The cleaners, the thief, Stephen Hawking and his lover

Lunch plays a critical role in working life in happy Brachau.

No matter how many meandering conference calls you have about bugger all, no matter how many pointless badly written poorly spelt rambling email queries you need to turn around, no matter how many slide packs you have to pull together at a moment’s notice for the latest knee jerk reaction of the Director of Paperclips, there’s something comforting about knowing you down tools around high noon and slope downstairs to the canteen (or, laughably, “staff restaurant”) to talk nonsense.

The usual cast of characters is Iain, Gemma and me. That’s the core, the Three Musketeers. We have a range of special guest stars, depending who’s in – possibly a visitor from BT, possibly someone else in the team, but the core is Iain, Gemma and me. And we love to talk nonsense. And smut. Did I mention the smut? A lunch without smut is like an episode of “Last of the Summer Wine” without a bathtub sliding down a hillside or a morning without a meandering conference call about bugger all. It’s just not right.

The banter at lunchtime today was fairly representative. For instance, we started musing about Gemma’s missing yoghurt. As the food is so rank we nearly all bring our own packed lunches in, and Gemma brought a yoghurt in this week that looked pretty special. Virtually fat free with vanilla and chocolate sprinkles. I recall Gemma boasting at length in the kitchen about how delicious it looked, and that was her fatal mistake. The next day when she went to take it down for lunch it was gone. Just like that. My inferior low fat yoghurt was intact – because there’s no justice. I know which one I would have nicked. I know for a fact that colleagues in the bay next to mine have covetously peeked at her pesto pasta salad before, so the signs were definitely there - this was an incident waiting to happen.

Suspicion alighted on our sinister cleaners (aka “facilities operatives”) Peter and Magda. They are never seen apart. Magda is a gratifyingly sour faced woman and Peter is a man with the moustache of a porn star and a body that could never live up to the promise of said moustache. Phil in my team has become obsessed that every chance they get they are in the store cupboard bumping uglies. I am expecting him to come in one Sunday and drill a spy hole in the door. Regrettably I decided to link the proximity of the cupboard to the kitchen with Magda and Peter’s alleged proclivities and ended up suggesting that Peter and Magda might have stolen the yoghurt to use it in the wrongest way imaginable. A lunch where I don’t even slightly put Iain and Gemma off their food isn’t really a proper lunch, not in my book anyway.

I don’t know how we got from there to talking about Stephen Hawking having sex. I have tried and tried again to remember the way the conversation flowed into that subject but it sort of came out of nowhere (not something Stephen Hawking is likely to ever do. You can’t sneak up on someone in a motorised wheelchair). But the lunch culminated with me and Iain impersonating Stephen Hawking talking dirty with his electronic voicebox.

Try it some time. It sets you up nicely for an afternoon of poring over pointless spreadsheets or trying to understand why the “room booking system” at work is designed to make room booking as difficult as possible. I once booked a room in our office which didn’t even exist. I found out when I turned up outside where it was meant to be on the day of the meeting – with some colleagues who were in my meeting – to find it just plain wasn’t there. I half wondered whether you were meant to run through the wall at great speed like Platform 9 ¾. But that’s another story.

Ukulele, Me-kulele

I have spent what feels like all of today on the train - travelling to our Manchester office and back in one day is pretty gruelling stuff. It was dark when I got up and dark when I got home and my body still hasn't forgiven me for getting it out of bed at 6 in the morning. And standing in a frozen huddle at Reading station clutching a cappuccino and seeing your breath in the air isn't made any more glamourous by the thought of a train journey to Stockport. Macclesfield will never be Monte Carlo, Coventry isn't Cannes and Stoke isn't... well, it isn't fit for human habitation.

I winced as the train pulled into Wolverhampton, bringing back memories of the horrors of visiting that particular pleasure dome. I used to visit Wolverhampton by bus back when I used to stay in the Black Country. The bus from Sedgley trundles reluctantly into Wolverhampton as if at gunpoint, and just as it hits the centre it goes past what must be the biggest branch of Netto I have ever seen. The windows always seemed to be completely obscured by box upon box of reduced cheese and onion crisps and I suspected the checkout staff inside, starved of natural light and civilisation, were all gradually turning into Gollum.

Still, all that aside I love travelling by train. I'm not sure what it is but I've always enjoyed public transport. Of course, since I can't drive some would say I'm missing out on at least some of the pleasures of public transport as all my experiences of automotive transport involve someone else at the wheel. But none the less I like what I see as the luxuries of train travel. I know, it's hard to believe - "luxuries", "train travel". But I'm not talking about the dubious delights of the buffet car or the far from gleaming lavatories - I mean the space and time you get from a good train trip. The ability to stretch out, put your feet up and properly read Private Eye, for instance. The people watching you can do on a packed carriage - the freaks, the codgers, the people arguing loudly with their estranged partners on a cheap mobile, the ones who are in it for the long haul and the ones who are getting off at the next stop. Heaven.

