Christmas leftovers – second helpings

Welcome to 2015!

Don’t worry – no-one can legally make you eat a sprout again for another 11 and a half months.

I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year and that those you love managed to stay the right side of a lethal dose of chocolate.

Ours was up and down; The microwave blew up (if ‘microwave years’ are like ‘dog years’ it was 168) and the curtains fell down, taking the pole out of the wall in the process; possibly due to the metric ton of cold-insulating lining.

As you’ll have probably had enough of repeats on the TV, followed by repeats of the Christmas Specials before 2014 had staggered to it’s end, here’s the other part of the compilation of entirely new bits, left out of columns last year, to keep you entertained until something better comes along.

No, thank me later – I accept all forms of credit card, but I prefer cash.

July: I’ve seen photos used on new identity cards by vain colleagues that are clearly so old, I half expect to see a TV in the background showing the moon landings, with ‘Live’ in the corner.

August: Whilst watching the news, I’ve come to the conclusion that, for some of my fellow countrymen, if brains were teeth they’d be sucking their lunch through a straw... once they’d worked out which end to use and stopped nibbling it in the middle.

September: When did manufacturers stop making comfortable underpantage? I’ve just purchased some new boxers and they feel like they were made by someone with a grudge against men. I’ve not had any comfy downstairs garments since the ‘90s (or ‘the last time I purchased underwear’, as it’s also known).

October: Apparently there will be a new £1 coin in 2017. Whoa there, speedy! I’ve only just got used to it being a coin, rather than paper! Why can’t they just wait until all us older people have died?

November: Almost time for the non-stop ‘Weather Warnings’ from the Met Office. How did we cope before any dodgy weather got a colour-coded, terror-inducing, alert? Oh, that’s right – we watched the weather forecast and made startling deductions for ourselves like “Snow? Wow – might be a bit tricky on the roads” or “Windy? Maybe I won’t go out for drive in my very high-sided and completely empty lorry”.

December: These legal proceedings have taken so long, I have a back-to front QWERTY imprinted on my temple from banging my head on the keyboard in frustration on a daily basis. I probably ought to sue for a new keyboard, too.

And there we have it. Just like the seemingly never-ending supply of cheese in the fridge you purchased mid-December, everything has been used up, with only a moderate dose of feeling sick.

I hope the year treats you well. Should it fail to do so, let me know and I’ll have damn good grumble about it on your behalf.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 2nd of January 2015.

It seems to have been used in it's entirety, including the title, and actually made it to the website as well - you can view it here

Currently pondering the fact that I'll be back in the office on Monday. Despite being off for a week and a half, I can't really pinpoint anything specific that got done, with the possible exceptions of consuming a swimming-pool's worth of cappuccino, and putting on about 4lbs from lazing around on the sofa eating chocolate.

Still, I've got a whole year to recover from that, unless the Lotto numbers come up tonight, it which case I suspect death by caffeine/chocolate overdose will have occurred by about June. Nice.

(New year, old tech. Listening to a cassette of Oasis' "Be Here Now, recorded in 1997.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog