Not so much gags about dropping your pants in the misguided pursuit of comedic merit, more a transcription of a microcosmic example of what happens where corporate life and bodily fluids collide. Although not in the truly physical sense “ well at least I hope not.

A man of a certain age is left with few pleasures; one of those remaining is a full and detailed review of the sports pages while communing with nature. And not in this modern willy in one hand, IPAQ in the other whilst wetting the urinal rubbish. I’ve mentally lambasted those nonses cracking off an email or checking out the football scores, when their attention should really be on what’s in front of them, or as happens rather more often, what’s leaking onto their shoes.

No I’m talking old school, slam the door shut to trap 1, perform the trick of dropping your strides while simultaneously rustling open the paper, and plonk yourself down on the thankfully unwarmed seat and think of England. The social variant of this process calls for a hearty cough to disguise the unfolding in case of other occupants prowling in this last Bastian of the male.

So obviously a communal gasp (or possibly gas) escaped both of us when we realised that the trap next door was occupied. Oh the stomach plunging embarrassment of being caught in loco paparis with literally your trousers round your ankles. This situation demanded a mature response, and in that vein I settled comfortably and refused to make even the tiniest sound until he wiped and ran. Unfortunately he too evidently couldn’t face the social stigma of being outed as a thunderbox rustler and adopted exactly the same ploy of total silence.

We’d probably still be there now except for a desperately difficult situation unfolding in Trap 3. The final cistern was being noisily breached by a man who’d clearly had a bowel full of sprouts in his recent digestive history. It put me in mind of The Ride of the Valkyries” arranged for Rectal Oboe and Small Intestinal Trumpet. Think of the kind of sound a horse attempting to play the trombone may well make and you’re right in here with us.

This went on for some time.

Continue reading “Toilet Humour” →

Reality TV generally leaves me cold. It’s a formulaic ritual where grandstanding prima donnas screech at each other in some lurid juxtaposition of vainglory and fame. But Gordon Ramsey is always worth a watch; you have to hand it to this man with a pan, who is now serialised and handsomely paid to bully people and call them fucking wankers. It’s nice to see such jobs being shared outside of sales managers and executives who believe such an attitude ups both their virility and importance.

Last night saw old Slam Dunk Ramsey laying about himself with special vitriol saved for, what I’m thinking of as, the Prawns Of Wrath. The young boy, funded with his dad’s cash, who was allegedly running the restaurant shared almost none of Gordon’s cooking skills but matched him toe to toe for arrogance. Ramsey, clearly furious that this oiky underling failed to understand the basic premise that God was in the kitchen, sent him out bullfighting. Apparently this was to make the lad understand the importance of instruction from an experienced practitioner. It was a brutal and lazy physical metaphor to begin with even before the increasing gored and terrified participant ran for cover. It would also have carried significantly more weight had the instruction had any effect whatsoever other than to beat the bloke into submission and subsume his ego to that of Flash Gordon.

The format is such that it’s impossible for the restaurant to fail any more spectacularly whatever the great man does. Short of grilling its’ customers or serving up family pets, the makeover is destined to generate an upturn in its fortunes. So essentially it’s a rigid set up for a middle aged man to swear and bully his way through an hour before returning triumphant to the stirring sounds of his ego being serenaded. We all know the ending before we start watching and yet watch we do as the textbook unrolling of incredulence, stupidity, cajoling, enlightenment and finally mutual affection unwinds off the plot reel.

But I think it’s great and can’t wait for the next one where hopefully a ritual disembowelment of the sous chef during a team bonding jousting session precedes a bitch fight with frying pans. Someone shout at the BBC ˜Now THAT’S public service broadcasting’

Domestically untroubled by cooking, it’s unlikely old Gordy will ever pop round to our house to check out my signature dish. And with it being Beans on Toast enlivened by a Lager chaser, that’s probably no bad thing.

Not five o’clock when my the maritimely authentic, personally installed barn mounted yardarm dips below the sun, rather a physical age where mental conundrums are verbalised without ever passing through any kind of appropriateness filter.

Let me source you a representative example; to my left Random, five years old and cheerfully unconnected to the workings of the world, to my right a copse of wind blown autumnal leaves latterly connected to their host trees.

Dad, I know why those leaves are falling off the trees”
Why’s that Hon?”
Because it’s Autumn and the tree has to go to sleep for the winter”
That’s right”
So, these leaves, they all die do they? Doesn’t the tree love them anymore?”
Thinks for a bit, death is a minefield that kids simply navigate whilst you explode on moves they’ve planned three moves ahead

They’re not dead Hon, they’re just going into the soil to make new trees”
I’m pretty happy with this, most angles covered
They still die though, they don’t even live a year and even our hamster lasted longer than that”

Bugger, that bloody hamster, it didn’t die of natural courses, it’s genetic drive for an out of cage experience ended fatally during an in a cat experience.
Well yes I suppose so but the tree goes on for ages, come and have a look at how old it is”
It’s an old oak, stretching arthritically for the sky throwing limbs akimbo around a fat and knarled trunk.

