The Patrician Trough

Mrs O and I went to an old members' garden party at her former college in Oxford on Saturday.  The weather was a bit hit-and-miss: wan sunshine and stairrods.  But no biggie - Oxford colleges, apart from the shitty modern ones, come equipped with handy cloisters for days such as these.

The quality of the booze and nibblage available at these shindigs is beyond compare.  It all takes place in the middle of the day, so it's only tiny sangers and cake, sluiced down with champagne and/or Pimms.  But you never tasted food like this.  It's living proof of the old adage "shit in equals shit out".  When the stuff going into the sandwich is as good as this, it cannot fail.  Like great art, every thing about the food and drink was better than it needed to be.  And when combined, the ingredients formed something far far greater than the sum of their parts.  Take the humble cucumber sandwich for example.  I don't even like cucumber, which is a bad start, but one was seduced into adoring it by the haute qualité of the bread and the butter it was hiding betwixt.

So, needless to say then, the missus and yours truly did stering work in the dining hall.  We then retired to the gardens to hook up with a few old friends.  And that was that.  There's no real purpose to these old member events it seems to me, other than for successful people to gather together somewhere beautiful and give thanks for God's bounty. 

Afterwards we jumped on the bus back to London.  It became apparent that the young lady in the seat in front of us had also been at the beanfeast.  She was extremely well-spoken.  I mean "What does your father do?"  "He's a viscount." well-spoken.  You'd have to suppose, then, that she'd seen a few fifty pound notes in her time, and yet even she was on the blower to her friends, outlining how much Veuve Clicquot she'd managed to bank before last orders.

I do worry about the upper orders sometimes.

Mister Punyverse

I've got a taster session booked at the Olympic Velodrome next week.  Initially I was hoogely excited by this, but later, as surely as night follows day, the doubts started to creep in.  Riding to work on Wednesday morning I thought I felt one of my hamstrings complaining.  This is normally a sign that my sciatic nerve is unhappy with developments, so it's not a problem.  I just step-up the yoga a touch and get on with it.  But the looming public display of cycling prowess had added a extra dimension of worry.

You see, I am fiercely competitive once I've thrown my leg over a bike, so I cannot and will not race unless I'm in prime condition.  I think it's referred to as "doing oneself justice".  So will I be able to give it full gas at the velodrome?  If I can't, I need to pull out beforehand.  The reason for my uncertainty is that I'm prone to psychosomatic episodes, particularly when I know I need to be 100%.  Chances are this is one of those.

The competitive instinct on the bike is an odd sensation for me.  Other than in this one arena, I have no competitive spirit at all.  In fact I dislike and mistrust competitive people.  I think it betrays a weakness of character.  Why do you need to prove yourself to others?  I know what I'm good at; I don't need to demonstrate that ability.  Except, that is, on a bicycle.

In other news, Mrs O and I are off to a garden party tomorrow at her old college in Oxford.  Sadly, my meteorological advisors tell me it's going to shit down rain, so that's the croquet gone for a Richard Burton.  No matter.  The sherry and nibbles at these do's are of the finest order available, so if push comes to shove, I can always spend the time indoors, face down in the buffet.

Teeth Richards

Luis Suárez has been up to this old nonsense again.  I say "nonsense"; I mean common assault of course.  Actually, I mean uncommon assault.  It's not every day, after all, that one grown man attacks another using his choppers for a weapon.

For those of you who don't esteem the beautiful game as much as I do, LS bit an opponent on the shoulder during Uruguay's game with Italy yesterday.  It's conjures up quite an erotic vignette, that, doesn't it?  One hot-blooded Latin, overwhelmed by his emotions, biting another on the shoulder.  In reality it was rather more sordid than that.

As I feared they might, the broadsheet polemicists went to town on this episode today.  Depending on who you ask, it was either a cultural misunderstanding on behalf of the English or a Freudian cry for help.  All the analysis was unpinned with an rather unpleasant sneering tone.  Whatever position football fans took on the subject was by definition gauche, and instruction was duly given.

That was liquid football...brown liquid.

Without wishing to labour the point, England are out of The World Cup at the group stage for the first time since the Crimean War or something.  I don't really care to be honest; I find it difficult to get excited by international football.  What does stick in the craw, however, is the bare-faced bullshit spouted by the players and manager in the post match trawl through the entrails.

