Becky says things about … failed exercise attempts

Hello, valued Listener. You look lovely today. That colour suits you.

Now. Exercise.

I know, it makes me feel a bit perturbed as well.

But I like exercise. I go through phases of doing it fairly regularly. I like an endorphin as much as the next man, and I enjoy the feeling of smugness that accompanies sweatily getting into a shower after a 30 minute run.

But for every 30 minute run, there is the Failed Exercise Attempt. You know what I’m talking about, dearest, static Listener. Those planned exercise sessions, that picture of your ideal body pinned to your wardrobe, the delicate fillet of lemon sole in your fridge, all geared towards transforming you into the Most Awesomely Stunning Example of Physical and Aesthetic Perfection in the World. All going up in smoke like a wet tea towel left on a burning hob.

I have identified four types of Failed Exercise Attempts throughout my extensive experience of the subject, and, for your ease of reference I shall detail them here.

The Unexpected Failure

You spend all day at work looking forward to a Really Good Session. You imagine your flushed cheeks, your sparkling eyes, your ripped abs, your toned thighs, your impossibly rounded buttocks. You bound home with the confident stride of a winner. You arrive home, you observe Rule No.1 of a successful exercise routine – DO NOT SIT DOWN EVEN FOR ONE MOMENT – you leap into your sports gear which you lovingly laid out on your bed this morning, you crank up some suitably noisy tunes on your iPod, you hop out into the cool evening light, you take those first sprightly steps in your new running shoes, the image of your disbelieving, beautiful face registering the roar of the crowd as you take Gold at the 100m final…

…and then the truth smacks you round the love handles like a horrible, slimy trout.

You really cannot be arsed.

You try everything: you tell yourself you are fat and disgusting, you grab handfuls of your inner thighs, you search frantically through your Running playlist for a motivational tune, you make a promise to cut off your own hand if you don’t do a 30 minute run… But alas. It is all in vain. You just cannot be arsed.

You lope home, turning the serene evening air blue with your curses, you rip off your sportsgear, you kick your trainers at the wall, and you make six slices of toast and butter and spend the evening watching terrible, terrible television in a vile immovable torpor.

The Expected Failure

You just know it’s going to end badly. You’re almost playing a game with yourself; you’re saying ‘Oh right, going to exercise are we? Really? Huh. Yeah, good luck with that. We’ll just see what happens, shall we? You’re ridiculous.’

You go through the whole sorry rigmarole of putting on sportsgear, you find your running playlist, chuckling sadistically to yourself, you stomp outside, you take an almost ironic little jogging step…

…and the whole thing unravels with a tedious inevitability.

You spend three hours eating chocolate and ice cream in front of YouTube, but you tell yourself it’s okay because you expected to fail, so, in actual fact, you haven’t actually failed at anything because you succeeded in meeting your expectation to fail, and you open the second tub of ice cream to celebrate your astute self-awareness.

The Gallant Attempt

Most likely to occur in gyms, where the social pressure is most acute.

You start off okay. You get a bit sweaty on the bike. You go really fast on the crosstrainer for two minutes, which probably burned about 3,000,000 calories because you were going so fast. You plod for a bit on the treadmill. You look at the chest press, and note the intention to use it. You know you’re on a knife edge, you can feel eyes on you. Cruel eyes. Judging eyes.

You pull yourself together, you stride across the gym with a determination that even Rocky couldn’t  muster, you grab the weighty-arm-strengthener-handle-pully thing, you give it an almighty tug with the strength of an ox in his prime…

…and it hurts slightly, the gym is just so stuffy, your shoes are rubbing, you’re thinking about dinner, and life’s too short.

You scuttle into the changing rooms, splash some water over your face so at least it looks like you broke a sweat, and you drive home shaking your head and cursing the £100 a month you pay in order to humiliate yourself.

The Non-Attempt

You lie on your bedroom floor intending to do 100 sit ups.

