Luncheon sausage

Thanks to our resident office Kiwi for the title of today's bloggage. Since it's a quiet day, there has been a degree of discussion about what luncheon sausage (as it's known in NZ) actually is.

Our friends at Wikipedia have done some legwork on this, but it's damned difficult to find any pictures of the stuff anywhere on the net.

Anyway, it seems that NZ butchers give the stuff away free to kids to eat in sandwiches. No wonder the whole of NZ has bailed out and come to London. The taste of a greasy Caledonian Road kebab after a night out kicks nine kinds of crap out of whatever the hell it is they're giving away on the streets of Wellington.

Incidentally, it's known as 'polony' in South Africa, which may or may not be racist anti-Poland talk. Polony isn't half as good as biltong spread by all accounts; the thought of this has got our resident saffies (from both sides of the boerewors curtain) salivating wildly.

On the subject of food, there seems to be a creeping nazification of the nation's youth. Whereas German children of the mid-1930s were persuaded to inform the authorities if their parents didn’t hate Jews enough, the UK is raising a generation of enviro-foodie fascists. Can I present any evidence to support this? Well, some.

• Exhibit A: the weekend before last, when I was staying with friends in the deepest West Country (amongst other things listening to a live rendition of "Combine harvester" whilst tucking into a Cornish pasty - you've gotta live the rural dream), a five year old told me in no uncertain terms that 'only stupid people like crisps and chocolate'. Pass the grated carrots.
  
• Exhibit B: my 16 year old cousin yesterday expressed outrage that her history teacher had thrown a, *gasp*, blank sheet of paper into the rubbish bin, not the recycling bin. Apparently this was in an effort to illustrate the worthlessness of Weimar-era currency. Still, my cousin then made up for it by telling me that Chris 'n' Gwyn's kid's first word was 'houmous'. My personal objective is to ensure that both of my children's first word is 'luncheon sausage'.

Enough sausage, pasty and houmous talk.

My week long absence is explained by my being struck down with a disease of advanced middle age, which you needn't know about.

Our great NHS is a source of mystery to me - in some places (five star hotels, for example), you always get great service, because the system is designed to benefit the customer. In other places (I'm thinking Argos, which, incidentally, means 'slow' in Greek), the service is crap, because the system is designed to benefit the people who run it .

The curious thing about the NHS is that it's so fiendishly complex and dysfunctional, it seems to have been designed with neither the end user or the people who run it in mind. The patients, sorry, 'customers', hate it. The medical staff are exhausted and baffled. No one seems to benefit.

Anyway, I've been referred by my (brilliant) GP to a specialist, which now involves something called 'patient choice', much beloved by that nice Mr Blair. Under the old, inefficient system, I would have been referred by my GP to the specialist in the nearest hospital, who would have sat on the letter for three months then claimed never to have received it, requiring the GP to re-refer me (this is also a handy way to keep waiting lists in check).

Under the shiny new online system, called 'Choose and Book' (which has paid for a couple of hundred thousand shiny new Mercs for IT consultants up and down the country), nothing will ever be the same again. I simply log on, look at the available appointments online, compare average waiting lists in each hospital, pick a time, and book it. Simple as that.

Well…

Having got over the initial hurdle of not having a user ID or password (the receptionist probably broke the Data Protection Act and contravened someone's Human Rights by divulging this information over the phone), I managed to log on, to find out the following:

• my nearest hospital refuses to treat me because it doesn't have enough staff (slamming and locking the door is a great way to 'manage' a waiting list)
• the other two 'available' hospitals don't want to use the online system. So they don't. So it seems that you can neither choose nor book.

Goodbye to £6.2 billion of IT investment. Hello to phoning both hospitals and waiting in massive queues before they 'lose' my appointment sometime in November and oblige to start the whole thing again.

Let's hope it's not serious.

On a lighter note, the latest Muse album is great - give it a listen.

Never judge your fellow man...

...until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.
At that point, you can call him whatever you want, since (1) He's a mile away and (2) He doesn't have any shoes.

