Christmata.

Not everyone approaches the sexual act the same way.

Whilst that is playing on your mind, i'll switch tack over to the topic at hand, so fluidily that you, the reader, will probably not even notice....Many different factors affect a persons approach to the Christmas festive season; there are generational nuances, class variations, chronology of childhood/adulthood, religious inclination....mental health condition....(the same thing?)

This year was not the Christmas that I expected. Traditionally or at least in recent years, I have spent the build up to Christmas combining working hard to earn an engorged December pay with having a good deal of holiday remaining allowing me to make the holiday period predominantly out of office. Mix this with work Christmas parties, friends parties, seasonal decorations and general good cheer and you have a heady mix that makes that 4/5 day return to the family embrace a warm and upbeat engagement, feeling insufficient in it's fleeting nature.

2009 however and from the off a few pieces were not quite in place. It was like a football missing a talented left winger or a talismatic captain, they can adjust and utilise momentum to flounder through a few matches but ultimately they will fail. Tottenham without Modric, United with Ronaldo, Chelsea without Drogba, Hull without Bullard....

An extended metaphor for those dulled into a coma by the football reference:

Buzzcocks without Bill Bailey, Quinticenssial Englishness as a media presence without Stephen Fry, Mr T without the A-team (see world of warcraft adverts currently on TV), Knight Rider without Hasslehof....

And to reverse the metaphor for indulgence:

Father Ted with chisled good looks, Indiana Jones with CGI'd monkey's...in fact...George Lucas with access to modern technology.....etc.

Back to the point,

I hate my job, it's about as financially productive and as valuable a use of my short life as it would be to post your Gold to those Gold buying companies currently on TV or dressing the concept of time up as a five pound note and swallowing it, then burning your faecal matter a day or two later, having spent the interim time period whilst it worked it's way through your bowels attempting to insert your own elbows into your anus.

I spent my carefully saved holiday days attending interviews for equally as unsatisfying jobs, didn't have the money to enjoy the process of purchasing gifts for others, exploring Christmas or buying luxuries like fucking travel cards.

It weighed on my mind and whilst i made Christmas happen, I didn't feel it.

There was the family event, the big day, a gathering of an extended network of blood line, all under 5ft 9 inches, they gathered stumpy and present laden, ready to save the 'day'.

'You're what, 29 and i'm giving you a stocking filled with presents?' barked my father at 10am Christmas day, after literally dragging me out of bed by my disgruntled foot. One swift reprimand for my pitiful career and several forceful suggestions that i'm a 'bit different' and my illusions of the family embrace healing my wounds like a crying child gripping it's mothers arm, were shattered.

In 1718 BlackBeard made his last stand, staving off inevitable defeat with 25 pirates and a ten gun ship named the Adventurer until he was killed in a gruelling hand to hand battle with his opposing captain.

In December 2009, I made a last stand, staving off an inevitable pitt of despair with an illmanned sense of Christmas cheer and a pen knife with pliers attachment that i recieved as one of an entourage of inexplicable gifts.

However, BlackBeard had his head swung beneath the bows of his enemies ship as a warning and as a sign that the most fearsome scurge of the seven seas had finally been defeated. Christmas 2009 would have no such victory over me, scurge all who like the point to be presented quickly and without going around the houses for the sake of pure indulgence.

Here we are in January 2010 and I am sat at my desk wearing a colourful jumper and a cheery grin, albeit eyes so puffy that they look like Charlie Brooker just got angrier, but i'm chipper.

The long and the short of it is that (like BlackBeard), I had a fucking good time. I enjoyed the incredulous sense of disbelief when I was handed an Ed Byrne DVD, I enjoyed being told that know one in the family understands me and that i couldn't have a lift at 7pm in the evening to go 8 miles, because, 'we are not a taxi service'.

