Everybody say: "Ahhh..."

Stung by reading yet another bit of thin blather, I turned to The Small Object of Desire and said: "I should become a library consultant. I can write a pile of weak bollocks like this."

"No you can't," she said. "Besides, you're not capable of kissing enough arses to get the work in the first place."

This is easily the sweetest thing she's ever said to me.

Prevarication

Reviewing a customer request with a manager:

• My response was: "No."
• The manager's response was: "Fuck, no."

We won't be bothering the man from Del Monte for a third opinion.

Evangelism

Big Billy Bullshit corporations are very big on having somebody high profile employed to do their blue skies thinking, to hide the fact that the company's selling the same old blarney but wants to look like it's cutting-edge and can think outside the box. Grey-haired men in suits are paraded as "technology evangelists" or "social media evangelists" or the like.

I am very taken with this. I'd like to become a Have A Cup Of Tea And Stop Talking Bollocks Evangelist.

Mutual discomfort

Having a glass of Doctor MacAndrew's Thunder Liquid in the temperance bar in Hannigan's Truss Boutique with Ken Barmy. He's in contemplative mood.

"I'm glad I'm unlikely to persuade venture capitalists to give me a shit load of money."
"Wouldn't you like a shit load of money?" I asked.
"Oh yes. But I'd be tempted to set up a mutual organisation for the libraries."

I understand his dilemma: I disapprove of the setting-up of Call Me Dave's "Just like John Lewis honestly" privatisations of public services but like Ken I sometimes worry that despite our deeply-held conviction that public services should be publicly-accountable and part of democratic organisations, there's the possibility that library services need rescuing from some of their local authorities.Luckily, for both of us, this is a purely philosophical quandary.

"Mind you, if I were to take over the libraries I'd set conditions." 

"To tell," I encouraged. 

"They could keep three libraries; I wouldn't want to know." 

"Too quiet?" 

"Too expensive for nobody to be using. Look at _____, the number of books they issued last month is what most of our branch libraries issue in a day. And we're paying way over the market rent for the place. Basically, it's just there to provide a nice little income for the school. Same with ______. And nearly all the books being issued are to the school they're set in. We're providing these schools with an excellent free school library service and paying them way over the odds for the privilege of providing them with the service. Conkers to that."

Amen to that. It would be easy to go off on one about the ways of schools.

"What about the third one you wouldn't want?" 

"Oh? The central library of course. Complete dog's breakfast. It's just a drain on resources - every bugger and his dog interferes with it and we're not allowed to actually run it as a library. Well, bollocks to them, I'd even let them keep the stock if they wanted. I'd just want the libraries we could run properly and deliver services in without having to constantly jump through hoops for permission to even do the basics."

" You've got to have a central library, Ken, how can you survive without a flagship library?" (I was being deliberately provocative). 

"Flagships are for people who like dressing up like Lord Nelson." 

This is quite true: does your local authority have a flagship social services office or a flagship environmental health office? No, of course not.

It's probably just as well that neither of us would be in a position to be setting up a mutual...

When was the last time you sang along to a PFI initiative?

It's a busy weekend. Customer-facing workers will be knackered.

 Meanwhile...

In those days while half the world was pink

No power on Earth shall pull it down.

One of those careers the nuns didn't tell me about

The lady at the chip shop is a bit stressed out at the moment because one of her dogs is pregnant and is being a bit snappily hormonal. "I wish I hadn't had her done now," she said.

She had dreamed of having lots of little baby doggies roaming round the house with mummy and daddy dog looking on in loving attendance. Unfortunately he wasn't much up to it so she had to arrange for her bitch to be artificially inseminated.

