Out of office auto column

Hello. I’m away on holiday right now – unless you’re a burglar.

If so, I’m fetching the baseball bat I keep in the cellar and practising my swing.

As I am enjoying some vaguely deserved time off, catching some sun and warmth in the south of Oxfordshire and bits of Hampshire, I’m clearly not able to write a newspaper column this week. (Whoever said “Nothing new there, then” I’m watching you.)

Instead, this is the journalistic equivalent of that annoying “Out of Office” message you always seem to get when you email someone about something really urgent.

In an effort to ensure the impossibly high standard of quality you have come to expect from me is retained, I’ve tried to cover as many news stories as possible in advance, leaving you with some multiple choice options to drop in to fit whatever has you hurling abuse and the cat at the TV this Friday night.

For example, this one should set the scene nicely:

What about that insert name here? Honestly, isn’t it about time they choose from: stopped messing about/explained themselves/got dressed and got themselves choose from: cleaned up/into rehab/a proper job?

Pretty much nailed celebrities, sports stars and quite a lot of MPs there, I feel. What else will be on the great North-West-of-England public’s mind today? Ah, of course:

Well, who would have guessed that it would have been so choose from: hot I had to take all my clothes off/cold I had to sleep in the fridge to keep warm/wet I now have a ‘Deep End’ in my living room this week? I blame choose from: The Met Office/Global Warming/Bruce Forsyth for this.

We probably need to cover this eventuality too:

Truly shocking to hear that insert name of Tory MP here has been forced to resign after it was revealed that choose from: He/She/Boris had been choose from: Having an affair/taking photos of the contents of their underwear and emailing them to Nick Clegg/dead for 6 months, but still claiming benefits.

And it wouldn’t be still a considerable distance from Christmas (but not far enough to stop me screaming “It’s too early for cutesy adverts!”) without commenting on John Lewis’s latest heartstring-fondling offering:

I don’t care what anyone says, that Monty the Penguin is massively choose from: Cuuuuute!/Annoying/Unlikely to survive in a centrally heated house and I’m going straight off to choose from: Spend all my money in a large department store/buy an inappropriate pet/make the dreadful assumption that two penguins that had never met before will instantly love each other like I’m some kind of deranged polar matchmaking service.

And finally:

It’s hardly surprising that Jeremy Clarkson has been caught up in yet another choose from: racist/sexist/Argentinean-baiting scandal this week. He really should choose from: grow up/stop being an enormous leather-and-denim-clad buffoon/stand for Prime Minister.

Depending on when this is published, have a great Choose from: Weekend/Easter/Last few days of futile existence before that massive meteor destroys the planet.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 14th of November 2014. The paper retitled it as "Away but I've got it covered" and you can view the version they ran with on their website here, although it has gone straight to the Archive section uncredited.

It was heavily edited, with some 60-odd words removed or altered. The intro lost the baseball bat section, the MPs part had the Tory, Boris and Nick Clegg stuff taken out, and the whole Clarkson paragraph went too. I guess the faint whiff of libel was in the air again. Shame really - I though some of the stuff taken out were the best bits.

I genuinely did submit two columns in a week to cover holiday, although I was actually back at home the day this one came out. Foolishly, I put all the stuff you see above in bold in those pointy brackets when I typed it. When I came to drop that text in here, Blogger took them to be HTML instructions, and all hell broke loose...

I had a nice break, filed with train trauma, family, friends and a lot of coffee - there are definitely bits I can use for a column, but I can't quite knit them all together in my head. I've got until bed-time on Wednesday to sort it all out and submit column 132. Eek.

(Tunes tonight from Chris Rea's mammoth Blue Guitars set.)