‘RED MEAT WILL KILL YOU!’ is the headline that greeted me as I logged onto MSN last week; a bold, confident statement I’m sure you will agree. This headline is bound to worry a lot of people around the country, especially me, I’m a vegetarian! I can’t walk past a butchers without the fear I may be struck down by a stray sausage, or drive near a Sainsbury’s delivery van for fear of it unloading 2 tons of black pudding onto my Fiat 500. I may be overreacting but MSN has told me how I’m going to die and it’s never lied to me before!This adds another way to die on to the ever expanding, carcinogen, obese creating, and cardiac arresting list. If our government is to be believed the most dangerous way to live nowadays is to be a carnivorous, chain smoking, alcoholic; also know as being French. By this logic surly the French should have died out years ago, but no, they are in fact thriving like mold in a Petri dish. Currently France has the highest life expectancy, as well as the lowest heart disease and cancer rates in Europe, this information, it seems, is totally at odds with our government’s heath guidelines. Let’s face facts there is only one logical explanation for this.
Now I’m not one for conspiracy theories, I believe we landed on the moon, Elvis is dead and Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK but I’m becoming increasing suspicious that the British government’s primary concern is that we don’t become French. Of course this is a valid concern, after the disastrous beret trend of the late 80’s and early 90’s, in extreme cases some teenagers even turning to poetry; an era, I’m sure, none of us would like to revisit. More importantly if we become French we might take to the streets in protest and make unreasonable demands such as decent working hours.
So what is killing us Brits so young? Well I think the answer is staring us in the face, its classic British repression! I believe every bottled feeling is the equivalent of a glass of Jim Bean, every emotion swallowed a shot of pork fat to the heart. I can almost feel the polyps forming in my bowl when someone borrows my stapler without asking, my head shouts “GOD DAMN IT, MY NAMES ON IT, KNOB HEAD!!!” But my mouth whispers “That’s OK any time” I can feel my arteries contracting when someone drinks the last of the milk from the work fridge “FOR CHRIST SAKE IT’S GOT PAYROLL WRITTEN ON IT!! YOU AND EVERYBODY YOU LOVE SHOULD DIE! YOU EVIL,EVIL C**T” screams my brain “That’s OK, anyone could make that mistake, I should have written it Spanish as well” I inevitable mumble. If either of these two happened in France there would be some almost poetic shouting, a man would be slapped, a mini riot would occur near the fire exit and then voila, all would return to normal, no aneurisms in sight.
A fine example of our inability to express even the most basic of grievances occurred in my office not more than 3 weeks ago. I was sitting quite comfortably at my beautifully constructed yet functional desk, in one of Warwick’s premier office blocks, when a worryingly failure odour wafted into my innocent, unsuspecting nostrils. Confusion struck me suddenly and held me in its grasp as I tried to wrestle with the idea of being trapped in what is essentially a sterile environment with a smell that is usually reserved for public toilets, Coventry or the homeless(in many ways, one and the same).
My confusing quickly turned to concern as I located the offending malodour, which unfortunately happened to be upon my person. It appears that I have fallen foul of the most common of scatological accidents and trodden directly into the ex-contents of a dogs rectum.
Unfortunately to make matters worse I am super cool and can’t be expected to sit on a chair like a normal person. I like to sit with my left leg folded underneath me. ‘yeah, that’s right HR girls I don’t sit like normal men cos’ I rock! Have you seen how bendy my mofo’ing left knee is?’ (I imagine this is how James Dean or a young Clint Eastwood would sit if they had happened to have worked in the payroll department of a market research company)
It appears that this style of seating has one drawback; if you’ve trodden in shit, it smears it in all the places you don’t want it to go. All over the chair, my legs, my arse, a large smear on the carpet below my feet, the cupboard next to me, Janet from account’s hair! If this would have happened at home I’d be all like ‘Oh what a silly Monkey, you’ve smeared excrement everywhere, what a wonderful anecdote this will make.’ But when you’re at work it feels somewhat uncomfortable knowing that you smell of shit, people don’t like that smell! Awkwardly, as bad as the smell had gotten none of my work colleges said a single word; It’s a very British trait that 5 people can all be sitting within a two metre radius of a man smeared in actual pooh will ,other than a slight twitch of the filtrum, not acknowledge the situation at all.
My initial idea was to wait until everyone went on lunch and switch the chair, which seemed a good idea at the time until I realised the person returning to their chair would probably be pretty confident that their chair didn’t have pooh on it before they went to lunch and the only person who worked through lunch would have been me. If there’s one thing worse than people thinking you’ve shat yourself is people thinking you’ve gone out of your way to shit on their chair.
In the end I decided the best bet was to spill coffee all over the place and wipe it up toilet roll, hoping the smell and colour of the coffee would mask the evidence. Almost, but rubbing it with toilet roll released the smell somewhat, to combat this I just wore the slightly guilty facial expression of someone who has just broken wind,’ farts’ ,I thought, ‘people are comfortable with farts, not pooh’. I think I got away with it, although people do tend to give me a wide birth at work nowadays.
The moral of the story drink more, smoke more, eat anything and everything but shout more.
The real moral of the story, don’t waste 20 minutes of your life reading pointless self indulgent blogs when you could be playing angry birds.
God speed and bless you all,
Me