"Well, it was a couple of hundred pounds cheaper than having her serviced by another pedigree dog," she explained.
"Did they use a turkey baster?" asked Frog.
"Summat like," she replied.
"You mean to say that there are people going round being professional dog wankers?" I asked.
"Oh aye. That was the thing: I couldn't ask her that on the 'phone, could I? 'Hello, do you wank dogs?' I rang her up and I had to stop and think and in the end I said: 'Do you artificially inseminate dogs?' and she said: 'Well, not on my own; the dogs have something to do with it themselves.'"
"Bloody hell," said Frog.
"So I got my dog and took him round to her. 'Don't drag him across the floor!' she yelled at me. 'He's only got little legs he'll be no good with a blister on the end of it!' Not that he was much good anyway. An hour and a half it took her, just for a little teaspoonful."
"Didn't she give him a magazine to look at?"
"No, she should have done."
"That's something we need to bear in mind when they make us redundant," remarked Frog.
"What?" I asked, "Dog wankers?"
"It's a living. We could put adverts in newsagents' windows; 'Pet Owners! Does your pet need a wank? Call us now on...'"

The problem is that it's rather more dignified than the jobs we're doing at the moment.

Deck of Cards

One day a councillor was walking through the Town Hall when he spotted a junior member of staff playing cards at his desk. Taking the worker to task the councillor asked for an explanation. "And it had better be a good one."

And the worker said...

When I see the ace I think of this single council that we all work for. One big cock-up.

When I see the two, I think of the dual nature of the councillor's role. On the one hand they are managing the council's strategic vision. On the other hand, they represent the public, as users of the council's services. Two-faced swine.

And when I see the three I think of the politicians, the press and the statutory inspection regime. All kicking the shit out of us.

When I see the four I think of the Fantastic Four. Who'd still be waiting for the hardware to be delivered prior to take-off if this council had had anything to do with it.

The five reminds me of the number of months you you're advised have to wait for an urgent decision.

When I think of the six I think of the number of months you really have to wait for an urgent decision.

When I see the seven I think of the number of complaints received by this council each month. Well, seven of them.

When I see the eight I think of an octopus. My doctor says it's the strain of working for this council.

And when I see the nine I think of the average number of Assistant Executive Directors in a department. After the cuts.

When I see the ten I think of the ten Executive Directors. One goalie short of a team.

When I see the knave I think of Eric Pickles. For some reason or other.

When I see the queen I remember there was about one now sadly passed away.

And when I see the king I am reminded of that one great figure that influences our lives. The man who brings round the sandwiches.

So you see, my pack of cards is my Org Chart, my aide-memoire and my public administration vademecum.

And the councillor said: "Did you say something?"

National Poetry Day

Place-Names of China
Written by Alan Bennett

Bolding Vedas! Shanks New Nisa!
Trusty Lichfield swirls it down
To filter beds on Ruislip Marshes
From my lav in Kentish Town

The Burlington! The Rocheter!
Oh those names of childhood loos -
Nursie rattling at the door knob:
'Have you done your Number Twos?'

Lady typist - office party -
Golly! All that gassy beer!
Tripping home down Hendon Parkway
To her improved Windemere.

Here I sit, alone at sixty,
Bald and fat and full of sin,
Cold the seat and loud the cistern
As I read the Harpic tin.

Something for the weekend

It's a cold and wet Winter's day in Helminthdale and I;m actually happy to be getting back to the workplace when I bump into Walter Brimsdyke, The Borough Environmental Health Officer. He has my sympathy already.

"It's always a bloody Friday afternoon, isn't it? And it's always when it's bloody raining isn't it?"

I strain three face muscles not smiling: I know what comes next...

"They bloody ring up and say: 'I'm very worried about that dead sheep up on the tops. It's been there all week...'"

It's always a bloody Friday afternoon...

More good reasons for not writing that one over there...

An after-works drink with Ken Barmy at The Duck and Pullet.

For the past decade and a half we have shared stories of the black and bleak madnesses of the running of public libraries and laughed uproariously at the absurdity of it all.

We found nothing to laugh at in the climate of the day.