I enjoyed it because it was unique to my breathren clan, absurd and exemplorary of a technically functional British family with absolutely no idea how to communicate and learn from each other.....except, they are and they do, they just haven't a clue how to express it so frustrate each other to the point of utter disbelief which marvelously, no longer comes to a head by way of explosive row....

in fact....

this year....

...It lead instead, to me attending a 'body pump' class that was fronted by a stunningly beautiful blonde woman who was seemingly considerably stronger than I, with my father. A unique way to vent your Christmas frustrations and find a bonding point that welded a generation together in the ridiculous, found sanity amongst the body pumping insane, welded the family middle class in the face of 'them lot with accents' and caused me a serious long term knee injury.

A week well spent.

Sweep it under the carpet.

Recently I have been plagued with feelings that I have let my life wind down a bit:

My job is a depressing waste of time counterweighted only by the fact that it requires about as much effort as lifting an empty box once every 20 minutes over a working day....interspersed with the occasional urgent lunge toward my telephone where I call my own answering machine and leave myself a message.

My social life is pottering along nicely but is only a hairsbreadth from becoming a close knit circuit of dinner parties and book reading meetings. That isn't due to a lack of opportunity to explore the surrounding world or even a lack of invitations to attend varied hedonistic occasion, it is more down to an internal sense of age.

So many weights begin to build upon social adventure as time passes...it hurts more in the morning that it used to....I’m more tired after work than I used to be....I’m reticent to skip sports lest I suddenly put on 40 stone and sound like I’m drowning in my own fat when I speak....I feel like I should be saving money not spending it and am aware that I might end up like a neglected old war veteran rationing the heating and attempting receding inside my own emotionally scarred memory bank to escape the cold....I feel like I used to be more fun, but I’m aware that I dislike that person as well on account of them being a super twat bag....I miss 3 day drinking binges with wild drug intake in a crack flat with only gnawed pieces of mouldy bread and 40 cans of lager for sustenance....but it would kill me and I’d have cunts for friends.....

and so on....

These things bother me sometimes despite the avenues of social exploration that I do adopt always resulting in a fine time and an anecdote or two, perhaps it is just the volume of opportunity that London offers making exploration seem a little less adventurous?

Regardless; I live in Stoke Newington, Hackney and recent event has evidenced quite nicely that my concerns are unnecessary and ill founded as I live in an area so absurd as to quite literally bring the sort of carefree nonsensical idiocy to my very front door.

From the street you must approach our basement flat abode by journeying down a set of steps into a large patio area suitable for BBQ's and the like. Under these steps is a cupboard guarded by a metal door and a bolt. In this cupboard is a dirty, damp stinking collection of our friend’s spare clothes and old bed linen. Quite recently the weather has become aggressively foul and this seems to have scattered and disturbed the local homeless community like ants facing an assault of boiling water. One of these street scavengers too shelter in our yard, a point that I was alerted to one morning as I strode naked into my room, glanced out of the window that was directly ahead of me and noticed a ragged looking fellow sat on a plastic chair and doffing his cap at me like an English gent on a Sunday who's garden I was passing.

Interestingly, when faced with a potentially violent, complete unknown loitering in your yard covered in mud and rain, the revealing of one's own birthday suit seems inconsequential.

Feeling a deep sense of empathy for his situation, I called in to working citing a tramp in my yard and stayed in bed allowing him shelter. The ambitious little fellow was not happy with his lot though and promptly smashed the lock of the cupboard off, bent the bolt and put up home in the musky under stair cubby hole, a veritable stig of the dump.

Being a natural coward, I stayed in bed until he left and told myself that I was being a Good Samaritan. Over the following week he returned on occasion to his newly found home to roost until my flat mate (a small girl from Birmingham) took up the man of the house mantra and shoed him away like a stray cat, though given her mindset I’m sure that had he in fact been a stray cat, or dressed as a cat, he would now be living in the flat and defecating in the cat litter box as freely as his cat suit would permit.

