We're off to see the wizard...

Today's my last in the office for a short bit.  I'm flying out to Ireland tomorrow morning first thing to see my sister.  She lives in the wilds of Co.Donegal.  The weather is supposed to be shithouse at the moment there too, which is a shame because I'm the designated driver for the weekend.  And when it's wild in rural Donegal, it's proper mayhem, like the bit in Alien when they land on the hostile planet and find the alien eggs in the guts of an abandoned space ship.

I haven't driven for a while either; we flogged our car a couple of years ago (has it's been that long?) as we simply weren't using it.  Driving's one of those skill sets, however, that never seems to desert me.  It's like riding a motorbike.  I had a bike when I was a student.  I haven't ridden one for 20+ years, but if someone pointed a blunderbuss at my head and ordered me to pop a wheelie on one, I could.  They say you know when you've mastered a motor skill if you can imagine it and feel the moments.  That's me and motorbikes.  I'm a motorbike prodigy basically - like Eddie Kidd and the Fonz.

So, it's an early one tomorrow morning.  We fly at 7am.  Tonight I'm crashing at my other sister's house; she lives close to the airport, which is just as well because I'm an absolute shambles in the morning - like a six foot tall, bespectacled new born.  It's as well I don't have to drive to the airport at 5am, otherwise we wouldn't make it.

Break the ice with a gag - a 5 minute one.

One of my colleagues left the employ of the firm yesterday.  In time-honoured style, his boss was handed the poisoned chalice, and had to make a speech to mark the occasion.  This he did with praiseworthy candour.  The chap who left, let's call him Joe, is unswervingly honest in his assessment of the short comings of the company.

They've (the bosses) only themselves to blame.  Joe was doing a job he disliked and wanted to move to a post for which he was eminently qualified.  However, his refusal to hold his tongue for the sake of social mores earned him some powerful enemies.  He gave them six and a half years, but eventually he realised he was banging his noggin against a concrete curtain.

Because he disliked his job, he alienated his colleagues in that section - hence the rhetorical cold shoulder.  His boss opened with the observation that some people are brilliant at their jobs but quickly forgotten.  Joe, on the other hand, was "a nightmare" at his job, but would linger long in the memory.

Joe sat and took the drubbing like a champ.  He waited for the bell, lifted his arms in the air and started an Ali shuffle on the spot as the judges scored the contest.  Those of us who were fortunate enough to witness this event guffawed from start to finish.  In the end, we concluded that the firm had lost on points.  When you start ridding yourself of talented, charismatic employees for being a little rough around the politesse edges, you're screwed.  The office is filling-up with dead-eyed, sharp-suited corporate robots - exactly the kind of people who know how to wield a fish knife and confine themselves to anodyne small-talk, but are ultimately fucking useless.

This kind of behaviour is what did for Thatcher.  She started to believe her own press, and remove the dogs-in-a-manger from her cabinets.  This isolated her from the "out there", and we destroyed her as a result.  She was the last person on Earth who saw it coming, which explains her tears on leaving Downing Street.  She thought we loved her.  Why wouldn't she?  That's what her advisers told her.  In fact, we hated her.

I, for one, welcome our digital overlords

I used to be very sniffy about the internet - not its avowed purpose, which is to propagate information and to allow instant communication, but its reinvention as a giant, virtual Argos.

I do still have massive reservations about the march of on-line retailing.  Okay - it's quick and convenient, but what happens to the centres of our towns and cities when all the shops close down?  And they will, let's face it.  And people who witter on about towns "being given back to people" are talking out of their fundaments.  Towns and villages have always had commercial premises at their hearts, encouraging people to congregate, discuss, foment revolution and generally to revel.  All those smokey inns in Shakespeare and Dickens - what would London have been and become without those?

Well, you can answer that question for yourselves.  Take yourself off to a village in the home counties on any given Sunday.  Chances are it will have been long since denuded of its pub, village shop/post office and any other commercial premises.  The reason for this is that home counties villages have become dormitories for London.  The people who live in them are generally newcomers, attracted by the peace and by the size of the housing stock.  They use them like apartment hotels: they sleep and ablute in them, but little else.

