No More Holidays Ever

I have come to the conclusion that it will be more conducive to my sanity and overall sense of contentment if I never ever take a holiday again.

No more days off. No more long weekends. No more weeks luxuriating in the otherworldliness of not being at work.

No more day trips, no more travelling abroad, no more completing lengthy DIY projects at home.

Just work work work from now on and forever. Ad infinitum without a break, pause or cessation.

I realize this new ethos of mine will be hard on the wife and kids but for the sake of my fragile mental health it must be so.

My reasons are thus:

I am back on an even keel. I’ve re-established that balance of ambivalence, insensitivity and self-delusion that enables one to get up every day and go to work and kid yourself that life is fine and dandy and you can keep this up forever and ever amen.

It wasn’t easy. I had a wobble. I teetered on the slippery edge of the pit of depression. I felt it’s cold, merciless maw sucking at my feet on Tuesday.

Why?

I had a lovely day off with my wife on Monday to celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary. We spent the day in Stow. We pottered about without the kids. We had a gorgeous meal at a fabulous eatery (The Talbot for those of you close enough to investigate for yourselves). We found a terrific vintage / antique shop wherein I bought a classic leather jacket that fit me perfectly (I am now waiting for the temperatures to cool again so that I can wear it). The sun shined. We were happy and at peace. We got to thinking that this is how life should be always. It was perfect.

And then I returned to work and the whole happy-shiny facade came tumbling down around me. Reality bit. I tasted dust and ash. I had to turn my face away from the sunshine of freedom and press it back against the iron-pocked grindstone of earning-a-crust.

It nearly destroyed me.

It’s the drop, you see?

The screaming descent from that wonderful carefree high to the brimstone earth’s-core low of back-to-workness.

It’s one hell of a mood swing. And I just don’t think I can cope with them anymore.

If one day can do that to me, imagine what a more lengthy period of holiday will do?

I’ve got 2 weeks off in August! It might just kill me!

So I’ve decided. No more putting myself through that cold hard climb to recovery. No more dragging the comatose corpse of my vital mind back out of the darkness of post-holiday-induced depression.

I’m on a even keel right now. I’ve hauled myself out of the bottomless waters of the ocean onto my fragile little raft. I’m nicely afloat. I’m flat-lining; avoiding the peaks and troughs of fortune and misfortune. I want neither too much wind nor none at all. An eternity of white skies with just a touch of breeze is fine.

No more holidays. No more living life the way it ought to be lived.

It’s a matter of survival.

It’s a matter of staying alive.

Wish me well. Maybe when I retire we could risk a visit to the pub for a celebratory drink?

However, I’m not promising.

The Inevitable Kick In The Teeth

The first time is always the worst. I don’t think you ever get completely hardened to it.

You send all your hopes and dreams off out into the world and expect the world to instantly be dazzled by their worth and startling beauty. To recognize their barely disguised merit – ‘cos if there’s one thing you’re not going to do it’s hide your light under a bushel.

Instead the world flicks you off its tabletop like a ten day old mouse dropping with the smallest of sneers.

If you’re lucky.

Most of the time the world doesn’t even realize you’re there and merely brushes you away accidentally along with all the other crap and detritus that has built up around its privileged higher echelons.

My latest novel, The Great Escapes Of Danny Houdini, received its first rejection slip yesterday.

Polite, polished and perfunctory.

Simply not what the agent was looking for.

This particular agent dealt with writers who guarantee a huge audience and generate a good income. Or so it said between the lines. Well, duh! If I’d known that I’d’ve sent my novel to an agent who was looking for little or no success and hoping to earn just enough to buy a baked potato from the marquee operating in the square outside.

*slaps head in frustration*

So it’s back to the drawing board. Back to the writer’s yearbook to pull another random rabbit out of a bottomless, unknowable pit of a hat. There’s so many to choose from and you never know you’ve chosen the wrong one until you’ve paid for the postage, sent off your novel and they write back to tell you so.

They want this, that and the other – not what you have presented them with. But they’d like you to try somewhere else because another agent might see things differently.

*sigh*

Normally I can cope with the rejection. I’ve become pretty immune to its bloodsucking effects over the years. But sometimes, just sometimes, it sneaks a punch in below the belt. Wallops your tenders like a couple of cathedral bells at a Royal wedding.

It gets you when you’re at your most weakest...

When you’re at your most hopeful.

Get Out Of The Way

Sometimes you just want to get home. Sometimes you just want to get from A to B through C (A = morning, B = evening, C = work / life / society) with the minimum of fuss and upset. You want to take the shortest, quickest, easiest route. The path of least resistance. As the crow flies.

Because you’re (to quote Shrek) a donkey on the edge. You are a Hadron collider of disenchantment molecules. One more straw on your back and you are going to get mediaeval on the world’s ass.

It’s not that you have anything against the world. No big beef. No real big issue. It’s just there. Today the world is there and you would much rather it not be there. But if it’s going to be there the least it can do is shut the fuck up and play ball.

That’s right. I want the world’s ass to play ball. Don’t get picky with my metaphors, I’m not in the mood.

So why is it, on these days, on these days when your mind is a hurricane of venom and antisocial energy that people, things, get in your way?

You’re just trying to get through to the other side as peacefully as you can but they – them – they get in your way. Constantly. Deliberately.

The phone call you know you shouldn’t answer but you do and it braindumps another load of crap onto your ass just before you’re about to go home. The people who insist on stopping immediately in front of you when you are rushing through town on an irritating, shit-kicking errand and they just stop dead and flounder and flummox and flop about wetly blocking your way even though they know you are there. The car at the junction that slows down in front of you not to let you cross but because they can’t be bothered to rush too much and so they slow but not slow enough for you to be able to cross in front of them and it’s raining but now you have to wait until Mr Air Conditioned Leather Car Seat and his kajillion decibel sound system on wheels rolls past you before you can cross. The shops who choose this moment – this exact moment – to run out of whatever essential item you need to buy on your way home when they have it every other sodding day of the year but no, not today, not at this hour, and now you have to go out of your way, walk longer, encounter more people, just to get this one solitary item from another shop which you don’t even like and which isn’t going to make your life any better but will feel like some kind of victory if you do actually get it.

Why? Why do all these get in your way?

Why do they choose today of all days to get in your face?

Why can’t they just stay the fuck away?

You know what I need?

A gun. A gun like Dirk Deckard had in Bladerunner. A huge fat jumbo jet sausage of a gun that shoots bullets the size of coke cans. Cos’ when Dirk pulled that piece and shouted, “get out of the way” people did. They got out of his way.