Bank holiday television

You can tell it's a bank holiday Monday by the state of the programmes they put on the telly, though God knows it gets more like a perpetual bank holiday every day:

• There is, of course, no news .


• On Channel Five a bunch of oddly-wrought blokes from places you've never heard of (including Dartford) are competing for the title of "The World's Strangest Man."


• On Alibabble, Miss Marple forsakes St. Mary Mead to spend a weekend at Melchester to watch Roy of the Rovers pit his footballing skills against Billy the Fish.


• Oh goodie. A special holiday showing of " Indiana Potter and
  the Eggheads of Hollyoaks."

I'm looking forward to later tonight when Tess Daley and Nick Knowles present "Zoo Time" live from the Trocadero, Southport.

Statesmen

Pausing to take a photograph of the Duke of Wellington, a passing drunk congratulated me on my choice of subject.

Playing the averages

I got quite cross the other day reading an article banging on about that old canard about the average public sector worker now being better off than the average private sector employee.

I get very impatient with averages. Especially when they are the mean figure for a whole host of variables that aren't self-explanatory.

The fact that the average public sector worker is better paid is scarcely surprising and owes nothing to the efficiencies of the market and the private sector's ability to keep down labour costs. It's simple, really; the public sector has been haemorrhaging low-paid jobs for the past three decades.

Most of the front-line workers; all the school caretakers and bin men and traffic wardens and street cleaners; the swimming pool attendants and men what paint the white lines down the road: they don't work for the council any more. The municipal departments that once employed them are replaced by two or three people whose job is to manage the contracts. Less than half of my colleagues at work are actually on the council payroll.

And so it will continue. With The Big Society, The Localism Bill and wholesale cuts in public sector budgets the logical end point is for each council to have outsourced all those services that have survived "we're all in it together" leaving just a chief executive and a handful of contract managers.

And the journalists will then complain that the average council employee is paid almost as much as a hack writer on a national daily.

28 Days Later...

The Small Object Of Desire And Moon Of My Delight woke up with a start.

"I've had a horrible dream," she said. "I dreamt that I was being set challenges. If I got the challenge right then a small disaster happened and only a few people died. If I got it wrong there was some sudden huge disaster and thousands of people died. And we were running round like mad trying to round up everyone we knew so that if anything else happened we'd know where they were and we could look after them and we wouldn't be having to keep going off to look for them.

"And you kept telling me off: we only had so much time to find everyone and if we didn't get back soon we might never get back so we might have to leave some people behind."

It's awful when work intrudes into real life.

Drips

Day eight of the hosepipe ban; the ninth day of torrential rainfall. Still, it's good for the garden.

I nipped out between showers and pruned back a couple of roses that had been flattened by Thursday night's deluge. Much to my delight I found some more seedlings of long-lost friends -- Echiums and California poppies -- and was also quietly astonished to find that the bottlebrush bush that I had written off as a Winter loss may still not have any leaves on it but has managed a bunch of flowers. I was very pleased. Much to my chagrin, I find that the rambling rose that I spent two years chopping down and digging out has risen from the grave. I have to be firm: it's a heartrendingly beautiful rose but there just isn't room for anything, however lovely, that grows eighteen feet in a season. I may let the railway have it in return for all those brambles and sycamore seedlings.

There are the usual mutterings about the hosepipe ban. And the usual justifications, together with pictures of empty reservoirs and threats to bugger up the North-West tourist industry. I have to wonder about the quality of maintenance of our reservoirs if they're so very, very low after the two wet and windy summers we had in 2008 and 2009. And while I can understand why all of last Autumn's flood water didn't get saved -- it's in the nature of flood water to hit and run -- I can't understand why more of an effort wasn't made to trap the Winter's melt water. There is was: all that frozen water not going anywhere for a month, nice and handy by the roadside and ready for picking up and dumping into reservoirs.

Too much effort or not profitable enough.