Without the patronage of locals (who sell up to accommodate the newcomers), the village pub goes the way of all flesh.  Ditto the village shop - people who work in London, shop in London.  What remains is a facsimile of an English village: half-timbered maybe, but half-dead too.  I've wandered around villages like this hundreds of times during country walks, and the feeling of isolation and joylessness that pervades them is horrifying.  No-one spends time outside their house because there's perceived to be no point.  There is no point.  I don't stand outside my (London) house, saluting passers-by, but I see and chat to my neighbours all the time when I'm rushing to and from the shops and pubs that surround my home.  That's how community is reinforced.

So next time you buy a kipper or a surfboard, do yourself and England a favour - do in an acutal shop, eh?

You again? Hurrumph...

Great Scott im Himmel, it's Monday again...already.

I had a funny weekend - a real bag of mix.  I spent all day Saturday in the hoose, doing good domestic deeds.  This was followed on Saturday evening by a trip to The Barbican Theartre to see Henry IV Part II.  It's a bit of an Elizabethan dog's breakfast if I'm honest.  It retreads ground already comprehensively, and much more entertainingly, dealt with in H4 Part I.

To compensate for the absence of anything to say, Shakie reverts to a string of comic (sic) scenes in act two, which are excruciating frankly.  And this is the RSC, mind you, with Antony Sher as Falstaff.  If they can't make it work, it's fcuked.  The upside was that we had better seats this time, not like the cruel perches we were subjected to last week.  But you know a play is failing when you start praising the furniture.

Yesterday, I awoke in a bit of a shabby mood.  I felt restless and twitchy.  The missus and I went for a longish walk, and popped to a museum we know slightly, to see if that would cure matters.  I then went off a-wandering alone around some of the places I used to work.  When I worked there, this area was an absolutely hovel.  It's currently undergoing an economic regeneration at the mo, and it's vee pleasing to see the old bag with a bit of lippy on for a change.

That event seemed to kick start my optimism, and the rest of the evening evaporated in a pleasing social whirl.

Voltarie was wary of too much philosophising, as it's sounds the death knell for action and therefore happiness.  When at eh end of Candide, Pangloss starts holding forth on his metaphysical nostrums, Candide replies "That is very well put . . . but we must cultivate our garden."

Quite so - let us cultivate our gardens.

High culture and that

Missus O and I are off to an RSC production of Henry IV Part II tomorrow evening.  It's at The Barbican, which is handy for us to get through.  Unfortunately, the seat in the auditorium are fucking atrocious, which as it's a 3-hour play, is less than brilliant.

The seats appear to have been designed by some disciple of Ernő Goldfinger.  They're all form and no function.  The bit behind one's lumbar spine has been recessed, making it impossible to rest the small of one's back.  Sadly this idiot aperture sits above a very shallow arse dish (I don't know the mot juste in chair architecture for the bit your buttocks sit on).  This means the jutting-out bit of chair back pushes on your shoulder blades as you try and follow the Tudor action.

Usually uncomfortable seats take their time in making their presence known.  Not these ones though.  As soon as you flop down in one, it's clear something is seriously to cock.  They're so poor, these perches, that we won't be going back to The Barbican.  That's some shit chair, isn't it?  The production was brilliant, but I won't be going back because my arse can't tolerate another sitting.  Their loss I suppose.  I might write to them, pointing out this big old hole in their business model.  In these straightened economic times, the arts, particularly high falutin' guff like Shakespeare, needs to ensure the customer comes back.  They shooting themselves in the loins.  It's not good enough.

I might have to pack a rubber ring tomorrow evening.  Oh woe.

Ahh, fun - I remember you

I had an unexpected fillip at work today.  When I got there, shell-shocked and foaming with anguish as per, my colleague informed me that our mutual boss is out of the office both today and tomorrow!  Let joy be unconfined.  And as a result, today has been an absolute pleasure.  I've been to several meetings and dealt with the same people and the same bullshit, but it's all been fun because we don't have him leering over our efforts, like impending doom.  I feel like I have a free reign to make decisions - wise, informed decisions.  My boss's judgement is like that of a 5 year old: driven by self interest and e-numbers.  He has zero deft and no political nous whatever.

I'm afraid I can't elaborate any further; I'm off out for a drink with my relieved and oh so thirsty colleagues.

In your face, bosses.

Vim Fuego

Bah!  I'm really lacking vim today.  No matter.  On with it.

