Labouring under an aberration of intellect

Question: what do:

(a) Black Economic Empowerment
(b) Harry Enfield, and
(c) Razorlight

have in common? Simple. As a result of (a), millions of bronzed, athletic, hard-drinking South African gym-bunnies have made London their home. This has led veteran comic (b) to stick the boot in with ‘Pik’, a bone-headed Afrikaaner whose life revolves around boozing and vomiting.

So where does (c) fit in? Well, for some reasons, the gazillions of little ‘Piks’ (or something that sounds like it) who live down my way love nothing better on a summer’s afternoon than drinking 3 dozen Windhoeks and singing along in a sort of strangled drunken yell to ‘America’ by Razorlight. Three separate braais audible from my back garden have pulled this stunt in the last week.

So why is this? Do our SA friends perhaps feel some affinity with Johnny Borrell, frontman of Razorlight, who is linked in the public consciousness with having an elite education, a staggeringly high belief in his own abilities, and a propensity to drink too much? I couldn’t possibly comment.

Like it or not we live in interesting times

Out and about last night (rare enough nowadays at a marginal cost of £8 per hour for babysitting), first to an art gallery (just a buncha pikchurs, innit) then to dinner with friends in Camden.

The dudes we had dinner with have one of these digital music thingies. Needless to say, and despite several patient and clear explanations, I can’t really remember what it is, or how it works. It’s very cool though.

Camden (no ‘Town’ – strictly for the tourists) might as well be on a different planet from little Johannesburg where I dwell. Whereas Planet Wandsworth is filled with Aryans trying to avoid black people, Planet NorfLandan is filled with white undergraduates trying to be black people.

I know it shouldn’t, but there’s something about white guys with dreads that winds me up. It’s all very well about ‘appreciating where you come from’, but most of these guys are from Kingston-Upon-Thames, for feck’s sake, not the other one in Jamaica.

Anyhoo, digital music guy recommended this site – a forum thing for hoody wearing soap dodgers who are old enough to know better, who spend their time breaking into old buildings and taking pictures. Once you get used to the mild whiff of nerdyness about the site, it’s strangely interesting.

Back to dull statistics – here is one of the dullest statistics-based sites I’ve seen for a while. Did you know that 900 trillion tonnes of solar energy has hit the earth this year? Um…no.

Certain of our US readers might want to consider this new model when next upgrading their cellphone / PDA / sidearm.

And finally, a quiz about Canada

Bon weekend à tous.

That's very much in the realms of technical positioning

“Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg - it seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else”

Thanks to LBJ (who died on the day I was born) for that insight.

Today’s hot trickle of piss in the UK is on the subject of free banking. Unlike everywhere else on earth, Brits pay no charges for running a current account (or checking account, for our North American readers).

The banks, meanwhile, make piles of cash by screwing feckless borrowers with (admittedly outrageous) charges for writing them threatening letters that they didn’t want in the first place.

So the deal is: stay in credit, and your banking’s free; cross the line, and we’ll nail your fiscal arse to the wall.

Sounds good to me: the nation’s debt-ridden underclass is subsidising my free banking.

However, the generally rather well-off Guardianista classes are moaning like hell that it’s unfair. But nothing like as much as they’ll moan when their bank starts to charge them £20 a month in ‘service charges’ and £1 per cheque, cash withdrawal and card transaction. Then, my friends, then you’ll understand that regressive taxes on the unfortunate are a fine thing.

Quote of the week from The Apprentice:
"Hmm, so you're saying that this work is the story of the ocean and the life within?... Would you be happy if a fish restaurant bought it?"
Personally, I wouldn't hire any of them. But then I'm not an employer, so it doesn't matter.

Finally, why not build your own banner? (although I'm struggling to understand what half of them mean).

An opportunity to learn valuable lessons from a controlled failure

Being the Wednesday of Administrative Professionals Week® (formerly Professional Secretaries Week®), today is officially Administrative Professionals Day® (formerly Professional Secretaries Day®). Here are some FAQs, but I'm not so sure that this lame bunch of questions are asked all that frequently.

As you may have guessed from the bunch of ®s, the phrase ‘Administrative Professionals Week’ has been hi-jacked by a gang of litigation addled Americans (the IAAP®, of course). However, if you should choose to use the more grammatically correct ‘Administrative Professionals’ Week’, you’re in the clear.

