Get Fresher for the Weekend

Here's a thought: what about a two-day working week, punctuated by a five-day weekend?  Yes, yes, we can all see the obvious, licentious advantages.  But think a little deeper.  The main advantage of a two-day working week, it seems to me, would be to clarify the mind of all the protagonists.

I contend that most of the (ahem) work in the modern office environment is obfuscation.  It's not productive or intelligent; it's simply process.  Process was invented by unimaginative office-Johnnies who have too much time on their mitts.  What better way to fill the void than with empty-headed meetings?  The clichéd apotheosis of this type of person is of course the career civil servant - Terri Coverley from "The Thick of It" for example.

But, somehow over the years, process broke free of its chains and started to wag the dog.  And as process is divorced from actual productive work, it engenders ennui.  A little is easy to deal with, as long as it is tempered with actual productive work.  However, when the balance gets out of cock, the subject is overwhelmed with feelings of intense discomfort.  Consider for example how many times you've found yourself in the executive washroom, grimacing and rubbing your eyes like an over-tired 3-year-old.  Hmm...a lot, isn't it?

If we were limited to a two-day working week, all the flim-flam would fall by the wayside.  There simply wouldn't be time for it.  We'd all be full-on, trying to get the in tray denuded before Sunday evening.  You wouldn't attend a meeting unless your life depended on it.  And even then, it would last ten minutes, tops.  There'd be no coffee and biscuits, that's fo shizzle.

Yes, it would be intense and pressured.  But as the work would be productive and the fruits of your labours patent to you, there would be enormous satisfaction also.  The boredom and associated fatigue would dissipate.  That strange feeling you get at work currently that you ascribe to chronic fatigue is nothing of the sort; that's why it magically disappears when you leave the office.  It's chronic tedium.  Imagine your life without it.  You would be truly alive.

Friday evenings would be a little glum; we'd all sit around at home watching "Last of the Summer Wine", wishing it was Sunday.  But that's a small price to pay.

I say we go for it.  Anyone?

Bonjour tristesse

So, back to work.  I've been charged with doing just two days' work this week.  Two days - that's all.  And yet I am struggling after 6 hours of day one.  Jaysus wept, it's hard.  I can't concentrate at all.  It's not clear why this should be; I slept well last night.  Oh, I know what it is: I'm bored incontinent.  

And while that sounds like an overstatement, it isn't.  Scientists have irrefutable proof that tedium is detrimental to the health, and can in fact kill.  Firstly it causes alpha-wave state, like being hypnotised or super-pissed.  Then the subject lapses into a persistent vegetative state (like an under-achieving turnip), and finally the heart beats so slowly that it loses internal pressure and flops over like a squid on an escalator.  Then you've had it.  Medical fact.

The trouble with tiresome work is that the temptation is to take one's slapped-arse expression home with one.  Then you have a miserable evening, notwithstanding the fact that you're not actually at work.  Great Scott!  Then all is lost.  You might as well fill your socks with Blu-Tack and leap off Beachy Head if you get to this stage.

The thing to do is to nip it in the knackers, as Malcolm Tucker so memorably put it.  Speed home and perform some trivial domestic chore to the best of your abilities.  It really works, this.  Why not iron your pants for example?  It's probably as well to remove them first.

I feel inspired all of a sudden.

Get orf of my in-laws' lahnd

Mrs O and I have just returned from a few days in darkest Cornwall.  I do mean darkest too, the bit right down the business end at Land's End, not the wan Devon-lite Londoners' plaything up on the north coast.  It was so dark in fact that I couldn't update the old blog.  The dial-up connection suffered a greenstick fracture when I tried to upload a holiday snap, and that was that.

It wasn't enlightening, being without the Internet, incidentally.  It was shite.  People who bang-on about the liberating effect of selling their televisions are psychotic.  You wouldn't cut yourself off the electric, would you?  Quite so.  It's 2014.  Suck it up and move on.  The Edwardians didn't eschew electric light because it was making their kids lazy.  They embraced it.  We should do likewise.

...God, I'm in a good mood...

A Plate Accompli

My dad has a significant birthday looming soon.  To mark the event I asked an old friend, who's a ceramicist, to produce a tankard.  This she's decorated with photos I took of places from the auld fella's past that have especial meaning for him.  It's a particularly nice gift as my potter friend's parents lived three doors down from mine when we were children, so her making the thing will be a surprise and a delight in and of itself.

I'm normally pretty good at coming-up with gift ideas, but I sweated cheddar over this one.  I could not think what to buy him.  The problem is that I usually just fire over a sporting biography to him in the post.  The low-key nature of the thought and the relative inexpense of the gift doesn't trouble either party; we're men.  Also, I know he will genuinely enjoy it.  But a book, even a hardback one, wouldn't suffice for this major life event.

But when the idea crystallised, the whole thing came together remarkably easily.  Until today that is.  I've been asked to come up with a pithy and moving legend for the base of the tankard - ten words, tops.  My temptation is these circs is to be profane, but you need to consider the object's future.  It  might well end-up in the hands of one of his great-grandchildren in 50 years' time.  And by then, no doubt, the legend "Goodnight, goodnight and eat me shite" might have lost some of its currency and charm.

