…. and I’m not coming back. Three reputable weather sites agree that the low pressure which has brought storms, floods and bloody misery to almost everyone is set to continue for approximately ever.

All this talk of ceaseless depressions is leaving me understandably depressed. Aside from the obvious record rainfall in June, further cheery starts include no day of unbroken sunshine for TWO MONTHS and – in the South East at least – there has been serial rain for the last 33 days.

At least in Winter, we expect the weather to be crap 🙁

I’m going to grudgingly admit that the new business class (sorry executive first) for Air Canada is a whole load better than the old one. But that’s like saying being menaced by a slightly vexed sheep is not quite as awful when compared to the full body killed and eaten experience from an angry sabre toothed tiger.

Gone have the cracked leather seats, 640×480 RGB bulkhead TV projection and in have come sleepy seats with a thousand controls, personal DVD systems and a whole bunch of other game/map/audio options that don’t actually work. But hey, the seats are very cool and you don’t have to elbow some fat guy on his third pudding when you need a wee. Which since I pre-hydrated with three glasses or orange juice and a litre of water is currently running at about a ten minute frequency.

The planes still only have two engines though. I may have previously mentioned how unhappy I am about that.

My fellow passengers in first class (and it’s all a bit wrong as all the poor b@stards in steerage have to walk thru this sci-fi seat arrangement marvelling at the pompous rich people within) are an eclectic mix of arrogant and annoying. One of the stewardess’s isn’t very well but this doesn’t stop these needy overgrown children demanding stuff they could quite easily do themselves.

The whole flying thing has come full circle – when air travel was for the rich back in the 30’s, it was all galleried fuselages and foie grass for breakfast. Then we had ‘pack us in and sell it cheap’ of the Laker era and now we’re back to the chippy fuckers paying thousands for a 7hr flight while those in steerage down are basically slightly expensive cargo.

I always feel guilty checking in, avoiding the queues, and then hitting the fast track where the wait is merely 10 minutes whereas everyone else has at least an hour of hot, turgid hell, and then the bloke in front of you still forgets he has to take his laptop out.

And if that isn’t enough, there is some kind of 1984 RightThink going on as you stumble out of security separated from about half your personal belongings. You’re flung into a neon hell of Satan’s wares double discounted and irritatingly pedalled by minimum waged uniformed desperados.

Maybe I’ve become a bit too cynical but I couldn’t wait to run away, get away to the calm of the lounge where many people displayed characteristics best described as “quite arrogant without much to be arrogant about“. I never really lost that working class chip on my shoulder, and I find myself being studiously polite to everyone from those cleaning the bogs to those serving you drinks.

I’d like to think this is because I recognise their worth in a world lacking in meritocracy, but I wonder if some of it is because I don’t want to be grouped with the self important arse sat opposite. Honestly some of these people, just so far divorced from reality, it’s scary. If I had any real working class credentials left, I’d punch the lot of them.

Still after only being singled out four times by serious looking men representing a myriad of UK/Canadian security services, I finally made it into the country. Apparently business travelling is still viewed by a few “ I assume these people have access to neither television or newspapers “ as a perk of some kind of privileged class. It isn’t, being here is great, getting here is bloody dreadful.

Pick three ideal attributes for a taxi driver? Punctual, careful and polite would seem a good starting point. But deaf, near sighted and stupid are probably not the first qualities you’d be stacking your CV with, if you were trying for a job driving the public around.

Clearly the bloke who fetched up at my place fifteen minutes late had somehow slipped through the net. Things didn’t start well when he turned left out of the road and headed for the motoring insanity that is Aylesbury on a wet Saturday morning. After a couple of polite interjections which he pointedly ignored while trying to reprogram the Sat-nav, I was forced to be a little firmer.

I explained that having lived here for 10 years and driven myself to the airport about a hundred times, I may be in a slightly better position to direct him than his sulking electronic mappage. Not only did I back my own route finding ability, a secret agenda was all about survival as his repeated punching of the touch screen diverted his weak eyes from the road.