Another dull language gripe – everyone within earshot in the office is currently saying ‘irrevocable’ c.5x a day for some reason. So why the mascara’ed arse are they pronouncing it ‘irreVOCable’ not ‘irREVocable’?

Finally, here’s the strangest story of the day.

Now, where the hell is my bloody useless secretary...

I know a pissed horse when I see one. Get him a kebab.

So dazvedanya Boris - the last of the great boozers in a position of power and influence, ignoring Charles Kennedy, of course. Feeling less than great today. Output restricted to a quote from Kingsley Amis:

"What I want is a chance to decide, from personal experience, that a life
of cocktail parties, cars, weekending at rich houses, wine, night-clubs and jazz
won't bring happiness. I want to prove that money isn't everything, to
learn that pleasure cloys."

With the exception of jazz, I agree.

Not so much a smile as a grimace of controlled revulsion

Happy St George’s Day. Last I checked on Google News, the only media outlets making any reference to this were the Wimbledon Guardian, Blackpool Today (pretty similar to Blackpool yesterday, I should think), and the fabulous Suffolk Evening Star. I wonder how many junior hacks over the course of history have started the headline to their St George’s Day article with the words 'By George…'?

Call off the search - after many years of fruitless casting about, the definition of ‘holistic cross-platform solutions’ has finally been made clear. It’s a term employed by thieving swine to describe robbing the feckless poor via their tellys.

As I sat in Battersea Park over the weekend with junior chimps, chewing absentmindedly on a Mini Babybel Light (which somehow tastes of absolutely nothing at all, despite containing a generous portion of vegetable rennet, whatever the hell that is), I suddenly became aware that each of the 20 thirtysomething dads within a 200 metre radius of our tartan picnic rug was wearing identical blue Polo (with a big 'P') shirts and camel cargo shorts. So maybe there’s nothing new under the sun. I then returned to helping the junior chimps to wave a cheery ‘bye bye’ to every single aircraft flying overhead. We sat under the Heathrow flight path for 3 hours; there is a plane every 60 seconds – you do the math.

Dietary warning: a new nutritional menace is heading our way. Having never heard of it in my entire life until recently, I’ve crossed paths with something referred to as ‘the Bolivian super grain,’ or Quinoa, twice in the last week (once in a scandalously overpriced pot of plums, the other in a Tupperware pot full of baby sludge being emptied down a one year old’s reluctant throat). Mark my words, ‘the staple diet of the Incas’ is back in a big way. And we all know what happened to the Incas.

Would an Anglo-French aircraft carrier really be such a good idea? Given that it took the best part of four years to decide whether Concord(e) should be spelt with an ‘e’,, how long would it take to determine whether the speedometer (or whatever they have on boats) should read kilometres or miles, let alone whether planes should take off and land from the left-hand or right-hand lane?

Positive aggression is half the battle

Having assumed that Reader’s Digest must have closed down years ago, I am proved wrong – apparently there are still enough readers out there to appreciate Memories of Immortal Jim Reeves, and How To Clean Just About Anything (“Did you know, for example, that deep heat rub can remove chewing gum from floors?”). I would previously have made a joke about Radio 2 listeners at this point, but unfortunately a plurality of my generation fall into this category nowadays, so it’s no longer funny.

These fine digesters of reading have also published a list of the best and worst places to bring up your children, which the idiotic winning yokels in East Dunbartonshire (I had to look it up on the map, too) are terribly excited about.

Now it may be that I am bitter that despite having an almost Third World (sorry, “Global South”) birth rate, and a dangerously high concentration of buggy workout and pilates practitioners (Mrs Chimp scores double points by combining the two, don't ask me how), my own fair Wandsworth comes in at a distinctly pedestrian 355th best out of 408, but is it maybe better to live in a somewhat “edgy” urban environment (Tooting, perhaps), than an suffocating middle class suburb where every middle manager reads the Reader’s Digest?

Has anyone else seen the ‘Free Alan Johnson’ hoardings that have been put up around London? It’s part of a campaign to “show support” and to exert pressure on “everyone with influence” over the unfortunate guy’s captors, which includes an online petition, and the ability to put a little Alan Johnson button on your blog.