You do two.

You get up and go to find food.

So, cherished, immobile Listener, there really is only one solution to these heinous daily failures:

Have a sandwich instead.

Becky says things about … saying things on other people’s blogs

Yes, sweetest Listeners, I don’t just say things on MY blog, I say things on other people’s blogs! Isn’t that great?

The clown of all evil / knowledge / worldly omnipotence, Le Clown, asked me if I’d take him out of his cosy clown home in Montreal and show him the sights in London.

I myself couldn’t be bothered to do this, so I got Stickman to do it, and, predictably, chaos ensued.

Okay, mate. I just don’t think anyone is ever going to ask you to show them round a  major city again, that’s all.

Anyway, Listeners, check out the whole unfortunate escapade here.

Becky says things about … terrible confessions

I recently made a throwaway confession on my Facebook page which went thus:

Porridge is revolting. There, I said it.

The comments I received were so numerous and passionate in their defence of porridge (good book title, that: In Defence of Porridge. Hands off, that one’s mine) that it rather took me aback. It also pleased me greatly that I had done something I don’t normally do: made a controversial statement. It made me feel quite the new woman.

So, spurned by my new-found rebelliousness and disregard for people’s opinions, I decided I would make some more confessional controversial statements. It’s rather liberating, you see. Rid myself of my deepest, darkest secrets and put them out there for people to do with what they will. Because I just don’t care. I am a law unto myself. FREEDOM!!

1. I quite often find children intolerable.

Thought I’d start with a nice evil one, but also one which I know will have a lot of you biting your lip and nodding in a ‘Thank God someone else does too’ kind of way.

Kids are cute, I’ll give them that. Not all kids, mind. There are some repulsive children out there, the sort where it is literally impossible to smile benignly and say to the mother ‘Awwww, she is adorable, you must be so excruciatingly proud to have spawned such a beautiful creature.’

But I can handle ugly children. I’ll just look at them and wince a bit, and there’s no harm done. It’s children’s behaviour I can’t handle. Now, I know that by their very undeveloped and uneducated and un-everything nature, children can be expected to act in ways that are perhaps socially and humanely undesirable, such as throwing tantrums when they don’t get their own way, or crying when they’re tired or hungry, or winging and being unreasonable and refusing every offer of food, sleep, warmth, entertainment and affection, but I just can’t help wanting to kneel in front of them and say very quietly:

And as for letting them win at stuff – well. Perhaps fortunately, I am yet to have my own children, because those children, when / if they eventually turn up, will have to learn the hard way that, guess what: LIFE IS NOT A BOWL OF RUDDY CHERRIES. So you’re not very good at hitting a shuttlecock with a badminton racket, and you’re desperate to beat your mum or at least get the bloody thing over the net, and your mum might shout words of encouragement and advice from the other end of the garden, but you know what she won’t do?

Hell no. Because you haven’t won, have you? You can’t even get the bloody thing over the net. And years later, when you sit down in an interview room for the job of your dreams and the interviewer doesn’t say ‘You sat down in that chair very nicely, you’ve got the job,’ you won’t be disappointed. Then you’ll thank me.

2. If I were Queen, I would ban football, tennis and golf from ever being shown on television.

It’s a Wednesday evening. You’ve had a hard day at work. Your boss doesn’t respect you and someone used up all your milk. You want a nice quiet drink down the pub to relax. You get to the pub and are confronted with this:

You spend the next hour listening to loud and fascinating opinions on the rules of football and the moral integrity of the referee, punctuated by brain-imploding cheers or teeth-aching expletives, knowing that at the end of 90 minutes you can look forward to a detailed analysis of the previous 90 minutes by those people who have just spent 90 minutes watching the 90 minutes and talking about the 90 minutes whilst watching the 90 minutes.

Or you get home from work one day in late June to find that your house has burnt down, destroying every possession you ever owned, with no hope of salvaging anything whatsoever, and you call a friend for some support.