And then of course there's the iPod. The iPod has transformed long journeys for me. I now wonder how people coped when they had to decide which one or two CDs to take with them on a trip. I was never a fan of those dubious cases that could hold dozens of CDs (no booklets! no lyric sheets! heresy!) but somehow I have adapted to an iPod just fine. But simultaneously I hate what it does to my listening habits. It doesn't just make listening to things easier - it makes not listening to things easy as well, and therein lies the problem. It means I don't perservere with things I don't love straight away, and god knows how many genius tracks lie mouldering in my iPod. I've never listened to them because I've never listened to them, and so it goes on.

Having said that, there are glorious moments where you listen to something and you just want to listen to it again and again. And, if memory serves, that was no bloody fun with a Walkman constantly rewinding and re-rewinding. Here is the song which took up quite a bit of my trip today, the splendid "Meet Me In The Garden" by Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele. I bought this CD on the basis of some reviews on Metacritic because it sounded right up my alley and so it proved. Everything from the chugging ukulele (you really can't beat a bit of ukulele in my book) to Dent May's splendid croon, it's a cracker. I even like the musical interlude some way through which sounds suspiciously like "Carnival" by the Cardigans. Plus the record is called "The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele", what's not to like I ask you?

Anyway, below is the video so you can make up your own mind. It's not a brilliant video, but I love the song. And it proves that if I'd been born 10 or 15 years later there might have been hope for me. Le geek, c'est chic. Enjoy!

Hand crafted words lovingly enrobed in punctuation

I got an instant message at work today from my friend Mikey. This usually happens several times a day and is one of the things that makes coming into work bearable. If nothing else it's a break from gazing at mindnumbing spreadsheets or sending someone a mail chasing them for not having responded to your mail chasing them for etc. etc.

“I’m so fed up of food descriptions” he said. “Ha! Ha! has sent me an email. ‘Hand crumbed haddock fingers’ indeed.”

This prompted a lengthy rant on the fun bus home about, among other things, how in God's name you would crumb haddock except by hand. And he’s right – it’s almost clichéd now to complain about this sort of thing. Nothing is “fried” when it can be “pan fried”. As if you were going to fry it in a shoe box, on a bin lid or atop a life size cut out of J from 5ive. Nothing is baked when it can be “oven baked”. And that’s before we get to descriptions. “enrobed” is a favourite of mine. Why use wrapped when you can use enrobed? Of course it sounds more sumptuous – it just happens to be utter bobbins. "Look at my packed lunch, it's enrobed in hand torn clingfilm" isn't something I recall anyone saying when we head for the canteen every day at lunchtime.

Such bland observational humour aside, Mikey and I were musing about where it will all end. “tin opened chicken soup” is surely only a few years away from winding up on pub menus throughout the land. “cheddar croustades with a Branston couli” is another personal favourite of mine. And I can’t wait to see “taken out of the foil tray by family artisans who have been heating up ready meals for generations”.

I remember at college when the catering staff went through an attempt to make our menu more sophisticated. The menu, I hasten to add, rather than the food – after all, that just involved dicking around on a word processor rather than going anywhere near a food processor. “Chips” were the first thing to go – replaced with the preposterous “chipped potatoes”. And if that gives the impression that they were faulty in some way it wasn’t entirely inaccurate. I assume they didn’t mean they had electronically tagged our dinner, though some of it was so dangerous that it might have merited a try. But even I was impressed when they announced that guinea fowl would be on the menu. That was something else.

I turned up early that evening to avoid disappointment – which, looking back, is laden with irony. There, in the stainless steel serving dish, were a bunch of mangy looking, veiny chicken legs. The same chicken legs, in fact, that they served up every week. Some of them looked like they could well have been the same chicken legs that they served up the week before. They needed a shave more than I did. I looked the woman behind the counter in the eye.

”This isn’t guinea fowl, is it”? I asked.

“No, it’s chicken. Don’t forget your chipped potatoes.”

On the subject of rebranding someone brought a box of Milk Tray into work quite a while back and I was impressed to see that they had renamed all the chocolates, seemingly with the sole intention of making them sound as smutty as possible. It’s almost as if someone was specifically marketing chocolates just for me and my ilk (i.e. the puerile). “Praline Whisper”, “Fudge Surprise”, “Nut Caress”… all present and correct. If only it had contained something like a “Ganache Felch” my life would have been truly complete.

7.0, or the enemy within

I went for a blood test just before Christmas. I have a variety of routine tests and check-ups from time to time to establish that I am still suffering from hypochondria. They usually follow a fairly straightforward process – first, I start exhibiting some symptoms. Then I find something suitably nasty that those symptoms could be in maybe one case out of a million. Then I become convinced that that’s exactly what I’ve got. Then I go to the doctor and after some routine tests and/or checkups the results come back, conclusively establishing that my hypochondria has flared up again.