I've taken a leaf out of the Pollyanna set this week and have started actively avoiding the news.  The news is supposed to be an objective overview of events, but if you weigh up the balance of positive and negative stories in a bulletin, you'll see that its primary objective is to scare the beejesus out of you.  The reason for this of course is that journalists are just co-opted entertainers.  They're there to inform, yes, but if (as I imagine the shameless self-justification rationale begins) no-one buys our product, then we can't educate them, can we?  So - paper the house with outlandish speculation, some showbiz news dressed up as fact and some sexual deviancy.  That's catnip for most commuters.  They're trapped in tube trains or on buses for an hour or so, and this stuff acts as a quick one off the wrist for the unimaginative part of the brain - the part Chris Morris memorably christened "Shatner's bassoon".

Instead of news I've been listening to Radio 3 of an evening.  It's perfect for me as I don't really care for classical music, so it just sits there in the background - an undemanding, yet comforting presence.  It's like when a cat rubs the side of his head against your shins.  It's pleasing and very restful, and you can get on with the washing up whilst the mogster does his worst.

Obviously, I do have some appreciation of the composers' skill in classical music, but as it's not something I'm likely ever to play, I can't let it slide in one ear and out the other without analysing it too much.  I am a musician (a rock musician, for want of a better term), and whenever I hear a piece I love, I tend to demand to know how to play it.  By the time I've worked it out and mastered the fingering, it's transcendent power is lost forever, which is sad.

Tonight I shall spent listening to Sibelius whist sanding the skirting.

Break the ice with a joke

We had our annual business conference today.  It's a 2-hour shindig at the nearby hotel.  The only reason I can be bothered to attend is that the catering is top notch.  Sit through an hour of heart-breaking business-speak and you qualify for a free lunch.

What is there to say, anyway?  If the direction of travel of the business makes your job about as current as that of lamp-lighter, then you're screwed.  And there's nothing they or you can do to remedy that.  If your skill set chimes with the direction of travel, then you're already involved.  Your workload has increased exponentially, but at least you're not in any immediate danger of receiving the dreaded notice of "consultation".  The consultation period is a 90-day stay of execution that employers are legally obliged to enter into.  It's clear to even the dullest intellect that once notice has been served, your career goose is cooked.  If the business were in two minds about your value to them, they'd keep their council.  Otherwise, they might lose a useful incumbent.  Ever if they do change their collective, corporate mind, you'll jump ship if you've any sense.

It was the usual "shit sandwich" approach this year: bit of good news (the bonus having been paid out at the end of last year); the bad news (choppy waters, change of emphasis blah blah); and finally a bit of good news (they're going to restock the stationery cupboard in time for Easter).

I managed to stay awake for most of it, and then bolted out for my complimentary lunch.  It was rather good, but I suspect the sautéed potatoes must have had some MSG on them because my mood started swinging furiously even as I was shovelling them down the hatch.  In spite of what the weasel food industry's co-opted nutritionists tell you to the contrary, it is possible to be allergic to MSG.  It drives me doolally anyway.

I'm dreading the journey home tonight too.  It's unfashionably cold in London again today - really rictus grin inducing chilly.  Chez moi is a modern, draft-free abode, but it lacks a fireplace.  The Romans didn't refer to brer fireplace as the focus for nowt.  Without one, a room lacks heart.  Objectively, our front room is plenty warm, but the old brain starts to fret and fizz when it perceives the fireplace has gone AWOL.

Chilly-nilly

Good God, it's cold in London today - unfeasibly brass monkeys.  I shouldn't moan too readily, I suppose, it's actually a lovely winter's day.  The sun is high, wide and handsome.  And there isn't a puff of wind, but it is viciously cold.  I foolishly opted to go for a junior wander at lunchtime, and was given a damn good drubbling for my efforts by the elements.

I rode to work this morning wearing virtually everything I own, and was still insensible with cold when I arrived.  And I'm now bracing myself for the return leg.

Deadline

I'm under deadline pressure today, so a very short and very simple post.  I'm off to the boozer with colleagues for an ale or several.  This is a rare but welcome occurrence.  I must be disciplined though.  I have my bike with me, so seven pints - tops.  I'm joking, officer.

Pie Ar5e Squared

I'm toying with the idea of putting on a bit of timber, for the winter months at any rate.  I've always been quite skinny, but as I age disgracefully, I find it increasingly difficult to keep a lid on fat.  I'm still slim, but I have to watch what I eat and drink to a certain extent NOW.  And that is exceedingly dull, believe me.