Or you’ve just run someone over and you’re quite keen to get it off your chest, so you go down the pub and sit next to your mate and have the following conversation:

You: Mate, I really need to -

Mate: Shh.

You: What? I just need -

Mate: Shh.

You: Why are you shhing me?

Mate: Tiger’s about to take a par 6.

You: What?

Mate: Shh.

You: Look, me talking in a pub in England is not going to disturb Tiger Woods playing golf in Florida -

Mate: Shh.

You: Mate, I really need some support here -

Mate: Shh.

Enough said. Of all sports, it’s those three that ruin the most lives.

3. I couldn’t really care less about animals.

Now let’s get one thing straight. With the exception of cats, I do not want to perform animal genocide and rid the world of every living animal on earth. I’m fine with coexisting in a world with animals. I really like dogs. I quite like sheep, and I’ve definitely got quite a lot of time for most ducks, especially mallards. But a photo of a horse leaning down to nuzzle its foal and the words Motherhood is Beautiful written across it will take me dangerously close to animal genocide. 

And I resent the fact that, just because I can’t get excited about your 3,503 blurred photographs of the back-end of an elephant from your African safari, it does not mean I deserve this:

And yes, that is the blood of a newborn kitten I am drinking.

4. I like being middle-class.

We get a lot of stick. We are pretentious, snobbish, lazy, boring, know-all, ordinary, coffee-quaffing, sushi-guzzling twatfaces. Apparently.

But I like it.

Why should I be ashamed of having half a brain, or trotting onto the train with a large Americano in the morning, or of having some standards as to where I consume my meals? A bit of healthy pretension never hurt anyone. Granted, there are some pretty invidious middle-class traits out there.

But I have no shame in admitting that I’d pay someone to clean my oven. No shame at all.

5. I have never seen Back to the Future, The Godfather, Rocky, The Karate Kid, Labrynthe, The Breakfast Club, Star Wars, or Top Gun, and I thought Ghostbusters was rubbish.

When I was a child, having to admit that I had never seen any of the above films was something I dreaded. It was social suicide. Mockery, shunnage, and active disdain would ensue. My pleas of ‘But I have seen Gone with the Wind, Singin’ in the Rain, The Man Who Would Be King, and I thought the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius was simply marvellous’ fell on deaf ears.

But as I got older, identifying a social situation in which I could drop this bombshell gave me more and more pleasure:

You know what, I’ve got through 28 years without ever having seen those films, and I’ve done okay. And what’s more, I’m shocked and appalled when you tell me you’ve never seen Strictly Ballroom, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Calamity Jane, Mary Poppins, The Railway Children or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And the more shocked you act when I tell you what films I haven’t seen, and the more you tell me I absolutely have to watch them or else I will be a social outcast for all eternity, the less likely I am to ever watch them.

That’s just how it works.

6. I would rather have a holiday in Las Vegas than help build a school in Africa.

I’m a nice person, honest. Just like you’re a nice person. We’re all nice people, really. But if someone said to you ‘I’ll pay for you to go to Las Vegas, stay in the most expensive suite on the Strip, give you £5,000 to spend, and book you in at the best breakfast buffet in the city, or … you can go to a small African village and help build a school that the community so desperately needs’, think very long and hard about your answer.

Believe me, if I had Bill Gates’ dosh, I’d get a whole heap of schools built over there – I mean, they wouldn’t be able to move for schools and wells and hospitals and housing.

I’d just also spend a hell of a lot of time squandering heaps of cash and indulging in sordid debauchery in Las Vegas, that’s all.

 

I feel much better after confessing all that. All that remains for me to do is sit back and await the hate mail…*

*Please don’t send me hate mail.

Becky says things about … stand-up sunbeds

What’s that you say? ‘Becky, surely you can’t have anything to say about stand-up sunbeds’?

Well, O doubting Listener, I do.

