a bad name

At work a woman e-mailed me to say that she had just sent through a fax to 'your good self'. Amused as I was by her archaic usage I had to e-mail her back to say that although the fax had duly arrived for my good self, my bad self had unfortunately intercepted it and ripped it up in front of me, laughing evilly. Could she send it through again?

The office's imagination has recently been gripped by 'Bungate'. This is the outrage caused by one member of staff's bringing in a pack of iced buns and not sharing them out equally. The incident has already been 'cascaded upwards', as they say - ie; mentioned to a manager - and we shall see what develops. A meeting, perhaps. Possibly including a presentation. A tribunal, even...

Personally, I think the scandal should be termed 'Icedbungate' to distinguish it from any incidents that may arise in the future involving other kinds of bun - hot cross buns, say. I shall certainly raise this at the meeting and/or tribunal.

There is a competition on the intranet asking us to name the sleek, high-tech new blood donation chair. They were after something that sounds inviting to the potential donor, so my suggestion - Dracula's Throne Of Agony - is probably not going to win. But here's hoping!

evil maniac landlord horror

We have moved without too many disasters, although moving day didn't begin well. Dave, in a sudden panic, started filling a Sainsbury's bag with spice jars, on the hob. 'Fuck, the bag's split!', he cried, and then, moments later, 'What's that smell of burning?' For he had inadvertently turned one of the hob rings on full, and orange plastic was busy melting all over it. Then he nearly had all the spices on the floor in his haste to get it all out of the way... In fact, he had conjured up a whole Norman Wisdom-style slapstick routine out of nothing in the space of three minutes.

The rest of the move went swimmingly. Not so the inspection. We had no problems at all with the landlord during the tenancy. 'We should help each other in this life', was his oft-expressed philosophy, and he was indeed helpful, while also careful to maintain a much-appreciated distance. The inspection, however, was carried out with ruthless precision, and ominous formality. I wouldn't have been surprised had he donned a special uniform for the event. Possibly including a monocle. As he shrieked: 'Look at that stain!' while indicating with a rigid finger an invisible mark on the carpet, it became increasingly apparent that this 'helpfulness' was a purely contractual phenomenon.

The new tenants have dogs, which makes his concern at the state of the carpet a bit, well, insane. I'm sure they will be fine, as long as they never leave.

As for the new place, it's fine. Well, the bathroom is a bit of a no-go area. Which is a bit awkward, as of course one does have to go.

curate's egg

They were doing 'breast screenings' in the car park at work. I expected to see the drivers sat there with tubs of popcorn, having got the wrong idea.

Within the office, tensions have mounted over the most serious subject yet - the Christmas meal! At one point two rival meals seemed to be emerging, and - as twist after twist transpired in a saga worthy of Downton Abbey - it began to feel like we would all be eating our turkey in separate restaurants. However, tradition does now seem to be reasserting itself, although Secret Santa is still judged too risky. Nobody wants to unwrap a turd.

I'm beginning to wonder how long the department will survive, since who needs to promote organ donation when you can grow organs in a laboratory, as scientists are beginning to do now? Luckily (because you should never think that NHS departments work together) we have an operative in the field who goes round sabotaging such experiments. Or at least we have a member of staff we never see, and nobody knows what he does, but that is how I like to imagine him - sneaking into laboratories, smashing up equipment, possibly being ambushed by livers...

My brother rang me to say that he proposed to his partner, Bobs, on Halloween. She accepted (he probably wouldn't have bothered to call otherwise) and now I am going to be a 'best man', one of those opportunities in life which I had hoped - I mean thought - had passed me by. The best idea for a stag do thus far has involved donning spray tan to imitate the cast of The Only Way Is Essex down the Sugar Hut. We can describe ourselves as 'model slash footballers'.

TOWIE, by the way, is surely the new Twin Peaks. It really gets under your skin. I can't wake up in the morning now without telling my alarm clock to 'Shut up' in a camp voice.

Ross and Christine have got engaged too, so Dave and I were round there the other night. Sadly I was out of the room when the night's most hilarious anecdote was told. I returned to find everybody helpless with laughter and babbling about jet planes being attacked by frozen chickens. 'Terrorism?', I asked, but this only seemed to fuel the hysteria. I still haven't got to the bottom of it.

My room in the new house is now as duck egg as it can possibly be without actually being a duck's egg.

adventure of the duck egg walls

Because I have to paint my room in the new house I have been obsessively examining the interior decor on TV programmes in search of clues. Lilac, my first choice, seems to be popular. In Eastenders it was in Ian Beale's living room, and then, when Kat fell over and had to have her baby checked out in hospital, it was in there too. It has also featured on Holby City. Yes, lilac has really jumped the shark, as they say. I'm glad I chose duck egg blue, or - as Mat calls it - 'egg duck'. It's more classy, like, you know, Downton Abbey or whatever.

Mat and Amanda and Sam were round at Justin and Bobs' for post-firework soup and hot dogs. Sam, with swept-back hair like a mad professor's, did his Darth Vader impression, which takes its place along with all the normal farmyard noises in his repertoire. Some are born into geekdom, some achieve geekdom, and others have geekdom thrust upon them. In Sam's case I think it's all three.

Mat's latest obsession is Sherlock Holmes, though when he was talking about it the other night in the Swan he seemed mainly interested in the amount of ejaculation going on in the stories. Of course he meant verbal ejaculations. He was particularly struck by a scene in which Watson was woken by Holmes ejaculating from the corner of the room.

In emulation of his hero, Mat's powers of logical thought have now been honed to such a point that, becoming aware of a strange smell in the Swan toilets, he was finally able to deduce - or, if you prefer, 'remember' - that he had eaten asparagus earlier that evening, and that the curious smell therefore came from his own piss!

Whether he then ejaculated I am unable to say.

social fools

I went to London a bit. I smilingly refused a Big Issue seller, and he said something that sounded amicable, although the only word I could make out was the last: 'Bye!' Later, I uneasily concluded that he might well have been saying: 'Die slowly in terror - bye!' I passed a man talking very loudly to his friend about the girl he was seeing: 'Do you know what her father does? HE INSURES COUNTRIES!'

On the train back from a gig by the 'reinvigorated' Swans - Time Is Money (Bastard) and You Fucking People Make Me Sick are representative titles - a young guy jabbering away to some girls inspired another male passenger to refer to him as a 'mouthy prick'. This resulted in a marked increase in the young guy's jabbering, to the effect that he was a 'gangsta' and cage fighter who could 'knock anyone out in his weight category' ('runt' being the category, as far as I could tell) and eventually he was pushed out onto the platform at Gidea Park by a group of men, who were bored with him standing in the doorway trying to phone for 'backup' and thus preventing the doors from closing. For all I know, he is on the platform still, shaking his fist.

Afterwards one of the men who had helped to eject him then made a kind of speech about it, rather as though he had faced down the Russian mafia instead of pushing an over-excited twerp off a train. We should 'stand up to these people', he maintained and not just sit there pretending it wasn't happening (which, needless to say, was what I was doing).

'Well', said one of the other men involved, clearly wanting the subject closed, 'we did stand up to him.'

'Well', the first man replied, feebly, 'we should do it more often.' As if talking about a possible series of jolly nights out.

Someone else even suggested that this was David Cameron's Big Society in action, but I'm pretty sure that that was a joke. The comment, not the policy. Although also the policy.