‘Straining

Time was, years ago, I was training averse.

Far from seeing training as the free-lunch-supplied-jolly of corporate tradition I saw training as a stodgy corporate attempt to mentally and emotionally waterboard the prevailing corporate ethos into my captive psyche over the course of a working day (with a few egg mayo sandwiches thrown in for free).

A boxed set of The Office had also indelibly marked my intellectual flux capacitors with images of David Brent jerking his moobs to Tina Turner’s “Simply The Best” and thus the mere mention of ‘training’ transported me psychologically through time to the worst excesses of both the 1980s and the 1990s and, really, no egg mayo sandwich, no matter how good, was ever going to compensate for that kind of spiritual trauma.

So I gave training a wide berth.

And as a consequence I stayed sane but also remained in a state of career undevelopment.

Not anymore.

The last few months have seen a sea-change.

Not sure why – possibly the promotion has re-engaged me and helped me slough off the mantle of stagnation and disenchantment – but suddenly I’m up for all the training I can get. Even Health & Safety stuff. Yeah. That’s how switched on I have become.

Of course, there might also be a survival instinct kicking in here. People in my sector are losing their job, subsisting on crap pay that is forever losing the race with inflation, a job for life seems about as realistic as living on the moon in 2020… training suddenly seems a quick way to arm myself with the knowledge needed to make me seem a viable prospective employee or an employee worth retaining. 

So I’m putting my name down for everything. Grievance and Disciplinary. Data Protection. Institute of Occupational Safety & Health. Fish Thinking. Mind Gym. Cresting The Curve. Killing With Papier Mâché.

Only one of those is made up.

I’m becoming a sound-bite hoover. A corporate cyborg. It is becoming ideologically impossible to waterboard me because my mouth and mind is always receptive and I can drink faster than they can pour.

I am, in short, becoming simply the best.

Fear me.

The creature I am becoming would give Mary Shelley the willies.

The Power Of Nerd

I’m reading David Mitchell’s Back Story at the moment – one of my Christmas presents from Karen. I like David Mitchell. I like his sarcastic rants and his double sided logical approach to the many stupidities of life. His book makes for a thought provoking, enlightening read and both confirms and debunks many of the general perceptions that we probably all harbour regarding David Mitchell’s true self.

One of the things I found interesting was his discovery of comedy and theatre and how it completely shunted him off traditional academe and into the realm of Footlights and fame and performance... so much so that his academic studies were all but abandoned in favour of sketch and play writing.

Believe it or not I too had dreams of writing comedy when I was in my teens.

Indeed I dabbled quite extensively. I wrote scripts that myself and my sisters performed via rudimentary microphones onto C90 tape – I even performed my own foley work. I drew cartoons. Once I had improved my recording equipment my mate Dave and I ad libbed our way through many a Saturday night in the early 1990’s coming up with enough sketches, impressions and jokey songs to make our own radio programme.

Most of it was excruciatingly bad, of course. Teenage toilet humour, puerile sex jokes and brickbats of buffoonery that targeted the most obvious of social stereotypes. Hardly high comedy. But in amongst the swamp of post school-boy, clod-hopping satire there were a few nuggets of genuine comedy. Material that would actually make an outsider laugh and laugh for all the right reasons, i.e. laughing with us not at us (though technically laughing at us). Because we had done something deliberately funny and not just because we had made complete arses of ourselves.

What frustrates me the most now (aside from Katie McGrath not returning my emails) is how little I did with it. All that material I produced, all that energy I invested... and then I just let it all sit and mildew. My God, why didn’t I send it into the BBC or some farty little local radio station? They might have hated it. They might have hated it but nevertheless given us advice to improve it.

They might have loved it.

This laziness and lack of motivation even in the face of achieving your wildest dreams is not uncommon in teenagers. Even David Mitchell refers to interest he received from an agent very early in his nascent career but that he didn’t really follow through on or capitalize on. The agent merely asked David to keep in touch but David didn’t. And in the end the agent dropped his interest.

Of course in the end, it worked out for David. He continued with the dream, pursued it, lived it. Trod the boards so to speak.

Have I continued to tread the boards or did I give up on it? I’m really not sure how to answer that. I certainly don’t write sketches or plays anymore or sing comedy songs. But I have been known to inject my novels and even my blog posts with the odd heroin hit of humour.

But it’s not the same is it?

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d joined a theatre group or gone to university in my teens "when I was supposed to" rather than in my late twenties when I’d finally summoned up the nerve.

And that I think is the difference between me and Mr Mitchell. We’re both nerds – I’m sure he won’t object to me saying that – but he had more guts than I did and a hell of a lot more nerve. More nerve to turn his back on his academic studies and pursue a crazy dream despite the huge risk of failure.

My trouble is I’ve always played it safe.

And you’ll never play to a full house playing like that.

Tell Laura I Love Her

Gordon Brittas.

If you were around in the Nineties and of an age to appreciate a proper sitcom done damnably well then that name will mean something to you. If not then, like my eldest boy, you will have to delve in the BBC’s back catalogue and get the boxed set.

Continuing my boy’s odyssey through the comedy shows of my formative years we have finally reached The Brittas Empire.

Gordon Brittas (played by Chris Barrie) was way ahead of his time. He was a forerunner for every Fire Safety diehard, every devoted Risk Assessor, every in-your-face, dyed-in-the-wool, dog-savaging-a-rabbit, never-going-to-let-it-drop-ever Health & Safety Officer who has ever walked, breathed and told you to move that pencil sharpener from the edge of your desk in case a colleague should trip over their own brogues and impale themselves upon it. He was the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Mr Bump.