Here in England, Mr Sun, after a long and frankly evil period of absence, has finally decided to show his face, and much like the rest of the pasty, sallow English species, I panicked when I realised that I will soon be required to exhibit flesh in public.

So there was nothing for it but to pay a visit to a sunbed.

Except that when I go on the lie-down sunbeds – which really isn’t that often – I get a burnt bum. I mean a seriously burnt bum. Traffic cones will melt if I stand too close to them.

So to avoid this potential plastic-melting hazard (because one must consider every eventuality), I opted instead for a stand-up one.

For those of you who have not been in a stand-up sunbed, it is like walking into a toilet cubicle on a spaceship in which someone has left the heating on for many hours. It has flashing buttons and neon lights and big heavy doors that should make a vvvvvvt noise when they close, as all spaceship doors do.

For those of you who have been in a stand-up sunbed – you just, kind of….

stand….

Don’t you?

They’re just a bit awkward, aren’t they? I mean you really do just

stand.

Naked, blasted with ultra-violet rays, wearing tiny black goggles, in a confined space.

It’s all a bit strange, really. I thought to myself ‘Well…… here we are then…’ And then thought of nothing, because there is literally nothing else to do or think.

Then I decided to pass the 10 minutes by doing some squats. You know, get a tan, tone my bum, multi-tasking like a pro. So I sank into the first squat, burnt my bum on the ultra-violet wall behind me, cursed, and stood up again. That was the end of the squatting debacle.

So then I thought that, despite the lack of music, I’d try a little dance. Anything to avoid just

standing.

So I performed a jazzy cavort that involved one very small side-step. Then a very small side-step back again. And so on, for about nine seconds, until I felt embarrassed in front of myself and stopped.

So after that I was back to just

standing.

But then seeing as I was naked, I thought I’d pass some time by fiddling with myself. No not like that, you foul beast. There’s a time and place for everything, and those silly goggles do not put you in a sexy mood. I mean just … you know … fiddling. I played with my elbow skin for a bit. That was fun. Then I prodded my stomach. Then I gauged whether I could be suspended by a hook through my love handle in a Saw-like torture method, and decided that I definitely could, which was a bit of a bummer.

Then when I’d run out of bits of prod, poke and pull, I was forced to just

stand.

After about 30 seconds of

standing

I thought I’d be a daring ninja-type-James Bond-tough-guy and flip my goggles off my eyes to see just how bright it really is in there.

I performed said goggle-flipping manoeuvre . And I’ll tell you just how bright it is in there. It is ****ing bright.

After causing myself permanent ocular damage, adding ‘Being suspended from a hook by my love handle’ to my list of Things To Worry About, embarrassing myself in front of myself with scanty dance moves, and searing my posterior, I decided to play it safe and wait out the last few minutes by just

standing

while my skin slowly crisped.

I prefer the lying-down ones.

Becky says things about … social media vs human brain

I am troubled, Listener. Imbued with angst and feeling a little perturbed, and I shall tell you for why.

So here in England a 17 year-old girl has been appointed a ‘youth police and crime commissioner’ (no, I’m not sure either) to represent young people across the country. In the last few days she’s been flung about like a mauled rabbit in the jaws of our Media for tweeting some rather silly thoughts that could be loosely construed as erring on racist and homophobic. Needless to say, chaos has ensued, and there’s been lots of footage of this boundlessly-coiffured young lady sniffing and apologising for everything she’s ever done wrong in her life. In an interview -

Oh for heaven’s sake, Stickman, you once portrayed a woman who’s just lost her virginity, so I didn’t think a bit of a 17 year-old hairstyle would hurt. But fine, forget it. You do make a fuss over nothing sometimes.

Anyway. In an interview with the BBC about why this young lady felt the need to send these thoughts toddling into the public domain, she had this to say:

“Older generations haven’t grown up with Twitter and social media – they know how to talk to other people about [their feelings], but for young people it’s different: you don’t want to bother people with your problems, you just think ‘I’m annoyed: tweet.’”

