swine tasting

Looks like that pig mask I bought in Birthdays could prove to have been a wise buy. Now I can wear it to work and pretend I've got swine flu. Ah ha ha ha ha. Yes I know swine flu is a disaster in the making which has already killed many, but I stand by my trivial pathetic joke.

There was a reporter on the news last night claiming to have seen 'no overt signs of panic' on the streets of Washington. Where nobody has died and hardly anyone has contracted the disease. Even Americans aren't going to be running around like headless chickens yet. Anyway, headless chickens, that's bird flu.

Pause for laughter.

Tomorrow, as I write, I am going on a work 'awayday'. A couple of days (one night) in a hotel near Stratford-on-Avon where we are to be 'embedded' with the new structure, a process which is hopefully not as gruesome as it sounds. What it certainly will NOT be is some kind of orgy of food and alcohol consumption all at the taxpayer's expense. There are 'workshops'. Nevertheless if there is not a feast complete with suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, I will be very disappointed. (A headless chicken just won't do).

It has come to my attention that I have drifted up a waist size since starting work there. I will panic later.

birthdays

It was my turn to take care of someone's birthday at work. She was meant to e-mail me with requests, but neglected to. However, I knew she liked gardening, so settled on a garden voucher, and with this in mind walked down to the nurseries in Ingrave, which I remember from my childhood when it was just a collection of sheds. Now it is still a collection of sheds. Outside of the voucher, I had a couple of quid spare, so I wandered into a shed marked 'Sundries' and scanned the shelves. I am not very good at buying presents. Slug pellets? Weedkiller? Nothing seemed quite right. A product promised to kill pests but only 'control' fungus. What would it be like, I mused idly, to control fungus? What would you be able to make it do?

I suppose it's like 'turf management'. Easy enough if you don't want the turf to do anything complex, like creating a spreadsheet.

Eventually I found a grubby 'rustic' basket, in which I felt the voucher might be presented to advantage, and (having paid, of course) walked down the road with it, managing to stop myself from skipping.

In the event I lined it with a garden waste sack, which I felt was a nice touch, though later it did occur to me that it might be slightly depressing to be presented, on your birthday, with a rubbish bag. Well, she should have e-mailed me; she was lucky I didn't get her a dead badger (as I pointed out).

This week it was also Justin's birthday, which we celebrated in the Swan. Mat couldn't be there because he was at a Prodigy concert with Dave - slightly reluctantly, since he was worried he might miss the imminent birth of his first child. Some wicked person suggested that, halfway through the evening, everybody should text him their congratulations ('Oh, didn't you know?') But that would have been evil. And the Prodigy were already tormenting him, having named one of the tracks off their new album Take Me To The Hospital.

all my regards

Everyone in the office has got their jobs. Except for the boss, of course, who is still wandering around the office looking a bit dazed, and will probably be doing that for another six months while they look for another job for her. I am still having flashbacks to my interview. I know they asked me about my 'autonomy' (ability to work unsupervised) but did they really ask me to express my autonomy as a percentage of my working life? As though I might say, without a moment's thought: '35.4. And I've got a pie chart I printed off earlier, if you'd care to look...'

As the 'structure' we have entered does not seem to exist, or not yet, we are doing an NVQ in IT to pass the time. This week, we had the basic numeracy and literary test you have to get through in order even to embark upon the course. And it is pretty basic. They literally did ask what two plus two is. (Up to that point, I was fine.)

The literacy test featured some ambiguous questions. For example, you had to fill in the missing word in a sentence such as: 'The lady had to run back to the cafe because she forgot her ____.' Then you were given a choice of four possible answers: 'leg', 'bag', 'hand', and finally something completely ridiculous like 'environmental'. And there was only one correct answer, but this didn't seem right to me. Clearly, they were expecting 'bag', but what was wrong with 'hand'? I mean it could have been a sculpture of a hand, or a hand of glory, or an artificial hand, or the severed hand of her latest victim.

Either these people are supremely unimaginative or I am suffering from an excess of creativity. I don't have too many outlets for it at work beyond trying to decide how to sign off an e-mail. Is 'regards' too brutal? But 'kind regards' seems patronizing. And if I label some of my regards as kind, what does this imply about all the others? It summons the terrifying spectre of all my regards fluttering about like bats against a moonlit sky - some of them, no doubt, truly vicious.

And then I keep making that mistake of writing: 'I would be grateful if you'd let me know' (never 'very grateful', because that seems to me curiously suggestive, as though a blow job might not be out of the question) and then ending the e-mail with 'thank you'. Which suggests that I'm already grateful, and gives them no incentive to let me know at all. Hopefully, they will cover this in the NVQ.

all aboard the torture porn express!

Can you believe that there's an amusement park ride based on the Saw movies? Do people really leave the cinema after seeing Saw V thinking: 'Well, I enjoyed that, but what I really want to do is repeat the experience in rollercoaster form'? Apparently they do. I don't even like the Saw movies. They're exactly the kind of films that give torture porn a bad name.

Speaking of torture porn, Lionel Richie has a new album out. I don't get to hear so much new music on the radio now because Smooth Radio exercises thorough quality control when it comes to new tracks, and nothing of any quality is allowed to get through. Lionel Richie makes it though. 'He always brings a new album out in time for Mother's Day', said Lorraine in the office. 'He's crafty.' Not as crafty as Ronan Keating though, who released an album called Songs For My Mother a couple of weeks ago. The whore. I heard him talking to Mark Goodier, giving an account of how he and his producer had worked for ages on a track, 'trying to get it to sound like me.' Eh? But it is you, Ronan. Isn't it? Ronan?

What are you, Ronan?

Smooth as it is, this station does offer up the occasional grotesquerie to wake you up, mainly during the ad breaks. For example, the woman who, in an ad for breast augmentation (!) encourages us to 'speak to My Breast'. And then there's the advert - for what I can't recall - where Theo Paphites introduces himself at the beginning and I always mishear it so that it sounds like he's offering a service called 'Feel A Foetus.'

But perhaps this says more about me than it does about Smooth Radio.