Working from home

I am working from home today (it’s the first really beautiful winter morning of the season this morning. Actually, that may not be quite true, but it’s certainly the first one I have seen. I was up rather early this morning, roused desperately early from a deep slumber by a twanging, banging hangover so grim that I originally thought of writing an article for ‘The Lancet’ about it but have now decided that it is actually worthy of its own book, as Chapter 1 alone would be barely sufficient to deal with what appears to have happened to my tongue overnight. Upon further consideration, maybe non-fiction is not the best way to describe all the effects, possibly an Opera would be more fitting, I wonder if Philip Glass is available? I am trying to abate the symptoms through an arsenal of remedies varying from the traditional; ‘chalkie friends’ AKA ‘two para’ AKA a couple of paracetamol, through the sensible; tomato juice, and finally the desperate; a tea that is described as ‘blended to recover’ and would appear to contain most of the contents of an English hedgerow except a sleeping hedgehog and a Tesco carrier bag impaled on a bush, and I’m not too sure about the hedgehog judging by the aftertaste. This is truly a desperate measure as I can assure you I am the sort of chap who views any tea other than ‘English breakfast’ with deep and I would say justified suspicion. At my place of business one has to share a tea point with others who are broader in their tastes and I am aware that people drink fruit teas. What’s the point? It’s simply a cup of hot squash. The women who drink fruit teas are invariably the sort of thin that is achieved not through diet, self denial and exercise, but because they are the sorts who lack the foresight when buying a sausage roll for lunch to purchase a second to eat on the way back from Greggs, so satisfying any hunger pangs and allowing you to really enjoy the explosion of hot fat and gristle wrapped in pastry that makes a sausage roll a sausage roll. That and the amphetamine suppositories they bought off the internet from some country that ends in ‘-istan’ and is unlikely to get EU membership while more of their citizens live in caravans than houses because they like it that way. The men who drink fruit teas are either homosexulists or closet homosexulists who are doing it to impress the limp women. One thing is true for both sexes, there is some sort of link between fruit teas and limp, lifeless, greasy hair. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s because deprived of a proper brew, hair lacks the energy to fulfil its main purpose in life; get tangled in brushes and consume a disproportionate amount of disposable income in care and styling products. No? Just me then. But my point is that a tea blended to recover sounds like borderline voodoo, what’s the next step? Catholicism? I’m currently caught in LaGrange point of the hangover where I’d really like something to eat but the thought repulses me. There’s a jar of cockles sitting in the fridge. This has, of late, become a dirty habit of mine, consumption of cooked cockles sold in a jar of, essentially, brine. Yet they do something to them that makes them taste goooooood. They are also something of an immoral treat (hence all the tastier) as there’s a whiff of gangmasters and illegal immigrants forced to do dangerous digging on tidal flats about the whole cockle industry. At least when you buy them from a stall in Norfolk you can rest assured that the guy selling it obtained them the traditional way, by getting his young kids up before dawn and out there on the beach, sobbing in the rain and darkness while digging away feverishly while the rising tide laps at their ankles, or facing the threat of a bloody good slap. Traditional you see?) and my levels of procrastination have reached such heights that I’m even side-tracking myself from writing a blog entry about it.

So is it GMT now, or what?

The clocks went back this weekend. This is a quaint custom which I think was introduced to help farmers during the war. Licensing hours were also introduced as a wartime measure and although these are slowly being eroded, there appears to be no movement on putting clocks one hour forward to announce the arrival of British Summer Time and one hour back, as today, to announce the arrival of British Winter Time.

Personally I’m tremendously grateful for some sort of organised event to announce the official start of winter – you used to be able to tell when winter was upon you by looking at the ‘seasonal’ aisle in the supermarket. BBQs, firelighters and salmonella cures meant that summer was arriving, advent calendars means winter is here and so you had better start eating chocolate now to build up fat reserves to live off when it gets cold.

Now though, with supermarkets battling to get out money and fuck up any sense of a pleasant anticipation of a seasonal event, barely have the Easter eggs vanished than the plastic pumpkins are out.

Thankfully, we can rely on official notification from the water board telling us there is a hosepipe ban to tell us that summer is here, but how about winter? That’s especially true of this year, when the only thing you could say about the summer was that the rain was warmer.

Putting the clocks back adds to the ‘nights are fair drawing in, eh?’ feeling. Meaning it’s dark at four rather than five. This of course means fuck all to me anyhow as at four or five I’m still stuck at the office and look out onto what I swear is an attempt to create a Romanian style housing project – short on charm, heavy on cabbage being used in the construction. It does mean that on the rare occasions I do quit the office early enough to see daylight, I don’t emerge into it blinking and shuffling like a Morlock, but run like hell whooping with joy and spinning like a demented woman in a tampon ad.

Today was rainy and overcast. I didn’t leave the house all day. It was kind of interesting though, to lie prone on the sofa, reading a book and putting off the decision to go for a pee until I really was in quite a lot of pain and watch the light drain out of the sky. Not that there was much light to drain, but with the clouds practically brushing the fucking streetlights, the sky was lit from beneath and showed off a luminescent, orange grey haze.

Bears, I think, have the right idea – set the alarm for spring and dream of your breakfast sporting an orange vest.