Day 250: I Haven't Got Much To Say

Regular readers will be aware of Speed-O-Blog, a highly developed communications system that involves presenting largely irrelevant information in bite-sized chunks. Its advantage is obvious (to me, at least): rather than having to find something interesting to say, I merely present a kind of 'pick 'n' mix' selection of information, none of which has to be connected in any way. Some people call it lazy; I call it The Sunday Evening Variety Show.

I See The Worst Jeans In Europe

My readers are intelligent people with exquisite taste. That is why they love this blog with all their heart and return to it day after day, gasping with desire to find out what utter cock I have posted that morning. There is therefore no need to explain why these jeans are so bad; if there is, I suggest you find another blog to read, or perhaps check out the 3-packs of giant pantaloons at BHS.























I Make Soup

Regular readers will be aware of my ongoing vague attempt to stop being such a lardy larder. Happily, some months ago I discovered a revolutionary new diet: if you eat less and move around more, you will lose weight. If you drink a lot of dark beer, eat too much cheese and do not go to the gym for a week, you will stop losing weight. Astonishing, I am sure you will all agree!

Anyway, I eat a lot of soup. It's good, is soup. I make it in vats and take into the office. I eat it (with an enormous salad) every day in the basement at work with S, who lays the table while I parboil green beans and do things with goat's cheese and lentils.

This week's soup is a carrot-based concotion. However, having read a thing that went ON and ON about the myriad benefits of spinach, I bought a carrier-bag full and put it in. And then I tasted it and remembered that I HATE spinach! I HATE it! It has ruined my soup and made it taste like a horseshoe made of iron jelly has been melted into it! Does anyone know how to take the bitterness of spinach away? (Do not say sugar, I beg of you.) Here is a picture of it, in case you need inspiration:

























I drink coffee (and eat biscuits)

My ongoing project continues with some success! Here are the latest pictures; from the top:

1. A cup of coffee (and biscuit(s)) at work, provided by S; the biscuits were discarded, due to lardy larder-ness;
2. An espresso in my favourite restaurant;
3. A capuccino yesterday morning (no biscuit, but an interesting cup I thought you might enjoy. In the background: some excellent lemon curd and a very tart blackcurrant jam).


































































I Consider Stealing A Puppy

I do not like small animals (i.e., anything smaller than a pig). They make me nervous. And there is nothing - but nothing - I despise more than people swooning over their pets as if they are actual and literal humans. "He is so clever!", they cry. "He is a dog!", I think. "He is sad and upset about something!", they squeak. "He is a dog!", I say to myself. "Look how funny he is! He knows he is being funny!", they swoon. "He is an animal", I mutter to myself, sticking pins into a voodoo doll of my cat, who I wish were dead.

However, there is a puppy at work. He is called Tate, except I call him Tater. Tater enjoys sleeping on my capacious enbonpoint. He is very tiny, and will not get much bigger. He lives in a bag; on Friday he worked out how to get up stairs. He is approximately twice the size of a small can of Grolsch.

Here is the photographic evidence of the fact that he is a) quite small; b) quite appealing, despite being an animal.






I Wonder About Dutch Easter Traditions

Good lord!























I Identify Some More Questionable Words (And Expressions)

- bite-sized chunk
- moist pouch
- ramekin
- fondant
- cashews are fleshy
- jus
- gently lubricated
- buttered mould

Day 248: "I Used To Be ..."

....someone with a BlackBerry, insomnia, eczema, fourteen hour working days and a penchant for entire packets of cigarettes illuminated and inhaled in one go. Now, as regular readers will be aware, I bicycle to work every morning along the prettiest canal in Amsterdam, sit at a desk overlooking a seventeenth century garden, and think about Canadian pathologists cutting their own hair.

But some habits die hard. To this day, nothing exhausts me more than being trapped in an office with a workfellow telling me how important they used to be. They invariably spew out a cavalcade of self-aggrandising cock, pausing only to provide a verbal precis of their CV (with a particular focus on PAs, titles, gigantic team sizes and 'territories' managed).

I invariably stand and listen with my mouth hanging open, a thin line of drool running onto my desk, wondering when the talking will stop and the working will start. In fact, I have estimated that if you convert all the hours people spend talking about how good they are into hours spent doing actual work, the average European working week would be fourteen hours long. (This is a real fact.)

I am a cretin, and the brief moments I spent with a fancy title and a PA who never answered my phone are but a distant memory. I have yet to convince anyone that I work with that I am good (despite the fact that I spend much of my day telling everyone that I am old and therefore wise and clever), and instead pass time eating biscuits, making telephone calls and walking around holding a piece of paper as this - as everyone knows - is the most effective way of looking busy whilst in fact doing nothing at all.

But in the time between walking around with a bit of paper and eating biscuits, I have had ample time to construct this handy cut-out-and-keep guide to How Not To Fuck Off Other People In The Office By Talking With Your Mouth. If you have anything add, do let me know.

Things that no-one is interested in:

- how important you used to be
- the awards you have won
- how big your team used to be
- which famous industry people are your close personal friends
- which jobs you nearly got
- which jobs you turned down
- how much better you are than everyone else
- which famous things you did and how clever you were to do them.

Things that are quite interesting:

- where you used to work, leading to ...
- ... who you know that I know
- what you know that I don't know that you can teach me.