Well, that’s what I need. That’s what I want. It’s not a luxury. It’s an essential item. It’s survival, people, survival. I will die without it.

And it’s nothing personal. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt you. Truly I don’t.

I. Just. Want. You. To. Get. Out. Of. The. Way.

The Ghost Of Christmas Post

OK. I’m waiting.

I have my arms outstretched upwards to the stars and my chakras open so wide a Higgs Boson could drive a ruddy great juggernaut right through the middle of them without touching the sides.

But it ain’t hit me. It hasn’t entered me. I am not speaking in Christmas tongues.

The spirit of Christmas has not seen fit to descend and use my body as a vessel for its gloriously tinselly commercialism.

I ain’t getting the Christmas vibe, man,

And I know I should be. The shops are selling their Christmas tat with the intensity of an Amsterdam window dancer. My home town had its big Christmas light switch on yesterday. Even Jamie ‘cheeky twatty’ Oliver is on the telly once more touting his mince pie flavoured ice cream (I kid you not: “individual ice creams wiv bits of mince pie in ‘em – even the pastry! Gor blimey, gov’nor!”).

The signs are there writ large upon the stars. Even the D list ones.

It is Christmas time (mistletoe and wine). It’s time to get jollied up. To get Santa’d. To get ho ho hoed.

But I can’t do it. I just can’t summon up the inclination.

It’s taken all my will power just to summon up a soupcon of enthusiasm to give my wife a Christmas wish list for myself – let alone trying to choose presents for other people.

I feel that spiritually I am shrugging with the burden of it all. I’m suffering from joy exhaustion or maybe more accurately “fear of joy commitment”.

Money’s tight. The health of the entire family seems to be dicey at the moment – if it we were a drink we would be Cinzano on the rocks without the Cinzano. Inanimate and domestic services are breaking down. My work colleagues inform me that Russell Grant got voted off Strictly Come Dancing. Things are on the verge of collapse.

Is this a good time to be having Christmas, I ask myself?

Might we not be better off postponing it until the Spring? ‘Cos Springwatch will be on the telly then and Chris Packham will be convincing us all that life is getting better because of all the birds and badgers producing young. The days will be longer. Jamie Oliver will have died from mince pie ice cream poisoning. I’ll have a modicum of hope in my heart that things will at least be getting warmer if not better.

This mid winter thing? I mean, is that really right for Christmas? Is it appropriate? Half of the world doesn’t think so.

Can we have a referendum on it, please? Put it to the vote?

Where the hell’s Jacob Marley when you need him?


P.S. This is my 800th post. That’s right: 800! 800 posts and still moaning...

No I Am Not Going To Stop Talking Even Though You Are Talking

So what do you do when a client persistently, obliviously, ignorantly talks all over you at business meetings?

I mean what is the correct etiquette that one should follow? Is grabbing someone by the scruff off their neck and shaking them so hard their blood separates into its component parts socially acceptable? Is it de rigeur to pinch their nose hard and pull their head down to within an inch of the tabletop and quietly mutter death-threats in a voice not unlike Robert De Niro in any of his films?

I need to know because I swear to God I am going to pop a vein if I attempt to suppress my anger any longer.

I think what annoys me most is that, in the moment, I allow it to happen. I can’t seem to raise my voice to battle theirs. I mean, I know I can do it. I know I can summon up the volume; my lungs have the capacity. It’s just that – in the moment – that response seems lost to me. I keep talking. Starting, restarting, restarting, restarting until finally Little Miss Gob-Jockey finally grinds her tongue to a halt. Then I get to speak. Only what I have said doesn’t seem to be heard or acknowledged or valued because the Uber-tongue starts up yet again exactly where it left off.

My only consolation is that it isn’t just me who has this problem. It’s not personal. I’m not an isolated case.

But it feels personal when it happens. Damned personal.

Time was, years ago, I was quite a placid character. An easy-going guy. Wasn’t really in touch with my anger, all that jazz. But over recent years, me and my anger, we’ve started becoming better acquainted. We’re not leaving it so long between phone calls if you get my meaning. The satellite link up is experiencing less and less delay.

It used to be that I’d get talked over by Be’elzeblah and the anger would hit me a couple of hours later. There’d be a bit of a drag to it.

Now though we’re talking ten minutes max.

It’s catching up with the moment. And you can see what’s going to happen, can’t you? Soon, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life my anger is going to be there right on the button.

And I need to know what is the most socially acceptable way of reacting. How far can I push the anger envelope and not have myself carted off to an anger management course?

Because part of me would just like to mutter “blah blah blah blah blah” continuously, unendingly... starting off real soft and low and slowly building to a crescendo that has everyone in the meeting, one by one, falling silent and looking my way. Another part of me would just like to be working class and just slam my palm down onto the tabletop and exclaim “fer fook’s sake, woman, will you please just shut yer fooking trap and let me fooking speak?” You know, the direct approach?

But there is another part of me – slightly unhinged with all this repressed fury – that just wants to scream “shut up shut up shut up shut up” into this person’s face and maybe spit a little bit into her mouth. ‘Cos – and this might come as a surprise to some of you – this situation is really starting to get on my goat.

Hey? Are you even listening to me?

Oi! Focus dagnammit! This is important!

The Road Reluctantly Travelled

Is it normal to take the long way round on your journey to work?

To delay the inevitable?

I can remember, years ago, back when my pass badge was shiny and the photo printed on it featured a young man bristling with enthusiasm and a full bead, that I would march to work with a spring in my step and a skip in my stride. So much so that one day a motorcycle traffic cop, a builder and a Native American Indian in full head-dress accosted me in the street and asked me to join their colourful band of deep throated singers.

I declined but now I’m wondering if that was a wise career move.

Because the spring has been replaced with a shoulder droop and the skip has been replaced with a foot drag reminiscent of someone who’s been hitched up to a chain gang. For those of you who are familiar with the work of Charlie & Lola... I have developed a “Lola walk”. The kind she employs when life is particularly bad. When she’s lost her satchel or ripped her Lelli Kellys.

And I am starting to take the ‘long way round’ to work.

It started with a few detours around the block. Alternative routes that covered more or less the same ground but from a different direction.

But then I started to become more adventurous. I started pushing the temporal envelope, pushing the flexibility of my start time. I started going all round the houses. Started trying to listen to entire album’s worth of music on my MP3 player (bear in mind that the journey at its quickest takes a mere 15 minutes). Started searching for old ladies to help across the road and refusing to go into work until I’d found one. In the end I had to improvise. I had to dress up as an old lady myself and help myself across the road. Have you any idea how long it takes to cross a road when your colostomy bag isn’t properly fastened?

