Bleurgh

Apologies for the lack of posting this week – though I’m sure you didn’t miss me – but me and the brood were all struck down by the lurgy.

Not a “cold” lurgy. That’s simple enough and to be expected at this time of year (or indeed any time of the year in the UK). I could have coped with that. No problemo.

Instead our immune systems were introduced to an unwelcome guest in the shape of a disease who I’m sure was the bizarre offspring of an unholy marriage between typhoid and dysentery.

He was a thorough little soul. I imagine him as a rather pale, round faced fellow, with metal-rimmed glasses perched daintily on the end of his nose and a penchant for wearing rubber gloves. Akin to an auditor of bodily functions, he got his feet under the table distressingly quickly and made it his business to go through every little process that related to the ingestion and the expulsion of food. His computations were constant, his calculator buttons hot and we’ve all been heavily taxed as a consequence.

To put it simply: we’ve had both ends on the go at once. We had a run on the family bank, so to speak, and the vaults are now empty.

I’m sure you get my meaning.

This is the first day I’ve felt human again.

This is the first day I’ve not been perched above the toilet or propped, face down, gazing despondently into its Loch Ness depths.

This is the first day I’ve felt in control of my body again.

The auditor has finally left the building.

But be warned, however, folks: he’s looking for lodgings elsewhere. I’m sure of it. I’d keep your account books clean if I were you…

Double entry book keeping isn’t for everyone.

Back To Grotwarts

I’m experiencing a harsh reality check today.

I have dragged myself out of Hogwarts, stuffed my pockets full of handkerchiefs and paracetymol and have returned to my place of work there to press my runny nose back to the grindstone.

In short I have swapped my wand and my invisibility cloak for a cheap biro and a clipboard. Swapped the ever present evil of Lord Voldermort and his murderous designs for my local authority boss and his complaints about the toilets.

*Sigh*

If only it were really possible to hit someone with a Bat Bogey Hex.

Gathers No Moss

Oh what an interesting morning I’ve had at work today.

There can be few jobs in the world where, as soon as you arrive, you’re greeted at the door by goggle-eyed colleagues all lasciviously recounting tales of the Phantom Public Pee-er striking yet again with his cleverly concealed urine spreader. Precious few.

So I feel like I’ve really lucked out in the lottery of life by finding myself landed with one.

Still, it’s better than shining Prince Harry’s boots on the streets of Baghdad I suppose or being one of Mohamed al-Fayed’s designated drivers.

Anyway, Captain Urine has struck yet again. Shock horror. Well, not so much “struck” as splashed and shook it about quite a bit. When approached by a member of staff he responded with logic so impeccable that I’d take my hat off to him if I was wearing one.

He needed a slash; the toilets were closed, so he relieved himself up the door.

Brave words. Fighting talk even. Into the valley of death, etc, etc.

But it will avail him not. The iron wheels of Local Authority bureaucracy are even now squeakily turning against him (powered by a one-armed monkey and a two-legged donkey)...

The police have been informed. Biometrics have been gathered. DNA has been swabbed. Keyboards have been keyed.

Due process has begun. The words “ban” and “ASBO” are being bandied about followed by “boot camp”, “public birching” and “Guantanamo Bay”. I can hear them knocking up a gallows beyond my office window even as I type. There will be no mercy.

So let this be a lesson to you all.

Don’t pee down my neck and tell me that it’s a gas gas gas...

Thursday’s Weather

I’ve had the glums for last few days – a combination of work dross, lack of sleep, a bad back and the interminably grey skies that have sat over the entire country like a giant pie crust.

What kind of filling are we, I wonder? Steak and kidney? Chicken and mushroom? Beef and onion?

I have no idea and as you can imagine pondering such questions has done little to improve my mood.

However, I can’t deny that there is something comforting about the featureless grey skies that have lidded my world for the last three days. Maybe I’m only saying that because I’m English and we English are secretly proud when our weather proves to be even more mundane and dreary than our European cousins think it.

For some reason it takes me back to my junior school days... huddling in the playground wearing a home knitted bobble hat and those annoying mittens tied together by a giant piece of string, watching the world go by over the other side of the school fence, thinking how lucky all the grown ups were to be able to go about their lives without having to be stuck at school all day...

I seem to recall that for a short period in 1980 there was a huge thunderstorm nearly every Thursday afternoon. Forked lightning and everything. It sticks in my mind only because the headmaster at the time – the evil Mr Enoch – informed us that Thursday was named after Thor, the Norse god of Thunder (hence Thor’s Day) and so the thunderstorms were all rather apt.

Sigh. I’m so glad I came out of school with something embedded in my skull (other than a thrown chalk rubber).

