body particles

At work, Carol asked Richard about his leg, or that's what Lorraine and I thought she said – in fact she had said 'leak' (there has been one in his house), which left us somewhat bemused when he described it as 'still damp' and said that he was 'waiting for someone to get the bits in to fix it.' I was wondering if this was a complication of his gout...

Then there was the saga of the 'bottom cable'. This was an attachment to go with a member of staff's headset. I had ordered it and Ben the temp had signed for it, but subsequently it had gone missing. An atmosphere of suspicion immediately clouded the office, and it began to seem that nobody would be allowed to leave until the culprit confessed. After a while it came to my attention that many people suspected the clutter on my (notoriously untidy) desk of concealing it. No doubt my maniacal laughter hardly helped matters, but it was only the word 'bottom' that was so effortlessly amusing to me (Imagine! A cable you feed into your bottom!). Luckily someone relented and a replacement was ordered, leaving the situation teasingly unresolved.

Needless to say, it was not on my desk, and neither was it up my arse – I know that's what you were thinking. Nevertheless, I could not repress a shiver of alarm on looking up at my screensaver to see a grinning Gary Lineker, fist clenched and arm bared to the elbow, fronting the current 'Roll Up Your Sleeves' blood donor campaign. It really does look like he's going to stick that arm somewhere he shouldn't...

On the radio last week Vanessa Feltz was sitting in for Jeremy Vine and talking about old men wanking each other off in care homes. Really! Luckily JV has now returned to raise the tone. Would people who had lived in the UK all their lives pass the new toughened-up citizenship tests, he was asking. Judging by my performance on the questions they asked, it's just as well I'm already in the country. Apparently the Clifton suspension bridge wasn't designed by Bernie Clifton. He was that guy who used to pretend to ride an ostrich on Crackerjack. Mind you, I ought to get a few points for knowing that (and also that the ostrich's legs were really his.)

Then they discovered, or announced that they might have discovered, the Higgs-Boson particle, so some scientist was on to explain why this was so earth-shattering. He proceeded to describe it in terms of Margaret Thatcher moving through a crowded room, and talked about how much excitement it had generated on his Twitter feed. Yes, but what practical applications did it have? 'Who knows?', said the expert. Well we were hoping – you.

But this was his way of saying, effectively, 'the sky's the limit'. Really, almost anything could come of this. Soon it might even be - as a song subsequently played by Jeremy had it – 'raining men'. Although in reality this would no doubt be a grimmer prospect than the Weather Girls seem to imagine... I would rather like to have had the expert's opinions on that matter, but by then they'd moved on to another topic – whether knitting was 'anti-social' I think it was.