Now, I fear, I am taking things too far. I am booking trains to Manchester and wondering if I can get in a bit of shopping before I head into the office. I am eyeing up flights to New York because I figure that paying my respects at Ground Zero would be an honourable way to start my working day.

Is this normal?

Is this behaviour indicative of some, as yet, unnamed malaise?

Answers on a job application form to the normal address, please.

Small Unremembered Acts Of Unkindness

I’m sure it’s not deliberate but this has happened with galling regularity during my time “here” as corporate slave. And it makes me hit boiling point every time because, in all honesty, I’m never quite sure how to handle it.

An engineer turns up in a company car. Or his own car. Whatever. The car is not important. But he needs to get parked and doesn’t want to use the Pay & Display spaces in town. This is fine. I lower the bollards and allow him to drive into the fiercely guarded enclave of the building’s footprint. I direct him to the staff parking bays down the back of the building. Off he drives with a cheery wave.

Pleasure, mate. I’m here to be helpful.

And then I wait by the entrance doors so I can chaperone the poor bewildered engineer to wherever he needs to be in the building. Usually a urinal which is behaving like the gateway to Hell.

And I wait.

And I wait.

And he stays in his bloody car. He doesn’t move. He just sits there in the warm, sealed cockpit of his worksmobile.

And I stand there by the front doors feeling like a jilted groom.

What do I do? ‘Cos I’m getting narked. I’m getting annoyed. I’m stood there like the proverbial last sausage and he’s rubbing himself off against his walnut dash.

Logic and the laws of dynamic motivation (is there even such a thing) dictate that I go up to the car and knock officiously on the windscreen and ask very loudly if he’s going to be joining me anytime soon because the vicar is getting impatient and the reception is booked.

But I worry that this might precipitate a faux pas of monumental proportions.

You see, he could be delayed for a very legitimate reason...

He’s taking an emergency phone call from his wife: “Darling, little Terry has found your stash of crystal meth and he’s bouncing off the walls with grandpappy’s pump-action assault rifle – the nanny is pulling her hair out and the nursery looks like a bomb site! What shall I do? What shall I do?”

Or – and this is the scenario that I fear the most – I storm up to the car, violently yank open the driver’s door and have a paraplegic engineer fall out onto the pavement like a newborn lamb from its mother’s womb.

Oh God. I am so sorry. Do you need a hand? Oh shit. I didn’t mean that the way it came out, honestly.

You get the idea.

So I wait.

And I wait.

And eventually the engineer shuffles out of his vehicle – not panicked in any way, with a full complement of limbs, wiping the foam of a take-out cappuccino from his top lip.

Utter. Git.

Gimme Some Of Your Attention

As I get older I am getting more intolerant.

Shit-intolerant. Stress intolerant. Niggle intolerant.

I confess as I wend my way through the narrow, dark, dank passages of life it is the little things that annoy me more. Which isn’t to say the big things don’t bug me. They do. But they’re so big I can philosophize about those. Make them part of a theme of moaning that actually gives my life journey a bit of impetus.

But the little things trip me up. Make me gnash my teeth. Make me spit feathers.

A ridiculously pimped up car is one of those things. And I realize that by definition a pimped up car will always be ridiculous. You know the type I mean. Hub caps with chrome spokes that look like something off Ben-Hur’s racing chariot. Fins on the back that look like they’ve been designed by a Great White shark but applied by Harry Hill’s tailor. Windows so black you suspect the occupants have coughed up all the tar from their lungs at a single sitting.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

These idiots have a right to spend their hard earned money how they like. I mean, it’s not easy selling drugs to kids these days or keeping your bling up with the Jones’s. Why should it bother me?

It bothers me because the drivers of these prattmobiles cannot drive past another car or pedestrian without slowing down or gunning the engine so loudly it sounds like a consumptive bull elephant.

They want people to turn around. They want people to crane their necks and eyeball the daft-punk homage to moulded plastic that they have created with their ill-gotten gains and they’re GCSE in woodwork.

They want to be noticed.

And I refuse to notice them. Refuse to.

Well. Strictly that’s not true. I refuse to acknowledge them.

Call me petty. Call me silly. But when one of these souped-up cock-wagons rolls past I deliberately turn my back on it and look the other way. I have also been known, on occasion, to randomly select a blade of grass from the verge before me and admire it intensely and theatrically as the baseball capped driver behind me desperately ups his rev count in an attempt to snare my attention.

It’s not happening, mate. I’m in love with photosynthesis. On your bike. Oh, and by the way, your exhaust needs sorting out.

And thus they drive away, their curses and imprecations drowned out by the high decibel dirge that invariably emanates from their in-car speakers. Some R&B bollocks sung by a woman who can’t sing a simple “oh” but has to sing “oooo-eer-urgh-ewww-oo-o-o-oh” instead.

They might look happy as they nod their heads in time with the music and take a toke on that scaff-pole sized spliff.

But really they’re crying inside.

Crying, sobbing and bleating: “Why is he ignoring me? Why is he ignoring me?”

And that makes me pimptastically happy.

With bloody great fins on.

Survival Tactics

Welcome fellow hunters to the wancid world of big game hunting in the office enviwonment... Now this is a dangerwous activity, not for the faint hearted or for those of you with a nervous admin portfolio. So be warned. Things could get vewy twicky.

So. Popguns at the weady, pith helmets firmly ensconced... let’s pwoceed on our way deeper into the office undergwowth...

First off, let’s see what we can spy at the watering hole. Shh, now. They’re easily spooked and you don’t weally want to be caught in the middle of a buffalo stampede. As Simba fwom Lion King well tell you, a violently thwust bulldog clip to the face can quickly end anybody’s woyal ambitions.

Ah, here we have the lesser spotted Stationewy Cupboard Gazelle... a nervous and flighty beast that is easily startled and that can often be seen gwazing on Bic Pens and those Tippex mice things that make your cowections look like they’ve been snogged by Michael Jackson. This beast is welatively harmless and is perfectly happy pwovided it has a steady supply of paperclips and camewa battewies. At the first sign of twouble it will merely wun and wun and wun. It’ll just wun away, take my word for it. It’s a big softie and hardly worth the twouble of hanging it’s doe-eyed head over your mantelpiece so we’ll move on.