You've gotta love South African humour. Thanks, Baron.

Normalised EBITDA

Friday's graph of the day looks at how successive generations of students have fared at the A-Levels with which I wrestled in the dark days of the Major years. There's no point in reheating all of the annual arguments about dumbing down, but nevertheless, the numbers tell a story…

Whoo-hoo

Well, this is my last blog, since I'm off to spend my bonus on wine, women and song.
Not bad for a year spend adding things up in Excel.

Prezza

Buns of steel

It's bonus day shortly, and I'm proud to report that my own share of the swill in the corporate trough this year is a whopping 0.0001% of the total London payout for the year. Nevertheless, a lot of people in this town are earning a ton of money. Which begs the question - how much is a ton of money? Today's graph would have answered this, but either (1) the site's not working, or (2) the Feds are onto me. I'll try again later...

Whilst on babysitting detail last night, I had the pleasure of watching "Rambo:First Blood Part II", for the first time since watching it illicitly at a friend's house at the age of 12 (my Christian parents unreasonably objected to my watching legions of gooks getting wasted instead of doing my Religious Studies homework).

So what if most of it was filmed in Colorado (with WalMart palm trees plonked in the foreground), and that the CIA baddy is the dude from the 'Good Old Boys' in the Blues Brothers and therefore difficult to take seriously?

It's pure Reagan-era escapism, complete with Vietnamese guys apparently wearing WWII era Japanese uniforms, and Stephen Berkoff heading up a squad of evil Russkies. But tell me this - having spent 100 years and millions of lives trying to shake off the yoke of imperialist aggression, how come Victor Charlie allows the Russkies to march all over them as soon as Uncle Sam walks out?

NB the moral of the story is that of the little guy prevailing over both the 'goddam bureaucrats trying to cover their asses' and the military might of a superpower. Something for the insurgents in Iraq to learn from that.

Turning briefly to nostalgia, it was fifteen years ago today that I received my A-Level results. It would have been round about this time of day that I cracked open the first beer, as life stretched before me. Wonder what August 1991 me would say to August 2006 me? "Loser," I should think. Rude b#stard.

At the risk of giving the fat buffoon the oxygen of publicity, the oaf Prescott has shoved both feet in his distended gob again. So Dubya is 'crap', and 'nothing but a cowboy in a hat?' Look in the mirror, Giovanni, look in the mirror.

Some Baz at the Institute of bean counters has launched an online Nozin' Aroun' : "it's an online magazine made by YOUNG ACCOUNTANTS for YOUNG ACCOUNTANTS and concentratin' on all the subjects that YOUNG ACCOUNTANTS are into. It's our world too! Right! Okay". Take a look. It's brilliant

Finally, my one year old daughter made it to another key development milestone yesterday, by sending her first SMS from my email phone (no, it's NOT a BlackBerry - it's LIKE a BlackBerry, but DOESN'T WORK MOST OF THE TIME). Anyhoo, my colleague from the office was surprised to receive the simple but elegant message "Gfthly". Three new appointments also appeared unexpectedly in my diary for today ("P" from 8am to 9pm, "Ooee" at 9am, and "Y" at 10am).

No good sleazy blood-sucking pointless thieving scumbags...

..have stolen my bike. Me Dick Van Dyke. Within 100 feet (although 50 of those are vertical) of my desk. My beloved Trek was 'alf inched and ridden away but some Camden Town tosser(s). I only hope that the height of the saddle (I'm 6ft4) ripped their privates in two, and that the chain falls off. A lot. In a bus lane. With a massive bendy bus bearing down on them. W#nkers. I hope they die. B%stards.

I've calmed down a bit now.

I suppose I should be philosophical. It's about the seventh bike I've had stolen in my life, forming an almost unbroken chain from the Peugeot Elan (seen above) nicked from school back in about '88 (had to borrow my brother's bike for the paper round) through the Chinese racer stolen from the railings of my uni hall of residence 14 hours after I first arrived in London in '91.

