» Weddings

This image is still burned onto my retinas....

Mate of mine was marrying his lovely Italian girlfriend in her home country. Her folks were very devout, so it's a full on Catholic wedding ceremony, hundreds of guests, they've flown in the 60 year old Irish priest who baptised the bride etc etc As my mate is a Scot, all us lads were in full dress kilts, including one particular buddy of ours 'Smurf'. A few months prior to this Smurf, at the age of 30, had declared himself to be gay, but wasn't having ANY luck finding himself a fella and was getting rather desperate. But then, if you will refuse all dental treatment since birth and drink enough beer to give the appearance that another, only slightly smaller, man is living in the bottom of your vest, it can be difficult to get laid. Bless him, but Smurf's no oil painting.

Wedding is delightful - on we go to the reception. Lots of wonderful food, and more importantly wine, which Smurf is chucking back with his usual haste and enthusiasm. He, it seems, is not the only man at the wedding with an extreme thirst though... Night wears on, I'm chatting away to female mate when suddenly she stops mid-sentence and goes as white as a sheet, staring in utter horror at something over my shoulder. The rest of the room has fallen strangely silent as well - I turn around to see what's going on. There's Smurf, at the bar, in a full-on French kiss with the fucking PRIEST - who meanwhile has his hand up Smurf's kilt and is giving him a vigourous and obvious tug-job in front of two hundred gobsmacked guests. Both of them had got wasted on free booze, presumably exchanged significant glances, then just fallen on each other like starving wolverines... Bride's mother, who I don't think was the most homosexually-tolerant woman on the planet anyway, storms over, grabs an ice-bucket full of ice/cold water and douses them with it. They don't even seem to fucking NOTICE, let alone stop... They had to be physically prised apart in the end and the Bride and her family were so traumatised that they declared the reception immediately over. Pity, us Brits all agreed that we damn well NEEDED more booze after seeing that. Fair enough, everybody deserves love and affection, but full on toothless-lardie-boy against 60-year-old-priest stylee action I can do without having to watch...

No apologies for length. You know you love it really.
(Mon 18th Jul 2005, 14:46, More)

» Workplace Boredom

The claw is your master!

So, 'Toy Story' had just come out and I was working in the absolute shittiest of my shitty, shitty early-twenties-and-all-I-want-is-beer-money jobs. To keep ourselves sane between 'No I don't want to do a market research survey on the phone, fuck off' conversations, my colleague Lex and I had started playing 'The claw is your master!'. Pretty simple - smuggle a post it note with the words 'The claw is your master!' scrawled on it into the opponents possessions - wait for the opponent to discover it - trill 'The claw is your master!' at them in the manner of the little three-eyed vending machine dwelling aliens in the aforementioned animated film. I know, I know, it sounds fucking lame - and I have no clue why we latched onto that particular phrase - but the cackles came from the increasingly devious places we found to secrete our little notes. Sure - we started out simple, just spamming each others paperwork. I then escalated: Lexor leaves the office on a rainy afternoon only to find the inside of his umbrella coated with claw-missives, and, whilst swearing on the pavement, is serenaded with 'The claw is your master!' from an attic window. Fine - he cuts out a precisely measured circle of post-it, be-claws it, laminates it, and wedges it in the bottom of my coffee cup: *glug* - *splutter* - "BASTARD!" etc etc. Within a couple of weeks we've both gone seriously Howard Hughes - paranoia, hawk-like mutual surveillance and bladder-straining refusal to go to the toilet unless the other was going as well. Whatever - it passed the fucking time. But eventually one of us was going to go too far - whether they intended to or not.

God knows how he got into my flat. But get in he did - teaching me a valuable lesson in the process. Specifically: even if you've got a woman you've just met in a club back to your bedroom, AND persuaded her to get her knockers out, she will not shag you if she slides under the duvet and suddenly finds herself stuck to 200+ post-it notes all informing her that something referred to as 'The claw' is now her 'master'. Instead she will run for the fucking hills.