OK. Now we’re in dangewous tewwitowy. The office mangwove swamp. This is cwocodile countwy, folks, so watch where you step. In fact, there’s one there, wight now. Lurking by the photocopier machine. Its big career mashing teeth weady to wend any wary twesspasser limb from limb. The photocopier is a much sought after wesource in the jungle and the beast that contwols the copier contwols the entire food chain. You set off a pwint-wun without the say-so of the cwocodile and you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of those big flesh wipping teeth before you can say “photocopy subsidy”. It’ll be no good you complaining that evewybody takes fwee photocopies evewy now and then, that some beasties pwint off entire web sites of shoes and handbags... you cwoss the cwocodile and you’re gonna get cwapped on from a gweat height. Twust me on this, fellow hunters, it just ain’t worth the wisk.

Let’s climb up now into the twopical wain fowest. The lair of the Stabu-inthebak Snake. This particularly venomous serpent is never ever seen until the last few seconds before it stwikes and even then you may be so blinded by the clouds of venomous mist that it exhales awound itself that all you'll see is the pitiful flutter of your own blood dwenched P45 as it splatters down to the undergwowth. Game over. Cuwiously the Stabu-inthebak Snake doesn’t actually eat the prey it kills but pwefers to munch on Müller fwuits of the fowest. It kills purely for the fun of it which makes it a far more dangewous animal than those cweatures that do actually kill for food.

Lastly, we have the kings of the jungle. Those at the very top of the food chain. Now, I know you’re all expecting it to be a lion. A mighty lion like the one Elton John sang about that had the voice of Darth Vader. But you’re wong. Completely and utterly wong. The jungle is wuled and contwolled by a team of monkeys that spend the entire day chattering and arguing and picking fleas out of their own backsides in air conditioned offices poised on the tallest peaks of the fowest and never actually weach an accord about anything. Hence all the tumultuous chaos and wecidivistic naughtiness that occurs among the lower orders of the jungle. It’s totally wild in here, folks. Wild and fewociously dangewous!

The only option is to get the hell out of the office environment and take a job in much less vicious suwoundings. Guantanamo Bay perhaps or even as a bodyguard to Osama Bin Laden.

Trust me: your chances of survival will impwove gweatly.

This concludes your tour with Corpowate Jungle Tours. Please tip the dwiver as you disembark from the shit covered vehicle.

Salt And Vinegar

When you’re watching a Western and you see all those dust balls rolling across the main street just before the main gunfight kicks off, have you ever wondered where they all end up?

No? Well, they end up in my street.

Along with yellow foam-styrene chip cartons, McDonald’s milkshake containers and old copies of The Sport (which could very well become museum items over the coming years).

I tell you this so that you don’t think my street is so clean it looks like something out of Trumpton. (How come Mrs Honeywell’s yapping dogs never foul the pavement, eh? Where are her pooper-scoop and her little plastic shit bag?)

My street is just a messy street. The town planners, when laying out the residential housing grid in the 1950’s, inadvertently created a trash vortex that pulls in rubbish from miles away and dumps it in the gap between my hedge and next door’s garden wall.

Or at least this is what I thought. This is has been my long held belief for years.

But I was finally disabused of this belief last Friday.

Leaving my house I chanced to look across the road where I witnessed a man in his thirties finishing a packet of crisps. Now, given there are public bins not 100 yards away, you’d expect him to screw up the packet and dispose of it responsibly. Well, you would if you were an idealistic fool who think that people actually care about their immediate environment. If, like me, you have a cynical bent you wouldn’t be too surprised to see him screw up the packet and lob it onto the pavement. ‘Cos that’s just how the majority of people behave these days. Like scum.

But no. It seems there was a third option.

This surprisingly well dressed lout carefully flattened out his crisp packet and took considerable pains to slide it between the slats of a neighbour’s fence.

I couldn’t believe it.

I mean, it’s bad enough to throw your litter to the four winds – people do it unthinkingly all the time. But what kind of inconsiderate, thoughtless, selfish prick expends time and energy shoving his rubbish into and onto the property of someone he doesn’t know?

I know, I know. Bigger things are happening elsewhere. This is a small issue.

But I can’t help but think it is somehow representational. There seem to be more and more people around these days who go out of their way to cause problems for others. Not just causing problems accidentally for other people, but deliberately doing it. Planning it. Devising ways to do it. Doing it even when doing it is not even the easiest option.

And what did I do? Nothing. I gave him a hard stare, Paddington Bear style, enough to make him turn around and face me under the iron disapprobation of my censure. But like Paddington I merely felt like I was a lone 3D character in a world of animated 2-dimensional cut-outs, i.e. I was the odd one out in this scenario.

The odd one out for caring and being pissed off at what this guy had done.

I did consider removing the crisp packet and following this guy home and shoving the offending article somewhere prominent on his own property but, I’ll be honest, even though Brian Turner has revamped the menus at the local A&E I am not overly fond of hospital food.

And besides. Why expend all that energy? A good gust of wind and that damned crisp packet will end up behind my front hedge anyway. The world is still the world.

Nothing has really changed.

*Sigh*

I never did like Status Quo.

Gob

Eavesdropping is necessarily a snide pastime.

I don’t think I’ve ever eavesdropped on a single conversation and come away thinking, “Ooh, they’re lovely people – I wish they were in my friend’s network so I could get to know them better”.

Generally I come away shaking my head, sneering, laughing and quite often disgusted at the small minded, bigoted, malapropism-rich outpourings of my fellow man.

Of course, I’m quite willing to accept that maybe I am just a big snob per se and congenitally live in contempt of my fellow humans.

But that in no way invalidates my claim that eavesdropping inevitably positions those being eavesdropped upon well beneath the moral hobnailed boots of those doing the eavesdropping. It’s just human nature.

This being the case, I was walking quite innocently back to work after my lunchbreak yesterday afternoon when I stopped at a pedestrian crossing. While I waited for the lights to change in my favour two other pedestrians approached the lights behind me and waited at my back. Two young teenage girls, the ubiquitous mobile phone held out in their hands like a Ghostbuster PKE metre and their overly glossed lips pulled into pouts big enough to form the south facing wall of a bouncy castle.

“Fockin’ gaffa tape. Fockin’ gaffa tape. Bastard. I mean, look, that’s what he wants me to get. Fockin’ gaffa tape. Can you believe it? Bastard. Fockin’ gaffa tape.”

And on and on and on. Those same few phrases repeated over and over while the orator’s companion laughed like a drain and no doubt was as familiar with the gutter as one.

I actually began counting how many times this delightful young lady swore. I got to 15 before the green man finally appeared and rescued me.