And I suppose I did buy my bike, er, "second hand" from a slightly shady outfit in Balham, so it may just be possible that the old girl had been forcibly separated from her previous owner. Nevertheless, I'm more filled with impotent rage than a Daily Mail reader.

The worst bit was having to take the train home in rush hour wearing my somewhat perished spray-on lycra cycling shorts (size large, naturally). Still, it's always summer on the Victoria Line - although only 20 degrees at street level, it's always a comforting 37 degrees below ground. Despite the fact that heat is supposed to rise. Hmm.

I'll round off with a selection of curses from the net, each of which are directed a thousand times at the bike rustlers of NW1:
1. Biblical: Hear this, O thou son of a Philistine, for you will be whipped with a thousand scorpions
2. Elizabethan: Thou rank boil-brained coxcomb
3. Random: May your underwear be filled with the fulvous eructate fingering from the refuse void of a Abysmian Whippinthig
4. Irish: Go bpléasca na gráinneoga cealgrúnacha do bhall fearga ("May the malevolent hedgehogs blow up your manly part")
and finally:
5. Arabian (well, sort of): "May a quartet of dyslexic dingos puke monkey crazy glue over your delicious log"

Spamwatch

Spam - it used to be slimy pink meat, but is now used to mean the torrent of unwanted emails flying around the globe, most of the time on the subject of, ironically, a gentleman's slimy pink meat.

The above summarises the 178 emails that were inserted into my box over the weekend, of which an amusing 69% were sex-related spam.

There's a particular sub-language associated with spam, examples of which include:

• empathetic description of intimate problems ("Lack control over your squirting?". "Why don't you prevent premature creaming?", "You always dreamt to rock hard erections")
• preying on your innermost fears…("Don't let your partner leave you", "Have you some doubt?", "Many of us know the bitter feeling of not being able to deliver", "Hate seeing her unhappy face after you finish too quickly?")
• …then providing the answer ("You won't hear another word of reproach from her!", "Tonight you’ll prove your volume", "She will never leave you", "She will love the new you", and best of all, "You will be counting days before your rod will be almost reaching your knees.")
• earthy proverbs ("Why bark when you can get a dog to do it?")
• unlikely-sounding email addresses (chickenarmpit@priest.com, armfulchunky@samerica.com, cowslipannoy@rome.com)
• blatant lies, especially in conjunction with man-made tablets ("lose weight naturally", "Join thousands of satisfied customers")
• spelling errors, deliberate or otherwise ("peenis", "ppenis", "pennis", "peniis", " ejacculatte" - one for Starbucks, maybe)
• unusual grammar ("Good afternoon and the results will impress your girl", "notice huge differences in the way they you operate your beef machinery.")
  and
• downright insults ("Stop being a two pump chump")

~

Something odd was going on on Clapham Common last night as I wheezed by. A dozen groups of twentysomething Northcote Road types (boys separated from girls) wearing numbered bibs were doing rather pathetic imitations of press ups and star jumps under the supervision of wiry guys with camo trousers and backpacks (containing bricks to make things more challenging).
Maybe the situation in Iraq is so desperate that the army is drafting conscripts from the ranks of trainee accountants, junior lawyers and up and coming hedge fund managers of SW11 . I can't imagine that the 1st Battalion of Her Majesty's Greedy Young City Types would be much good for anything other than braying into mobile phones, wearing pink rugby shirts with the collars turned up (good for visibility on the streets of Basra), and arguing drunkenly with minicab drivers on a millionth of their salary about the fare home. Perhaps we're just trying to bore the Iranians into submission.
A more likely explanation is that this was some sort of test for the Duke of Edinburgh's award, or some other 'gap year' activity used to bolster the already overloaded CVs of the scions of the upper middle classes.
Whatever was going on, the instructor I rode past who was "supervising" a group of eighteen pink and glowing girls bouncing through their paces definitely had a glint in his eye.
A white courier van was lurking at the gates of Downing Street this morning - maybe our friends at Al Qaeda have given up mucking about in the woods outside High Wycombe and gone for the direct approach - Fedex the bomb directly to the head of the capitalist snake.
Only just resisted the temptation to yell "Banzai" at a squadron of Japanese tourists milling about in the bus lane on Whitehall whilst approaching them at speed this morning, but in the light of today's anniversary, decided not to.