Pfah! The problem with market economies is the compartmentalising of cost. So long as it can be kept off my particular balance sheet I don't have to worry about it. Remember all the bleating about the cost to the economy of all those blocked roads and accidents and stuff? In a command economy the cost of leaving the ice where it was would be weighed against the cost of shovelling it up and shipping it to somewhere useful. Clear roads, filled reservoirs and people in paid employment in a recession, job done. Or else we could have had derivatives specialists and directors of merchant banks doing the shovel work as part of their community service.

There are times when one can almost forget the stultifying idiocies and evils of the Soviet system.

The perils of manliness

For the past week I've been trying, and failing, to come up with a short and snappy comment on Tazeen's post about hopeless chat-up lines. I won't spoil things by telling you the offending comment but it is a classic of its kind.

Why do we do it? Oh, we all have done, let's be honest (perhaps not so spectacularly!). The answer, as always, is down to evolution.

Men are wired such that when they first approach a woman they find very seriously attractive they are more likely than not to say something utterly stupid. This is deliberate on Mother Nature's part. In the scheme of things the child-bearing partner in the relationship is bodily committed to a lengthy process of gestation and upbringing so she needs to be particular about finding a suitable mate. Now let's the honest, the usual combination of raging testosterone, general manliness and a pair of well-polished shoes would ordinarily be irresistible. So Mother Nature, in her wisdom, has redressed the balance by providing a hurdle for the gentleman to negotiate in the relationship. Just as the peahen is attracted by the peacock that can survive the rigours of the jungle despite the burden of an unfeasibly-long train of feathers so the female of our species stops and thinks to herself: "Bloody hell! Well, if they've not killed him by now he's either got a lot of money or he's very good in bed."

Nature's marvels don't end there. We're told that ladies forget much of the pain of childbirth so as not to put them off having more children.* Men are similar: we can none of us remember that first, calamitous opening line.

Luckily, we have the womenfolk to do that. Often. In company.

---

*I notice it's generally male doctors telling us this, not ladies who've had children.

Perspective

Running a cold, and having chapped lips, I popped into the chemist's for a stick of lip balm.

"Is it properly kissproofed?" I asked.

"Is it an issue?" asked the pharmacist.

Film fun

If you're on the mailing list of The Cornerhouse you can get a copy of their monthly listings booklet, which has been generally pretty good. So of course it couldn't last, could it?

"Our new calendar below hs been created to accommodate flexibility in our film scheduling so we can respond to your demands and give you more opportunity to see popular films. This means for new releases it isn't possible to list times here."

That's right: in order to provide a better customer experience you have to guess when the films start.

I wonder if Orwell would laugh or cry at our clever modern world.

Stooge for England!

We seem to be losing a lot of our iconography lately. And while it's true that we afford them their due deferences and mourn their passing I can't help but feel guilty about not singing their praises more loudly in their lifetimes.

So let us sing a song of Nicholas Parsons.

At least half of my English readership will have smiled at that sentence. In itself that is a tribute to the man's work. Starting out as one of the myriad unremarkable young actors who'd do little cameos in films or plays he has become A National Treasure. And he has managed it by more than mere longevity.

Like many of his contemporaries, Nicholas' early career involved his playing respectable, if a bit wet, characters with impeccable Stage English. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he carried on doing precisely that, acting as stooge, or straight man, to a succession of comedians and, finally, The Nation. The big turning point was his teaming up with Arthur Haynes who was one of the big TV stars in the fifties and early sixties. Haynes generally played the stroppy 'little man' who thought he was being hard done-to by authority, very often typified by Nicholas Parsons. Other times he would be a rather wet middle-class friend to Haynes' "common man."

When that partnership dissolved he became a regular on The Benny Hill Show. (BTW: one of the things I like about Benny Hill is that he continued the tradition of surrounding the comic with straight men and character actors and then letting them be funny.) Hill was lucky to have both Nicholas Parsons and Henry McGee in his troupe.