Things that are definitely interesting:

1. If you a decent cove.
2. If you are good at what you do or not.

(In that order.)

Actual fact

The more important, talented and clever you are, the less you need to show off about it.

Actual story proving this fact

This happened to me once in a situation of actual work:

Me: Hello! I am NWM.
Man: Hello NWM. I am Niall FitzGerald.
Me: Hello Niall! And you're ...
Niall FitzGerald ... I'm from Unilever.
Me:Oh, right. What do you do there?
Niall FitzGerald I'm the, um, Chairman.

800 people fall silent. A distant gunshot is heard. Someone coughs.

Me: Oh God. How embarrassing.
Niall Fitzgerald Not really. Why should you know who I am?

Day 248: I Demand That You Buy This Book

You really should buy this book. In it there are one hundred posts from one hundred bloggers collected, edited, collated and made into a book in ONLY SEVEN DAYS by the simply extraordinary (and quite attractive, despite being on a different bus to me) Mike Atkinson.








Reasons you should buy it:

1. I am in it, as are 99 other people
2. It has an attractive front cover drawn by Lucy Pepper
3. It is funny
4. It contains swearing
5. It is for charity.*

As my 'sales pitch' has been so convincing, I am sure you will need very little encouragement to click here and buy it in bulk.

Pip pip!



* Despite the fact that charities are usually good, they embarrass me a bit. The charity that will benefit from Shaggy Blog Stories is Comic Relief, the third most embarrassing charity in Britain (in at No. 1: Band Aid. No. 2: Royal Variety Club).

Foreign readers may be interested to know that Red Nose Day (which is today) is a day of fundraising for Comic Relief. On Red Nose Day, unfunny people (e.g. politicians) try and be funny (the word "skit" is usually used, and a comedy song performed), and funny people (e.g. professional comedians) try and be sincere (usually by squinting and not wearing make-up in Africa). All of this colludes to make me feel very hot and slightly sick.

However, the money does good things, I am neither Stephen Fry nor Claire Short, and I am on the whole a self-obsessed twat. So I've bought five copies and think you should do the same. (Failing that, go here and give them some money. Don't be put off by Lenny Henry. He means well.)

Day 246: I Am Bound To Silence

Despite being essentially non-working in my heart, I must sometimes work to get money. At the moment, I work in Amsterdam in a room high up on a canal. I have a view, and in my job in the day I build brands and differentiate parity products. When I am not doing that, I sit in rooms with conference calls, eat biscuits, write words like "hijack" and "replicate" on flipcharts*, phone people up and write things down. Sometimes I also empty the old coffee out of the coffee machine, load the dishwasher, write things that say "Strategy" on the top and avoid the use of the word "cretin" for up to and including three hours.

But I cannot allude, even vaguely, to the rest of it. Not the giant kites in the shape of biscuits; the tethered blimps; the 4m diameter glitterballs; the Turkish shopping centre; the Montrealers in the roof who wear pastel-shaded sleeveless jerseys and still look like men; the 23-year-old Frenchman who asks me earnestly if I have heard of Nick Drake; the bicycles disguised as wafers; the lunches in the basement; the Roman with the broken printer; the pony in the garden; the inadequate salad.

And most of all I can't tell you anything about an email we received today that inspired us all with the simple words: "... put these clients on the railway line to saving the world ... this is the job of superhumans! Not children!"


* Inc. arrows and dotted lines

Day 245: I Am Pruned

I am quite used to ladies in white coats administering hot wax ("Are you supposed to burn the hair off?"), or cold wax ("CuntingfuckingHELL") to my ladygarden. In fact, I am generally quite used to foreign bodies (not that kind!!!) in my ladygarden: chewing gum, remote control scanners with flashing lights and leftover bits of wax that pull in unexpected ways when boarding the bus.

But having the ladygarden pruned in Amsterdam is a whole different affair! "This is the best wax outside of New York", shouts Marjam. "Underwears off please, all of them, I must see EVERYTHING", she roars, tossing my legs about as if they were mere flotsam and jetsam.

Behind her, mounted in a case, are seven different tubes of wax, all different widths. "Tiny one for faces; biggest one for backs of men; small one for pussies." I wonder briefly how you wax a cat, then remember and feel faint, what with "pussy" being one of the words that makes me feel bilious. Underneath the tubes is a small cauldron of dark green wax mounted on a plinth.

If I swizzle my head round to the left a bit I can see the waterfall in the garden. No-one can see in through the enormous floor-to-ceiling window unless they are in a helicopter with a strong telescope. I am happy about this, as my ladygarden is encased in dark green and Marjam is doing something simultaneous with two of the tubes. The phone rings. Marjam goes to answer it through the door of the treatment room, which opens directly onto the shop floor. There are people there; the door is ajar; a light breeze plays over the wax that is, only now, hardening in the afternoon air. A door slams in the distance; someone laughs.

Marjam comes back. There is a picking, as if she were trying to get purchase on the edge of a particularly stubborn plaster. And then a rip; a rip like three-inch thick calico being torn by the hands of giants. I wonder what "cold poultice" is in Dutch.

Marjam is laughing. "Look at this!", she says. In my face she waves a perfect reverse impression of my ladygarden fashioned from green wax. "See the strong roots? It is good, no? Now turn over."