Now. Here in England we have a newspaper called The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail would take the following stance about this story:

I am not going to venture quite this far. If anything, humanity will be buggered by moral degradation and gratuitous salt-intake long before social media gets its claws into it, but that’s another story for another time.

However.

I am still troubled.

We all know that the social media revolution has ripped our brains open and encouraged us to splatter our profound cogitations (‘You’re sure you know someone and then they go and steal your last Custard Cream. TRUST NO ONE.’), our niggling concerns (‘I think my forearms might be slightly hairier than they used to be’.), and our banal musings (‘I need a poo.’) onto the face of the world for everyone to peruse at their leisure and take as seriously or as lightly as they wish.

But I’d like to think that for those of us who still remember how to think and deal with thoughts and emotions using our consciousness inside our heads, communicate using our lungs, vocal cords and lips, and use a pencil to write words on some paper in order to express an emotion or a deep desire to kiss Graham from Accounts or to assassinate Mrs Fitzwilliam from next door for leaving out smoked mackerel for Cuddles the Cat and thus single-handedly causing the worst fox plague your street has ever seen, the splurging of thoughts on our Facebook walls is a choice rather than an unequivocal imperative.

Shut up, Stickman. I was very proud of ‘unequivocal imperative’. You’re always raining on my parade. Just because you don’t know what ‘unequivocal’ means.

Hah. That shut him up. Don’t challenge me to a word duel , Stickman, I’ll trounce you all the way from here to Thesaurus.com.

But focus, Listener. You don’t half digress.

We of the private consciousness and vocal cords and pen and paper generations surely remember how to deal with strains of thought that enter our little heads in a quiet, peaceful and private manner? We know how to deal with these musings, don’t we? No matter how agonising and potentially defamatory they may be.

See? Stickman beautifully handled a very difficult anxiety. He acknowledged it, accepted it, and decided upon a strategy with which to contend with it. All inside his own sticky little head.

But what if he had done this?

He would  have been branded a nature hater, forced to apologise to the Royal Horticultural Society, the National Trust and English Heritage, probably lost several friends, been disowned by his parents (National Trust members) and his life would never have been the same again.

But for those ‘young people’ whose lives in their living memory offer the ability to project every thought that enters their head onto a public wall, might they eventually lose – or, as time goes on, not even properly develop - the inclination or capacity to think thoughts and deal with emotions by themselves in private? What if the faculty for maintaining an interior monologue diminishes because there is no need for one?

I have conducted an in-depth, multi-billion pound scientific study of how the advance of time and technology has impacted on a human being’s handling of his interior monologue and how society has adapted to it. Please see following exhibits:

Exhibit A

Stickman decides to let loose his interior monologue on the world in 1993, with the following results:

Exhibit B

Stickman decides to let loose his interior monologue on the world in 2013, with the following results:

Finding A: Our concept of what constitutes information worthy of public expression has become considerably screwed. A statement such as ‘I’m going to buy a sandwich’ may now hold the same gravity as ‘My right kidney fell out of my bottom this morning and I’ve had a marriage proposal from a man who claims he is the Messiah and dresses up as a giant turnip on Thursday evenings.’

Finding B: Society’s willingness to accept the public expression of these banalities is potentially limitless. Will there soon be Tweets that simply say ‘I am currently breathing’ or ‘Living on ground under the sky’ or just ‘Alive’?

There are no conclusions, as yet, to these questions that trouble my consciousness interior mind inside my brain in my head. We’ll just have to wait and see. When the social media generation is old enough to become our teachers, doctors, politicians, artists and grown-ups, we might see what damage, if any, has been done. Or maybe things will just be so different there’ll be no need for a private consciousness. Maybe Facebook will change ‘My Facebook Wall’ to ‘My Facebook Brain’. Maybe in 50 years’ time we’ll be looking down at generations of vacant-eyed grunters. Or maybe not.

