Wax on, wax off (eventually)

My colleagues and I go out for a drink every Friday lunchtime and, ever since I started at the company, we’ve always gone to the same pub. Last week however, we went somewhere different. And, as any good buffoon knows, change = bad.

As we made our way over, my co-workers projected adjectives about the new place they'd heard about. "Retro!". "Grungey!". Oh, no.

It turned out that the bar was underground, so I was immediately out of my comfort-zone. Given the choice, I always prefer to consume above sea-level.

We walked down the stairs and into the pub. It was dark. Not dark enough to not be able to see things, but dark enough to not be able to tell what they were. Judging by the smell, it was probably a good job we couldn’t really see what was in there.

Having groped our way across the room towards the bar (and indeed the only light in the room, several candles burning away), complete with an almost comatose barmaid, we each bought our own drinks. Hey, this is London. We might be colleagues, but that doesn’t mean we like each other enough to risk buying an unreciprocated round.

Anyway. Not one, not two, not three, but four of my colleagues managed to complete their drinks transactions like fully-functioning members of society. Then it was my turn. The weary-eyed barmaid looked everywhere except at me as I ordered a cider with textbook technique.

She poured it, she dumped it down on the bar, and she charged me for it. I paid with a £5 note. (Yeah, I earn the big bucks). Again, textbook.

And then she brought me my change. She lazily lifted her arm across the wooden divide between us. I held out my hand expectantly. Only for her to drop the menagerie of coins past it, straight into a lit candle, cascading hot wax all over my extended arm.

Manfully, I squealed like Babe in the infamous deleted sex scene from Pig in the City.

“Sorry,” she mumbled as she shuffled off into a room behind the bar. I assumed she’d gone to fetch a cloth or something, but it soon became apparent that she wasn’t coming back.

With my arm copiously coated with the translucent surprise, I excavated my change from the now-defused candle, picked up my cider and retired to the table my colleagues had somehow managed to locate.

At least it was too dark for them to see me wincing as I picked solidified wax out of my arm hair.

I'm going to make sure we go back to the usual place next week.

(Don't) walk this way

Women in London seem to be in a league of their own when it comes to walking. Or specifically, walking technique. Basically, they're dangerous. Behold:


She looks innocuous enough, doesn’t she? Wrong. She’s actually a weapon of groin destruction. A passion assassin. A crotchial gladiator. Look at those cold, dead eyes again: she knows it too, you can tell. She's probably got a stash of injured puppy photos in that bag for whenever she needs a laugh.

Anyway, the problem is this: while the bag-holding arm stays pretty much static, the other arm pumps backwards and forwards like a steam engine piston. You get the impression that, were you to immobilise that arm, she wouldn’t be able to move the rest of her body either.

So. Yesterday, I made the discovery that such an arm, with its fist at its maximum backward point of trajectory, is at exactly the same level as my crotch. Coincidentally, I made this discovery at the precise moment I was inspecting the pavement, doubled over in a letter P of unexpected genital pain.

If I want kids, I might have to move back up North.

Sex, drugs and dustpan & brush

I’ve just booked a long weekend in Amsterdam with a few friends for the start of May. Printing out e-tickets (and storing them safely somewhere that I’ll have long forgotten by the time I need them) made me nostalgic about my last holiday. It was in 2008 when I went backpacking for a couple of weeks around Prague, Berlin, Brussels and some very, very ropey youth hostels. I had a blast.

That said, I was concerned that the very first night was going to end with me in a hospital bed.

Having found my way from Prague Airport to my hostel, I checked in and took my rucksack to my shared room. There was no one else there, so I put my bag on the only available bunk of eight - where it looked stupidly pristine against the graffiti and mysterious stains tattooing the walls -.and headed to the bar downstairs.

Before long, I was drinking and talking with a pair of confident Americans called Max and James. We appeared to have joined some kind of infinite happy hour, so the balance of talking and drinking soon swung very heavily in the direction of the latter. Max told me I was the best person that they’d met so far, which I took to mean that it was their first night too. And that he was also drunk.

At what must have been about midnight, Max and James decided that they needed something to smoke. I’ll give you a clue: it wasn’t cigarettes.