And now I sit at work, watching the world go by outside my window and think how lucky all the kids are to be attending school rather than sitting here behind my desk grubbing at interminable paperwork and trying to diffuse the latest plumbing disaster to hit the public toilets...

Is that amused hammering I can hear in the distance...?

Grindstone Cowboy

Well, the grindstone is busy turning and my nose is back pressed up against it. It’s so good to be back at work.

Not.

Actually, I’m being very fair. It really isn’t too bad and I suppose in some ways it’s been nice to touch base with the real world once again (touch base? I had, I admit, a sudden impulse to type “touch cloth” there). And my return to work was less of a tribulation than I’d expected.

Everybody wanted to hear all about Tom and my new experiences of fatherhood and it was nice to relive the last two or three weeks conversationally amid the shadow of the mountain of detritus that covered my work desk. An internal lifeline keeping my head steady against the influx of the terminally tedious.

Now, four days into the working week, the mountain has been levelled and I’m re-acclimatized once more to the endless drone of the local authority work regime.

Leaky roofs... Blocked toilets... Customer complaints.

I’m ensconced upon my white charger and comin’ to get yer.

Yee-ha.

Holy Mackerel

First day back at work today and God has it been hard. Picking up the threads of flooded basements, blocked lavatories and recalcitrant contractors. How could I ever have coped with being away from it all?

Cornwall now seems but a dream but one which I have made several escapist dips into over the last few hours. For all I’m totally un-enamoured with being back at work everybody has been telling me how well and how relaxed I look. Plainly Cornwall has done me good. Sadly its boosting effects will no doubt have worn off by the time Friday arrives. I can feel the rising tide of mediocrity lapping at my boot heels even now.

Talking of tides and such... the last day of the holiday Karen, Ben and I went mackerel fishing from Penzance. Karen had been mackerel fishing before and I’d done some night fishing in The Maldives some years ago so we were both well up for it and thought the experience would be a good one for Ben.

The experience certainly started well enough. We headed into Penzance and managed a lovely late afternoon meal at a lovely little café that was proudly advertising the fact that the BBC had named it as one of their food heroes for the area. Good for the BBC. I stuck to omelette not wanting to risk a chilli con carne on the high seas while Karen plumped for the crab salad. Ben, ever the galloping gourmet, went for the chicken dinosaur shapes. Not even Gordon Ramsay could have dissuaded him.

Anyway, such culinary fare took on a slightly sour note once we were at sea in waters that I’m sure your average sailor would merely describe as “a mite choppy”. For us it was a deal more alarming – especially when, the engine stopped in readiness for us to cast our lines forth, the boat was constantly being rocked at 45 degree angles, port to starboard and back again... up and down, up and down.

As the song goes: Huey, up she rises! Huey, up she rises!

Or something like that.

Never having been one who’s ever suffered from any form of travel or motion sickness I was absolutely fine – though I caught not a damn thing; not a single bite. Ben’s chicken shapes however started a deep sea diving expedition about an hour into the fishing time and disappeared overboard with much gurgling and splashing. About half an hour after this Karen’s crab salad also made an escape bid and headed back to the ocean in a much reconstituted form.

Such chumming of the waters may have been what kept the mackerel away. Personally I was juat glad that it didn’t encourage the much reported Great White shark that was stalking the Cornish coast at the time to head in our direction while we were at sea.

Anyway once Ben had recovered some of his colouring the Cap’n good naturedly asked him if he’d like to come mackerel fishing again...

To which Ben told him with frank 6 year old politeness that he “really didn’t think he should...”

That’s my boy.

Landlubber and proud of it.

Blockages

What type of person wilfully blocks a toilet?

I really need to know. It’s something I’ve never done myself or even, for that matter, ever had the urge to do and yet frequently in the course of my day-job I come face-to-face with bizarrely blocked toilets on a frighteningly regular occurrence.

It’s like there’s some sort of club or secret society that I’m patently not a member of.

Most of the time the troublesome blockage is caused by a beer can or a rolled up copy of Heat magazine. You’d think that top shelf magazines would be the obstruction of choice but, no, these rarely make an appearance in my experience. Miles and miles of scrunched up loo paper feature quite a lot too but this is plainly the work of amateurs or bored school children – so much so it’s barely worth commenting on. It takes a dedicated expert to do the job (pardon the pun) properly. Because let’s face it: a beer can or a rolled up copy of Hello Magazine requires a fair bit of planning and effort to see it securely installed. Such blockages are the by-products of finesse and a certain amount of personal refinement. They’re out of the ordinary and the items chosen to perform the snarl-up usually have the flavour of social or political comment about them. It’s sculptural graffiti. 3-D satire.