Gosport

Some junior editor at BBC News seems to have discovered Google Earth in recent weeks - even the meanest stories with no possible geographical angle are being introduced with a by-now-obligatory whizzing 3D map. The graphic on the right, for example, was used by BBC South Today to illustrate a particularly riveting tyre slashing story.

So, back to the shower room at work. The place is plastered with little laminated notices telling users what they may and may not do, signed by important sounding people (the most notable of which is the instruction to proceed immediately to the second floor in the event of a fire. Have they thought that through? What if the fire's on the second floor?). The problem is that absolutely no-one pay any attention to the ever-more numerous and complicated rules (resulting in sweaty pants and damp towels draped over every available surface), despite increasing resources being thrown at the problem. Rather like modern Britain in fact. So in summary, my argument is that silly government rules are the, er, sweaty pants smothering the shower room of life. Either that or I'm annoyed because persons unknown from the smoking room next door keep coming into the changing room to take a dump whilst I'm in the shower.

Saw a road sign in Hertfordshire yesterday that had once said "Speed camera ahead". So far so good. Then someone at the council decided that this was too emotive, so ordered that all such signs be redesignated "Safety camera ahead".

It must have taken a bus load of clipboard Nazis the best part of a year to locate all of the offending signs, put out a tender to sign-makers for three dozen small metal signlets saying "Safety", place the order, fiddle around for a couple of weeks whilst they were being made, miss the delivery from the Post Office because they were out playing croquet, hire a big truck to carry the signs, hire some guys with hammers and nails, then drive the length and breadth of the county replacing "Speed" with "Safety" on each of the signs. There's a small town somewhere in Hertfordshire whose entire Council Tax moolah for a year was spent doing this. Just to make drivers more calm and understanding next time they're automatically shaken down for £80 when they break the limit by 4mph on an empty, dry, straight road in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe this idea has legs. "Income tax" is very negative, isn't it? Perhaps "Social cohesion contribution" would be better. "Waiting lists due to budget cuts" are just so, well, unpleasant, aren't they? How about "resource optimisation due to the popularity of world-class services?"

Finally, a warm welcome to the blogosphere to the President of Iran . He's put some thought into the look and feel of the site, but the content needs a bit of patience to work through. Worryingly, he posts in the small hours of the morning (4.12am) - not pleasant to think that the fellow who
(a) isn't keen on we decadent westerners and
(b) may or may not be developing a long range nuke

is making important weapons-based decisions without getting enough sleep to think straight.

Graph feature to return tomorrow

Yuppie quotient

1 in 3 of my loud, skinny, tanned South African neighbours are yuppies - a greater proportion than both London and England as a whole. But, as I'd always suspected, proper yuppies tend to steer clear of my area, and live in Wandsworth proper. Maybe it's the rapper gang murders and jellied eel stall on the main road that puts them off.

Scary to think that there are 6.1 million people in England spending 365 days a year watching daytime TV whilst on benefits. If they ganged up with the next 6.5 million doing the worst jobs imaginable, there might even be a workers' revolution. The problem is that they'd actually have to work once the glorious revolution has turned the gutters red with the blood of financial analysts and PR consultants.

Better get back to crushing the downtrodden proletariat.

Q: How does a two year old...

...make 300 people late for work?

A: Simple - he insists on walking up the narrow stairs at Euston station (the only way out of the station, since the escalators are out of action - probably Al'Qaeda again), step by agonising step, whilst his mother (who's never bothered to discipline him) glares angrily at the 500 tutting commuters trapped behind him.

So the world's going to hell, but see above for my proposed solution. At least we're not from Norfolk.