As I sped away I could still hear, “Fockin’ gaffa tape, fockin’ gaffa tape, bastard” singeing the air like hastily deposited nuclear waste and I found myself wondering whether anyone on this planet can ever find such constant expletive incontinence attractive. Or even think it adult or mature?

I mean I am right in thinking that someone who effs and blinds every second word is chromosome deficient, aren’t I? Their emotional / intellectual development has somehow stalled at the ‘bike shed badinage’ stage and they’re forever stuck with the mentality of a 15 year old where they think that heavy use of the eff word automatically bestows upon them the heady mantle of ‘Adult’.

I instantly found myself dismissing this pair as a couple of foul-mouthed, uncouth, thick as shit, nob chompers who will end up working in McDonalds and exorcising their dissatisfaction with life by wiping malicious bogeys onto the underside of all the bread buns.

Which isn’t fair. They might actually make it to Burger King.

Joking.

They might actually be intelligent. They might even be nice girls. From good homes. With a staunch moral view of the world and an acceptance letter from Oxford.

But I don’t think so.

We are how we talk. Our voice and choice of words express our personalities and our aspirations. I’m not talking about accents here. I’m talking about what we say rather than how we say it. To choose to swear so prolifically and so (deliberately) loudly speaks volumes about a mindset that has not only normalised aggressive displays of behaviour but has also promoted them as being the most efficient way to navigate modern society.

And that is deeply, deeply saddening and possibly speaks volumes about the rest of us.

Possibly.

Or it could just be that a potty mouth is a habit that people fall into when young and like all nasty habits needs a jolly good kick to get it broken.

Believe you me, I was tempted.

Anti Social Networking

I’ll be honest. Despite being a denizen of the internet for the last 15 years I am not up on the whole social networking scene.

I dragged my heels with Facebook (and still grit my teeth when I use it).

I tried MySpace and loathed it so dumped it. I now have NoSpace and am much happier.

Skype I’ve heard about but can’t bring myself to install.

Messenger I have permanently disabled because I hated the way it would launch itself on me as soon as I turned on my PC (like being hounded by a happy-clappy stalker).

Twitter I use infrequently and cynically, i.e. only when I have a blog post to sell.

I admit I tried ICQ (remember that?) in the early days but found it bothersome and frustrating – I’d be at my computer trying to do stuff and people would bug me for inane conversations overloaded with smilies and emoticons.

Emoticons. Urgh. I hate both the word and the concept. Let’s break it down: emotions / cons. You get my drift? :-P

But some Social Networking facilities have made it through my taste firewall. LinkedIn is one of them. It seemed a good idea at the time and helped me to reconnect with an old friend but since then I hardly use it. I’m Connected with a handful of people – some old school friends, some blogging pals and, er, that’s it.

Nobody – and I mean nobody – has used the site to contact me in the manner recommended by the site’s administrators, i.e. nobody has offered me work / money / commissions / contracts. It has done absolutely zilch for my career prospects.

But nevertheless I’m on there. Pimping myself. Or rather, pimping my online persona. Links to my web site and this blog. The kind of unthinking self promotion that we all do from time to time.

Suddenly, within the space of 2 weeks, I have had Connection requests from 2 people who work in the same Local Government corporation as me. People who I see once in a blue moon and only ever in a professional capacity. One of them is very, very high up in the corporation hierarchy. Very high up.

I confess it has put me in a spin.

You see, I don’t want these people getting too close to my online persona. I don’t want them reading my blog and the comments upon it and realizing what a cynical, back-stabbing little turncoat I am. I want them to continue thinking I’m a good boy who keeps his head down and deserves the money that they keep paying me every month.

This Connection thing is too close for comfort.

And utterly pointless.

I mean, what’s the good of them Connecting to me on LinkedIn? Are they going to offer me a job?

Hello? I’m already here.

So the barricades have gone up. And by barricades I mean I have ignored the email from LinkedIn – including the reminder email that tells me these people are still waiting for me to confirm a Connection with them.

I don’t want a Connection with them. The real life connection is bad enough. I don’t want them following the breadcrumb trail back to this ‘ere blog and the harsh excoriating heart of my lifelong malcontent.

I am simply too anti-social for Social Networking.

Too curmudgeonly. Too grumpy. And that’s the plain honest truth.

I mean, they’ll be wanting me to Poke them next. And that folks is just an interaction too far.

I think I may just have to be permanently AFK.

That’s all, folks. Goodbye.

P.S. Do feel free to RT this post.

Hee-Haw

So I’ve been off work a couple of days - using up my holiday entitlement that I’m not allowed to carry over into the new financial year to enjoy a long weekend. It was my wife’s birthday and I confess we have kicked back a little and quaffed lightly from the fragile cup of good times. We’ve been to see a couple of movies – Paul and True Grit (both excellent) – we’ve eaten meals out in a French restaurants, we’ve blown a little money that we shouldn’t have blown... all those moderate things normal people do to try and claw some back some enjoyment out of life after the grindstone has coated everything in ash and dust.

And I realize that doesn’t sit well with some people.

Some people who didn’t have a long weekend and who were at work when I wasn’t were possibly a little bitter. A little narked. A little nowty.

And nowty people like to hit back in small and mean ways.

It’s the only explanation I have for the three crates of wine that were dumped by the stairs to the office and the post-it note on my desk saying could I please bring the wine upstairs and put it away. The note dated yesterday.

To make it clear: that wine wasn’t for me. It’s not a gift for my personal consumption. It is wine that is doled out for public events. It is just bought in bulk and stored on site.

Now, what gets my goat is that this wine has sat downstairs and the note has sat on my desk all day yesterday when I wasn’t at work. Other people who were in work will have past those crates of wine countless times; each time they went up to the stairs to the office. And given that those stairs are the only way up to and down from the office every single person will have eyeballed those crates several times over during the working day yesterday.

Nobody and I mean nobody took it upon themselves to take one or all of the crates up with them on their journey to the office. Nobody thought. “I’m going this way anyway, I won’t go empty handed”.

Nobody.

‘Cos I’m guessing everybody saw the note on my desk and figured, “Hey, it isn’t my job to move that wine; it’s Steve’s job, it says so here on this note that’s been left for him so I can absolve myself of all responsibility and courtesy and just go on my own sweet selfish way and not give a shit.”

Now at what point in my dim and dark career history I became the packhorse for the entire office remains a complete mystery to me. It sure as hell isn’t in my Job Description (unless you include the catch-all title General Dogsbody). But somehow, silently and without willing collusion, I have taken on that mantle.

