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?

Please don’t think, we've done all of the thinking for you

Back in the office after training. Today's title is a memorable quote from one of the partners running the course. Makes you think, dunnit?

And now for those of you who missed it, an executive summary of this week’s Apprentice (sponsored by the Amstrad E3 Superphone).

• Act I – Candidates boast about themselves: "I can be very offensive if I need to be…Life isn’t always biscuits and sandwiches…This is what I deserve"
• Act II – Candidates pretend to like each other: "If it goes Pete Tong, I’m in the boys’ room with you mate…We work on every deal as if it’s the last day of the last year…we work until we bleed…I could not be happier"
• Act III – Candidates got stressed doing a bad job: "If everyone just shuts up - let me talk, yeah…it’s ground it’s ground it’s ground it’s okay it’s ground…no it isn’t ground"
• Act IV – Pre-boardroom blame gathering: "You’re really beginning to p*ss me off…don’t try to pin this sh*t on me…f*ckin’ idiot… He’s nice, but not outstanding in any way…not really cut out for the business world…We bought? No – you bought…He was weak"
• Act V – Enter Sralan, the pantomime bad guy, repeatedly mangling the present tense of the verb 'to be': "I tell yer sumfink wot’s definite, Certus is gonna bleedin’ ‘urt us…Let’s get down to the business of the task… is we usin’ the ‘we’ ‘ere? the proverbial ‘we’? … You went off nilly-willy…Was you in charge of the purchasin’?...This weren’t exactly the Man’attan project…It’s no good talkin’ after the ‘ors ‘as bolted"
• Act VI – Denouement: "Nice enuff fella as you are…yer fired…Please Sralan, don’t fire me, I’ll give you 110% (etc)"
• Act VI – Epilogue: Ruth bloody Badger (who’s lost some weight, but only around her face, somehow) completes the ritual humiliation of the loser on live TV, using a series of mixed up metaphors involving plates - “Stepping up to the plate is a poisoned chalice”; “You were forced up to the plate, and you were forced to eat” (wrong sort of plate, dufus, it’s a baseball analogy ). Crestfallen loser then gives insightful analysis of the reasons for their failure (“I should have made some decisive decisions”)

~The End~

Training

So I'm on shore leave for the time being, and spent today at a jolly corporate training facility (whose meeting rooms are named after irritating neo-fascist corporate goals such as 'Achievement' and 'Triumph') to learn about a global mandatory framework rollout.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but it's not such a bad course (although one of the facilitators keeps saying 'pacific' instead of 'specific', and I got into trouble for asking what or who an 'insights breakout' is), although a quick bit of mental arithmetic indicates that the grad trainee sitting on the same table as me was born in 1984. Jesus.

Anyway, part of the course inevitably involves one of those jolly corporate videos with jingling music, containing a mixture of stock corporate shots (people walking purposefully across office reception areas, groups of staff representing each colour, creed and religion under the sun chatting animatedly around a laptop - you've all seen it), senior people looking like rabbits caught in headlights saying important things badly, and a hand-picked selection of young, good looking junior staff mouthing platitudes about how fantastic everything is.

The problem is that said youngsters are all too obviously reading off a card held up behind (and slightly to the left of) the camera (the Managing Partner is almost certainly holding their family hostage to ensure they co-operate), rather in the style of those occasional and unfortunate POWs who are paraded on a tinpot dictatorship's TV screens, very unconvincingly telling the world that they've got it all wrong and the war should stop...


Just discovered facebook by the way. Having spent 10 minutes leafing through pages and pages of pimply youths who will graduate from Harvard in 2012, I suddenly feel very very old.

Carpe Diem friends, because sic transit gloria mundi

We're potentially getting into a pretty interesting time

The Apprentice is back tomorrow – check out this year’s crop of unpleasant obnoxious over-achievers, who still don’t get the basic premise of the show, which is that Sir Alan simply doesn’t like youngsters who are likely to be more successful than him, and especially those with more than 3 GCSEs. So he fires them.

On the subject of salesmen, as I barged my way into the station during rush hour this morning, a glossy piece of paper was thrust into my hand by a young buck lurking by the perpetually malfunctioning ticket machine. Such pieces of paper are usually ads for gyms, art fairs, bars, and most often of all the local Conservative party asking commuters to moan to them about the trains (you think I’m kidding?)

Not this time, however – I was the lucky recipient of something called a ‘CareersLife Outlook newsletter’ – written very much in the style of Jehovah’s Witness literature – lots of open ended, existential questions about the meaning of life and whether the reader has ever seriously considered just why the hell their pathetic little existence is so utterly pointless.

And is the same way that seemingly innocuous dinner parties held by the fervently religious result in a call to give your heart to the Lord over pudding, the leaflet invites the reader to ‘discover more’. And so I did.

After digging about on their website for five minutes (and ignoring the irritatingly clichéd quotes from ‘wise men’ such as, um, F.W. Nichol, liberally sprinkled all over it), it turns out that these fellows, who live in a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Portsmouth, have invented some certificates that they sell to their grateful clients. You start as an ICC, progress to ICDF, and if you’re really good, you make it to ILA. You then spent the rest of your life explaining to baffled interviewers what these initials stand for. I’ve forgotten already.

I’m guessing that the ICDFs mentor the ICCs, and the ILAs mentor the ICDFs, meaning the only thing needed to maintain the momentum is an endless supply of fresh candidates for the ICC. Which brings us neatly back to the chaps lurking in the station this morning. Brilliant.

A couple of questions, though:

• If you accept FG’s central thesis that most jobs are crap, and that they offer a failsafe superhighway to a better lifestyle, why do they spend their time hanging around stations doling out newsletters?