Now, I totally share the concern and hopes expressed by the blog-buttoners, but my question is this: how on earth will this have any influence whatsoever on the hostage-takers? Will the guys crouched with their RPGs and Kalashnikovs in a Gaza basement by any chance be surfing through blogs in their idle moments and have a prick of conscience? And what of the assorted London couriers, cabbies, commuters on cycles riding past these billboards – what are they supposed to do? Or is this perhaps an example of well-meaning people adopting the doctrine that it is better to do something utterly pointless than to do nothing at all?

Better cheer up before sign off, so here’s a new game, called ‘ASBO name bingo’ (dedicated to one Carole Olva, who having cursed her daughter with the cast-iron ASBO name of “Serenza”, has recently been busted for goading her children to fight on video).

See how many names (girls or boys, it doesn’t matter which) you can spot which practically guarantee that its owner will at some point be slapped with an ASBO. My opening bets are Leah, Scarlett, Courtney, Dylan, Reece, and Jayden.

Finally, check out this piece of Jack Bauer-type technology. Big Brother just got bigger

You're 'avin' a graph mate

Check it out - a graphical representation of this blog (yes, I've been drinking), thanks to the fine people at Websites as Graphs. Give it a go - your favourite website transformed into a slightly sinister, ever-growing cancerous cell-like structure thingy.

Can we do it on a slightly less VAT basis?

Aggressive Tre is behind today’s title – you’ve got to respect him for suggesting a VAT fraud in front of Sralan’s slightly ludicrous in-house lawyer, who had to pretend to disapprove for the sake of the cameras. After all Sralan’s the original crafty cockney, or perhaps cockney, um, winker for our adult viewers.

Another day of having a less than bulging in-tray, so I’m looking for a suitable gift to send to pair of ex-bean counting colleagues to celebrate the recent arrival of their first born. I’m guessing that the people who claim to specialise in this area have limited experience of babies, since the sheer horror of milky sick, interrupted sleep, projectile diarrhoea, nine changes of clothes a day, soggy nappies, collapsing pushchairs, and the general collapse of civilisation which the arrival of a new baby entails can’t really be erased by a bottle of £15 bubble bath, a £24 box with a small dribble-proof book in it, a £40 box containing a couple of bibs and a single muslin square (average life expectancy in the line of fire – c.7 seconds), although “beautifully presented in cellophane”, or indeed a £200 baby rattle (with accompanying Tranquility:calming candle, which you’d Bloodywell:need at that price).

The problem is, a £30 Tesco voucher which could purchase all of the above plus a decent bottle of bubbly doesn’t really hit the mark.

Now that companies have finally stopped blaming 9/11 for crap sales, a new punch bag has obligingly been slung from the roof the corporate gym – apparently global warming is the reason why DVD rentals collapsed over Easter. That and the fact that Turner and Hooch is still filed under 'Latest releases'.

On that subject, I spent an extremely middle-aged 30 minutes last evening listening the Reith lecture by Jeffrey Sachs on Radio 4 (on Freeview, the only electronic device in Chimp Towers not currently farking broken). It was surprisingly pleasant to spend a few minutes doing nothing other than listen to the wireless – one could have been an Oxford tutor lying on a leather sofa, listening more or less attentively to an undergraduate’s weekly essay.

Anyhoo, the terrifying fact is that we’re apparently doomed, except we may not be. The good thing is that unlike the bloody moaning Indie (sorry to go about them, they just wind me up somehow), Sachs lays out a calm and balanced view of the situation, and offers hope that we’re going to be OK. The bloody moaning Indie, of course, wants us to stop work, destroy our houses, offer our children for human sacrifice, and live off dandelion roots in order to further the cause of ‘global justice’, whatever the hell that is. Take a look at this map to see whether you’ll be smug or swimming by the year 2050, when sea levels have risen by up to 14 metres. I’m about to move to a house on top of a hill. *smirks*

If you’re really, really bored, try this American IQ test thing, although, like me, you’ll have to get over the rage you’ll no doubt feel rising in your breast when you see the phrase “seven intelligences”.

And finally, if you’re really serious about getting shot of the muffin top before you hit the beach, try paying an ex-squaddie (probably with ‘issues’ after a tour in Iraq) to yell at you .