Wow, that looks really old? changes verbal direction Is the bark like skin then?”
Prods next sentence with minesweeper. Comes up with a clean tone
Yeah I guess it is”

Wow, looks even more wrinkled than Grandma and She’s ANCIENT”
Grandma is in attendance. Now not looking quite so fondly at her previously loved cheeky granddaughter. Change subject rapidly before she gets really personal.
Anyway, why didn’t you want to walk home from the pub, you’ve only been swimming, you’ve had a huge lunch, you got up late, you’re only five, what’s wrong with you?”

Pensive expression spreads on her face like clouds on a sunny day. Fastens finger to lip and mentally strains for the right words. Clouds turn to rain as she’s clearly upset she can’t express herself properly
Well Dad, you know, you know, I’m, you know¦, you know…..”
Come on, have a go at the words, what do you mean”
Honestly?”
Honestly”
Dad, I’m bloody knackered”

Grandma de-wills youngest daughter whereas I have to be collected off the pavement due to hysterical convulsions. But this is the kind of thing that happens all the time with Random “ she’s just loose change in the vast mint of real life.

A couple more to cement the argument – When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she responded with a huge smile and I’d like to be a big house which we could all live in”. And only last week she asked me Daddy, if I was a baby elephant, would you still be my dad?”

Biologically tricky to answer that one. But I tell you if they grow up any faster, I’m having ˜em down the hospital to check for Genetic Modification.

Guy Fawkes – obviously the sanest bloke ever to enter Parliament and look what happened to the poor bugger. All he ever wanted to do was explode the king into a thousand non identifiable pieces, and add significant collateral damage to the stuffed and hair shirts pontificating on the future of the country; to whit how they, the landed and ruling classes, could stuff everyone else to make more money. Ooh that chip’s hot on the shoulder today.

So here we are four hundred years since the poor sod received a state hanging for his republican zeal and many thousand bonfires bridge the gap between history and reality. Although political correctness dictates we no longer have a Guy” pyratically reliving the events of 1605 and quite right too; if we’re going have the whole Sealed Knot nonsense, let’s do it properly with ˜hanging from the neck until dead’ followed by a jolly butcher’s quartering before assorted organs are flung at face height through the power of four horses and an insane form of protestant justice.

Probably frighten the kids a bit that, so instead we’ll fire up a bonfire of the vanities possibly miscoded as the village firework do. While the current government continues to reject the use of rockets and other firepower “ except in the pursuit of some lame and tired foreign policy – we risked third degree burns and possible censure through the firing of a few low orbiting projectiles over the allotment.

Neighbours, who I know only from a friendly nod, come together with a good burn of right-on non recyclable rubbish and a legion of unruly vegetables, accompanied by mulled mine, rubbish fireworks and a perennial feeling of community. It’s all sentimental nonsense of course and considering my previous tirades at the middle class pretending to care, it had more than a little potential to be bloody dreadful.

And guess what? It wasn’t. We’ve been doing this for ever, bucking the trend of Englishman’s Castle isolation instead chucking in a tenner, a few beers, and whatever Tesco could offer in terms of premium sausage rolls. Did you make these yourself? They are FANTASTIC”/”Yeah, sort of, made the money to pay for them which is almost the same thing”

The allotments opposite our house are rather impressive both in terms of acreage and pointlessly oversized root vegetables. They also provide the annual hotspot for a swift burning fire, small talk based on guesswork and night vision and a fireworks display that “ with twenty plus kids present “ would soften the heart of the most cynical arsehole. Trust me on this, I have almost all of the credentials to validate that statement.

I turned up with a the Bastard Cold That Will Never Leave, a crate of beers and an aloof expression. Maybe it’s working in London that’s hard wired a cringing shudder when kitsch is on the menu, until a shadowy neighbour proffered a plastic cup of mulled wine clearly simmered on Lucifer’s crucible. A single gulp suffused a nuclear reaction of warmth from head to toe evicting the virusy squatting of what I believe is Ebola. You may notice it’s quite strong, we tried boiling off the Brandy but I’m not sure it’s worked”

After a brief enquiry into the ingredients of this liquid sun, I felt qualified to explain that a two week period would be required to boil off a pint of Brandy. Apparently they got it cheap which makes me worry that somewhere Austria may be missing a runway de-icer.