Whatever makes you happy, Stickman.

Becky says things about … hangovers

I would first like to say, dear suspicious listener, that just because I am writing about hangovers doesn’t mean I have recently suffered from one.*

*It completely does. I have recently been killed by a hangover, and miraculously came back to life, a bit like Jesus.

Hangovers are God’s way of telling you you’re an idiot. Hangovers are a punishment for having fun. Hangovers are your body deciding that it’s going to take away a day of your life by preventing you from doing anything remotely productive and instead forcing you to spend the day in bed eating bowl after bowl of cereal and watching episode after episode of The Golden Girls on YouTube.

Most certainly, Stickman, but it is far more enjoyable when one chooses to spend a day in such pleasant diversion, not when it is literally the only thing that one can do apart from lie on the floor in a pit of self-disgust and softly wail. And if you’ve eaten all my cereal I am going to be livid.

Like life itself or the quality of supermarket own-brand products, hangovers are unpredictable. You can never tell whether they are going to be a mere mild irritation, like a slightly sunburnt elbow, or a fatally catastrophic life-altering event that forces you to reassess your very existence.

Sometimes, the sheer meekness and mildness of a hangover can be a stupendous victory that makes you feel like a superhero with a liver and stomach made of titanium (I think they call that particular superhero ‘Low-Density Corrosion-Resistant Transition Metal Major Organs Man’). Those nights when you start on the beer, then have a few cheeky wines, then some bright spark suggests Jagarmeister, then before you know it you’ve got your face in a bucket of Sambuca and someone is preparing a syringe with which they mean to inject absinthe into your eyeballs, and you wake up the next morning to nothing but a slight headache and an ambiguous stain on your lapel.

These hangovers are worth celebrating. You are clearly bionic and incredible, and that deserves a pat on the back and a massive full English breakfast, a stroll in the park feeling fresh and breezy, and quite possibly a few cheeky beverages later on in the day to thank your body for being so utterly super and brilliant.

And when those nights of absinthe-injecting and tequila-inserting and Sambuca-snorting do catch up with you, and you wake up to cataclysmic devastation and horrible awfulness and a cat is on fire and people have died, you don’t mind so much, because you know you ruddy well deserve it.

But sometimes your body doesn’t want to play. Sometimes your body thinks ‘Hey. You. Person that I keep alive. You’re going down, you hear me? You gowin daaaaooowwwwnn.’ (Yes, my body sometimes does a Samuel L. Jackson impersonation. It’s confusing, but fun.)

After a hard day at work you think to yourself ‘I’m going to imbibe a couple of well-earned alcohol beverages because I have been productive, efficient and generally smashing today, and what harm can a mere two glasses of wine do to my most excellent body?’ And you pop down the pub. You consume said two drinks, perhaps three, if you have one forced upon you or there’s a sudden and unpredicted thunderstorm outside and to leave the premises would be dangerous. Then you go home and you go to bed. It is a perfectly pleasant evening.

And then you wake up and you feel like this:

Your second emotion is confusion. Your first emotion is an intense wish to die, but you quickly pass over that on the grounds of it being dramatic. You are confused. Why has this happened? Why do you hurt so? Who hates you? Did you really only have two drinks, or did you have thirty, get chucked out of the pub, mug an old lady, steal her pension, use it to buy Special Brew and White Lightening, find a bush in a park, drink £80′s worth of almost illegally-strong alcohol in said bush, gatecrash a student party and achieve a record for sucking the contents of a bottle of vodka up your bottom through a straw, steal ninety-five cans of cheap lager, drink them all whilst standing on your head and get a cheer for vomiting into a pint glass and then mixing it with Lambrini and drinking it, then fly to Dublin, wipe out an entire village of its Guinness, fly back, and get hit by a transit bus carrying holidaymakers to their plane to Malaga?