The game was a dead rubber.  Costa Rica were through and so fielded a team of ladies, children and the lame.  And the thinking was that as England had phuque-all to lose, they would play with abandon and invention.  As it turned out, they reverted to type and played a ponderous lumpen version of the game; thereby proving, je suppose, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a pig's perineum.

Current manager, Roy "Woy" Hodgson, opted to play some youngsters in order to blood them at this rarefied level.  Sadly, they were all found wanting.  Probably the worst aspect was the absence of a recognisable football formation; they just seemed to meander about the pitch in a loose confederacy of ineptitude.  What had Woy said to them beforehand to prompt that? 

So the game petered out, bringing down the curtain on a shambolic tournament for this sceptred isle's finest - not that you've have known this from the words of the protagonists afterwards.  Good Lord, no!  England played some "good stuff" apparently.  There was plenty of scope for optimism.  Unfortunately this was absolutely at odds with the empirical evidence available to those with eyes.  England weren't awful, just very ordinary and anodyne.

There was a vee awkward stand-off between Woy and a BBC reporter straight after the game.  The reporter opened with a carefully-weighted and accurate precis, along the lines that the game didn't really get going, did it?  Woy took odds with this.  And they wonder why England supporters get hacked-off.  You don't have to have played the game at the highest level to recognise a shit game when you see one.  It's a variation of the old "I've never been to the North Pole, but I know it's cold" argument.  If he'd fetched-up and confirmed what we already knew, people would have said "fair enough".  Expectations were pretty low to begin with.

Tossers.

Bob Hopeless

I'm in the office watching England's last group (and therefore by extension last [fullstop]) game.  It's against Costa Rica.  Marketing have laid on drinks and nibbles for us all, but no-one's heart is really in it.

A few weeks ago this must have seemed like a prime fixture: 5pm on a fine late-June Tuesday afternoon, everyone in the office, the sun cracking the stones outside and free ale for all.  The thinking was, also, that England would need to win this match, so the excitement would be palpable.  It isn't; it's a dead rubber.  I can't even bring myself to down a complimentary continental lager beer; that's how bad it is.

Maybe next time...

Appraising Grace

Oh woe - appraisal season is upon us.  Mine is tomorrow (Tuesday) and I simply don't have sufficient psychic energy on a Monday to go through the heartbreaking paperwork.  I'm going to have to wing it.

I used to "wing" things a lot as a young adult: school, college, work, bands, girlfriends - you name it, I've wung them all.  Most fly-by-night wing weasels tend toward the Byronic, i.e. they don't give a shite for authority or the consequences of their actions, and refuse, therefore, to prepare or do as they're told.  I wish I could claim the same, but I'm not like that.  I'm actually quite risk-averse.  The only reason I end up improvising wildly in front of strangers, like an unimpressive white John Coltrane, is because my time-management is shambolic.  Also, I know from emetically tense experience that I'm good at it.  

All the same, I'd don't care for the practice.  The hours leading into a performance are awful.  American comedian Steven Wright once described unease as akin to that feeling you get when you overbalance while leaning backwards on a chair, and then catch yourself before falling and overcompensate again in the opposite plane.  He claimed to feel like this all the time.  Well, it's also how I feel before an outlandish wing.  Not pleasant.

Also, even if I were inclined to do the needful, there's football on constantly in the office (future me, please note The World Cup's on - Brazil), so I simply cannot concentrate.  This World Cup is just superb: wonderful, open games, hatfuls of goals and giant-killing par excellence.  

If these aren't auguries from the gods telling me to chuck my bureaucratic hand in and chance to luck, then what are they?  Eh?

HR-se

I've got an appraisal at work next week.  Nothing gets me closer to telling them to stuff their job where-the-sun-don't than the annual appraisal.  It's not that I fear falling-short; I can, and sometimes do, do my job standing on my head.  It's just that the whole HR cavalcade of corporate fanny really gets in amongst me.

I don't know why it should anger me so much; it just does.  I suppose it's the fact that its avowed intention is to make you feel better about things whilst it's doing the exact opposite.  It's spirit-sapping stuff.  For example, they sent us a document to fill out prior to our appraisal meetings.  Its name?  Competency Framework.  What does that even mean?  As Alexei Sayle once pointed out: unless you teach woodwork, using the word "workshop" marks you out as a twat.  Ditto "framework".

Why can't HR confine itself to payroll and discipline?  That's the real point of all the psycho-twaddle, personnel doesn't have enough to do, and needs to salve its conscience.  The robust, fully-embracing, methodology-implementing, benefits-realising bastards.