Food exhausted, once the locusts of children had devoured the dessert selection, fireworks began begat by two headtorches representing sober parents. Amusingly, someone “ in a fit of inspired urban planning “ had set Aylesbury on fire some four miles distant which somewhat put our£10.99 selection box to shame. So we ooh’ed and ar’ed as the dwarf lit fountains and orbitally constrained missiles briefly took flight before expiring with a final long spark, putting paid to any remaining cultivated vegetation.

But everyone loved it. Including me which considering I’d intended to bring a camera with a long exposure and an aloof expression was a bit of a surprise. So while the excitement hardly raised a heartbeat, my smallest child ran around happily shrieking until she ran out of positive electrons and was dispatched homewards with Grandma. The other one inserted fingers earwards and refused to accept her friend’s entreating arguments that fireworks only hurt the sky.

Go tell that to Mr. Fawkes.

Anyway, I wanted to write how rubbish and stupid and pointless it was. But you know what? I thought it was great, it reminded me of Charles’ and Di’s plates, bunting in the street and the notion that someone other than those in full view of a mirror actually matters.

I loved it 🙂

If one whiffles the trousers of history, you shall discover many disturbing incidents involving the humble shower. The Germans were guilty of some reprehensible alternate uses during the war, Janet Leigh suffered something sharper than shower gel in Hitchcock’s Psycho and “ if you were privileged enough to attend public school “ one was expected to uncomplainingly endure the repeated rogerings from the Head Boy.

Being a comprehensive lad, thankfully that vignette of education passed me by, but now I’m adding my own “ admittedly somewhat milder “experiences to this pantheon of misery.

Remember last week when the ratio of queue to showers attained the hitherto un-scaled irritation ratio of 10 to 1? The situation was sufficiently dire to inspire the apathetic grumblings of the shower room to take direct action. A torrent of emails bombarded the Facilities help desk with our list of outrages demands including working showers, a non sticky floor, removal of old clothes and dead bodies and “ pushing it a bit “ the occasional refill of the hand towel dispenser.

Our reward was action, well the promise of action anyway which for Facilities (Motto stop whinging, it’s shit for everybody here“) constitutes the same thing. Dusty parts were retrieved from back order, the jet wash hosed down ready for use and a flange of boiler suited engineering types were summarily dispatched into the land of the unshowered. Their promises were legion “ bounteous hot water, non fetid environmentals and a reduced risk of typhoid.

And in the meantime, we bathed in the warm glow of finally getting one over the hidden denizens of our property group. We showed ˜em, they can’t stand up to mass action, typical bullies “ snap like twigs when facing a bit of English backbone. You could almost hear the strains of Jerusalem as we indulged in a bout of metaphoric back slapping. Although that could just have been the onset of post sprout rectal music, you can never be too sure.

The signs of actual activity were all around me this morning. We had a new bin, a strongly worded note re: weapons grade socks and a small patch of cleaned floor. On the downside, they had disconnected the boiler. You see this is their standard response, you ask us how much worse it can get and we’ll show you.

Apparently the boiler has been eaten by one of the carbonised socks which now have taken upright form and show the beginnings of a personality. It’s hard not to cue up a joke about offering them the shower maintenance contract but there’s probably little point. After the bracing nay heart stopping experience of a freezing shower this morning, it’s clear the facilities group are looking to solve the problem more cheaply by simply killing us all.

And I see the weather forecast predicts an onset of wintry conditions layering frosts onto the icy wastes of Aylesbury Vale. Now I was born in Yorkshire, we’re meant to be good in cold conditions but even with the genetic thick skin of my birth, freezing cold showers have pushed me over the edge.

I shall, therefore, be found at my desk naked displaying the message Smelly Non Showered Person Appeal “ Please give generously” on a strategically placed sign .

This is not a new type of bestiality inspired cigarette, rather a sad tale of suicidal bagers taken from that irreverent electronic daily, The Register:

Reginald Perrin would love it: rail services near Tonbridge, Kent, were yesterday disrupted by “a smoldering badger on the line”, the Daily Mirror reports.

Said disruption was not, however, on the same apocalyptic scale as that commonly caused by the wrong kind of leaves on the line, as watch manager Peter Brown explained: “Somebody had reported an electrical fire on the track at 8.30am. It [the badger] was on fire and every time a train came past it reignited.

“The flames would die down, but when another train passed the wind would cause the fire to start up again. I wasn’t going to have trains stopped because the badger was already dead.

“We just told Network Rail there was a smoldering badger on the line. It didn’t present a further danger.”

A maintenance crew was duly dispatched to remove the fried badger from the tracks. Brown noted: “Thankfully I should think it died very quickly of electrocution, and did not suffer.”

What a shame for the badger’s family; think of the children Mum, mum, can we go and see Dad’s grave? / No but if you’re good, we’ll visit his ashes?

PS
In episode five, series two of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the hero does indeed explain his late arrival at work with: “Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden.”