These hangovers are confusing. They’re unfair. They are disproportionate to the amount of alcohol you consumed. The ratio of fun to pain is deeply unbalanced. They are nefarious. They are like a malicious Pain Lord wreaking havoc in your innocent body with his pointed stick and his penchant for inflicting misery. They are not to be trusted. They make you doubt yourself. They make you think you are destined to a life of tea, coffee and fizzy pop, ultimately leading to stained teeth and offensive wind. You begin to yearn for liver disease.

Hangovers make you slow. If your hungover motor ability was a tortoise, it would be jeered at by the other speedier tortoises.

Hangovers confuse your stomach. One minute you are gorging on fried sausages and two loaves of bread, and the next you experience that phenomenon of Sudden and Categorical Certainty that You Will Vomit if You So Much as Move a Millimetre of Your Body.

So, dear listener, let that be a warning to you. Next time you fancy a quick drink down the pub, think again. That quick drink may be your undoing. That quick drink may change your life. That quick drink may force you to watch forty-seven videos of squirrels falling off walls and babies laughing at paper on YouTube.

Related articles

• Hangover Cures around the World (usgreentechnology.com)
• How to Overcome a Hangover After Alcohol Excess (healthhype.com)

Becky says things about … meetings

Oh, sweetest listener.

Meetings.

They are an integral part of grown-up life, like love, depression, and buying the wrong bin bags. Whatever your vocation in this strange and bewildering grown-up world, you will, at some point, have sat through a meeting.

That meeting might have been so phenomenal that you emerged from it on a PowerPoint-induced high and were forced to do something spontaneous and dangerous, like a bungee jump or get an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, just to make use of the adrenaline.

On the other hand, that meeting might have caused you to question the very meaning of humanity and your status therein, wish a terrible ‘accident’ upon everyone the room, and wonder whether the fall from the window would kill you.

As the question ‘Why are meetings evil?’ is one of the most pressing and profound in the modern world, I have attempted to answer this with a comprehensive list of reasons, and, for the good of mankind, have also suggested the best methods with which to remedy these ghastly situations. (I did prepare a PowerPoint presentation, but Stickman closed it down before I could save it, all because he wanted to look at his disgusting websites.)

Content

The foundations behind any meeting’s evilness. I have never sat down at a large cluster of tables with a plastic cup of cold coffee and been told ‘Right, the purpose of today’s meeting is to design a Julie Andrews-themed theme park, and come up with names for the rides, like ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialigoodnessmethisisfast’. We will also be drawing a lot of pictures of roller coasters.’

That literally never happens.

What does happen, is someone says ‘BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA QUALITY DATA BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAA PERFORMANCE INDICATORS BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA SPREADSHEETS BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA EFFICIENCY MANAGEMENT BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABIMBAMBUMBOODLE I’M GOING TO BORE THE BUM OFF YOU BUMBUMBUMBUMBUMSPOON.’

Due to the fact that the topic under discussion is invariably as enchanting as a hernia, the very act of being alive can become a strain. You begin to wish your skin would melt off just so you could leave the room to get some Savlon from the first aid box. The speaker’s words cease to be words, just noises, like a walrus humming. Concern grows that your brain might actually be crumbling, and will soon dribble out of your ears like a torrent of soggy moths. The clock tells you you have two more hours to endure, and you panic.

Remedy

If there is a view from the window, estimate how long it would take you to travel from one end of the view to the other using various styles of movement i.e. crawling, galloping, ambling as though filled with hubris. If there is no view from the window, imagine one bursting with sunshine, meadows, sparkling brooks, and those cartoon cupids from Fantasia. If there is no window, get out immediately. You are being held against your will and they are going to torture you, remove your limbs, and laugh at your helpless torso.