Having persuaded him to tack in a direction TOWARD the airport, he then further undermined my confidence by asking which terminal we were trying for. I’ve no idea, I’m not good at details but I was able to whip out the communications thingy before being roundly beaten by the Air Canada website which only operates with Internet Exploder version 4 and that pre-assumes the worm hole expansion pack installed.

A more traditional approach of phoning the wife support service quickly put us back on track until he asked right terminal three, that’s Gatwick is it? Unless there has been a rapid building plan around Reigate, I’m pretty sure the UK’s second airport has only two terminals. And I would have though he’d have known that too.

At this point it was obvious that his fascination for the Sat-nav was to compensate for his partial blindness “ looking at the little screen seemed to be his terrifying approach of working out where the next corner would be.

I’m sure many of you “ as I did “ can immediately saw the flaw in this plan. The Sat-nav is blissfully unaware of the metal tonnage in play in front, behind and around us. I closed my eyes and waited for the airport or death by family car sandwich.

I’m sat here waiting to go, cheered by the happy news that the aircraft have been significantly refurbished which is welcome, although this doesn’t extend to crafting on an extra engine under each wing. So while I can have my ego polished in leather seated comfort, my mind will still be screamingly terrified of plunging into the Atlantic.

I hate flying.

… Or just the one keg

Imagine joy unconfined on seeing this officially stamped on the changing room door this morning.

Apologies for the shonyphone image but taking pictures outside of the toilets can soon get you the type of reputation that does not guarantee future employment. But the prospect of a beer flavoured wash and the possibility of being officially drunk on duty elevated me above a ground state of sweaty, annoyed and damp. Sadly all was not as it seems and my reward for a pant dragging headlong plunge into the shower shouting “Unleash the Beer” was merely boring H20 with no happy additives.

Talking of things not being quite what they seem, today I attended a workshop with some of our Human Resources clones. There was much to joke about that is food, drink and probably a fine after dinner cigar for the hedgehog, but I can’t repeat it. I just can’t – see that bit about above ^ about future employment? It’d be one of those.

I did learn something though. For example, it’s no longer personnel. And it’s gone beyond human resources, now we’re all fully synergised with the human capital team. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that but it was almost an alien experience dealing with many, many people who I honestly thought were responsible for only hiring, firing and providing a bit of warning if the building was about to explode.

Apparently this isn’t the case; the fire drill is the responsibility of the facilities group whereas theft of stationary falls under the remit of this never ending procession of similarly dressed, strange acronym speaking, borg like flange who make up this much maligned business function. Must be like dealing with IT if you’re a normal person. Very odd.

Anyway, I retired before being volunteered for anything I think and such is the deficit in the karma weather bank that my entire ride home was best categorised as gopping, bloody wet. I’m going to be needing those Ale Showers if it doesn’t get better soon.

After a brief but uninvolving flirtation with contentment, the man standing, with a guilty look on his face, squarely behind the hedgehog has reverted to type.

First there is what some allegedly qualified weather lunatics are referring to as summer. These are the very same nutters who predicted an arid, water starved landscape under unbroken sunshine after three hot days in April. I cannot watch my license fee being wasted on yet another fancy graphic showing a world of wet without shouting “bloody charlatans, bring back Wincy Willis”

Take Monday morning for example. A smiling, well dressed cipher of the Grim Reaper bounces onto the weather stage and declares cheerfully “if you live in Yorkshire, there’s a good chance that an entire years rainfall will fall in a single day” without adding “OH MY GOD, FIRE AND BRIMSTONE, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, WE’RE ALL DOOOOOMED I TELL YOU“. Still,at least, other publicly funded bodies took it a bit more seriously with Hull, for example, declaring a state of emergency. Still this could be for almost anything really, such as “I’m sorry the architecture is so poor and the smell of fish so overwhelming, we’re declaring martial law”

And we need this kind of nannying because people are idiots. Take this guy for example, did he think his car was in fact a boat? Could he have imagined that when the water is above the roofline, some loss of steering might occur? Down here in the soft south, we’ve had consecutive rain on twenty one days but no more than a shower compared to the poor buggers up north. However, it’s still bloody annoying as the longest day has been and gone; but it’s hard to find something fun to do on light evenings when the cat is being blown around the garden, and the lawn is below the water table.

