pictured) passed its MOT first time which, I think you'll agree, has a distinct ring of odd about it.

Odd stalks Chris like a shadowy turd fly.

But, odd as he may be, we can't wait to see Chris and this odd jalopy brightening up the streets and beach car parks of Bude, like a welcome and wonky ray of sunshine.

Keep it real, oddballs.

At least it was dark....

My last memories of Saturday night at the Gul Nightsurf are somewhat of a haze. A haze of breakdancing, Kahlua shots and a straw in the shape of a mans privates. Somehow I got back to Bude. Somehow I held it together to get 2 quality surfs in yesterday. Somehow my girlfriend is still talking to me.
A big thanks to all my colleagues at Gul who made it such a great event. Feel proud to work for such a fun company.
If anyone does have any pictorial evidence of me dancing, please feel free to send all blackmail requests direct to the shop address, whereupon they'll be paid in full with little or no quibbling.

Vic Reeves it ........ Believes it

Vic Reeves came into Gul Bude today.


Emma was too shy to ask for a photo.


So you'll just have to believe me.


UVAVU Emma .... UVAVU

Tea Leaves

My friend Shayne knows more about tea than you do.

So much, in fact, that he's going to bring out a book about it.

Power to you, Shayne!

Egg on your (Fat) Face

...and a big thankyou to Fat Face, who kindly let us display our Nightsurf postcards in their shop today. It's great and quite heart-warming when two competing brands can be big enough to forego any petty one-upmanship and allow the other to promote themselves on their turf.*

* We can only assume all this as the Fat Face manager has absolutely no idea that they are in there. Of course, the last thing we want to do is make this some kind of childish contest. But Wayne, just so we're clear - current score: 1-0 to us.

The Gul Nightsurf

It's so close we can almost touch it...

The event has kind of already begun, with the inaugural contest at the Flowrider in Retallack (yeah, near the old Wild West Theme Park... I bet you loved that place as much as I did.)

It then moves to Fistral Beach in Newquay tomorrow, with stuff happening all weekend. Look out for Bude band 'The Sum Of', playing on the beach at about 7pm Saturday evening.

Cat Tales

I'm a sceptic with flying saucers, even though I think I saw one once. I'm also a sceptic when it comes to ghosts although, again, I'm pretty sure I could hold my own by a fireside with something I saw several years ago. Admittedly, it was in a bar.

But until yesterday, I'd never spotted a notorious 'big cat', even though I've spent many long hours walking my dog alone on the beautifully desolate Bodmin Moor.

On the route home after a few hours 'bouldering' in The Barn, near Tavistock, a couple of friends and I were driving down a wooded incline when we saw a large, black animal with a long tail slip through the hedge and down the steep bank that descends by the side of the road. Unfortunately we only caught the tail end of the creature, but it left us in no doubt that we'd seen a large cat. Too big for a domestic Tomcat, too far from Japan to be a Ninja - the fact that it's tail managed to catch and sway a large branch tells you that this was no Tiddles.

Today, I'm a believer...

Meeses

What do you get if you try and cross a Mouse with a Human?

A very angry Mouse..........

If you want a job doing.............

BRAIN WAVE!! We trained up these clever perfoming pengins to do our stock take, so we could laze around in the sun all day and have a BBQ tonight............

However...... they ran off with most of the stock.

Oh boy are we in trouble now!

MISSING!

IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO BUDE ACADEMY DAY!

Toms Mexican Dog Parties

He mentioned this briefly the other day. I laughed nervously and tried hard to think nothing more of it. "We have Mexican parties for our dogs," he said, with a completely straight face. I thought he was having one of his little 'episodes' so I just got on with what I was doing at the time.

But then I trawled through some of his pictures on Facebook and found.... this.

Aye Chihuahua!

Big Blue & Gul Pro Surf Academy Day

Tomorrow it's Surf Academy day! We've got Gul sponsored Brit Pros Russ Winter and Mark Harris heading up to Bude to be part of a day of surf tutorials. Come down and watch the fun!

Last minute enquiries: 01288 331764

Ahem...

...I forgot to blog today.

My bad.

Get some.......

Bude Surf Report and Forecast

Wednesday (pronounced /ˈwɛnzdeɪ), This day is between Tuesday and Thursday. The name is derived from Old English Wodnesday, meaning the day of the English god Woden, a god in Anglo-Saxon England until about the 7th century. Wēdnes dæg is like the Old Norse Oðinsdagr ("Odin's day").

So thank Odin when your getting shacked mid-week.......

Lewis Stritch Moviedrome

Our boy Lewis when not eating pastys.

Jolly Roger

There's this man we know. You might know him too. Most people in this area do. His name is Roger Tout, and he makes surfboards. A lot of surfboards. So many surfboards in fact, we're pretty certain his body mass must now be at least 45% fibreglass.

Roger also tells stories. If you ever get a spare 30-45 minutes, we'd wager there aren't many better ways to spend slack time than to take in a tale from Mr Tout.

Here's a classic shot of Roger, back in the day, wearing a wetsuit that we can only approve of.

Sunday lunch

Grumpy-Go-Round

Our friend David (above) is actually, believe it or not, a happy soul. But even the happiest soul often has a scratchy, grouchy underbelly. And Davids underbelly was gloriously revealed when the fairground came to town recently.

Miffed that the noise from the popular family attraction (that had pitched up in the car park below his flat) was still keeping young children smiling and families happily entertained at a crazy 10pm, he did what any grown man with a stout measure of joie de vivre would do. He moaned about it. He moaned about it to his girlfriend, to his friends, to his cat and to facebook. As to why he didn't just march down and confront the burly fairground workers on their blatant inconsideration of his enjoyment of ITV's 'Britains Got Talent', we can only assume it's because he didn't want to be turned into candy floss.

Humphrey

This is Humphrey.

Humphrey is a dog.

Humphrey has a few 'conditions', but we love him dearly none-the-less.

Humphrey makes a throaty grunt when he's happy. Scratch him behind the ears, he goes all out.

As for the tongue, well, it kind of has a life of its own. Humphrey just lets it do its thing.

We think Humphrey is pretty much the coolest-looking dog in the world.

See you soon Humphrey.

Feeding - runs in the family.

My staff like a holiday.

It feels like they could give Judith Chalmers a run for her air miles. It's Emmas turn to vacate this time, packing in a small trip before the season really kicks in - she's off to a sunny Greek island whilst the rest of us work twice as hard so that she can frolick on Mediterranean beaches.

We're just a bit jealous - speaking for myself, the furthest I've been in the last 6 months is Bodmin. But none of us here are complaining: Emma can go wherever she likes so long as she keeps inadvertently leaving us weeks worth of food which we plan to eat, in a shameless fit of gluttony, within the next hour.

Thanks Em!

Superdog.

The surf is good today.

We know it.

And Superdog knows it too.

Nana's been feedin'

Emmas' Nan has been a bit over-generous throughout Spring.
Loading Emmas lunchbox up with delightful but artery-offending treats as she does, which eagerly get passed on to myself and Tom, well, as you can probably see, it's done us no good at all...

Hold the soft cheese, we're hitting the treadmill.

tis raining......

It raining quite a lot here in Bude on this Tuesday that feels a bit like a Monday.

But the holiday makers and cheery locals are still on the prowl and at the end of the day it's only a bit of water so we are still gonna hit it hard!