Comedy value for money

From this morning's METRO newspaper:

" A mother who bought a lucky bag full of games for her three-year-old son found a card with the word wanker on it inside. Anna Royce complained but was dismayed to find the game still on sale a week later. "I couldn't believe it, particularly because it states on the bag it is suitable for children aged three and over," said Ms Royce, 32 from Colchester, Essex. She bought the Doodlewonker game featuring a monster called the Galloping Wanker from a Poundland store for son Jamie. Poundland pledged to investigate."

Well, what do you expect for a pound?

A start

My Blackberry alarm goes off at 6am but I’ve already been awake for some while. At various points in the night my two sons have found their way into our bedroom and the youngest one has been kicking me in the head for at least two hours. Despite the fact that my phone is downstairs, the alarm is still loud to wake the household and so I go down to switch it off. I determine, whilst I’m down there, to try and find the razors and shaving cream that I’d bought the other week. Last seen on one of the kitchen worktops when I unpacked the shopping bags, they have since disappeared. I check every cupboard, nook and cranny in the kitchen, my bedroom wardrobe, and the cupboards in the bathroom. Zilch. I suspect that my youngest son has somehow broken through the stairgate into the kitchen, found the razors and cream and posted them both into the dustbin. He’s making a habit of doing that. I saved two LEGO cars from the same bin the other day but I obviously wasn’t in time for the razors. Two packets of pegs have also mysteriously disappeared...

I shave my head and face with a blunt razor, miraculously retaining both ears.

Shower, dress, and fold clean clothes from the washing line. Place clothes in airing cupboard. Leaving them folded on shelves will mean that small hands will pull them off again just as quickly.

By now it’s seven o’clock and time to wake my daughter. She started school on Monday and she needs to be out of the house by 8.30. I rouse her, bathe her and dress her, getting told off as I do so for pulling her tights up too high and giving her “granddad trousers”.

We go downstairs together and I sort out some breakfast for her. While she’s eating I unpack the dishwasher and then stack a couple of dirty plates from the previous evening. I’ve also brought dirty clothes down for the washing machine but it’s full of clean clothes from yesterday and so I peg these out first and then set a new wash going. It goes straight to the spin cycle and I realise that my youngest son, not content with posting my shaving gear into the bin, must have also fiddled with the programme on the washing machine. I stop the machine, re-programme it and start again. By now, Niharika has finished her breakfast and so I sponge the last remnants off her skirt, wipe her mouth and she’s good to go. So too, am I. It’s just gone ten to eight and I have about seventeen minutes to get to the station in time for the 8.09 to Liverpool Street. I saddle up and set off. I’m there by three minutes past, lining the platform at the start of another day.

Great Cock Taste

There's a nice quote in this morning's The Sunday Times:

"It is understood that executives at Cocal-Cola's headquarters in Atlanta last week ordered the London office to sever ties with [Wayne Rooney]. The multinational is worried that the allegations that Rooney, 24, paid for prostitutes while his wife, Coleen, was pregnant will taint its image as a family brand."

"Taint" its image? Yep, I should think that would just about do it.

Pret a Jesc

My weekday lunch these days consists of a cheese roll rather than chicken biriyani, and the Pret a Manger chain is usually the beneficiary. This afternoon it was as if I'd travelled not five hundred yards to the local Pret, but five hundred miles to Gdansk. The bright and lively blondes behind the counter all bore names like Marinia, and Davinia, and Gloskzsky; and all had exactly the same heavy European accent so ably taken off in Harry Enfield's Polish cafe sketches.

It's a funny thing, but when I go there in the morning, the staff all appear to be of south asian extraction, but by lunchtime it's the Polish shift. The Pret website states:

"Our starting salary is £7 an hour (after 10 days, including bonus). Many get over £8 an hour and more..."

And that probably explains why Pret is staffed by hard-working foreign labour which is prepared to work for around 300 quid a week, and not by British workers who can sit around on their arses all day and, with a bit of ducking and diving with social services, pull in the similar money without doing a stroke of work. Or am I out of touch? "Jesc" by the way, would - if the accents were in the right place - mean 'eat' in Polish. Photo courtesy of Pret.

Wastage, and the great British eccentric

I was in our local Sainsbury's at 7am the other day. We needed milk and a loaf of bread, and although I could have probably picked up both at the local newsagent's, it was chucking it down outside and I needed a lightweight raincoat as well.

As I reached the bread counter, the staff were throwing away the loaves and rolls from the previous day: great big bags of them, dozens of loaves of bread baked a few hours earlier and now thrown into a bag marked "NOT FIT FOR SALE". I don't suppose those loaves were even donated to homeless people as there's probably an EEC rule which bans such benevolence just in case a vagrant happens to choke on a sunflower seed. It always made me smile in India when we'd go along to the laacaal shop to get bread and then ask if it was fresh.

"Aaah, aah, fresh saar, yes; fresh yesterday."