Shirty

Today's pointless survey is on the shirts of my colleagues. A strong showing for plain, blue shirts, which is less than surprising. What IS surprising is that a chap around the corner pitched up at work today wearing a light green suit in combination with brown shoes (albeit lovingly polished). I hadn't realised that it was "Dress like a German" day.

The UK airport system has ground to a halt over a purported terrorist plot, that has been (in descending order of hysteria) "Uncovered" (Grauniad), "Thwarted" (Telegraph), or "Foiled" (Sun, Mirror, Mail, Times, Independent). Why can't you take a book onto an aircraft. God. The most unpleasant result of all this is that people travelling with babies are required to taste the contents of any bottle being brought onto a flight. Have these people ever tasted baby milk?

I guess a little light relief would be provided if an irate female passenger had to argue the toss with a government bureaucrat about what constitutes "sufficient and essential...female sanitary items". Eek.

Maybe it's a decade's exposure to the opportunistic fibbing of Mr Blair's mob, but I'm not entirely certain that anything's happened. If we're all supposed to be concentrating on long queues of angry people at airports (hardly unusual), I wonder what's going on unnoticed somewhere else?

My own theory is that the uncontrolled rash of road-digging that has erupted in the last couple of days on the capital's streets is something to do with Al-qaeda. Maybe they're planning to shut off everyone's gas simultaneously or something..."Damn, the grill's gone off, now the Welsh rarebit will get cold. Time for a global caliphate, I suppose".

Top eight things not to do in an open plan office:
1. Repeatedly use a speaker phone, oblivious to the death stares of all
2. Speak annoyingly loudly
3. Leave your mobile unattended with loud and / or "amusing" ring
4. Drop the phrase "spit roast" into a conversation when 25 people can clearly hear you
5. Converse loudly in Afrikaans then refuse to explain what you were talking about
6. Read someone else's PC screen over their shoulder
7. Answering your phone with a loud "HAIR-LAIR"
8. Converse with your bank manager / lover / recruitment consultant

Intermittent showers

YAAG #3 - traffic lights report. It seems that life is happier under Ken, with 68% of the 37 traffic lights I encountered this morning showing a favourable colour. The bad news is that my fellow cyclists jumped a red light every 41 seconds.

Whilst using the frankly awful shower facilities this morning (with all orifices firmly closed - if the NHS can't be arsed to clean their water tanks, there's not a chance in hell that my employers will have done so), I spotted that one of my colleagues buried in a different dusty corner of this dusty office uses a shower gel that "excites your body and arouses your senses" - I sincerely hope that he rinses down the shower cubicle afterwards. Anyhoo, it kicks nine kinds of crap out of my own shower gel, which is merely "a combination of an invigorating masculine fragrance and a conditioning formula". And I thought it was just soap.

A ghastly post-script - whilst looking into Lynx, I came (ahem) across an intimate local anaesthetic product called Stud 100 - does anyone use this stuff? Mind you, the alternative is far worse...

Staring blankly into the middle distance...

...is officially the most popular occupation of the rear half of the fourth coach of the 8.51 to Waterloo. Surprisingly few iPods and BlackBerrys - presumably people with proper jobs (paying proper money) have already been at their desks for at least an hour by 8.51. Here endeth the second installment of 'yer avin a graph'.

New feature

So, like, here's a noo feature for this blog, called "Yer 'avin' a graph mate". It's very simple - you (or let's face it, me, since no-one else reads this nonsense) dream up an item, situation, or in fact anything at all, and I'll summarise it in graphical form. Go on, you know you wanna.
To the left is a starter for ten - the ratio of chaps to chicks in the office today.



An exchange between colleagues earlier:
Q: So how was the bad world of Peru?
A: Not bad.

Almost as funny as the boss kicking the rubbish bin over and commenting "oops, I've kicked the bucket"

Q: What's worse...

...than cycling against a northerly wind across Clapham Common with horizontal rain lashing against your face?

A: Being a fat guy on Clapham Common doing forced squats on the damp grass whilst your skinny, tanned South African personal trainer is paid by you for yelling at you from a distance of 1 metre.

