Some much to do, so little...well, you know the rest

It's Friday, and as luck would have it I've just discovered that the micro-brewery that lives around the corner from home has opened a bar on its premises.  Mrs O and I are going to scud round this evening and bury a few.  The trouble is I'm absolutely shattered after 4-days paper-shuffling and general office-twattery.

This evening could go one of two ways then: either my head will be lolling around like a bladder on a stick as soon as I get a sniff of the barmaid's apron, or I'll spring into life the moment I lay eyes on a brown bottle.  Let's hope it's the latter.  There's nothing more frustrating that a thirsty brain and floppy chassis.

In other news, today is yet another disappointment meteorological-speaking.  All week the weathermen and women have been rattling on about how warm it is in the south east (of England).  Trouble is, it isn't.  I don't doubt they've got some scientific explanation for why it is actually warm and only appears to be freezing, but frankly they can talk to the hand.  Chilly is as chilly does.

Tell the D.A I need 24 hours, goddamit

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.

I'd give my right arm for a Bruce Rioch

Well, World Cup fever is building up aplenty, n'est-ce-pas?  No, perhaps you're right.  It's so very autumnal around these parts currently that staging a World Cup in a fortnight's time seems implausible and a touch distasteful.  A bit like washing your hair in the toilet.

I was reading some old guff on the BBC web site earlier about men in their 30s and 40s collecting Panini stickers during football tournaments.  It's all the rage.  I did try this once a few years ago, but it was rubbish.  When I was a boy, I thought if I had all the money in the world to spend on stickers, I'd find contentment.  I know that now to be untrue.  I did throw money at the sticker problem as a grown up, but just felt more and more frustrated.  In the end I gave up.

I shouldn't have been surprised by this; I've read enough philosophy over the years to wallpaper an oil rig.  And it all reaches the same conclusion: material things make you unhappy.  And yet I still harboured dreams of buying my way to happiness.

Those wrong-headed notions were shattered by Panini (thanks, fellas).  I no longer buy lottery tickets, thanks to them.  What's the point?  I'd just be a miserable millionaire.  "Why can't I afford a platinum submersible?"

What price Bob Latchford?

Summer lovin'

Another bank holiday here in dot-coe-dot-you-kay yesterday, and another hosing-down from the gods.  We're in that difficult transition period between "it's been a shit spring" to "it's being a shit summer".  No-one's quite sure where the cusp lies.  It's like Easter; only the Vatican seems on top of that sheight.  All we do know is that it's close.

The point of this equinox of course is that one must abandon hope if it can be shown we've passed it.  Summers in this country and short and brutal, like a spell in a young offenders' institute.  If we've missed even a week of the summer season to poor weather, then statistically-speaking it cannot be saved.

As Bill Shankly or Buddha would no doubt have averred: it's the hope that kills you.

This spell of appalling weather has come at the end of a very trying weekend too.  On Sunday my beloved Orient were beaten in the League One play-off final at Wembley.   I've seen Orient lose more play-offs than I can shake a stick at, but this one hurt particularly  

I was stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the same cohort of people I was in the 80s when Orient went up against Wrexham, and we've been there for every major game since.  The difference this time is that if we needed 13 years to reach another Wembley final (the gap since our last play-off final), would the club even exist?  It was this thought that played on my mind on the interminable tube journey home.

If West Ham get Olympic Stadium, I fear we're screwed.  The children of Walthamstow, Leyton, Leytonstone etc. will grow up to be Hammers.  You can't blame them; I would have done the same.  The idea of Orient not outliving me is hugely troubling.  I've got football existential angst.  I wonder if my GP will sign me off work?  He is an Os fan after all.

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...