At the time I thought The Brittas Empire was hilarious. By the third series the writers (Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen) were well into their stride and managed to demolish Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre in ever more inventive and bizarre ways. Rogue fireworks ignited by sunlight cast through a carelessly discarded pair of spectacles would in turn ignite a storeroom being used to house petroleum because the fuel tank had a hole in it; over elaborate fire safety drills would actually result in staff being injured and horribly maimed; the most improbable of small events would domino and coalesce into disasters of national proportions in the space of half an hour. Mr Brittas would be the author of all. The more obsessive he became about doing the right thing and following safety guidelines the higher the body count would rise. I think in the fifth series the writers actually managed to destroy the Centre in every single episode.

In theory Mr Brittas should have been an unsympathetic character whose blind adherence to local byways and the letter of the law rendered him beyond redemption. But he was saved. He was saved by Laura Lancing his long suffering, ever patient, ever understanding Assistant Manager played by the gorgeous Julia St John (pictured above). Rather than create a mean two-dimension caricature of an overzealous jobsworth, the writers – through Laura’s insights and interventions – created a more rounded character who, despite scoring a whopping 100% on the National Annoyance League Table, was nevertheless a decent, well-meaning man who constantly tried to be kind and caring and morally upstanding and who was only ever hampered in achieving this by his fevered need to always do the right thing.

Laura was an angel. Laura was a goddess. And she had the soft, smooth voice to match and a ready ironic smile where most would have had gritted teeth.

Naturally I fancied the gym skirt off her back when the series was first aired and watching it again now she has lost none of her allure. Even my wife has commented that most guys she knows “had a thing” for Laura. Laura was the calm in Mr Brittas’ storm. The Ying to his Yang. The sensible, sane response to the madness that he unfailingly caused. And she had eyes that could stun a charging red blooded male at 50 paces. I would have died for that woman and, if I’d worked at Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre, the chances are I probably would have.

I laughed at the time. I thought the premise of the show was hilarious.

And while I’m still laughing now, watching it years later, that laughter is distinctly tinged with nervousness. It is tinged with a sense of burgeoning tragedy.

Because suddenly Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre is all around me.

It has become the world I live in. A world where workmen cannot abandon their ladders in case some cranially challenged hoody decides to show off to his mates and swan-dive from the top of it and then sue the company for his inability to sign-on every week. A world where hot water cannot be too hot lest it scald the person washing their hands but not so lukewarm that it allows Legionella bacteria to grow and flourish. A world where everything from opening a trap door in the floor to lifting a hot cup of tea to your mouth during work time has to be risk assessed and approved by a Health & Safety Officer and underwritten by an insurance company lest the corporation be responsible for your accidental demise.

It is the world I work in.

It is the modus operandi of my working life.

I have become Mr Brittas.

Only I don’t have a Laura to sweeten the pill. A Laura to save me from myself.

*sigh*

As the song goes: tell Laura I love her, tell Laura I need her...

But onwards and upwards, people. Now excuse me while I just move this unexploded World War II bomb I’ve found into the gas boiler room for safe keeping... oops, look at that petrol spilled on the floor... someone could have slipped over on that...

Going Round The Twist

It’s amazing what you turn to in times of trouble. What crutches present themselves. What wild ports in even wilder storms you find yourself seeking succour in.

Some turn to drink. Others to drugs. Some try lighting up innocuous substances like banana skins or dried hummus because they’re too scared to get sorted for E’s and Whizz. A few turn to hallucinogenic combinations of all these in the hope that the absurd cocktail they have created blows their mind to greener grass and a more comforting mental ambience.

Some, of course, seek solace in the wild abandon that physical pleasure can bring. Gorging themselves on fishnet wrapped flesh and the tangy odours of perfumed armpit and crotch. Excuse me while I pause and take a few deep breaths here.

Yes, a person’s elected path of escape says a lot about their character. It is only in extremis that the world sees us for what we really are.

And Lord knows I have needed to seek comfort of late. The recent troubles with Tom’s nursery have nearly driven me over the edge. It has been brinkmanship of the highest order.

You have to believe me when I say I wouldn’t usually have done this. But... needs must when the devil drives. I was pushed to it. And when the chips were down this proved to be the sauce that saved me.

Round The Twist.

I happened to see the boxed set of all 4 series going for a veritable song on Amazon. Little more than a tenner for all 52 episodes. I bought it instantly and I swear to God that this show has saved me during the last few weeks when things were at their worst.

For those of you who missed Round The Twist first time around, well, I offer you my sympathies. You have been truly deprived. It was originally made in Australia (all the best kids TV shows are made in Australia – excepting The Wiggles) and broadcast on the BBC in the UK back in the early 1990’s. It is just about the funniest, most inventive kid’s TV show ever. Paul Jennings, the show’s writer, is a genius. Each episode is little more than 25 minutes long but is packed with ideas and jokes and (sometimes rather near the knuckle) fun.

I’ve managed to turn Karen and our eldest boy, Ben, into instant Round The Twist converts. For me, it is a real trip down memory lane. Sure the effects are as ropey as all hell and the music dates the show horribly but once that theme tune is stuck in your head it’s stuck in there forever.

After I’ve been laid low with a day’s worth of trial and tribulation, just a quick hit of Round The Twist and I’m right as rain again. I’m reminded that life can be weird and wonderful and fun. You just have to look for it.

And the best thing of all is I don’t have to deviate my septum sniffing coke or wear that damned gimp mask anymore.

(Oops...! Sorry. Too much information?)

If you can’t live in a haunted lighthouse yourself then buying Round The Twist is honestly the next best thing. They just don’t make shows like this anymore. Alas.

Now nick off, you big galah!