The ordeal over I gradually regained the confidence to walk through the yard as oppose to the all new head down dash attack that I had adopted. That is until but a few days later another one of club street roamer came strolling through our threshold gate and began plodding down the steps full of aplomb and as smiley and happy as lord.

He wanted to know if his chum 'was in'....was in? 'Was in' in so much as the cupboard was now his permanent abode? I wonder if he's informed the Post office of this new address and left a forwarding address at on top of the cardboard box that he used to live in.

Barely having recovered from the surprise at the audacity of our parasitic friend I was enjoying one of my favourite day's in the house with tea, biscuits, computer games, Father Ted DVD's and children’s TV(I’m hooked on the new adventures of Iron Man), when two burly looking men began sweeping up outside my front door. Disconcerting at the best of times but our front door has a glass transparent front and leads directly from the yard into the lounge.

So whilst naught but a couple of inches of glass separated me from these angry looking do-gooders, I pondered, 'how often can I ignore events like these before I begin awaking to a homeless sleeping next to me in bed and a behemoth of a man vacuuming my room?'

Before the full impact of that thought had reverberated through me one of them knocked on the door.

This was it, he obviously wanted to sweep up the kitchen wearing a dress, and I was doomed.

Apparently they were builders, and apparently they were sweeping up the mess that they had made but a few days earlier and apparently his broom had snapped so could he borrow mine?

In a flash I had provided my sweeping device, innocent as they motivations of these men, they made me uncomfortable and I wanted them gone. Some time later (there was a great deal of mess and my broom is of limited usefulness resembling more of old toothbrush than a method of 'sweeping' away rubble) a knock at the door, and the call of 'I’ll just leave it put here mate', though he didn't look that bright so probably miss-spelled his own sentence, 'out hear'....

Once I was sure that the coast was clear I poked my suspicious little head around the door fearing having to sign for delivery of a package that the tramp had ordered or something, perhaps a new welcome mat. The broom was leaning on the wall. Or rather, A broom was leaning on the wall. The Builder had swapped it for a white one of similar quality taking my blue one with him.

BUT WHY?

The brooms were of similar inefficient quality, this wasn't the alleged broken broom and presumably he had to go and get it, else never would have needed mine in the first place.....

Perhaps he fears the colour white? Or is so unhappy in his marriage that any variety of any kind is vital to the perpetuation of his bliss? 

I wish him well with his new broom and certainly haven't suffered for the replacement, but I am now acutely aware that I do not need to leave my own living room to endure anecdote provoking lunacy and that anyone who says that one is wasting one's life by just sitting in front of the TV is completely wrong, if anything to go out, to leave all of that to go on un-seen would be a crime.

After all, if a tramp moves in to a cupboard and no-one knew he's done it, would he have really moved in at all?

In Decision.

Decisions are the toughest part of life.

Not only does the approaching need for a decision drag in one hand a Christmas stocking brimming with glorious potential, but in the other a fettered old sack oozing putrefied dreams.

Should I go on holiday?

Should I leave my wife?

Should I hold up traffic by stopping and asking directions or just take this next left? It's probably left...

Should I call that client today?

Shall I pass the ball or shoot for goal?

Should I hand this wallet in or spend the money?

Should I vote for George Bush or just kill myself now?

Should I drown my housemates cat in the river or just club it to death with a hard back copy of Blitz Cat and then claim that the book 'fell' off the shelf?

(Are you technically a casualty of World War 2 if paraphernalia that only exists because of it kills you?)

There are endless decisions of every level of importance and every one of them right down to the subconscious and accidental shape our lives and consequently the existential reality of those around us in some sort of decision making Fantastic Mr. Fox Trot.

The Butterfly effect ones choices are immeasurable and unquantifiable, but conjecture is nonetheless interesting.

Last Friday night I stopped out after work for a drink in the White Horse pub Soho. From the window I could see the back of a theatre that the erstwhile Dylan Moran is performing in. He was standing out the back of theatre swilling a glass of wine and manically waving a cigarette as per his comedic persona. Either Dylan Moran has become his own character or Black Books is really more of a documentary.