The idea occurred to me to give being a bit heavier a whizz.  One's appetite always increases at this time of year (January, as I write) so one has to be even more diligent than usual.  Why not then, I thought, go with it for a bit, and let the excess slide off of its own volition in the spring?  I suppose there is a danger than once it's made itself comfy, the extra lard might feel disinclined to piss-off when the clocks change.  I might end-up, 20 years hence, being winched out of the front room of my council flat by a team of burly firemen.  No, perhaps I should remain diligent.  Thin has always been my USP.  I feel I'd be losing a part of myself if I put on weight - ironically.

Wisdom

It's my niece's 20th birthday today.  I'm scudding round to my sister's after work this evening to gather en famille and anoint her now adult head with Bacardi Breezers and premium lager.  Of course, she still seems like a child to me, and always will.  That's the nature of generational succession.

It's odd, and rather unhelpful, how one constantly reassess one's maturity in retrospect.  At twenty I was pretty much the man I am now (don't laugh).  I may have been less well educated than I am now, but I was certainly as intelligent, probably more so.  And I seem to recall being quite mature then, apart from occasionally charging around the place, pissed-up.  When sober, I was interested in art and culture - again probably more so than I am now.  But when I look at my niece, I can't help hearing the words "frivolous pigeon".  I'm being unfair, of course.  The truth of the matter is that I just don't know her that well as an adult.  I didn't know her that well as a child, but nippers is easier to blithely categorise, aren't they?

Now what?

Well, the first working week of the year is done, and it wasn't that bad.  Unfortunately, this has led me into a false sense of security.  I thought I'd broken the back of the new year.  I was rudely disabused of this belief on Monday morning when I work up with a monumental gob on.

It's not even as though I've got much to bellyache about at present.  Work's ticking over; we've got some holidays booked and looming, and all is well.  However, it's the prospect of another year exactly like the last that's getting in amongst me.

That's the real catalyst of mid-life crises I think.  It's not grandiose, nihilistic notions of one's mortality; it's the realisation that all the great changes that happen to a rotter over the course of his allotted years are now very probably behind you.  It's going to be like this until...well, until it is no longer like this, if you know what I mean.  That's a sobering thought, eh?

Also, there doesn't appear to be any easy way out of the malaise.  On Saturday, I had an inkling there might be a fug on the horizon, so I thought I'd take myself off to London's fashionable west end and piss some money up the wall on unnecessary consumer durables.  But when I got there, I realised I couldn't be bothered with them.  Most men my age still get a minor frisson from buying toys, but I no longer do.  I've never been very materialistic I suppose.

I could take up a dangerous hobby - martial darts for example.  But it sounds like an awful lot of effort.  I'm not sure I could be bothered.

Charlie Farley and Piggy Malone

The fallout from the Charlie Hebdo massacre continues to rain down on us.  The usual pattern of claim and counterclaim on social media observed a brief dignified silence over the weekend, but today, the Monday after the attack, the gloves are off.

Some people are posting about why there's a double standard regarding defaming Jews and Muslims.  Their argument is that no-one can be critical of Judaism without being censured, but it's open season on Islam.  There may be something in this; I don't know.  I don't have an over-arching and objective view of all broadcast media.  No-one does.  So none of us can form an objective opinion, only a subjective one.  As with all subjective opinions, it's probably a mix of 75% prejudice and 25% anecdotal evidence.  That's a recursive subjective opinion right there of course.  You don't see those too often.

But that argument is to miss the point spectacularly.  A friend on Facebook alerted me to an article by Stephen Fry that does get to the heart of the matter.  In this piece, Fry dismantles the supposed motive of the terrorists: that they're offended by the perceived slight to their god and/or prophet.  However, let's conduct a little thought experiment.  If you did actually have the answers and could see life for what it really was: all-loving, everlasting and meaningful in the embrace of the godhead, how would you behave day-to-day?

If you think about this for a moment, it's clear that anger, envy, avarice and all the petty, self-serving motives that fuel most of us in the everyday lives would wither and die for you.  These emotions no longer have any purpose, do they?  But the people who carry out these actions are angry (even they'd admit that much), which suggests their claims to religious "insight" are flawed.

QED...for all the good it'll do us.

Weak end

Friday today.  Thanks be to Godfrey.  I've only done 4 days this week, and the final two of those didn't exactly cover me in glory.  I turned up and made the right noises, but, really!, I should have been at home under a 20-tog duvet for all the use I was.  It wasn't for the want of trying.  I do have enough residual Catholic guilt to at least try and work, but I couldn't uncross my eyes long enough to get anything meaningful down on paper.

The events in France are coming to a predictably violent head.  Those behind it will all be shot to ribbons of course, moving their cause on not one jot.  There's a legacy for you.  I'm willing myself to keep my sense of humour in the midst of all this misery, but it's tough.  If there is intelligent life on Europa, or one of these hundreds of habitable exoplanets they keep turning up, let's hope they swoop down and give humanity a right good kicking for treating its sentience so shabbily.  If I set about some blameless passer-by with a broom handle one day in the name of Eros, say, I'd quite rightly be locked up as a loon.

A lunatic.  Lunacy, which is just idiocy's wide-eyed cousin of course.

The Aftermath

After yesterday's massacre in Paris, events are unfolding apace.  There are reports, as I type, of fresh shootings in Paris, and the suspects in yesterday's killings have held up a petrol station in northern France.

After work yesterday evening, I rode to Trafalgar Square in central London to join in a silent memorial gathering in front of the National Gallery.  My initial reaction to the slaughter was one of anger of course, which I suppose is inevitable.  But today my feelings have modulated; I've decided to devote the rest of my life absolutely to satire - its propagation,  dissemination and promotion.  I will use my energies and talents to ensure that measured and merited sarcasm and piss-taking flows from me like shite from a new-born.  I've always been a sarcastic bastard anyway, so it's a bit of a busman's holiday for me.

The bearded, joyless twats who want life to be grey and doctrinaire are beginning to get on my tits.  And when you're a satirist, what do you do with people who annoy you?  That's right, you rip the piss out of them.  I'm not going to waste any more of my time and energy on looking doleful, or getting depressed.  I'm going to to point and laugh.  

You mean to tell me you know god's will, do you?  You, who couldn't right his name in the dirt with a stick?  I find that rather difficult to accept, frankly.  God would surely have chosen a more elegant vessel for his message, I fancy.  Me for example.  So if I'm not getting mentally spammed by the big fella, then I'm damn sure you're not either.

Let's face it, the best place for people like this is restocking the paint aisle in Homebase.  That's where your abilities rightly place you in modern polite society, my friends.  I'm sorry if that doesn't sit well with your misplaced romantic notions of your worth, but life's unfair.  Your psychological and intellectual shortcomings mean you were never going to be leaders of men, only followers.  Self-knowledge is a bitter pill at times, but if there is a purpose to human life (there isn't, by-the-way), a goal to aim for, then perhaps it's that.  Know thyself.

Today, like yesterday, but worse

No long, rambling post today.  Lack of time and a lack of will.

There was a massacre in Paris this morning.  Twelve people were killed in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine.  Some people's all-knowing, all-powerful deity cannot tolerate satire it seems.  Presumably this deity also created the human beings they today destroyed.  I thought only god could grant and take life.  I was wrong.

Welcome back...right, tea break's over - back on your heads.

The first working day of the new year for yours truly.  It's not been that bad to be honest.  I think my absence of festive sentiment this yuletide saved me.  It wasn't much of a wrench to get back to it.  The worst part was the alarm doing its pieces at 7.20 this morning, which felt like the middle of the night to me.  Other than that, I found my trotters in no time.

It helped also that Missus O has booked loads of mini-breaks for the upcoming months.  I had a list of leave to get in the diary at work when I arrived, which was a pleasure unalloyed.  There's a part of one that weeps a little at divvying the year up like this; it's a bit like wishing one's life away.  But, let's not delude ourselves, friends, everyone dislikes his or her job to some extent.  Those who pretend they don't are joyless, friendless fcuking weirdos.  For me work's a mild irritant.  But in the past I've had jobs that I would happily have seen mown down by a runaway steam engine.  So when the opportunity to not have to attend to my miserable duties for a day or two arises, I cling to it like a starving man to a Wagon Wheel.

I wonder if I've crossed an Xmas Rubicon?  Even the removal of the decorations didn't garner a flicker of regret this year.  I've grown immune, it seems.  It's only taken 46 years.  I do hope something takes its place in my affections though.  It'll be a boring dotage otherwise.  Life's just a little vanilla when you can't get ridiculously over-excited.  I suppose that the one great thing that adults lose when they jettison childish things - over-excitement.  That and laughing, I mean really laughing.  Being flaccid and helpless with mirth.  When's the last time that happened to you?  I thought as much.  Shame, really.  I used to love a laugh, me.