Which links, not at all well, to the great British eccentric. One of the joys of commuting is that you get to see all manner of nutcases, listen to all manner of banal and tedious conversations, and witness bizarre behaviour. Years ago, I used to carry a notebook with me and jot down these eccentricities, even trying to transcribe particularly dull conversations word for word. Once all my stuff arrives from India, I might dig out some of those old notebooks and post some of the conversations here. But anyway, back to the present.

Last week I sat next to a courting couple who obviously hadn't seen each other for three or four hours or more and were consequently overcome by the urge to eat each other's lips in between each sentence. After ten minutes of slurping, I gave up trying to read my book and shut my eyes. Yesterday evening, I sat next to a Chinaman who, five minutes into the journey, stuffed several pages of The Sun newspaper down the back of his shirt. Well actually, he stuffed the pages up the back of his shirt. I suppose it gave him more satisfaction than actually reading the thing.

Image from The Eccentric Club blog.

Use it again, Sam

I have to keep telling myself, "It's for the children." And I find myself repeating it more and more as a mantra these days, as I bang my head in the cubbyhole under the stairs, or knock my temples against the cupboard in the kitchen. "It's for the... ouch! Children."

I wouldn't mind if it were just paper, or just tins, or just bottles, but these days it seems, it's just about everything. Great Britain has gone recycling crazy and it's only going to get worse.

I was looking at our recycling leaflet this morning, trying to work out whether we should be putting out household refuse with paper, or cardboard, or charity appeals. Actually, I needn't have bothered because we missed the binmen altogether and therefore they'll have our marinated refuse to greet them next week. But I did see that the council was gleefully announcing a new "plastics collection" in the same way that GAP, for instance, would announce its new "Autumn Collection". So now, instead of chucking away your empty milk containers or your fast food packs, you can stick them in another bag and then try and find space in your house for the blasted thing until it's time for you to miss the refuse collection operatives on their weekly round.

At this point in time I have a cardboard collection in the living room. Outside the back door I have a box for tins and bottles. In the kitchen cupboard I have sacks for plastics and newspaper. Polythene and plastic bags go in a separate bag, so too would batteries, tin foil, engine oil and uranium (that goes into the lead-filled container under the stairs). Currently, polystyrene, bubble wrap and naval fluff are not recycled and may be thrown into a waste bin. The point is that we don't live in a mansion and I tell you, it's a nuisance trying to find space for all this blasted rubbish. I really do feel half inclined at times to dump it all into our brown (garden waste) bin and cover it over with six inches of grass cuttings and just hope that the bin men are looking the other way when it's tipped noisily into the dust cart.

I recall, a few years ago when I was clearing my house in England, that I took a load of stuff to the local tip and then had to fanny around in the rain putting this junk in one skip, and that junk in another one. Chastened, I returned home, booked a skip to turn up on my drive and then emptied absolutely everything into it: cardboard, paper, plastics, bottles, iron, an old sofa set... You name it, the skip ate it; and it was a curious quirk of fate that it was completely legal - if a little expensive - to do that.

And if you think I sound like an irresponsible old whinger, well just try unpacking a shirt and then disposing of anything that isn't a shirt. The plastic cover goes into the plastic bags' bag, whilst the plastic clips and that clear plastic bit under the collar go into the "new plastics' collection" bag. The cardboard backing goes into the cardboard collection box in my living room, and the tissue paper goes into the paper sack - by way of a bumped head - in the kitchen cupboard. As for the pins, I'm saving those to jab into the eyeballs of Chelmsford Borough Council's Recycling Manager when he calls round to complain about household refuse being dumped into his garden refuse bin.

"It's for the children...
Breathe...
It's for the children...
And, relax."

The years in between

At times I have to pinch myself to confirm that I am where I am. I last commuted to London in, I think, 1994. Then, the company I was with re-located to St Albans, and the following two companies I joined were both based in Essex. That takes us up to September 2003 and my decision to move to India. Fast forward seven years and I'm back in England and back on the train. I'm even commuting to and from the same stations. It's a bit like something from the X-Files; as if the Indian experience and my fundraising career never happened.

The trains are the same, the route is the same, but the people are more casual. In 1994 there was far more evidence of suits and ties. Now, every day seems to be a dress-down-Friday. I'm not so sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I had seven years of pretty much dressing down in India. My normal work dress was, for several years, jeans and a t-shirt. I upgraded slightly to jeans and a collared shirt when FLOvate became WNS and we traded our lovely spacious and secluded office for a few square yards in a call centre, but that was as far as it went. To be honest, I was looking forward to getting back into a suited routine in the City of London, but the company I'm now working with also has a relaxed and informal attitude to dress. Yesterday I arrived in a suit. Today I've dispensed with the tie; tomorrow it may be the jacket. I'll retain the trousers at least.

And, as with life in 1994 London, I'm eating sandwiches and rolls at my desk again. In due course too, a few weeks from now, I'll also be upending my keyboard and emptying old breadcrumbs over my desk.