Anything needs carting, carrying, humping (oh please), moving, shifting, lugging or just generally dumped from one dark corner of the office to another dark corner just to please the passing whim of one of my co-workers, well, that responsibility gets carted, carried, humped, moved, shifted, lugged and dumped onto my shoulders because I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be a post-it note somewhere that says it has to be that way. There’ll be a post-it note with my name on it and someone blow drying their freshly painted fingernails waiting for me to do it.

Out of the goodness of my heart. What a gentleman I am.

I’m the office brawn. The office beef. The donkey. The pack animal.

Hell, I’m practically a coolie.

I know, I know. Bigger things have happened at sea – have and are. But this inherent laziness in people really sticks in my craw sometimes. This unwillingness to do something simply because it needs doing and it isn’t even particularly out of your way to do it. This “it ain’t my job, let’s pass the buck” attitude. Let someone else do it; him, let him do it, him, him there, he won’t say no; how can he without looking petty and lazy?

It doesn’t sit well with me. Not at all. I like to help out where I can. I do a little extra. If I see something that needs doing, I do it.

I figured that’s how the world works.

Yeah, I know. Donkey? Dumb ass more like.

Ask me if I’m glad to be back at work. Go on: I dare you.

Small Unremembered Acts Of Violence

I am not given to random acts of violence. On the whole I’m fairly pacific. But I guess the stresses of modern living have lowered my threshold somewhat because I am finding myself more and more overtaken with a burning desire to twat people.

Very often people I don’t know. Perfect strangers. Though from their behaviour it is clear that there is very little that is perfect about them.

Take yesterday for example. My wife and I were in our car approaching a T-junction. As we slowed down a pedestrian stepped out in front of us to cross the road and we all of us did that peculiar British thing of hesitating in our resolve. The guy bobbed back and forth unsure if we were going to let him cross. My wife slowed but not completely as, in the vernacular of the road, the car behind us was right up our arse.

This little dance – this little tennis match of non-decision making and non-commitment – lasted mere seconds but, due to the quantum effects of the time-space continuum and much theorizing by Professor Brian Cox, seemed to last forever.

In the end, not wishing to be caught forever in a time loop and subsequently rescued by Matt Smith (though the lovely Karen Gillan would have been fine) I put an end to this mini eternity by waving the fellow in front of us across the road: go on, my son, you may pass, on your way, go about your business.

He did so. But then had the audacity to stand at the road side as we drew close to him and gave us the mother of all glares and the dubious benefits of his middle finger.

What?!

I erupted like an Icelandic volcano. I believe certain words crossed my lips that rhymed rather nicely with trucking banker.

My wife laughed it off and turned the corner both euphemistically and in reality.

I on the other hand have to admit that had it not for my boys being in the back of the car and my wish to set a good example to them weighing heavily on my mind would have leapt out of the car for a mere tuppence, run up to this shining paragon of social politeness and kicked him up the jacksy so hard my boot would have remained shiny for a 12 month.

It prayed on my mind for a good hour afterwards. I was seething at the mere thought of this arrogant little dickhead slumping his way to work, thinking he’d got away with this monumental act of rudeness and feeling somehow that he’d scored a small victory for the common man.

Victory my arse!

He had no right of way, goddammit! We let him pass before us out of kindness! He should have waited!

We should have run the effing little toe-rag over!

My teeth ache just at the memory.

Is it normal this amount of rage? Is it normal to fantasise about meeting this fellow in a dark alley and finding I have a baseball at my disposal to disrupt the relationship of his femur to his patella?

Shouldn’t I just live and let live?

Because in the end, I did just that, didn’t I?

So why don’t I feel very glad about it?

Hiccups And Bile

A ragbag post this as due to a poor night’s sleep (due to a bad stomach) my brain feels like it’s been given the full works by Colonel Sanders.

I arrived at work this morning and realized that I wasn’t as popular as I once thought I was the moment that someone else got the “mwah mwah dahling” hug and air-kiss treatment while my greeting was very much an afterthought. An “oh hello there I didn’t see you beavering away beneath that rock and now that we’ve made eye contact I’d better acknowledge you just to maintain appearances” sort of look.

I responded with an Inspector Zen-like look of subtlety and European enigma but I suspect I merely looked like I was fighting to keep an unhealthy amount of flatulence safely contained within my gut.

Which funnily enough, I was. It was something I ate. A homemade chicken and bacon pie last night. I’m fine with chicken. I’m fine with bacon. I’m fine with pie. But for some reason, now that I have clocked over 40 years on the ol’ age-o-metre, I find that my stomach is starting to rebel against some really bizarre and nominally innocuous food stuffs. I mean what could be less offensive than chicken and bacon? (I, of course, address this question to all non-vegetarians in the audience – thank you for coming; do try the veal.) I’ve eaten both for years but suddenly, over the last 12 months, my colon has decided that as a combo the 2 taken together are poison. My guts swell up and produce gas which my body refuses to let go off and I am in pain as a consequence.

My wife, when I tell her of this, looks at me with eyes that speak volumes of the years and years of IBS she has suffered and I can hear the words “now you know it feels like” sung by invisible angelic voices over my right shoulder. The guy over my left is pulling his pants down and farting.

I suspect I may be clinically insane at this point in my blog.

And then to top it all I seem to have been embroiled against my will in a row with another work colleague from another department for reasons I can’t go into here but suffice it to say I am innocent of all wrong doing (apart from nicking a biro from the stationery cupboard once a number of years ago). Sadly I am being held responsible for things I have no responsibility for and this person is refusing to take my calls, emails and offers of free pens.

I am not someone who co-exists with ill feeling at all well but have done all I can to clarify my position so I am content to let the hurricane exhaust itself on the beach before I venture out to sea again with that particular sailor. No jokes about Seaman Staines please.

And lastly, whilst examining my blogging stats in the way one examines one’s navel, I noticed that one of the search terms that has driven traffic to my blog over recent weeks has been “hiccups and bile”.

How very apt.

Monday is it? Time for some Boomtown Rats, I reckon. Ta ta.

It’s Time To Kill Christmas

No, really it is.

She’s had her day. It’s time to move on. Christmas must die. And that goes for all this Happy New Year bollocks too.

You know how I know?

I came into work this morning (well, that’s enough in itself), took one look at the tin of Quality Street that some festively drunk work colleague had donated to the office and I didn’t fancy one at all. The thought of letting another chocolate morsel slip past my ruby red lips made me want to regurgitate my breakfast all over my keyboard.

