Hubris

“The 13th has never been unlucky for me. Never. I’ve never had a bad experience with the number 13. Not once. Not ever. I’m immune to it.”

Even as I typed those words last Friday I was reminded of a poem by Roger McGough (can’t remember which one, sorry) where he talks about being afraid to tempt fate in case fate, tempted, one day weakens... but I shrugged it off anyway with a cavalier laugh and got on with cocking my snook at the universe. You can’t touch me, I thought to myself. I’m immune. Y’hear me? Immune! You can’t touch me with your so-called Friday 13th bad vibe!

Somewhere in the very centre of the universe an omniscient mind heard me and had an inclination...

And by the end of the day Friday 13th was going all out to prove just how unlucky it could be.

All was fine until it came time to head home. Of course this is the moment where you desperately want things to run smoothly. You can practically smell your evening meal being cooked. You can almost feel the warm cosy embrace of your sofa wrapping itself around you and calling you to submit to end-of-week TV-soothed slumber.

You just want to get out of the office and escape while the going is good.

Last Friday, the 13th, the going was decidedly not good. As I was literally on my way to the exit doors I was called to the men’s public toilets. A cubicle was occupied and the patron was refusing to respond to all calls to vacate the premises. I had no choice but to force the door. Inside I found a young male slumped over, completely unconscious, his trousers around his ankles and his head face down on his knobbly knees. He absolutely could not be roused by anything we did. It didn’t look good. One of my colleagues recommended we try smelling salts until I pointed out that, given the ever present stench of the urinals, if he wasn’t compos mentis now with the ambient bio-fall-out irradiating his nasal hairs a tiny little smell in a bottle was hardly going to kick-start his cerebral cortex.

So we called an ambulance. And therein the farce truly began. The operator took all the details and then asked some bizarre questions along the line of did the injured party have a history of heart trouble, etc. Now bearing in mind I had already explained that the injured party was an unknown member of the public I found this question rather ridiculous. I think the operator picked this up from the mocking pause that I dropped into our conversation. “I still have to ask, sir” he told me smartly.

Did he? Did he really still have to ask when he already knew I had never met the person in the toilets before in my entire life? I realize that most telephone operators work from a script these days but surely there is room for commonsense? Room for people to think independently and realize that sometimes portions of the script can just be dispensed with?

Plainly not.

Anyway. Despite all this guff the ambulance was apparently on its way.

Great, I thought. Blue and twos flashing it’ll be here in 5 minutes and I can get away home.

Not so. 20 minutes later me and my loyal colleagues were still waiting. 25 minutes later we saw a paramedic’s car parked on the other side of the road. Just sitting there. Waiting. What the hell was he doing? Mr Knobbly Knees in the toilet could be choking on his own sputum by now! Why wasn’t he attending to the 999 call I had made? We approached and asked, amazingly politely, if he had indeed come to answer our summons for help. Yes he had, he said, but he couldn’t do anything until his “back-up” had arrived.

Oh. Back-up. A SWAT team was on its way then. Or possibly armed specialist forces. Great.

We had no choice but to back to the building and continue our wait growing more and more sour with each passing minute. We appreciated, loudly, that in today’s world dealing with possible drunks or drug users can be extremely hazardous and a bit of support is probably a necessity but even so... this poor guy could be voiding his entire colon down the bog for all anyone was doing to help him.

And so the wait went on. And on. Made worse by a drunken gang of teens who suddenly appeared and decided to hang around outside the front of the building and empty their bladders over our railings. Charming. The evening was getting better and better.

Finally, 50 minutes after my initial 999 call an ambulance at last sirened into view. Hoo-bloody-ray. At last. Now with two green jacketed body guards flanking him the paramedic boldly stepped into the breach. As I opened the door to let them in one of the teens mumbled something along the lines of: “oh, hey mate, we think one of our friends might be in your toilets...” Cue Beavis and Butthead laughter.

Oh how typical. I managed to marshal my sarcasm (i.e. utilize it) and told him that yes, that was why we had called an ambulance as his so called mate was out stone cold.

“Oh,” said the dazed teen, “is it OK if I come in and watch?”

Come in and watch. Not, how is he? Not, is he OK? Just: can I come in and watch.

I shut the door on him and locked him outside.

15 minutes later the paramedics had got Mr Knobbly Knees up and mobile. He looked as dazed as his erstwhile mates outside. Confused and a little embarrassed too. But I daresay by Saturday he was rather proud of his exploits and was boasting of his advanced state of inebriation to all those of his friends who were not too inebriated themselves to tell him to shut up and go and flush his stupid head down the toilet.

Their job done the ambulance crew melted away into the night, reholstering their standard SWAT team issue revolvers. Don’t thank us; it’s just what we do. Yippee-ki-yay.

Whatever. My colleagues and I headed outside too and wiped the dust from our shoes and headed our separate ways.

I finally arrived home over an hour late, tired, soaked with rain and in a foul mood.

Friday 13th? I shall never mock you again. And that’s a bona fide promise. I have seen the power of the Universe and it scares me.