That was at about 6pm and there was something seductive and vital about the way Moran carelessly swilled his health away whilst being entirely successful (appearing on the surface to do so without any effort and almost to hold success in contempt). Instantly I felt the need to regress to an infantile state of booze swilling, foot loose, foot uncertain, good time lovin' student Dom.

Luckily I had a party invitation ready and willing.

By 3am I was without my coat, my beloved mid nineties adidas tracksuit top, my mobile phone headphones and my mind...oh and my house key. Not noticing the lack of house key until I arrived at my front door the torrent of thoughts...'my housemates not in...should I go back to look for the key....I can't afford that taxi....can I smash a window?....what if I try to and the brick rebounds of the window and hits me in the face?...What would Bruce Willis do?....

Knowing that I had to be up in 5 hours anyway to get myself to Surrey to lose a game of horribly amateurish football to men better suited to sitting down in a curry house than running around, I just couldn't sanction the taxi spend to travel across London to stay within the protective walls of a friends sanctuary.

There is something about whistling wind and a border line Ice storm that makes a man covering his Torso in naught but a baby blue Childs 70's T-shirt feel vulnerable. Alone and vulnerable...in Hackney. The excuse to launch Rockets into the air and burn one's own hand off with fire sticks is definitely not lost on the children of Hackney and the 6th of November was not a good place to be drunk, cold and with no where to go. It felt similar to Stalingrad 1944 and had there been a fellow human around that I was capable of overpowering I would surely have panicked and eaten him.

As it was, I was a very lucky fellow. I use lucky in the broadest sense of the term, as there was a sleeping back out on our washing line that I had neglected to bring back into the house to see how long it would take for it to be stolen. It was of course damp and cold sort of like a corpse just pulled out of the Thames being pressed against your face. This was to be my plank of wood at sea, my puddle in the desert, my slippers in a snow storm.

Tucked away on the hard cold concrete floor with this wet bag pulled up over my head I was just well protected enough to doze off until morn and awake having absorbed the bag moisture into my now wrinkly skin. I looked like a man who had gone into a cocoon and emerged 60 years older, an age accelerating hibernation serving little to no use or purpose lest I need to enter a pruniest face competition or to go undercover in a care home.

Was this all Dylan Moran’s fault? It was his decision to emerge out the back of the theatre and be all physically charismatic and carefree...but who made the decision to send him out that way in the first place?....and who made the decision to build the theatre in the first place? I have much work to do if I am to identify the culprit and have my vengeance.

Perhaps though there are even worse consequences. Perhaps an inquisitive firework wielding child due to embark upon DofE the following week saw me clamber youthful and enthused into the embryonic sleeping rag and happened to be passing later that morning when I twitched and writhed until the sack spat me out, birthed like a sodden foal, reborn, an octogenarian. Fearing the consequences of entering a sleeping bag he refused to attend the DofE award opting instead to spend the time studying at school under the supervision of a teacher. The teacher was a lonely middle aged spinster with confidence problems and after a couple of days of proximity they find themselves in an impassioned embrace, the confused hormones of youth crashing into the menopause, a symphonic eruption. Inevitably, the ensuing media storm drives them both to move to Eastleigh for a fresh start, where the boredom results in their mutual premature deaths just 6 months later.

My fault? Or Dylan Moran’s?

Dermot-itis.

It was prime-time television, it was a Sunday, my flat mate had control of the remote control and I was trapped under the oppressive weight of a belly flopping fat man of a hangover.

The scene was set for subjection to the televisual equivalent of attending a karaoke night in the Rhondda Valley with a vice on the top of my head gripping at my temples, a dog strapped to the vice barking incessantly into one ear, whilst a screaming malnourished baby is strapped mouth first to my other ear.

And so X factor began with the usual strobing effect of a light display designed to completely baffle the audience and fox them into thinking that something of value was going to happen; other than a bunch of self obsessed casualties of the modern celebrity disease further sickening the wafer thin fabric of personality that allegedly still exists amongst our youth that is.


