Thursdays are rich with meetings and intrigue in the office where I work. Put enough men in a meeting room together, give them an agenda and plenty of coffee, and watch them go. The nervous energy that gets shed here in the pursuit of trivial arguments most Thursdays would power sub-Saharan Africa for a one-thousand years.
I generally drift off after the initial sparring and verbal foreplay is done. The rest of my colleagues, on the other hand, really get into it at this stage, brow-beating each other and trying to get the upper hand. If it were accepted business practice to take off your shirt and beat your naked chest, most would. Try minuting that.
I used to worry that my inability to join in the brouhaha was a failing, a sign of testosterone-deficiency or something. But now I realise that whatever its cause, I'd sooner set fire to myself that take this stuff seriously. I should resign and become a child.
My length of shrift I give to office blather has shortened rather of late as I'm currently reading Robert Grave's experiences in the Great War, "Good-bye To All That". What strikes one most about RG's grimly comic memories of the trench warfare is the blasé attitude of the professional soldier to the mediaeval conditions and brutality he experienced.
Graves enlisted before it became the mandatory draft, and the career soldiery were dismissive of newly-minted officers like him. When one "copped it", then, they hardly missed a beat, stepping over the fallen unfortunate like someone avoiding the cracks in a pavement. Also, the strict seniority of regiments in the British Army was religiously upheld at the time. Men would blithely walk into certain death in order to uphold the reputation of their regiments. Madness.
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