You must never trust a man who hunts south of the Thames, who has soup for lunch, or who waxes his moustache

Good to see that following yesterday’s slip by Des Browne, firmly not saying sorry is now very much back on the political agenda. To quote our soon to be absolute ruler yesterday “I tell the House that I do not apologise.” That’s more like it.

Seething today due to an evening wasted weeping in frustration at my inability to cope with technology. In 30 short minutes, the following things ganged up on me:

• wireless keyboard on PC packed up


• no i-Link port (whatever that is) on my PC, rendering expensive stolen camcorder useless. Karma, man.


• discovered that memory card in camcorder doesn't work because it has too much memory (double Karma, man), then


• forgot internet bank password, then


• forgot password for memory stick that contains spreadsheet with all my passwords, then


• forgot password protecting the spreadsheet containing all my passwords, so


• locked out on internet bank, then


• replacement password sent to my BlackBerry didn't arrive, because Tooting doesn't appear to have a 3G network yet, then


• poured a large G&T and tried to calm down

On the day after inflation busted 3%, and the humble British £ hit $2, a quick bitch. An Abercrombie & Bitch, in fact.

Before I gave up pretending that I was a young buck, I bought the odd item of yuppie (or more correctly, preppy) kit from A&F’s US website (they weren’t interested in the UK at the time). A t-shirt probably cost around $40, or maybe £25.

Now these goddam yanks are under-dressed and over here, having opened a store some place in the West End where the upper echelons (the sort one sees getting pissed at the Mariners in Rock after a hard day’s jet skiing whilst waiting for their GCSE results) drag their reluctant parents to spend a couple of hundred quid on some pre-wrinkled shirts.

The thing is, A&F have used Gap’s tactic of pricing their UK clothes by simply applying Tip-pex to the price label, changing our $40 US t-shirt into a £40 London t-shirt. Great news for A&F – assuming it cost $4 at the Vietnamese factory gate, the gross profit per shirt shoots up from an already-handsome $36 to a frankly drop-dead-gorgeous $76. Ker-ching.

Being too clever by half, I wondered whether this presented an arbitrage opportunity – why not buy the kit from the US website as before, and sell on at somewhere between the $40 cost in the US and $80 UK selling price?

However, by using internet trickery worthy of the Chinese government, the fiendish yanquis have in fact blocked access to the US website from the UK – no matter how you try it, the only way to access A&F online is on the UK website, which sells half the number of items for twice the price of its US cousin. Try it. Globalisation schmobalisation - this is protectionism, pur et dur.

However, the fact that:

1. the moaning bloody Indie seems to have added A&F hating to its already long list of bloody campaigns (running stories on 18 March, 22 March, 23 March (x2) and 25 March), and,


2. A&F winds up the swivel-eyed right-wing Christian lunatic fringe Stateside,

leads me to wish these price-gouging greedy seppos all the very best. Caveat preppy emptor.

A degree of regret that can be equated with an apology

Today’s entry is dedicated to Des Browne, the soon-to-be-former Defence Secretary, who made history yesterday by being the first ever member of the current government to say ‘sorry:’

…eventually. Well done Des, it wasn’t as bad as all that, was it?

Apparently the poor guy has been compared by some unkind folk to Swiss Toni , a failed car salesman in The Fast Show (which I never really watched due to revision for accountancy exams). So, in tribute to the great man…

You know, completing a sensitivity analysis is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You’ve got to acquaint yourself in detail with an eye-catching model. You must carefully identify her most sensitive parts. And manipulate them skilfully, to achieve an end result that satisfies all parties. Then you draw a bunch of graphs.

Some bright spark has come up with an irritating TLA (except it's technically an FLA) for the frequent problem of dipping one’s toe into the www ocean to look up some inflation statistics, only to emerge four hours later dripping with an encyclopaedic (if unplanned) knowledge of the art of llama breeding. Step forward: WWILFing.

Grammatical whinge of the day (1)
According to this article, a broadband challenge is facing Britain. Surely it’s Britain that’s facing a broadband challenge? How about ‘The clouds wandered lonely as me’, or perhaps ‘Fear has nothing to fear except ourselves’? Sounds a bit odd.