Naturally, there was the usual repetitive formula: The 'judges' arrive and every one cheers as ominous music follows them out onto the stage, the harbingers of doom. This is always followed by the acute awareness that having put oneself in a position where the credibility and personality of Cheryl Cole can make or break you is a bit like bending over in a prison shower with the soap already wedged between your buttocks and an ACME cartoon sign point at it. Well, it isn't observed that way, but it really should be.

Next the carefully compiled collection of desperate, attention seeking, brain dead fucktards are wheeled out before us to showcase how idiotic they are as a unit with some kind of 'team' performance. Once the audience has been stunned into disbelief, convinced that this really is the peak of entertainment and talent otherwise how could anyone have the gall to showcase it, the collective are removed and then hoisted back on individually, to sing, dance and ultimately cry.

The crying has become an implicit part of the performance these days. Sing, dance, cry. Almost as if being marked by a special board of Olympic judges with boxes that need ticking and ranking.

-Sing:  7 (sang someone else’s song not as well as they sang it...again)
-Dance: 1 (dancing that only someone now convinced that conviction is more important than visual effect   would attempt...again)
- Cry: 10 (perfect, instant, convincing, desperately selfish and transparent).

I could go on, but complaining about what should be self evident to a nation of perfectly well educated Brits with an incomprehensible depth of culture and intrigue at their finger tips BUT IS APPARANTLY NOT, is as tedious as the show itself.

HOWEVER, this Sunday, something marvelous occurred. The events of this particular episode of Twat Factor were so overwhelmingly beautiful that we shall claim that the only reason I shan't watch it again is so not to ruin it.

Dermot O’Leary, much maligned by those with an IQ over 17 but much loved but those with a chronological existence of under 17. Describing exactly why he is a terrible presenter that should be shot for having the gall to accept his massive wage for being a useless sack of unrecyclable, non bio-degradable waste, is remarkably difficult to get exactly right. This Sunday, Dermot O’Leary finally gave us the anecdotal example required to dismiss the babblings of the dribblingly idiotic that he has a value.

Dermot O’Leary accidentally blurted out at a clearly confused, unfit aging Whitney Houston who's dress had mimicked her career and come undone, leaving her partly exposed....he blurted out in general on stage filler communication, designed to make Whitney look good and set up album/tour plugging....he blurted out in the midst of what is the summation of what could be termed his 'talent'...."you don't take any punches do you Whitney".

It is only sad that his career has not been torn from his sweating mitt as he clearly realised what he had just said as soon as it popped out of his yapping bleat box. It was all down hill from there as he then proceeded to clap Whitney by pounding a closed fist into an open hand, the type of obscure idiocy that only someone aware of a mistake can make as they scrabble around inside their own tiny minds to find all the things that they absolutely must not do.

As the drivel wound down to it's gurgling conclusion, I sloped off to bed hangover finally absorbing the last throws of consciousness, but my slumber was all contentment, assured that somewhere, Dermot O’Leary was more uncomfortable than I.

Paying the Price of Katie Price.

Today’s ‘hot’ news in the Guardian was yet another terrifying reminder of the damage that humanity has done to the global climate. The article showcases the effects of speeding up climate change and explains that the Greenland Ice sheet is uniquely vulnerable and melting at an unexpected and terrifying rate.

The same of course can be said of the soul of one Katie Price (Aka Jordan) as it squirms, squeals and writhes in the fires of hell before she’s likely to be anywhere near the end of her mortal life, let alone have passed on and suffered the inevitable consequences of eternal damnation. It seems reasonable even to believe that the certainty with which she is going to hell concludes the perennial question of the existence of the after life.