And don’t get me started on the mince pies. They’re dotted around the office like land mines. Little scalloped crusts of Christmas codswallop. Poisonous pastries baked in the devil’s own arse.

But the real indicator that Christmas needs to be jerked off the nearest scaffold is the reaction engendered in me whenever anyone wishes me Happy New Year or (worse) asks me how my Christmas holiday had gone.

“Aaargh! Don’t ask me about my Christmas holiday! It was precious! Just between me and my family and I don’t want it sullied by having the experience aired in the scabby work environment where it will get cheapened by the buzz of the fax machine or a work colleague sobbing down the phone line to HR. Mind your own business, my Christmas break was mine, do you hear me? Mine! Not yours! Stop trying to finger it with your grubby little paws of perfunctory politeness and yes you may borrow my stapler.”

I have managed to gouge 2 inch deep claw marks in my ergonomically sound desk since my re-emersion into the work environment yesterday.

It does not bode well.

The sooner we can get on with mindlessly pressing our faces hard into the grey grindstone of normality and forget all this talk of goodwill and hope and the painful memories of freedom the better.

Because there is no point fooling ourselves. Christmas is just a holiday romance. It was never going to be forever. Sure she might wiggle her baubled boobies at you in December. Tell you that her Christmas milk shake is better than everybody else’s. She might gyrate her tinselled tush in your direction at the office party and invite you to pull your festive sleigh up to her bumper (baby) but she’s just a big prick tease.

Apart from a few present on the 25th she’s never going to deliver. She’s got no sense of longevity. She’s got commitment issues, Goddamnit. It ain’t you; it’s her. She needs her freedom. She needs to feel the wind beneath her wings or a hundred and one other clichéd excuses.

And I’ve heard them all before. Every sodding year.

Well, enough is enough. I can’t take it anymore, Christine Mas or whatever your real name is. If I can’t have you, then no-one can have you.

This is the end of the line. I’m sorry. I really am.

But it’s time for you to go down and stay down, bitch.

Click click.

It’s time to say goodbye.

I’m sorry. There is no other way.

Ka-blam!

Ahem.

Well, I don’t know about you lot but I feel better already.

No, No, No! That Is Not How You Do Sci-fi!

+++ APOLOGIES +++ MINORITY INTEREST NERD POST +++

One of the drawbacks of having a pre-teen boy around the house is the sighing acceptance of having to watch crap sci-fi on TV. Because when you are young and a boy, absolutely any sci-fi is good even when the quality control guys were plainly out of their minds on rohipnol and the ultimate product is complete and utter shite. I know this for a fact because I was once both a boy and young and thought that Hawk The Slayer was well scripted.

As you get older the scales fall from your eyes and you realize that sci-fi is the altar upon which many make offerings and most of them end up burnt. And not in a good way either.

Take Primeval. It should in theory work. It's like Einstein's theory of complete relativity. It's all there. Kind of. Dinosaurs. Big guns. Time travel. Sexy blonde chick. Dopy-but-good-looking nice guy. But somehow it just doesn't work on the quantum level. There's something missing. The atoms don't play ball with each other. The only black hole that has been created is the script writer's arse that the plot continually falls into.

I'm not quite sure what ITV are playing at with Primeval. It got ditched after the last series. Someone plainly thought it needed to be put out of our misery and they put a gun to its prehistoric head and pulled the trigger. Respect. But then some other buffoon decided to resurrect it and Haven holidays decided to sponsor it and suddenly its back on ITV. The show that refuses to die. The show that staggers around a shopping mall crying, "Brains! Brains!" in the pathetic hope that somebody will actually donate one.

It ain't gonna happen.

I have this theory that ITV just don't do good sci-fi. They don't get it. Or rather they get the veneer of it. The patina. Yes, we need monsters. Yes, we need chases. Yes, we need guns and A-Team style violence.

But where the hell is the science? Where is the consistency in the plot? Where is the emotional heart?

Primeval has none of these.

First series, the space-time continuum anomalies that enable random acts of time travel (try saying that without sounding like an absolute cock) merely brought dinosaurs forward to our time. But after that, realizing (I guess) that there are only so many dinosaurs you can pick from the Top Trumps Dinosaurs set before you have to do some, like, real boring proper research in a library and shit, the show's writers decided, oh sod it, let's have our space-time continuum anomalies also open up portals on parallel universes so we can just make any kind of monster appear.

Hence we now have dragons appearing alongside the occasional T-Rex.

Bullshit! Bollocks! Balderdash!

That is just lazy. Damned lazy. Lazy and inconsistent.

And this laziness infects the whole show. The plots are scanty at the best of times but they are now reduced to threads of American-corporate media-speak strung out between a relentless barrage of car chases and dinosaur chases.

Scene 1: the team shout and argue with their boss in the big science base. Scene 2: a dinosaur appears right outside and the team chase it in their cars. Scene 3: the boss shouts at his team via a radio. Scene 4: the team in their cars are chased by the dinosaur. Scene 5: dopy guy messes things up but in a good way and saves the day. Sexy blonde girl pouts but somehow doesn't look sexy. Scene 6: team return to base where the boss shouts at them but in a good way. Scene 7: repeat this entire process until the end credits roll.

Gaaah! (This is the sound a velociraptor makes when it realizes all those years treading the boards at the Sylvia Young Stage School learning Hamlet have been a complete and utter waste of time.)

The characters are flat and have no emotional life outside the "dinosaur world" that has been hastily erected around them. The dinosaurs are just CGI'd lumps of meat that run around bumping into industrial size storage containers. And the science behind the show is as convincing as Barney the Purple Dinosaur trying to convince a judge he isn't a serial kiddie fiddler.

Lord knows that Doctor Who doesn't always hit the mark but at least there is always an emotional arc and a plot arc. It's not all about the monsters and the chases. It's about emotionally real characters being placed in moments of crisis and jeopardy that dare us to dream and wonder about future worlds.

And that, ITV, is how science fiction is supposed to work. Please take note.

Don’t Talk To Me About My Holiday; I’m Back At Work

So I’m back at work. Slumped in front of the ol’ workstation. Viewing my Tippex and my stapler with the kind of hatred one usually reserves for one’s jailer. How dare they steeple up so smugly from the confines of my desk-tidy? Don’t they know I don’t want to be here? Don’t they know I didn’t want to come back?

One week off. One short-lived beautiful week. Already consigned to the dustbin of memory. Written off by virtue of having been lived and loved and replaced by the present. How can time move so fast?