Grammatical whinge of the day (2)
Bloody annoying Jo from last year’s Apprentice (the screeching, irrational, crying one, although this was only because whilst selling fruit and designing calendars, she apparently “wanted to be true to myself, but found each day my conscience was challenged… you have to face your fears, deal with your demons and fight them off every day.”) seems to have launched a company with a grammatically tragic press release, in which she can’t in fact spell Sralan’s ever-popular catchphrase “You’re fired”. Or is it “Your fired?” Or is it “Your fir’ed?” Or is it “Yo’u’re f’i’red?”

I, think its’ a load of crap.

An awesome lack of anything interesting to impart

Ah, dining al desko once again after a week in the highly unlikely Devon sun. I am in trouble with the powers that be for submitting timesheets late, spending more than 15% of my time on unauthorised administrative activities, failing to submit my CPD declaration and still not completing my SMART objectives for the coming year within the 12 box framework. What better reason to knock off for 10 minutes and blog awhile.

After weeks of paper shuffling, it seems that the purchase of the new chimp enclosure in Tooting may be going ahead. The question is – have we managed to get a bargain as house prices shoot up, or are we the last poor fools to close a deal at a ludicrously inflated price seconds before house prices begin to fall?

I think I’m the last person on earth to have heard about the guy skiing down the escalators at Angel, but it’s not a bad way of spending 1minute and 10 seconds of your afternoon.

I was unfortunate enough to go to a sixth birthday party on Saturday afternoon, which is unlike anything I’ve seen for a very very long time. Imagine the ninth circle of hell, and you’re not far off. The combination of a middle-aged fatso dressed as Scooby Doo (and running round clutching an inflatable Spiderman in what can only be described as a suggestive position) and a roomful of pumped-up six year olds was deeply disturbing.

Given the amount of time and effort that the government and educational establishment puts into moulding our future citizens into non-competitive soft-left tree huggers, the event was surprisingly Neanderthal, the key themes being:

• Extremely loud throwaway pop music (including the unutterably awful ‘Fast Food Song’, which has surprisingly survived the post-Turkey Twizzler meltdown), which almost certainly fell within the definition of “excessive noise” under which an ASBO can be issued
• Massively competitive dancing contests (the resulting jubilant winners and despondent losers running directly counter to the Department for Education and Skills’ requirement for “fairness and social justice.”
• The contests also involved the cynical rigging of prize giving, wherein the juvenile judge of each contest gave the prize to their best friend, then shared the spoils, something the Competition Commission would be interested in.
• Consumption of large quantities of unnaturally coloured sweets, something the Food Standards Agency would be particularly unhappy about – I particularly love the advice given to “avoid Shark, swordfish and marlin” – an everyday component of many British inner city toddlers’ diets
• Lots and lots of shouting (see ASBO, above)

So once the combined might of bureaucrats belonging to the local magistrates, DfES, CC and FSA had shut the party down, what might a government-mandated alternative look like? My guess would be a Mozart piano recital presided over by a Community Support Officer, in which carrot batons and houmous are distributed equally (and above all quietly) between all of the subdued invitees. Thank heavens for political incorrectness.

Whilst the junior chimps were unsuccessfully pursuing a cockerel through the Devon farmyard last week, I took the opportunity to flick through the FT (not my own copy you understand, we were on hols with a proper businessman, not a parasitical hired-help such as myself), and found an article about business bloggers.

Today’s paradigm shifting question is: do I “write discreetly and bore readers witless”, or do I “reveal secrets and get fired”? Neither I hope, but you’re the judge of that (other than the firing bit, unless my boss is reading this).

Could anything on these endless dull pages aspire to be called “a rare flash of talent in the over-hyped and overcrowded field of blogging”? or is it truer to say that I have “an awesome lack of anything interesting to impart”?

Who cares. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Triangulating your resilience is like watching a swan.

Today's post (which is in a holiday mood) is proudly dedicated to the Baron, who after this afternoon is giving up exciting opportunities in a go-getting organisation in order to muck about with covenant re-sets for the rest of his career.

This week's lesson from Sralan on 'The Apprentice': "When I sell, I sell to people like Dixons". Maybe if they hadn't carried so much Amstrad stock, Dixons 106 closed stores might still be open.

Well, a very Happy Easter to you all, I'm out of town for a while. And remember - in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It’s probably true that hard work never killed anyone – but why take the chance?