Over the last few months, the most deliberate indifference to the banshee like squawking of Katie Price has proved no defence against the accumulation of the knowledge of her every move. At some point in the recent past the two most pointless human beings on the face of the planet broke off a relationship. A relationship that is, with as much depth and emotional value as two Barbie dolls that had been dropped in Ronseal and inadvertently landed with their eternally static faces on top of each other seemingly simulating a kiss.

Why do we know this? We know this because they haven’t shut up yapping about it for 3 months. Why do we know that they haven’t shut up about it? Because it has been the front page story of every, nonsensical, bile spewing, humanity slaying shit rag this side of Gordon Browns to do list. Why do we know that? We know it because just above every piece of media that might nourish or stimulate the thought process of the British public, just at eye level, is a Heat magazine or an OK magazine or the Sun or the Daily Star. Any number of these insults to journalism, fit only for wrapping up a dead cat before you bury it, are currently in circulation, at last count there were actually more tabloid journalists than people in the world…..

Utter rubbish, annotated by people so desperate to be considered a journalist that they will write about the text that someone who broke up with someone sent when they were pretending to be upset……and then felt the need to forward the text to all the journo/PR contacts in their phone….and write about it….for 3 months…..on a daily basis.

Obviously it is no coincidence that in the case of Katie Price and Peter Andre, they have stamped their devil hooves as loud as they could as a pre-amble to both having an incredibly dull reality show about themselves released. Blur vs Oasis eat your heart out.

On the bright side, as a reaction to the airing of the first episodes of these pustules on the cheek of television, a ratings war has erupted. There are even people who are willing to refer to them selves as ‘Team Andre’ and have begun to harangue Katie Price. With any luck this will develop into the spiky, self obsessed infestation being ripped limb from limb by enraged hordes of Andre fans wearing old Richard Nixon masks converted by an ill conceived recycling plan into the face of Peter Andre.

Despite all of this though, it doesn’t seem fair to blame the likes of Price and Andre for any of this. They are just incredibly well animated automatons being lead like starving prisoners into a furnace that they think contains food. It even almost seems naïve to point the finger of blame at the perpetually interested members of the public who insist on dipping their frontal lobes into this literary pot of acid. After all, who knows better the meaninglessness of this all than the publishers and the journalist’s who produce the information and farm it out like Nestle powdered milk to ill educated developing countries.

The Daily Star today:



It is not the fi rst time Kate has lashed out in public since she split from pop singer Peter.


During her wild booze-fest in Ibiza earlier in the summer, Kate threatenedto “cut” Daily Star Goss Girl
Jessica Brown.


And last month, after spending a week’s holiday cavorting for the press cameras with new fella Alex
Reid, 34, she greeted me on her return to Britain at Gatwick Airport by snarling: “Is it true you take it
up the arse?”

First of all it is worth noting that the spelling and typo errors on the above are as published, but more importantly notice that Katie Price has probably the first time in her entire life asked a layered an poignant question.

She asked Gemma Wheatley, the journalist in question, ‘Do you take it up the arse?’

She most certainly does. In a desperate, futile attempt to gain a sense of self worth, to be a member of what can be one of the most valuable, powerful and well respected institutions in contemporary human existence, a Journalist, she takes it up the arse from a giant un-lubricated Devil’s fist from deadline to deadline. It must be agony, and I hope she gives birth to a Goat as penance.

In the long run, Gemma Wheatley can molest Katie Price as much as she wishes through the Daily Stars bleating trumpet, she needs Katie Price, her retarded giant child, blind stupidity, raw venom, pure selfishness and whopping great mammary glands. She needs Katie Price. Imagine that. Just imagine it.

Edgy Veggie

What is it about Vegetarianism that incites such a sweepingly dismissive attitude from the average meat eater?



It is a patient vegetarian whom thinks it wise to raise an eyebrow, or grimace at jocular talk of bludgeoning a beast of burden or sucking marrow from the femur of a ferret.



The peculiar response is usually one of aggressive mocking. Not your run of the garden, lads together, tongue in cheek jousting in and around each others belief systems or principles, but a genuine short tempered blurt.