• Is there the slightest possibility that in order to become an ICC, ICDF and/or ILA, you may just have to pay them just a small sum of money?


• The website disclaimer claims (or perhaps disclaims) that ‘“FranklinWaugh” is a registered trademark of Franklin Waugh Ltd.’ Yes, well…this isn’t strictly true in a couple of key respects – firstly it isn’t a registered trademark, and secondly, FranklinWaugh Ltd doesn’t exist. As they themselves quote so memorably on their website: "Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters" - Albert Einstein.

To finish on a lighter note, here is a strong contender for the most boring wikipedia entry on earth. Any other ideas?

Purity? Balls.

Apparently a quiet news day for the Daily Telegraph today. Having a delightful (and forever chaste) daughter myself, I shouldn’t be writing this, but given the pictorial evidence above, let’s just say that certain young ladies will probably have fewer problems retaining their honour through those difficult teenaged years than others.

Remaining on the subject of religion (albeit tangentially), I found myself sitting cross legged on the floor of a church hall on Friday morning (it would take too long to explain why), fiddling around with plastic toys at the Baptist playgroup whilst keeping half an eye on the baby chimps.
Certain moaning right wing papers (most of which I read, and wholly agree with, of course) bang on incessantly about the feminisation of society, and the dire consequences of everything from the oestrogen in our drinking water to the lack of male role models for boys during their critical years of development due to the absence of fathers, male teachers etc.

Needless to say I was the only male older than 3½ in the room, and as is the case with most fathers, I soon mucked in and started building stuff with bricks, making fire engine noises etc. This soon attracted a small but loyal following of youngsters mistakenly referring to me as ‘daddy’. One of them even presented me with a small knitted ball, measuring perhaps 4 inches across, and judging by its weight, filled with old socks or tights. The sort of thing with no edges, no corners, indeed no potential to harm anyone at all. (You can see where this is heading).

“Wow!” I said, “Thank you!” (addressing those under 3 requires the liberal use of exclamation marks!!), “a ball!! Shall we throw it?”. And so I gently threw the ball maybe three feet into the air, with sixteen pairs of juvenile eyes following its climb and descent with a mixture of wonderment and delight. “Again!” someone said. So I threw it again, this time eliciting some giggles of pleasure from the assembled watchers. And then before I knew it…

… one of the old bats who runs the place (short hair, overweight, smells of moth ball, looks like a dog breeder) had waddled over, and said in a tone which could only be described as light-hearted-with-an-undertone-of-threat, “We don’t approve of that sort of thing here, and I’d be grateful if you could stop immediately,” as if I’d been teaching my young charges the rudiments of sodomy.

Well I mean, honestly. No wonder we trample all over God's earth destroying things when we're brought up by such people.

The gawky and lifeless sit around, innocent of any flicker of intelligence

Thanks to the late, great Anglo-Yank Alastair Cooke for today's blog title - an uncannily accurate description of beancounting towers, where I spend every waking hour. Well, I never thought I'd live to see this day, but the lovely, inclusive, collegiate, all-round good bloke Gordon Brown has actually increased my net wealth thanks to the latest budget, to the tune of 50.42pence per day. Gordon, I salute you. That will bring down my Stamp Duty bill on the new chimp enclosure (still in Tooting, alas) to just £27,366, a trifling tax bill which will only take an entire year of mortgage repayments to pay back.

Enough from me. I'm off to read up on just how the bloody hell I'm going to "handle the 'paradox of success.'" Nice one

Forecasts are forecasts really, you don't really know until you know

An Excel Chimp budget day scoop - insider knowledge of GB's final budget!

Benign debt paydown profile

So I was on the train home last night accompanied by the usual collection of South African accountants heading to Wimbledon and corporate brokers heading to Farnham when the woman standing next door got involved in one of those tedious high-volume one-sided mobile calls that make other commuters' lives hell. Said woman, however, was a very loud, very confident and very OK City yuppy, brimming with uber-confidence and desperate to tell the equally bumptious person on the other end of the phone how simply ghastly the weather was in New York at the weekend, and how it was absolutely dreadful that poor Jessica had just got pregnant after moving in with her boyfriend of nine months.

Then, the two blonde, tanned South African girls next to me on the other side started sniggering loudly, saying in a thick Gauteng accent "Does she know how ridiculous she sounds?" "Yah." Long live multiculturalism - your opportunity to hate people of all races equally...

Still, at least the South Africans are moving up the London social food chain

Crack on and give it our best shot

Finally signed off regional project on Friday, although not without a couple of calls in the middle of the night. Now facing the ghastly prospect of having to self-assess my performance using the 15-box 9-dimensional core competencies system as part of what I believe is called an 'interim appraisal'. Have a good week.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même run rate analysis

Here again in the spooky cold office with no-one else around and the lights going out every five minutes requiring a ridiculous dance which results in my iPod headphones getting tangled up with my mouse. Whoopee do, life in the M&A fast lane. The proverbial late night axe murderer charging hrough the darkened office could run at me, strike a lethal blow through my skull and get out of the building before the so-called firking motion-sensing lights finally blink into life.

Not sure I'm going to hang around to find out. I dream of sleep. Yet when I sleep I don't dream. Odd.

It's acceptable to punch someone who's resisting

So, it's approaching 4am, and I'm engrossed in part 8 of 'Deutsche Plus' on the BBC Learning Zone. So just who the f*ck sits at home learning German at this time of f*cking day, especially from idiot actors wearing pale brown shoes and stupid waistcoats?

It's deadline week, so I'm willing to bet that this won't be the last stupid bedtime this week.

Another gem on a conference call today:
Banker to PE guy: I'm assuming your process is running like a well-oiled sewing machine?
FD of target to no-one in particular: So which one of us is getting stitched up?

Guten nacht, alles.