In other bad news, it appears the finest medical minds that seven years of hard partying at med school can create, have deemed it necessary to put my dodgy shoulder under the knife. This exploratory surgery will not actually fix the problem but may give them some clue to why, five months after I monged it, complex muscular actions such as putting on a shirt still make me want to blubber. For reasons I don’t really understand, this is the only options short of amputation and it’s six weeks off the bike at best. Right then, that can wait until winter.

Wimbledon has started and almost ended for any British competitor. Good ol’ Tim somehow made it to the second round but you feel the third may be somewhat beyond him. So pissed off am I with it all, I’m leaving the country to ply my dodgy vocational trade in Canada for a week. However, looking at the forecast for Ottawa, it appears I’m taking most of this crappy weather with me.

However, I’ll make absolutely sure that I leave you some. It’s no fun being grumpy on your own.

When Ben Elton used to be funny, his stand up routine included a sketch lampooning the great British public. He pinpointed our fierce protection of personal space by mimicking the mantra of the desperate commuter – “double seat, must get a double seat”. Various tactics were discussed but the premier seat reservation system seemed to be the strategic placement of a plastic dog turd, almost guaranteed to preserve ones’ anonymity in the face of other fare paying passengers.

Twenty years on in a new millennium with new rolling stock, the practice is still the instinctive reaction of any self important cheeky bugger. This evening I witnessed a brazen embodiment through the physical medium of a stuffed shirt transformed into an arse. Neat trick I can tell you and here’s how it works.

Middle management, middle aged spread swapped the novelty turd for a plethora of vocational accouterments including his silly briefcase, a collection of allegedly important business papers and what he laughably considered to be his best “bagsy this seat” stare.

And only under extreme duress did he give it up, firstly feigning deafness and then grudgingly shovelling his stuff elsewhere with the expression of a man who couldn’t believe nobody else realised how important he actually was. It reminds me of a World War II anecdote were a German SS captain pushed his way arrogantly past a Frenchman whose country has been recently occupied. When asked to apologise, he responded with a haughty “I am a German Officer” to which the ever so brave French replied “as an excuse, it is inadequate, as a reason, it certainly is“. Probably got the poor bugger shot.

Train etiquette is even less obvious in the morning with the Alpha Males all playing materialistic “Risk“, fighting over the battle zone of the shared table. Empire building takes the form of depositing laptops, PDA’s, phones and diaries at the exact centre of the table. Border skirmishes see the armoured reserve of newspapers and monographed papers probing your enemy’s defenses.

Eventually trench warfare sets in as they flit impatiently between unconnected devices pretending not to notice the opposing belligerents, but secretly attempting to outgun their foes with the trills and beeps of their rambling pantheon of electric weaponry.

Me? I am stinky in shorts and long in amusement, launching unilateral biological strikes with each stealthy lift of a sweaty armpit. Occasionally – if I find myself annoying drawn down to their level – out comes the astonishing electronic do it all the firm furnishes with me for testing. This is akin to introducing a stealth fighter to the do battle with Sopworth Camels (or in the case of some of the niche tat on the train, just camels) and their barely checked envy clearly means that I have won.

This counts double if I’m paying Tetris rather than pretending that I am at the eye of some informational tornado. Although I’d rather win by involuntarily ranting some spittle flecked diatribe on what a sack of shallow wankers I share my commute with. But I’m far too English, so instead I shall not cease until my search for a plastic dog turd is complete.