Room Temperature

In an age where we can hold the world in our hands, explore distant galaxies, and make washing machines that are also tumble dryers, no one has invented a meeting room with a stable climate in which living organisms can exist comfortably for any portion of time. In these chambers of atmospheric whimsy you will either be boiled to death in temperatures that make the Sahara feel like an English Summer, or you will get hypothermia, pneumonia and frostbite in a sub-zero climate about which you can do absolutely NOTHING, because the air-conditioning is controlled from an office in Saffron Waldon, and by the time you have logged a call, requested that the air-conditioning is turned off, received an acknowledgement of your request and a promise to respond within 24 hours, you will already be dead.

Remedy

If it is too hot, strip to your underwear, lie on the table and ask the speaker for a Lemon Fanta and a massage. If it is too cold, your most judicious option is to make a hefty coat from the skins of your colleagues. If you have no instruments with which to achieve this (don’t underestimate the uses of the humble Biro) or are of a non-murderous disposition, you’ll just have to hold up a placard with a polite request to put the heating on, vocal ability having been rendered impossible due to the air-conditioning drying your passages so that they resemble the dusty pipes of a derelict manor house.

Human Noises

Without doubt the most deathly appalling and evil element of any meeting. In that inescapable confined space you are subjected to the various bodily clanks and clunks of people you haven’t chosen to be locked up with, because why would you choose to spend two hours with someone who clears their throat every six and a half seconds? Not a cough, listener – they never actually cough, there is an apparently insufficient build-up of phlegm to warrant an actual cough - a mere clearing of the throat. Every six and a half seconds. You know the sort I mean. A little ‘hahhugm’ noise. Every six and a half seconds. After two hours each ‘hahhugm’ is like a dagger in your heart.

And then you must contend with the sniffers, the sneezers, the sighers, and, the godfather of all evil meeting elements: the speaker’s mouth noises.

The loud swallows, listener – every squelch his saliva makes as it forces itself down his throat echoes through the room and pierces your very soul with its heinousness. The sucking of his tongue on his teeth every time he draws breath or starts a new sentence; the occasional slurp or snort; or the accumulation of such a quantity of saliva in his mouth that it sounds like  he’s talking through a mouthful of cotton wool, and this only serves to intensify your growing panic as you begin to rock back and forth, a tear forms in your eye, and you silently offer up your own grandmother in exchange for just one swallow from the speaker.

Remedy

There is no easy way to deal with this evil meeting situation without making tyrannical and barbaric use of staple guns and shredding machines.

No, I mean there really is no other way.

Epic Fatigue

It is well-known that meeting rooms are fitted with devices that spray invisible yet potent soporific gases into the atmosphere to cause almost coma-level drowsiness and extreme weakness in the inhabitants of said room. There is no other way to explain the unfathomable and almost biblical lethargy that one feels immediately upon entering a meeting room. You might think you’re a fairly virile, bounding sort of chap – you eat a lot of pulses and lean protein, and you fit in a couple of 5K runs a week and people say things like ‘I wish I had your energy’ or ‘I can’t keep up with you’ – and yet you are no match for the epic fatigue that consumes your entire being during a meeting.

Remedy

There are two effective methods to combat the epic fatigue: the first is to make a cocktail of espresso, Lucozade, Red Bull and cocaine, and fifteen minutes before the meeting inject it into your veins. There are possible extraordinary side effects of this method, including re-enacting an entire battle scene from Gladiator with you playing all the parts (including the horses), building a scale model of a pyramid using pencils, agendas and your colleagues, and trying to walk on the ceiling.

A less disruptive method is to simply give in to the epic fatigue and get yourself a nice couple of hours kip, with only a marginal risk of shouting out potentially compromising dream words.

 

So there you have it. I hope you now feel equipped, dear attentive listener, to deal with any future meetings that you will inevitably have to attend if you are to remain in this grown-up life. There is, of course, the catalogue of Plausible and Implausible But Always Mega Excuses to Avoid Going to a Meeting, which you should carry around with you at all times, particularly for those unscheduled meetings that managers like to spring on employees to make sure they’re still alive.