Thanks to the late Gipper for today's title. Just goes to prove that you be a slacker and still make it to the top, provided that you're sufficiently charming.

Have you ever been trying to read a particularly complex paragraph in a book (this sort of thing) whilst on the train home when a series of unsolicited announcements (‘There is no smoking on this train …please do not leave bags unattended…please move right down inside the carriages…please do not give money to beggars’ etc) means that you have to re-read it 12 times for the meaning to go in?

Well, HMG’s latest idea is to distract your attention permanently from your own little life by deeming it necessary to have local council employees barking orders at us through loudspeakers
in addition to watching our every move on CCTV.

Better still, the government has come up with the idea of using local children to be ‘the voice of authority,’ in an effort to tug on the heartstrings of the minor offenders being harangued as they mind their own business urinating on bank machines and throwing litter bins at each other after a night drinking Thunderbird.

Can you imagine the trauma, as a hormonal 14 year old chav, of hearing an eight year old’s voice crackling ‘Please refrain from having unprotected intercourse on the park bench behind the running track’ over a nearby loudspeaker just as you enter the home straight with your girlfriend?

The UK, it seems, is turning into a vast, authoritarian primary school.

And finally, having spent yesterday afternoon on yet another training course discussing at length something called ‘permitted leakage’ in the context of locked box transactions, a couple of Trevor McDonald-style ‘light’ items to leave you with a warm feeling as you get on with your day:

• There seems to be a childrens’ film doing the rounds, incredibly called ‘The Last Mimzy’. Setting aside the Americanization (with a 'zee') of the spelling, this film suggests all sorts of inappropriate imagery to the adult viewer;


• ‘Menopause: the Musical’ (I sh*t you not) . Coming soon to a theatre near you: ‘Erectile dysfunction: the pop-up (but only after therapy) book'

If you are sad, you can pick a fantastic wine, drink it without saying a word and afterwards still not say a word and just make love

This morning’s blog title is courtesy of Gerard Depardieu, the celebrated French baquet de saindoux (‘tub of lard’ to you mon ami), perhaps best known for his portrayal of a 23 stone, um, ‘starving’ miner in the tedious early ‘90s French film ‘Germinal’, which I was lucky enough to sit through in a drafty Parisian cinema in the early 90s when I should have been doing my translation homework.

I found myself in the Lyceum Theatre on Saturday afternoon, blocking the view of the unfortunate 4 year olds sitting immediately behind me, watching ‘The Lion King’. I’ve decided that chartered accountancy will never make me rich, and will henceforth establish my fortune by flogging small branded soft toys (knocked out in Vietnamese sweatshops for 4p a throw) to yuppie children for £15. As for the show itself, there was one particular song about a depressive egomaniac whose ruthless power grab still didn't make him popular, which resonated somehow…

Scene XI - The madness of King Gordon
Enter King Gordon, crowned after an ‘accident’ disposed of Kallmitoni, his popular predecessor, prowling up and down his lonely cave, with Edballs, his hyena-in-chief

King Gordon: Edballs, why am I not loved? I am that rare and awesome thing, I'm every inch a king. Yet I feel a twinge of doubt, as I go walk about. When my name is whispered through the pride, is this talk of love or regicide? Tell me I'm adored, please tell me I'm adored. Day after day it gnaws at the very core of my being, it's like an itch... deep, persistent, profound...

Edballs: You are so adored, oh, you are so adored

KG: That's more like it

EB: Oh, how I miss Kallmitoni

KG: Kallmitoni?! Kallmitoni?! How dare you! I told you never to mention that name!

EB: Note taken. I shall never mention "K-k-k" again

KG: Even in death, his shadow looms over me, there he is! no! there he is! and there!

EB: Calm yourself, Sire, or you'll get another one of your splitting headaches!

KG: I am perfectly fine! I'm better than Kallmitoni was, I'm revered, I am reviled, I'm idolized, I am despised, I'm keeping calm, I'm going wild! I tell myself I'm fine.

EB: Oh, pull yourself together, Sire!

KG: Oh, very well. Edballs? Edballs, Edballs, Edballs...?

EB: Yes, Sire?

KG: Nobody loved me, there's the rub, not even as a cub. What did my brother have that I don't have?

EB: Do you want the short list or the long?