The most bizarre blockage that I can recall (and I recall it only because it was so bizarre – I don’t particularly catalogue these lavatorial events) was a loo that I encountered at the end of Dover pier. Somebody had shoved a whole, unused loo roll down the toilet. Then, not content with this ironic swipe at the Andrex ideal, they had then dropped a “log” of nuclear-submarine-like proportions straight down the central tube of the loo roll thus spearing it not unlike a big blue fish in a barrel. Hoop-la indeed.

I have to say that I was both incredibly impressed and disgusted with this singular feat of precision bombing.

But the same question still remains: what type of person chooses to do this? Who in their right mind decides that today is the day they are going to block a public convenience?

Am I failing society by not blocking a toilet myself? Am I missing an essential life skill? Or am I just lacking in ambition?

Oh well. Bombs away!

Captain Grim

This is probably an unfair posting but I just can’t help it.

Part of my duties at work involve managing the small team of cleaners that maintain the cleanliness and hygiene of the building. Now before I get accused of snobbery I’d just like to point out that I did such work myself during my twenties. It’s demeaning, thankless, boring and ultimately unrewarding. However, it did allow me the freedom to write to my heart’s content for years and years without my creativity being debilitated by a stressful working life. And cleaning does have some amazing pros: you’re pretty much your own boss, there’s precious little responsibility, it’s not difficult and when your work is done you can go home, forget all about it and concentrate on the stuff that’s really important to you.

I have a tremendous amount of respect and even a little envy for anybody who cleans for a living. I really do.

So why is it that I absolutely can’t stand the cleaner where I work? I shan’t mention his name because that really wouldn’t be fair.

There is something so... spiritually desiccating about the man, it’s unbelievable. He only has to approach me and I feel my life force being sucked out of me and a dark rain cloud of gloom being inserted into the cavity it leaves. He’s a depressed and depressing vampire. Everything this man says is a lament or a tale of mundane woe. Everything. But worst of all it’s also so grovellingly accusing.

• Steve, we’re run out of loo rolls... and it’s your fault.


• Steve, the toilets are blocked... and it’s your fault.


• Steve, vandals have broken the sinks and are running amok with AK-47s... and it’s your fault.

Aaargh!

But what I hate most of all is the simple fact that this man doesn’t EVER listen to whoever he’s having a conversation with. He’ll ask the same question or make the same point eight times in a single conversation without once registering that it was responded to after the first instance. It’s maddeningly infuriating!

Steve, the toilets are blocked.

I know. The plumber is on his way.

Steve, the toilets are blocked.

Yes. The plumber has been called. He’s on his way.

Steve, the toilets are blocked.

Are you listening? The plumber is coming RIGHT NOW to deal with it.

Steve, the toilets are blocked.

Look I’m gonna shove this plunger up where the sun doesn’t shine in a minute!

Steve, the toilets are blocked...

And so on and so forth. Ad bloody infinitum.

Lastly – and this weirds me out big time – he sings to himself.

Nothing strange about that, you may think. But... he sounds like a ruddy Clanger. With a Geordie accent! I kid you not. “Bu-bu-bu-booo-boooo! Boooo-booo-bu-bu-bu-boooooo!” The corridors resound everyday to the ghostly yet faintly melodic wailing of hand-knitted children’s television show puppets from the 1970s. The toilet pans echo to their plaintive cries.

Ha-wey! These bogs are blumin blocked agen, Steve man! Is the plumber comin’..?!

It’s doing my effing head in.

Fosters

One of the more "exciting" elements to my job is dealing with complaints from the general public – bless their little white cotton socks – and such complaints usually centre around the state of the toilets in the Art Gallery / Library complex where I work.

The fact that they are PUBLIC toilets and therefore their state is entirely down to the abuse and depravations of the PUBLIC themselves never seems to occur to the officious little tell-tale twits when they come and offload their tale of wee-wee woe upon me, of course.... no; suddenly the situation is entirely my fault and what am I going to do about it?

If the cleaner has knocked off for the day that question is usually answered by me donning a pair of industrial strength rubber gloves and grabbing a plunger the like of which was last scene surmounting a mediaeval lance tip... straight in and no messing, that’s my motto.

Yesterday saw me up to my elbows in Marigolds once more.

Apparently a report had come in of a great pile of beer cans clogging up the gent’s toilets and rendering them utterly unusable.

So off I trotted expecting the worst and what did I find?

A single can of Fosters – surprisingly empty – dropped nonchalantly into the toilet bowl. It wasn’t even wedged into the S bend but just floating like a tuberous blue lily upon the surface of the water.

Wow.

Now that is either one hell of an eloquent lager review or some joker just decided to cut out the middle man.

Or someone was disturbed trying to get a refill...