Postscript: Somewhere at the centre of the universe an omniscient mind wonders perhaps if it has gone too far and decides to offer a little consolation... a small token of recompense.

On my way out to get some milk on Sunday morning I noticed that among the assorted chip wrapping and drinks cartons that the wind constantly deposits on our front lawn a slightly damp but otherwise perfectly intact £5 note.

For moi?

Why, thank you Universe. Apology gratefully accepted.

The Mystical Toilet

When you're a kid, toilets are magical, mythical, mystical contraptions.

Aside from the boyhood / manhood pleasure of blasting your urine around the rim like you're strafing an invisible enemy army, there is the magic of the disappearing water.

You pull / push the flusher and all that water shoots down and disappears... where?

As an adult, of course, the toilet is downgraded to merely a mechanical appliance that is (quite literally) always at your unthinking convenience but as a kid... they're akin to dragons and unicorns. Eerie, intriguing, frightening beasts of indeterminate morality.

My eldest boy, Ben, was always a little scared of the toilet and overcoming that fear was a major factor in getting him properly toilet trained... making that big step from carelessly filling his nappy to anticipating the demands of his bladder and making a pre-emptive strike at the portal of the big white telephone. He got a toy car every time he successfully made it to the toilet. Even now those cars are referred to as "poo cars". But his initial fear is understandable. That wide open mouth... The chasm down to deep waters... The porcelain abyss with it's strange smell even when the water is clean... It's a big thing to park your bum over it for the first time and relax enough to let nature take its course.

That fear is also greatly increased when the toilet has eaten one of your toys.

Ben once accidentally dropped a favourite toy down the loo when he flushed it. Of course it went the way of all small solid things trapped beneath the flush cycle.

And that only added to the mystique of the toilet. It transports things elsewhere... Elsewhere via dark underground water chutes. Through the sewers, through vast underground caves... out, out, far out to sea. Or so I used to think as a kid. It's a bit disappointing to learn as an adult that everything actually ends up in some huge sediment tank at a nearby water treatment plant where all the muck is literally sucked out of it. God knows where that toy is now but it's certainly not floating around the Atlantic as Finding Nemo would have you believe.

Anyway, my youngest, Tom, is displaying early signs of having an interest in the toilet. When he has a bath (or a "splish splash splosh" as it is known in my house) he likes to have a quick peak over the rim to see what's down there. I'm hoping this bodes well for future potty training and isn't an early indication of his entire Duplo brick collection making a bid for the Pacific sometime soon.

But regardless of erroneous submersibles and unlikely submarines, it's comforting to know that his toilet rites of passage will begin soon. That he too, in time, will embrace the mystique of the toilet.

Enemy in sight. Release safety catch. Open fire...! Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta...!

Magic.

Some People And Me

Three items on the bugbear list this morning.

First off – a flagrant disregard for child safety.

I took the boys into school / nursery this morning as Karen is in Birmingham on an accountancy training course. On the way we passed one of Tom’s nursery mates being walked to school by her dad. Well, I’m assuming it was her dad and not her uncle. Whoever he was he obviously wished he was doing something else. There were frequent exhortations to “come on” and “hurry up”.

Bear in mind his ward is a wide-eyed 2 year old.

Now Tom loves walking. He finds it a great delight and no doubt feels very grown up doing it. Unfortunately, at just under 2 he just does not understand how important it is to hold mummy or daddy’s hand when busy roads are nearby. So he gets strapped into the pushchair. He’s fine with this thankfully. It’s still fun to be out and about even without the ability to perambulate freely. But even if he complained I’m afraid he’d still be stuck in the pushchair regardless.

I’d rather have him crying and safe than laughing one minute and forever silent the next.

So it was with horror that I watched this poor girl almost run out into the road when a car was coming and then get hollered back onto the pavement at the last minute.

For God sake man keep a grip of your child!

This would be bad enough in isolation but my wife witnessed a similar incident with the same family a few afternoons ago when she picked Tom up from nursery. Again the kid ran out into the road and was only hauled in at the last moment. The poor motorist who was almost involved looked ashen as they drove away.

It’s an accident just waiting to happen.

What is wrong with some people?

Secondly – cleanliness.

Due to blocked drains I’ve been flush testing all the toilets in the building this morning. As I was doing this someone came into the toilets after me. Now, I don’t know why, but I instinctively stood still and kept quiet and out of sight in the cubicle. I instinctively became furtive. Bizarre when I wasn’t even doing anything that involved the lesser-loved bodily functions. But there you go. Maybe I was a pervert in another life? Please keep your responses to this to yourself.

Now I know for a fact that, due to the location of these toilets, they are mostly used by the catering staff.

So imagine my disgust when I heard the urinal being used and then the “urinee” head straight back out without even a cursory swill under the taps.

This is someone who literally has his fingers in every pie going. Not to mention casseroles and stews. And a whole menagerie of sandwiches. On a daily basis.

How can you do that? How can you “point Percy at porcelain” and then not even wave your dannies under a bit of running water?