The intrinsic flaw in communication is that the meat eater will move from the innocent asker of a question, such as, 'why are you a vegetarian', to a group of people lambasting the moral crusader in question - whether they answer the question or not.

Said lambastication will be full to the abattoir brim with Normative arguments. That is to say statements that propose a value beyond factual observation.
Example:
'You NEED to eat meat' or 'Vegetarian food ISN'T as good as meat'.

Idle, nonsensical, meaningless, aggression. Despite the nature of the statements being structured to draw argumentative responses, the aggressing party will then look at the respondent like a preaching fundamentalist when they finally offer their feelings on the matter.

For example, my official stance is simply this:
'I do not need to eat meat to have a healthy, fulfilling life. Taking the life of an animal without cause or necessity seems to me to be spitting in the face of the human soul that we have been afforded. The very thing that allegedly sets the human aside from the animal is the ability to consider, to think in a considered and self-aware fashion. This is the very process that allows us to pose moral questions and require answers before we continue with an unnecessary indulgence'.

The common response:
'I like the taste of meat too much to give it up' 'Meat is good for you' 'You need meat to survive' 'It's the food chain' 'A lion wouldn't think twice before eating you'.
'I don't agree with Vegetarianism'.
The implication:
Vegetarians are idiots.

At this juncture, roughly 30 minutes of terrible jokes about how eating lettuce is killing a lettuce and telling me I would eat meat if my mothers life depended on it....etc.....

The inflated sense of victory and achievement that comes with this is born of the fact that there are invariably more meat eaters in the room than vegetarians. The lack of interest in pursuit of the debate from the vegetarian once this level of puerile nonsense is introduced to undermine a perfectly reasonable discussion point, in order to maintain the status quo only exacerbates this.

Perhaps what causes the habit laden, blood gargling retards who shout out this feculence freely whilst smashing the bones of their victims into the top of their skulls, is that they are being asked to question the morality of their actions simply by the existence of a vegetarian.

What is preferable - to double check that you are safe from mass ostracism by colluding with those who's actions match your own? Or to carefully consider your own real feelings about a point of moral question.

There is no debate about whether the moral question exists. Vegetarians have asked it.
There is also no debate about whether the next person who tells me that i need meat to survive, blissfully unaware that i am in fact... alive...will be faced with, instead of apathy and disregard, vitriol and persistence.

This is a vow:

Come near me with a normative argument designed to sidestep consideration of the question being asked and i will hound you like hungry wolf tracks sheep, until you wilt and die of exhaustion.
Why do meat eaters aggress vegetarians? Fear, fear that they are Jew killing Nazi's dressed up as parents and friends.

'That and because meat clogs the artery that takes blood to their brain', I might say if i were to adopt the approach of my enemy.

Which i won't.

The Joy Division at the Hub.

Negotiating the politics of the work place can be a difficult affair that will oft drive one to the very brink of despair.

Common sense will clash with functionality on an almost hourly basis. Ease of process is usually harranged and dragged to the floor by middle management for no explicable reason. There is, in fact, nothing quite so fascinating as watching a perfectly reasonable idea preyed upon like a straggler on the wilds of the African plains, brutally subdued and strangled by a prowling hungry Lion. The helpless on lookers plod on perhaps only meters away from the thrashing victims final lifeless twitches, tapping away, heads down, tapping cowardly belligerent emails back and forth in silence never daring to open their challenge to the floor.

Have you ever read a Zebra's outbox content?

'That Lion thinks he's the Billy Bollocks, but he doesn't know what he's fucking talking about. I heard he's shagging a Giraffe behind his wife's back anyway, but she actually knows and doesn't care because she's pregnant with by that Macaque monkey that's always hanging about'.

It isn't all doom, gloom and wild frustration though, just every now and again, business process will falter, trip and celebrate individuality. A dangerous move that normally signals and alarm flashing in HR's offices with a Neon sign screaming 'SUPPRESS SUPPRESS'. An example of this occasional occasion was last Friday:

In an attempt to involve the staff in a new centralised office site shrewdly named, 'The Hub', my office in the midst of a tube strike requested that those of us who had difficulty getting to work, annotate our tales of innovation and ingenuity.