Parsons was, and is, a consummate straight man. This isn't easy. In fact, it's damned hard. It's easy to imagine that all a straight man has to do is stand there and say his lines while the funny man does the comedy. It's easy to imagine that and dead wrong. If you want to see how easy it isn't, just watch the next time a US President teams up with a comedian for one of those "let's entertain the White House Press Corps" skits. You laugh, if you do, at the novelty of the event and at the good sportsmanship of the President. If the President was Joe Bloggs from down the road you'd think this was a pretty mediocre bit of comedy. The straight man has three important jobs to do. He has to provide a counterpoint to the comic, in physique or personality, or both. He has to provide the feedlines properly - the gag lines must not appear contrived and the feed must not accidentally telegraph the gag. Sometimes a feed deliberately telegraphs the gag, in which case the straight man and the comic both must have confidence in each other not to say a word until just that right moment. A good comic working with a good stooge who he knows and trusts can ride an audience's knowing what the joke is going to be for a good many minutes. (The longest I've seen was Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough riding a very weak punchline for the best part of ten minutes, made the funnier by Dawson's mercilessly trying to corpse Barraclough by staring him out.) The straight man must never step on a laugh.

Strangely enough his big step up to fame had nothing to do with comedy at all. He was the long-time presenter of Anglia TV's Quiz Of The Week, "Sale of the Century."

These days he is more well-known for his stint as chairman of the long-running radio programme "Just A Minute," where he has acted as the foil to the likes of Clement Freud, Derek Nimmo, Peter Jones, Kenneth Williams, Graham Norton and Paul Merton (and about half a million other celebrities, with all due apologies).

I don't know for sure, but I have my suspicions, which of these turned a jobbing actor and presenter into something else. Nor do I know for sure why he was the chosen one: it's not like the seventies was short of people presenting slightly tacky games shows (Mr & Mrs had both Derek Batey and the bloke with the moncle!) Whatever. It happened. Nicholas Parsons became one of the butts of the nation's comedy. Here's an example from 'Hello Cheeky,' circa 1975.

Stranger Than Truth: A new volcano has appeared on an East Indian island. Reports say that it just sits there rumbling and spewing hot air. The natives call it Nicholas Parsons and throw rocks at it.

A picture, or even just the name of Nicholas Parsons became a short-cut for a quick laugh, whether it was the Goodies using him to scare off policemen or the 'Burkiss Way' telling us that "as The Minute Waltz fades away, here's the man who doesn't." In the eighties and nineties both he and his agent worked bloody hard. It often appeared that he would show up at the opening of a packet of crisps. You'd see him in the most unlikely places, always ineffably nice and polite and bemused and always making sure that the clever and funny people appeared to be that little bit more clever and funny. I met him once briefly in a Green Room (nothing clever on my part: I was riding on the coat tails of my brother's ligging and meeting Nicholas Parsons was a bonus). In the Green Room he appeared exactly as he had appeared on set: nice, polite, and apparently bemused to be there. (I have every confidence that he was the only one in the room who had much idea why any of us were there.)

There is a folk memory, and I don't know if it is more true than that, of Benazir Bhutto turning to a companion in a Broadcasting House lift and asking: "why does everybody in Britain hate Nicholas Parsons?"

The truth is that we don't. He is guyed and he is mocked and he fills theatres with his one-man-shows and recordings of "Just A Minute." He is what he is: The Straight Man To The Nation. And God bless him for it.

Straight actors and actresses, once they reach a certain vintage, are accorded knighthoods and damehoods almost by default. In contrast to that, "light" actors like Ian Carmichael and Nicholas Parsons are consistently, and disgracefully, ignored despite their having put in many decades of work sustaining public morale. It is a national disgrace that it is not Sir Nicholas Parsons.

And when the time comes, as it must, what will the reason be given for the title? Why, for nothing more nor less than his services to the tomfoolery of the nation. And long may he prosper for it.