Folks, there’s a lot to be said for preparing your own packed lunch every day.

Lastly – my own self deprecation.

The other night I assisted some work colleagues who were having difficulty alarming their department at the end of the working day.

When such difficulties arise and seem to be insurmountable I always recommend that staff ring the local CCTV guys and ask them to keep an especial eye on the building. It’s a little extra security measure that probably acts as nothing more than a mental placebo.

I was asked if I had the number to hand.

I did. It was in my head instantly.

My head is full of useful numbers and codes and passwords. I make no effort to memorize them. They’re just there. They stick. It’s a natural facility. When I used to work at British Telecom I found I could give out a lot of the numbers to people without referring to the computer records at all. I had them off by heart. Only the frequently asked for ones I hasten to add. I’m not one of these people that make a living (or a living death) out of memorizing phone books.

But instead of just giving out the number I made a pretence of thinking hard about it. Pretending to strain as I fired up the old memory engine. Why did I do that?

It’s like I was embarrassed to have the necessary knowledge so ready to hand. Was I afraid of appearing sad and nerdy as opposed to just damned efficient?

Why hide my light under a bushel?

Some people, eh?

Whiner Diner

Apologies to my international readers (oh what a thrill to be able to say that) who won’t have seen the relevant programme but I’m greatly enjoying “Big Chef Takes On Little Chef” at the moment.

I don’t usually go overboard on cooking / food TV shows (unless they feature Nigella Lawson’s oscillating bosom as she hand whisks a soufflé) but this particular outing has reeled me in hook, line and sinker.

For those of you that don’t know, celebrity chef of international renown, Heston Blumenthal, has been engaged by the big boss of Little Chef to revitalize the company’s ailing fortunes by souping up (ahem) the old hackneyed menu and injecting a bit of dynamism into their geriatric “business model”.

Hmm.

Apparently, in its heyday, Little Chef was a motorway restaurant of world class reputation.

??!

Yes. I was surprised by this revelation too as, even in my childhood, Little Chef was only ever viewed as a toilet stop of the very last resort on long motorway journeys rather than as a place in which the human body could be effectively nourished – and, to be honest, you had to be faced with some pretty scummy hedgerows and embankments to prefer the dubious environs of the Little Chef latrine to spraying the contents of your bladder over the passing wildlife.

But I digress. The Little Chef boss – a man both improbably vacant and impossibly conniving whose name I have deliberately forgotten (let’s just call him David Brent) – has drafted in Heston to “blue sky think” his company back onto the fast track to fame, fortune and Michelin starred glory. Mr Brent – let’s not think of him as a company director, more of a chilled food entertainer – wants pizzazz; he wants culinary extravaganza, he wants the wild, the wacky and the wonderful. He wants some of the “out there” experimentation that has put Heston’s own restaurant – The Fat Duck – onto the global map. And he wants it all for under £10 a head in a greasy motorway restaurant who’s kitchen equipment doesn’t extend beyond a griddle and a microwave and staff who have no idea how to operate a saucepan (“where’s the effing button to turn it on?”).

Mr Brent’s utopian vision of culinary excellence ran into one or two fundamental obstacles right from the start.

1) The “out there” experimentation at The Fat Duck costs punters approximately £250 a head (to quote an unabashed Heston) which is a little out of the price range of the average Little Chef punter...

2) Heston did what Mr Brent should have done, i.e. some real actual market research which quickly confirmed what was bleeding obvious to everybody from day one: Little Chef customers don’t want to be chowing down on snail porridge or beef hotpot with oysters floating around in it. They want the legendary Olympic Breakfast. They want ice cream that’s cheap and cheerful. They want fish fingers and chips that look like fish fingers and chips. And they want baked beans with everything.

Heston, to his credit, realized immediately that his normal fare would never be acceptable in the kind of establishment that Little Chef epitomizes and reined in his humungously large creative flare to come up with stuff that was far more suitable and appropriate, i.e. ideas that stood a chance of actually being implemented by the socially lobotomized staff on the front line.

Good ingredients, fresh and nutritious, cooked well and served fast. Shazam!

The basics of any successful restaurant business surely?

Mr Brent didn’t seem to get it though. He was disappointed with Heston’s ideas. In fact he rather insultingly told him that “any celebrity chef could have come up with such a menu”. Cheeky get.

I won’t go on. Suffice to say that it is surprisingly addictive viewing: Heston trying to maintain his integrity in the face of political manoeuvring behind closed doors (and frequently off-camera) and soldiering on in the slow-dawning knowledge that the Little Chef upper echelons are merely using him as a marketing ploy without any real commitment to re-branding their product. And Mr Brent’s constant media speak and blue sky malapropisms.

The show highlights where the problem lies with most ailing businesses these days. Forget the Credit Crunch, the fault lies in the fact that they are invariably run by sad little egotists who are accountable to nobody but their own shareholders and who are obstinately out of touch with what their customers really want.

It’s no wonder that so many of them are going to the dogs.

And I have to say, the hedgerows of the M40 are looking better by the minute...

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...