Naturally, there is very little outside of utilising a different mode of transport and getting up early that can be done about a tube strike. The idea that someone might feel compelled to report to all and sundry that they cleverly took a bus instead of headed underground to stand in a sweltering sardine tin, frankly left me embarrassed for our vision less stumbling HR department.

So i contrived a ridiculous, rushed and childish lie about how I had dealt with this allegedly complex travel situation.

To my delight I arrived this morning to this:

http://thehub.incisivemedia.com/tube-strike-escapade

Which in case the link doesn't work, Reads:

Tube Strike Escapades
It is impressive how far some employees will go to get into work
Thank you to everyone who submitted their stories concerning the obstacles they faced trying to get into the office and the creative ways in which they battled to overcome them. We have awarded Rekha Pindoria from the Finance department with a bottle of champagne for her efforts, arriving at the Haymarket office at 7.00am!!One other employee's imaginative endeavour stood out above the rest, demonstrating 100% commitment and loyalty to Incisive Media.Unfortunately this heroic colleague submitted their story anonymously! Therefore if you wrote it or know who did, please contact Terri-Ann Barry in the HR department, as we have a bottle of champagne waiting for them....

"Travelling to work from Stoke Newington ran a risk of being a difficulty, with already over crowded buses put under desperate pressure from those who would normally dive underground like rats up at Seven Sisters or Tottenham Hale.
To counter act this I devised an ingenious alternative route to work that considered all eventualities in almost prophetic fashion.
What I first needed was to stop off on the way home on Tuesday and accost a teacher from the school at the top of Kingsland road. After attacking him from behind and wrestling him to the ground, I took a brass rubbing of his face and clothing that would allow me to accurately impersonate him the following day.
The morning came and as yet still free of arrest from the previous nights assault, I was able to disguise myself as the teacher in question. Having risen suitably early I was afforded the privilege of perusing the down stairs windows of the surrounding housing until I spied a blue school uniform resting on a drying rack. The uniform of the school on Kingsland road.
Strategically placing myself as 'passing by' it was a cinch to strike up conversation with an unsuspecting parent who was then more than accommodating in providing me with a lift to the school as I plied them over the top insidious complements about their prodigious offspring.
As soon as the car door was shut I had bolted, my disguise left strewn behind me, a triumphant trail of debris.
The second leg of the journey was trickier. Fully aware that London transport would fall over themselves with glee at the site of a tube driver, I acquired a uniform from a local dry cleaner, bribed with stolen oyster cards, and approached the Northern Line. Next all I needed to do was adopt the greedy confused bewilderment suited to an unskilled worker in miserable conditions wielding the power of the underground transport system.
The ruse had worked, I was permitted through the doors with cheers and a pat on the back from the management staff.
I boldly took my position in the tube driving seat. It was a this point that the swift thinking and nimble mind that my role at incisive had honed to perfection kicked in. After all, who but James Bond himself could master the controls of a vehicle he had never before been faced with?
Closing my eyes and with sweat of the kind that only tense scenes from the Wire would normally produce racing from my forehead, i pushed the lever entitled, 'GO'. IT WORKED! and i was off.
Screeching to a halt at Tottenham court road and storming off the train exclaiming that I had changed my mind and stomping up the stair well with calls of 'down with Boris' and 'No tube in my name', I had all but completed my journey and had made it to work right on time....dressed unfortunately, as a tube driver."

A bottle of champagne....for wasting 30 minutes of the working day that they pay me to attend, contriving this pointless fabrication.

I've been waiting nearly 6 years for office process to work out in my favour and it finally has.

What now though?

Perhaps this is what really happened to Ian Curtis whilst he moonlighted as a admin assistant?

We can but speculate.