Barely have time to blog today, too busy sauntering through the streets of Ürümqi (somewhere in the Chinese outback) on the new test version of Google Earth. A rare and welcome break from Excel...

Vnable to vtilise my "yov" bvtton

Severe misfortvne. My "ewe" or "yov" bvtton no longer fvnctions. I can no longer type svch accovnting favovrites as "vtilisation", "svbsidiary vndertaking", "discvssions abovt factval accvracy" or "does not constitvte an avdit in accordance with Avditing gvidelines". Disaster. Calamity. It's vnbearable.

...and another one...

"life may not always be the party we hoped for, but whilst we're here, we might as well dance"
May be some firewall issues with this one

Another one...

"always a pleasure, never a chore".
If you knew who just said that, you'd be laughing...

Corporate mottos

An important guy at the office always includes the motto "Fail to prepare, prepare to fail" on the footer of his emails, which gives rise to the very important question - what would yout motto be? Responses so far:

• "Shut up and get on with your work" (anyone know what this is in Latin?)
• "Work hard play hard"
• "I may not soar with the eagle, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines"
• "Eating ain't cheating"
• "Don't ask me, I dunno"
• "Don't leave your glasses on a train"
• "Sapere aude" (dare to drive a German car)
• "massively overrated"
• "Sempur in excreta"

Keep 'em coming...

Illiterate dullards

Between them, the seven chartered accountants who sit within ten feet of my desk have failed to read 51 of the top 100 books that Penguin's marketing people recently published. If you knock out the mandatory GCSE texts (Orwell, Chaucer etc), we're a pretty ill-read bunch. We can do awesome graphs though.

Time to do battle with the London traffic...

Before I go home

The lifts in our office are crap. Who cares? I do.

I like to ride my...

Cycled into the office today, so am now starting to ache in places I'd forgotten I had places. I'd forgotten how pleasant it is to be stuck in a shared cycle land behind an 2 mile queue of Ken's half empty 18m long buses, hemmed in to the right by a queue of stationary traffic. The only solution is to seize one's destiny and charge at high speed into the gap between the buses and the traffic, which is a bit like the end of Star Wars when the good guys are flying at high speed down that long corridor thingy on the surface of the death star.

Also very pleased to see a large number of comedy seasonal cyclists wearing an iPod instead of a helmet, a long floaty skirt instead of eye-wateringly tight lycra and flip-flops instead of those funny shoes with wierd bottoms that proper cyclists seem to wear.

A few special mentions before I fire up Excel and get some serious data analysis done:

• to the balding driver of silver sporty Merc K3 MRF - thanks for not giving way to the right on that roundabout - you're right, though - if you accelerate really really fast whilst cutting up a bike, it doesn't count
• to the TNT driver at Wandsworth Common who jumped a light in order to make an iffy left turn, causing three cars to brake and me to run for cover sideways
• to the white van man who ran me into the back of a stationary bus whilst looking the other way and laughing at something the chap on the other end of the phone was saying
• and finally to the slow guy who kept overtaking me at red lights then giving me a view of his visible hairy crack whilst he puffed along - I would have gone to Hampstead Heath if I wanted to work myself into a sweat whilst staring at a hairy man's back

Still, near-death experiences in low single-figures counts as a successful day on London's roads.

A quiet day at the office

Can you picture an office that has recently been refurbished from a mid-1970s to an early 1990s standard of decor?

If you listen closely, can you hear the click of laptop keyboards, the tap of fingers on calculators, the ting of the crap, unreliable lifts and the clack of a biro being dropped onto a wood-effect desk?

If you listen more closely still, can you hear the secretaries discussing what they're going to order from Tesco online later, in between the occasional whirring of a printer in the middle distance?

Can you see the collection of dusty cheap golf trophies sitting abandoned on the top of a filing cabinet and the fading World Cup results chart pulled out of some tabloid weeks ago, and now clinging limply to a flimsy dividing wall?

Welcome to my world.