Oy vey! You meddling kids!

In a weird "one in, one out" experience I returned to work today to find that one of the guys in the next bay along was retiring. A small group of us congregated round his desk as he received the traditional card, present and awkward speech in which someone tried to say that he'd done a wonderful job of revolutionising Process X or found a new way to sort Column Y in Spreadsheet Z which had saved the office 2.3 man hours every calendar month. It was very moving. Mandy had baked a delicious cake - like a lemon drizzle sponge with a thick layer of icing. My cholesterol problems are currently at bay (another blog entry all of its own) and so I manfully took a slice. It was mouthwatering and reminded me how much I've missed eating bad things - and in the great tradition of sinful food I wolfed it down in about a tenth of the time it takes to polish off a vag pot.

Incidentally, I got a message at work today from Anne Marie, a friend of mine and a regular reader of the blog. "Guess what I had to eat yesterday?" she asked. And yes, it was a fucking vag pot. She's hooked on them. She had one yesterday, one the day before and she's having one today. She's collecting the full set and thinks I should write to the manufacturer claiming commission. I can picture the letter now:

Dear Innocent Foods

I am Mr London Street, a blogger and Reading's premier humourist. I recently wrote a piece on the internet in which I compared your snack product the 'veg pot' to "chowing down on warm loft insulation" before saying that most tramps would sooner eat a "gangrenous rodent". I also repeatedly referred to them as "vag pots". In particular I spoke about your 'Indian Daal Curry' as a "sea of beige sludge".

Due to my ringing endorsement one of my friends has now bought three in a week and is your biggest fan. Please could you send some form of remuneration? In return I promise to refer to your popular range of smoothies as "a bit like fruity snot".

Yours faithfully,

Mr London Street

Err... where was I? The guy retiring today is one of the lucky ones. He doesn't leave because of redundancy or getting caught banging one out to goatsex.com. Nobody has got rid of him because of some dubious images on his hard drive. He has bumbled nicely along to retirement age and will leave on his own terms. And different people will remember him for different things. Some will remember his thick beige fleece, permanently draped over the back of his chair 365 days of the year and probably, by now, a tad whiffy. Some will remember his fondness for rabbits - the fluffy type that lollop round fields I might add, rather than a distant relative of the giant black sex toy in my top drawer at work. Some will dimly recall him talking of fun times with his partner ("partner", not "wife", we all clocked that one) who I understand is a lady somewhat older than him. But not me. To me, he will always be the man who sent what Mikey immortally referred to as "the most racist email of all time".

It was a slow afternoon at work many months ago and my IM popped up with a message from Mikey. It simply said "I think I may just have been sent the most racist email of all time."

Everyone at work knows someone whose moral compass is just a bit wonkier than the norm, don't they? And Dave was one of those - an inadvertent racist who probably didn't even know he was doing it. He and Mikey once had a lengthy discussion about whether his fondness for saying "I'm off down the chinky for dinner tonight." was racist or not. He even offered to prove it wasn't by going down the "chinky" and asking them whether they minded being referred to as a "chinky" before Mikey managed to talk him down from the metaphorical ledge.

After some persuasion Mikey sent me the mail. The title alone, Immigrant Telly, was a warning in itself. It might as well have said A bunch of jokes about how much I hate foreigners. Now in England, sadly, anti immigration views are extremely popular in a certain demographic. These people have their own newspapers, their own pundits (the especially hateful Jon Gaunt - or "Gaunty" - and Richard Littlejohn for starters) and I'm told some of them are getting close to evolving opposable thumbs. But it's safe to say they haven't quite developed their own satirists just yet. This mail proceeded on the "hilarious" assumption that we had so many immigrants here now that they would need their own TV shows. And, to cap the rib tickling, all these shows were puns on existing television programmes, all subtly altered to show that they're for immigrants. Calm down there at the back. I know, I haven't told you the punchline yet and you're pissing yourself already.

As I scanned down the list on that slow afternoon in the office I was struck by the fact that some of them were just plain lame. Currynation Street, for instance, or Middle East Enders. But at least they showed some rudimentary skill for punning. As the list went on whoever had put it together ran out of puns and just decided to move on to spite and/or random references to race. For instance changing "You've Been Framed" to You've Been Bombed, what's that all about? Are all immigrants now suicide bombers too? They come over here, take our jobs and kill everyone in a human fireball, that sort of thing? Even more arresting was Postman Pak. This doesn't work on a number of levels. I mean, for one the link between "Pak" and "Paki" is a bit tenuous. Second of all, surely nobody has used the phrase "Paki" in anger since about 1988. Well, except Prince Harry but what would he know about not being prejudiced? The man's a ginger for Christ's sake.

The last one clearly showed the triumph of bigotry over comedy - Scooby Jew. Scooby Jew. It was so silly it was genuinely funny. I had an image of Scooby in a skullcap in the haunted mansion at night making a massive fifteen storey sandwich with gefilte fish.

So in the end I did laugh at Dave's racist email, to my eternal disgrace, but only because my mind turned it into something funny because I couldn't cope with the banality of evil. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Mikey pondered telling him he hadn't appreciated the mail or its contents but, like most of us when confronted with something so offensive, he didn't say anything. And nor did I this afternoon as I clapped like everyone else, ate my moist and moreish slice of cake and left Dave to head home at the end of the day and enjoy spending more time with his fellow Klansmen.

Of course, the other possible explanation for my failure to condemn Dave is that I too have a proud record of inadvertently offending minorities in the office with exceptionally poorly chosen jokes. But that's a story for another time.