This is the point at which I probably should have gone to bed. Max said that he knew a brothel about half an hour’s walk away where we could ‘buy’. He put his arm around me and asked if I was coming. In the spirit of several spirits, I decided that it would be rude not to.

After negotiating two dozen identical streets, we found ourselves standing outside a run-down building with most of its windows boarded up. My new friend Max pushed one of the doorbells next to the front door and we were buzzed in. I wished I was in my bunk bed.

Several flights of stairs later we stood on the top floor, which housed a solitary door. It was ajar, and to dark to see inside. As we got closer though, I could just make out a small Asian woman looking out from a few feet inside. She leaned forwards and furiously beckoned us in like we were her kids getting home late for dinner.

Max went in first, then James. And then it was my turn. I peered into the shadowy hallway as best I could, looking for a reason not to enter. It looked OK (or as OK as a shadowy hallway can look). There was a bit of muffled creaking and groaning going on, but then it was a brothel. I stepped inside.

Our hostess immediately shut the door. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could just make out Max and James talking quietly to a couple of burly men in a room behind the front door. I looked at the woman, who was depressingly dressing gown-clad. With a shooing gesture, she motioned for me to move away from the door, of which she seemed to be becoming increasingly possessive.

I smiled and, possibly on account of the flamboyant company I’d apparently started to keep, elected to swagger back confidently. Crunching my shoulder straight through the glass front of a huge picture frame hanging on the wall as I did so.

Three sizeable, shapeless shards of glass leapt away from the appropriately straight-faced woman in the portrait. I was too shocked to even attempt to catch them and consequently had a perfect view as they smashed to smithereens on the floor. The groaning and creaking surrounding us suddenly stopped.

Only one person moved; one of the huge men who had been talking to Max and James. He stepped past the pair of them and moved towards me, his foot calmly crunching down on the glass as I imagined it might a skull.

Shaven-headed and as wide as he was tall, he looked like the lovechild of a bodybuilder and a wardrobe. As his dented face loomed in close to mine, the only thing I could hope for was that the picture wasn’t of his mother. And then he spoke, the thick accent unfamiliar but the six words unmistakeable.

“I will get you the brush.”

I doubt that anybody’s swept a floor and then run down seven flights of stairs as quickly as I did that day.

Cock-a-doodle-do

I’ve never been one for meetings. I’m just not a good meeter. I think it stems from my being an only child and the subsequent formative years I spent forcing Action Men to brawl with each other in the nude. (For some reason I always deemed it necessary to strip each figure, prisoner-style, as he entered my jurisdiction. Pirates, army men, cowboys; if the clothes came off, I removed them. My mum and dad were very worried about that for a while).

The point is, I’m not good in situations which demand the stereotypically business-y communication we’ve all seen on the Apprentice. It’ll be a cold day in Hades before I bang my fist on a long table and demand more ‘visibility’ on a project or anything.

So, whilst everyone else in whatever meeting I’m attending is doing that sort of thing, I doodle.

There tends to be a lot of A4 documents handed out, every single one of which - without fail - features the phrase ‘blue-sky thinking’ at least once. These sheets are my canvases. Or possibly canvi.

And that’s fine. Nobody’s ever commented, and I imagine that only a couple of people have even noticed. That is, until today.

There was a meeting at work this morning. I attended, I listened, I doodled and I left. Fine. Then I went for my lunch, had a jacket potato and did a crossword. By the time I returned, the sheet I’d doodled on had disappeared, replaced by a post-it note. My stomach whispered that I might soon be inconveniently reunited with my jacket potato.

I looked at the note. It said: ‘Borrowed your notes, coffee-tastrophe on mine! Pete’. Pete is my heart-breakingly polite boss. Oh, no. Why couldn't he just have looked after his coffee?

About five minutes later, Pete duly appeared. He shuffled over and handed my sheet back to me. “Thanks for that...” he said, expressing the same uncertain gratitude that you might show an eight year old boy who suddenly and proudly gifted you a naked Action Man.

I looked at my notes from the meeting. There were one or two annotations that I’d added to what was printed on the single sheet, but they were in a minority compared to the doodles.

So many doodles. I don’t have a scanner, so I’ll just describe the most prominent:

A cluster of cheering tomatoes holding a group pyramid formation atop a speeding motorcycle.