And my workmates keep asking me about it. How was my week? Did I have a good time? My oh my, I’m looking well.

Torturers the lot of them. Turning the screw. Twisting the thumbnail removers. Gouging the flesh.

I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about my week in the sun now that I’m hip deep in mire and sludge and greyness. I just want to get my head down. Get stuck into the tasks at hand. Grit my teeth and do whatever it is I have to do.

I let it all die away. The goodness. The memory of an alternative lifestyle. Another way of filling my days. I wait for the shiny memories to fall away, to be replaced by dull mundanity. Wait for the blinkers to settle back over my eyes. It’s easier that way, believe me.

I can do it then. Survive. Get stuck into the old routine. The same old same old. Kid myself that this flat-line existence is enough. Is a life.

Live for the weekends. That’s what I’ll do. That’ll get me through it. That’ll give me a toe-hold on the sheer glass-smooth face of utter tedium and desperation. And onwards I’ll climb. Upwards and onwards.

Onwards and upwards to the next holiday. The next week of freedom.

Just 4 weeks away. 4 weeks and then the sun will shine again.

No. No! I mustn’t think of it. Not yet. Not yet.

I have to keep going... have to keep going... have to...

Bread Crumbs

This week I have quaffed deep of the carafe of crapness. Supped long and hard on the soup-bowl of complete and utter work soddery. It is not an expression I use often on this blog but this week has been a shit sandwich. A shit sandwich of doorstep proportions.

There’s too much to go into here. Too much to discuss that would get me into trouble with my employers were I to share it openly – and you all know how I actively seek to avoid trouble of that nature. So let me satisfy external analysis by providing – for your delectation – one small vignette that not only began this week of work-based woe but also rather neatly sums it up.

Monday morning. We have just opened to the public. The foyer area is sparkling and smelling of pine fresh disinfectant. A contractor turns up to meet me. We exchange pleasantries and head back through the foyer to look at the faulty doors he has come to repair.

There is shit everywhere. Human shit. A trail of man-poo that slithers from the public toilets across the foyer to the library, across their cool blue carpet tiles, back out across the foyer towards the entrance doors and, yes, when I check, leads off across the parkland outside. Without any effort at all I bet I could follow the perpetrator all the way home.

The trail reminds me for some reason of the blood trail left after a seal has been clubbed and dragged back to a fur trading ship. Somebody has obviously clubbed a seal to death with an elephant sized turd.

I am gobsmacked. In fact I smack my gob and keep my hand there to prevent myself from inhaling the ripe aroma of freshly ejected effluvia that floats up from ground level like marsh gas.

In the space of a few brief seconds some scrote has – unfathomably – left the public toilets whilst soiling himself at a constant rate of one plop every third footfall.

Why? How?

How can you do this and not know you are doing it? ‘Cos I’m assuming it was an accident and not deliberate. Or am I wrong? Has the guy in question cut a hole in his trouser pockets like a POW in the Great Escape and carefully and surreptitiously dropped his load in the hope that the Nazi prison guards wouldn't notice what he was doing?

He’s failed. It sticks out a mile. And it smells. And – oh God – other customers are coming into the building and walking through it. As I watch, the wheel of a wheelchair carves a moist furrow in a particularly fetid looking dollop. There are now new shite trails beginning to spread out everywhere.

We get the cleaner. Bless her, she dons her marigolds with the stern expression of a vet about to remove a breach calf from the back end of a cow and gets to work. The clean-up operation has begun.

In the meantime a quick look of the CCTV cameras reveals a lost, confused, heavily bearded man wearing a woollen bobble hat despite the summer heat leaving the loos and wandering across to the library at the right time. Even with the dodgy quality of the CCTV footage you can clearly see that he’s not “all there” (indeed, a lot of him is spread across our floors). The phrase “care in the community” comes to mind. I.E. nobody cares and he’s been left to his own devices.

The cleaner reports that the loos are a bombsite (bum site?). Faeces and toilet paper in all the loos and all over the sinks. It’s going to be a big job (no pun intended).

*Sigh*

And that is how Monday began and – you know what? – the work week hasn’t got any better than that.

Like I said.

A shit sandwich.

It’s MY Bloody Bin!

My workstation is a curious thing. When I clock-on on a Monday morning I greet it with a mixture of spleen, bleak acceptance and an odd proprietorial sense of comfort. It’s mine. I might not like the thought of another week at work doing tasks that nature never intended me for but while I’m here by God I’ll make sure my presence is writ large. Me and my desk are as one.

I own it.

Pens. Pencils. PC. Prittstick.

All mine. They may strictly speaking belong to my employer but they’ve been supplied for my use and my use alone and woe betide anyone who borrows my stapler and doesn’t bring it back. Blood has been shed for less.

This sense of ownership extends to my bin.

It’s mine. For my use. For my waste.

And few things irritate me more than arriving at work of a morning, feeling hound-dog miserable that another week will pass without me being employed as a script writer for the BBC, to find that someone – some lazy so-and-so with their own bin – has tossed their detritus into the hallowed plastic bag lined maw of my own personal trash receptacle.

My desk is right near the office door, see. It’s the last workstation people pass on their way to freedom.

So you can see how it happens. Someone scoffs a banana on their way to the door, or takes a last slug on a bottle of tequila, or maybe quaffs down a Müller Crunch Corner that they didn’t quite get round to at lunchtime and, with an arm action worthy of the Harlem Globe Trotters, the offending banana skin / Tequila bottle complete with maggot / yoghurt pot ends up in my bin.

Foodstuffs that I have not had the pleasure of consuming. Foodstuffs that have energized and nourished people other than me.

Their germs and their lipstick – maybe even a few stray nasal hairs – are still around the edges of their cast-off comestibles.

In my bin.

Great. Now the cleaner will think they are mine. Will think that I am the sort of person who discards banana skins in a way that leaves yellow stringy bits decorating the sides of my bin like a cheap Christmas decoration. That I am alcoholic. Worse. That I besmirch the holy temple of my body with a Müller Crunch Corner.

It’s the worst kind of identity theft there is (well, perhaps not as bad as having your credit cards cloned, houses bought in your name, debts run up on your accounts and your family killed by the identity thief and the blame put on you so you have to be investigated by Keeley Hawes – though I can see some positives in that. Note to self: amend that last sentence before the wife reads it).

It’s identity defamation. It’s identity libel.

Or identity... something.

Look. I don’t know what it is OK? It’s just annoying. And I’m fed up with it. And it’s Monday morning. And it’s MY bloody bin!