The second notion was to have a stab at profound.  But profundity descends into sentiment if not very carefully rendered, and no-one wants that.  Furthermore, I don't think my relationship with my father could be said to be profound in-any-way-at-all.  Close, yes, but not profound.  I could just picture his rictus grin as he read my cack-handed pensée for the first time, his eyes mouthing the words What the feck is that supposed to mean?  No, that would not do.

I shall probably just end-up plagiarising one of his maxims.  He's got more catchphrases than Bruce Forsyth, my old man.  They have the twin benefits of brevity and a vaguely-scatological sledgehammer charm.  And what says "happy birthday" more than that winning combination?  My thoughts exactly.

Hark at Mister Grumpy

I rather rashly decided to take some leave next week.  This means of course that I'm catastrophically busy clearing the decks before the off.  I don't ever remember work being like this previously.  In days of yore, one's duties could go hang for a few days unless you were Foreign Minister or something.  Now it's impossible to fetch a jaffa cake from the canteen without someone phoning you, demanding to know your whereabouts.

People bleat about how sad it is that children aren't allowed to gallivant in the streets unchaperoned by adults in the modern age.  But they fail to behold the beam in their own grown-up eyes first.  Most adults are constantly wired into the grid these days, and willingly so it seems.  When my Dad was my age I dare say he could have hidden in the factory toilet for 4-5 hours a day without anyone batting an eyelid.  Their generation must look upon ours and shudder.  I would.

As Blur quite rightly averred: modern life is rubbish.  I wouldn't mind if my job were actually that important, but it's trivia in a suit, like all modern jobs.  Why people get so het up about these matters is beyond me.  Relax and have a choc-ice whydontcha?  Unless a flaming asteroid hurtles into Mother Earth over the weekend, I can deal with that next week.  And even if I didn't, so-what?  I'm sure the fates, or God, or the prime mover or whatever couldn't give a shite either way.  Yes, perhaps I'll bugger off to Cornwall with the inbox still groaning.  That'll show 'em.  Grrr...

Be still, my beating ar5e

Well, that was an intense evening.  I jollied along to Orient last night for the second leg of the League One play-offs.  All went as planned and Orient prevailed.  It did remind me, though, of why I don't attend football matches.  It was two hours of nerve-shredding confusion and anxiety.

I have, even if I say so myself, a "footballing brain" as it's termed.  I see the game well, its territorial aspects etc.  A lot of schoolboy footballers, while technically adept, have no feel for the sport.  They look at their feet, the ball and about 20 feet of turf in front of them.  And their reaction to receiving the ball is always the same: running with it.  You'll never develop into a useful footballer with that world view.  One needs to look up and assess the situation.  You only pin back your lugs and give it the full Forest Gump if the lie of the land demands it.

Despite my sang-foid on the pitch, when spectating, I'm a gibbering wreck.  It's just a blur of colours and sounds.  All I can do is tremble and swear.  I cannot follow the game at all.  It's like trying to watch a production of The Cherry Orchard from a roller coaster.  The see the action, but it doesn't really sink in; the nuances are lost.

Unfortunately, my torment isn't over.  We're off to Wembley en bloc on Sunday week for the final.  For everyone else this will be like a works outing, full of drunken laughter and tears.  But for me it's the emotional equivalent of Cain carrying a burning-hot cauldron in the opening credits of "Kung Fu".  If you're under 80, you might need to Google that neo-classical reference.

I'll try to maintain a phlegmatic expression, but the beads of sweat on my brow and quivering lips will tell their own story.  - I come in peace...up, The Os.

My trouble is I care too much

I'm off to a football match this evening.  That's a rare occurrence for me.  I used to go regularly, not often, but regularly.  But as real life has increasingly encroached upon childish pursuits, I've rather left the beautiful game behind.  This trend was exacerbated by most of my friends moving away from the area we grew up in.

I did go alone once, but it was an horrific experience for all concerned.  I ended-up sitting in the family enclosure, and was surrounded by 12-year-olds and their mothers, all in scarves and rosettes.  In any other circumstance this would present no problems; I'm a polite well brought up sort.  Unfortunately, when it comes to football, the veneer of civility slips away rapidly.  As soon as the referee gets proceedings underway, yours truly starts swearing like a docker - one who's just stubbed his toe on a red-hot javelin.

The reason for this is nerves.  I get really het up at football.  I hate it in all honesty.  It's the one arena in which I do let the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune get to me.  I look upon it as a personal slight when an opposition team of journeymen professionals contrives to beat my beloved Orient.  It's like someone having a pop at your family.

I know this makes me sound like a nutter, but I'm really not.  I wouldn't categorise myself as much of a supporter at all.  I don't slavishly follow the club's news, or pour over match reports.  I don't even really care that much for the game anymore.  I used to, as a boy, but now I've bigger cultural fish to fry.

The reason I can get upset to such an unseemly degree is that for me football is territorial.  The club is a reflection of what and who I am.  That's why I could never support a team with which I had no geographical or cultural link.  What would be the point?

The club is akin to a river for me.  I was brought up on its banks, and so it belongs to me.  I care not a jot for the players in the squad at any given time.  I appreciate what they do for the club, but they are not the club - no more than the water is the river.  The river's quiddity transcends its individual temporary elements.  And that is why I eff and blind all the way through the game.  Yes - including the halftime break.  QED.