A chicken surfing a fried egg along a river.

A pair of elderly ladies enacting a tug-of-war by linking the hooks of their walking sticks.

And a big, solemn-looking capybara with a huge speech bubble emerging from its mouth to surround the contents of the entire sheet, precluded with words “There is little time. Listen carefully, I will say this only once...”

I looked at the sheet for about 15 seconds. Then I looked at my manager. Then I just looked down.

Interpreter wanted

When I’m not otherwise engaged in spontaneous toilet photoshoots, I work as one of Satan's little helpers. Or ‘in advertising’, if you’re not familiar with the work of Bill Hicks.

Part of my job as a copywriter is to come up with ideas for adverts. (In contrast, and in spite of having being corrected by every member of my family at some point, my grandma still believes that I’m a copyrighter and consequently that I spend my days battling piracy). (Which is a crime, kids, so don’t do it).

Anyway, the thing that I’ve noticed since becoming slightly less rubbish at coming up with ideas for adverts is that the best ones tend to crawl into my head when I’m not really thinking about the job in hand. I’ve been far more creative standing over a washing up bowl or sitting in front of the TV than I ever have behind a desk, gurning at a blank piece of paper.

And that’s fine. The problem is in the moments that I’m in bed and drifting off to sleep, when a decent thought decides to arrive, uninvited.

The solution that I’ve developed to combat this is to quickly type the headline or concept into my phone and save it amongst my drafted messages to look at in the morning. By which point I haven’t got a clue what my shorthand rigmarole means.

So, let’s take a look at the ones I’ve saved from the last month – and if you can tell me how any of these might fit into an advertising context... Well, you’re about a month late.

‘Brainfist’

‘Sad social worker - no hands’

‘Big treadmill little treadmill – daddy?’

‘Little flower with an emotional face’

'Two moustaches'

‘Children with dog heads - dog school’

‘Electrocute barbie’

‘Origami ocean’

Yeah... Reads like the diary of a mental patient, doesn’t it?

An accident

Look, I’m not proud of this, but sometimes – not very often, just occasionally – I check my phone whilst on the toilet. I know, I know; not very hygienic. Don’t tell my mum.

So anyway, just now I was in the crowded Gents’ at work when I decided to reconfirm that nobody ever texts me. So I reached down into my pocket for my phone and unlocked it.

Unfortunately, this action can sometimes switch the phone straight to camera mode, and in doing so can actually take a photo. With an unnecessarily loud shutter sound and delightfully unwelcome flash. However, this had only previously happened either in my own room or in the street, where such an accident can easily be camouflaged. Conversely, it had never happened in a densely-populated room of quietly defecating men.

You’ve already guessed what happened, haven’t you?

Anyone who noticed the noise and the flash could only have reached the same conclusion: that I was standing in that cubicle photographing my own genitals. I immediately knew what I had to do – address the issue there and then. Just own up and explain.

Not really. I waited until everyone else had left, then crept out of the toilet and back to my desk like a ninja. A dirty ninja.

You, me and Mick Jagger

So, there I was; out on my lunch break, woolly hat on and non-woolly headphones in. The air was cold and the music loud as I shivered manfully down the street, trying to cocoon my brain in warm thoughts.

Then, out of the blue, a colleague poked his face into my vision. I looked at him. His mouth was moving, so I assumed he was talking. However, I couldn’t hear him.

Now, at this juncture, most people would have removed their headphones and had a normal conversation. But that is not the way of the buffoon.

Still wrapped up in a wintry mind-fog headlined by the Rolling Stones, I immediately removed my hat and turned my head slightly, so as to relocate one of my still-headphoned ears closer to his mouth and the words exiting it. What followed was a brief, awkward conversation which I think (and hope) was about the best place to buy a sandwich, my colleague visibly distracted at my refusal to take out my headphones and me competing with Mick Jagger to reply to him unnecessarily loudly.

Naturally, I realised my error after about 30 seconds - it’s not like I’m an idiot or something - but by then it seemed like it might come across a bit huffy and look-what-you’ve-driven-me-to to suddenly change my strategy. “Still here, then? Well, you know all that stuff you were saying just then? I couldn’t hear a word of it.”

No, no. Much better off leaving him with the impression that I’m a social hiccup.