Only this time it was different. Last month my doctor told me that my blood cholesterol reading was 7.0. I’ve always thought 7.0 was a respectable mark out of 10 – after all, if it was a Pitchfork review I’d give serious consideration to buying the record. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite apply with cholesterol. It turns out that this is very bad indeed, and that I need to drastically change my diet – and start medication – to prevent the risk of a heart attack in the not too distant future.

The doctor gave me a nice friendly looking handout with details of what I can and can’t eat. So it turns out that fish, fruit and vegetables are good whereas pies, chocolate, cakes, biscuits, butter, cheese and full cream milk are all off limits. In fact I had a look at all the foods in the “avoid” column and, set to music, I could probably incorporate them all in a cover version of My Favourite Things.

It has taken a bit of getting used to. The topography of the supermarket, for instance, has changed completely. Before, I would go into a supermarket and rush through the irrelevant distraction of the section full of random green stuff en route to the pizzas. Or the cheese for that matter. Not to mention the ready meals. From there on in the voyage through the aisles got increasingly exciting culminating in the Holy Grail – three consecutive aisles filled with cakes, biscuits, crisps, nuts and of course chocolate. All the fun was loaded towards the end of the trip and the wares got gradually more and more exciting. Which is just how life should be, right? (Ignoring for a second the inconvenient fact that all the cleaning products are right at the end. Let’s not think about that.)

But what a difference a blood test makes. Now by the time we’re finished in the fruit and veg section the shopping excursion is virtually over. I spend more time choosing between varieties of apples than I do scurrying past the chocolate section while averting my eyes and suppressing a pathetic whimper. On Sunday I spent all of five minutes picking which granola to buy. Yes, I know. It’s not good. It all looks like it belongs in a bowl being gnawed at by some indeterminate rodent and that is what passes for fun around these parts. But it’s a slow process, and people I know who know these things tell me that eventually your palate changes and you get positively excited about granola. We’ll see.

It’s not all bad. Last night I had a delicious supper of swordfish steak, crushed potatoes and green beans with a delicious home made tomato sauce – something I would never have thought to have a month ago. I am getting used to wholemeal bread and sweeteners. And semi skimmed milk really isn’t a hardship when you get used to it. But I’m still trying to find those magic foodstuffs that you can eat as often as you like without making serious inroads into your life expectancy. Fish in general, it turns out, is one. Granola – should I ever develop a taste for it – is another. And I can have as many strawberries as I can comfortably eat. But passing on a bowl of peanuts and instead chomping on a pickled onion? Not sure I’m ready for that quite yet.

Starting out

I blame Doogie Howser, M.D.

Not sure how many people remember it, but back in the early 90s this bastard son of St Elsewhere and The Wonder Years ruled the airwaves. Or maybe it didn’t, but one way or the other it was a permanent fixture in my house. My brother loved it and I slowly grew to loathe it the way you slowly grow to hate a shit job or a mindless single on the radio.

The premise was simple – Doogie Howser was not only a doctor but also, in a brilliant twist, a teenage child prodigy. Back in the 1990s I’m not sure why I didn’t identify more. Basically here was a big haired boffin kid with tons of academic smarts and few social skills worth speaking of. But that’s not why I hated it. It was the ending.

At the end of every show Doogie would tap away on a computer (probably the size of a fridge freezer, I really can’t remember) writing his computer diary. And of course, this being America, he learned Something Very Important in every episode so Doogie’s tappings contained a homily quotient that made the Gideon Bible look like the lyrics to a Slayer record. So naturally I hated it.

But anyway – because believe it or not there’s a point to this – I’m convinced that young Howser invented blogging. Every time he typed some life lesson or other he was paving the way for everyone else. In many ways Sex and the City is like Doogie’s non-identical twin. The only difference is that Carrie Bradshaw types her pithy observation on the screen of her Mac at the start of every episode and Doogie does it at the end. (Well, of course there are more differences. I don’t recall Doogie getting any sex and he certainly never treated anyone with “funky spunk”. But I digress.)

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep a diary and it's safe to say it didn’t go well. Am I the only person who physically can’t write longhand any more? I worry that in 10 years time all our wrists will be so riddled from typing that we’ll need anabolic steroids just to fill out an application form. But wanting to write something didn’t really go away. And being fairly active on Facebook has made me realise I’m a terrible show off and like writing stuff. So a blog seemed like the logical choice.

I don’t know what sort of blog it will be, or what I’ll talk about. It might have photos, it might talk about books or music. Or it might just contain random stories about my day (remind me to talk about the “top 3 sex scenes discussion" if I forget). Maybe you’ll get bored. Maybe I will. But I can promise two things – firstly, it won’t be anywhere near as tedious as the diaries I used to keep as a kid and secondly there won’t be any homilies. Well, let’s hope not anyway.