Thanks Lex. Thanks a bunch.
(Fri 9th Jan 2009, 0:05, More)

» Out of my depth

Window cleaning is the most dangerous job in the UK - here's why...
My firm makes industrial safety products that are really REALLY important and on which people's lives depend. I do marketing and PR however and have no engineering qualifications AT ALL.

I recently attended a meeting, as an observer, at British Standards Institute (the guys responsible for kite marks). The meeting was to create a new standard for the type of kit we make, and I had jotted down a few suggestions just in case I WAS asked to contribute.

If only anybody else had done the same.

Suffice it to say that I was the ONLY fucker with anything to contribute AT ALL and the new 'standard' consists in fact of the uninformed bobbins I came up with on the tube to Chiswick. This, it seems, is the way or country's health and safety beaurocracy works and I feel we should ALL be afraid.

I do not wish to identify what it is we make but I will say this: if anybody is reading this at the top of a ladder - come down now. SLOWLY.
(Wed 20th Oct 2004, 11:08, More)

» Petty Sabotage

Bathroom ordinance

If you put a bar of soap into a microwave it will rapidly expand into a large microwave-interior-filling block of solid foam. All meals prepared in the microwave for months afterwards will, I'm reliably informed by the one person who I have pulled this trick on who still speaks to me, taste of soap. Great icebreaker for parties (at other people's houses).

I HAVE NOT attempted this but APPARENTLY if you put a can of shaving foam (the old fashioned white kind rather than poncey new-fangled 'gel' or similar) in the freezer for a VERY LONG TIME, the contents will solidify and it will then be possible to saw off the nozzle bit WITHOUT the pressurised container exploding and knacking you up right proper. You then simply place your open-to-the-elements can of frozen foam in the wardrobe/room/car etc of your choice and hey presto! As soon as the fucker melts it instantly expands into a Ford-Fiesta-sized mound of shaving foam. HOWEVER - accurately judging whether your foam grenade is indeed frozen solid or still under sufficient pressure to knack-you-up-right-proper-when-sawed-into is, I would say, somewhat difficult. I therefore take no responsibility for any of you chimps trying it and blowing your hands off - I am not at home to amputee wannabe-saboteur lynch mobs.
(Wed 4th May 2005, 11:59, More)

» Foot in Mouth Syndrome

I was only doing as I was TOLD
A long time ago, while in a particularly desperate unrequited love situation with a mate of mine who I will call Jane for now, I was invited to her flatmate's 21st. On arrival the flatmate in question told me that not only had Jane just dumped her boyfriend, she was hinting that she had done so because she could no longer control her true feelings for me. Wheee! This 21st was a sit down meal with lots of the birthday girl's family around so I decided to wait until it was over before making my move on Jane... The flatmate's dad however was a big, bluff rugger bugger and decided to liven things up by getting everyone at the table, grannies and grandads included, to tell the most tasteless joke that they knew as the evening went on. I got picked last. I had had a lot to drink. But still, MY joke wasn't as bad as some of the ones that had already been trotted out - or so I thought. I stood up, "What do you call an anorexic girl with thrush? A quarter pounder with cheese!". Eerie silence followed by a combination of growls/sobs from the family end of the table. Turns out the flatmate's little sister, a rather slim girl who, due to my romance clouded mood, I had failed to notice was not in attendance that night, had just been commited to hospital with anorexia nervosa. Her father had started the tasteless joke thing in order to try and cheer the family up a bit. He could not comprehend that I would just *happen* to pick that gag and so, assuming that I was taking the piss, chinned me. His wife and other daughter cried a lot and I was blamed for ruining her birthday.

Proving once and for all that there is no justice in the universe, I still got laid. However, I can't shake the feeling that what should have been the most romantic night of my young life was cruelly stolen from me and replaced with a pity f*ck...
(Wed 21st Apr 2004, 16:40, More)