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.

Lurlled of weather

A week of many hues, this one.  Yesterday was a full-on late autumn day in Londres.  The cloud base descended to a height of about seventy feet, and the air below that was absolutely chockablock with moisture.  I'm not sure that it actually rained in a strict meteorological sense, but you couldn't walk the length of a dining table without getting sodden.  The air was saturated.

I went for a wander anyhoo, my usual route down to Westferry Circus.  It was wonderfully desolate down there.  The office fodder were put off by the weather and it was deserted.  There's a lovely le Carré feel to the place when it's grey and empty like this.  I can fill my time simply to staring out to the river, pretending I'm awaiting a contact from "our man in the Soviet trade delegation" or something.  This kind of glassy-eyed time wasting gets me down usually, but not at especially grimy moments.  I did try to read at one point, to take the curse off my idleness, by the book starting taking on board water like shit dingy, so I gave up.

Today, on the other hand, is a sunny, warm and life-affirming November day.  The colours are superb, and I say this as a registered colour-blind person.  It's the contrast between the plant life and the sky that does the trick.  Decaying organic greens and browns seem to suit that cornflower blue you get in the sky in the late afternoons at this time of year.  I was always taught that "blue and green should never be seen", but this is the exception.  Everyone from Keats to Jeremy Clarkson seems to like the combo.  

Actually, why on earth did they try and teach us an orthodoxy of the aesthetics of colour using rhyme in the 70s, like this?  It's seemed as natural as learning the times tables at the time.  Now it strikes me as a lot bizarre and a little sinister.  I dare say Thatcher heaved that bit of the syllabus out the window as soon as soon as her skinny white ass hit the Parker Knoll in Number 10 in 1979.  Had she stopped there, I might have felt better disposed towards the dozy old sow.

Or perhaps not.