We're going to need a bigger gag

So, another birthday is rolling around again and, as a fledgling Grumpy Mama Bear, I only want one thing.* Stilte, stille, silenzju, cisza, silenzio, silence.

Gorgeous, glorious silence.  Second only in awesomeness to sleep.

You see, since becoming a Mama Bear, I am surrounded by noise.  Whether it is the diurnal hyperbabble of Baby Bear, her crepuscular honks and squeaks as she’s settling herself down, the echoes of her bawling that reverberate through my brainpan after whatever sadness has subsided, or the whooshing of my heartbeat I can hear in my ears as they strain in anticipation of the shattering of a peaceful night’s kip, Baby Bear certainly keeps the old lugholes active.  

But that’s fine.  General racket, I’m told, is part and parcel of the whole ‘having a kid’ shebang.

What is worse, what makes Missy Chatterbox’s vocalizations pale into insignificance is something more pervasive and irritating.  Me!

I simply cannot shut up.  Ever.  Drop in on me at any given point and you will find me:

• Babbling like a Gelada with my little girl
• Singing and throwing some serious shapes for her entertainment
• Relaying back, in real time, every single action (however small) I perform
• Vocalising everything that flitters through my mind. Everything. All the time. Ever.

The problem is that, alongside my figure and sanity, motherhood has robbed me of my ability to use my inside voice. And what’s worse, I bedeck my constadrivel with dreadful rhymes. Dreadful rhymes.

It’s not an egg; it’s an eggy-weggy. Our faithful hound has been rebadged a “doggy-woggy” and I seem to be avoiding words that I would previously wield with joyous abandon, but can’t use for fear I break my own teeth trying to bang out a rhymey ending.

Words like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis which become unstable when a suffix is added, will fall in on itself and either form a verbal black hole or will rip our reality to shreds. 

My new found linguistic "dexterity" has left me sounding like a lobotomised Edward Lear. 

The depths to which I have sunk recently became clear to me when, on a glorious walk in the local woods, I realised I had been babbling non-stop for about an hour and Baby Bear had been. Asleep. The. Whole. Time.

Sweet Jumping Jesus.  Do I do this regularly?  I do! I merrily wander about, talking to a sleeping baby, in public.  I may as well be talking to the pushchair or my handbag for all the legitimacy the presence of a sleeping Baby Bear lends my inane driveling.  I am no better than Radio Guy, Pants Man or any of the other denizens of a nearby high street which, for very good reason, is locally known as Freak Street. 

So for my birthday, I am giving myself the gift of silence.  I’m going to go to a spa and take some time out to shut the hell up and reset and recalibrate my inside/outside voice relay.

Without a doubt I’ll be back to my new old trick the moment I am within earshot of Baby Bear, but I acknowledge that I do need to take periodic breaks from constantly generating noise or I’ll end up like the guy that Grumpy Papa Bear and I recently saw in Asda. 

He looked like the baddie from Raiders of the Lost Ark and he was squeezing fruit.  Wearing leather gloves.

*that is actually a lie.  Grumpy Papa Bear! If you are reading this, I want many things. Many, many things.

The Destruction of the Tea

Today I am making a stand. I need to rid myself of a terrible scourge that lurks in my kitchen. They lurk in the cupboard like modern day Scyllas and Charybdises (Charybdisai?), presenting a dire fate for any foolish traveller who forsakes the gleaming well-lit safety of the refrigerator wherein the real coffee resides, choosing instead to plumb the depths to seek an enjoyable beverage. I speak of the blight that is herbal tea, specifically fruit teas.

It is worth noting at this juncture that I don't hate all herbal teas.  I am merely venting my spleen (which has not been emptied for so long, it’s about to go all Dave’s Syndrome on stuff ) about one or two species of the genus thea herborum.  Or hippy tea.

We’ve all been there.  You really fancy a hot drink, but you remember you’ve already had half a dozen espressos and you suspect your heartbeat shouldn’t be doing that bippity boppity.....bang thing.

So, just like that scene in Flash Gordon, where the fella off Blue Peter has a go at the big old tree stump on the planet Arboria, you gently insert your mitt into the cupboard, snaking gingerly past the Horlicks (phew, that was close!) and various packets of spiced latte mix, drinking fudge* and other delicious treats until you light upon a fruit infusion.

Ah ha!  A fruit infusion with zero caffeine!  Fantastic.  You crack open the overly decorated box – usually incorporating some “poetry” or how the <insert indigenous people here> used to use it for something or other - revealing about 15 individually paper-wrapped infusion bags. 

While you wait for the kettle to boil you have all the time in the world to remove the packaging, pop the bag (sometimes a paperish one unless you have the expensive ones which are made of muslin) into your mug and wrap the bit of string with the pointless tab on the end around the handle. 

According to the destructions, you should leave it to steep for 5 minutes, but you’ve tangled the string and pointless tab around the handle so it’d be a faff to unwrap.  Drinking round the bag it is, then.

You pick up the mug and inhale deeply.  My goodness! It smells amazing! There’s a party up my nose and everyone’s invited!  And with no calories, you say, oh nutritional information on the box? Amazing! Why do people bother with drinking fudge when you can have something as glorious as this?

Then you take the first sip of the fruit infusion.  Which henceforth shall be called the mug of Perpetual Steaming Disappointment.

What kind of witchcraft is this? What kind of necromancer creates something that promises so much, but leaves you sucking on the beverage equivalent of an Enya or Dido cd? And why did I buy so many of them?  For that brightly patterned box is not alone.  Oooooooh no. I’ve bought a metric f*ck ton of the bastards.

It transpires that herbal teas, or at least the purchasing of herbal teas, appear to be more addictive than the caffeine I ingest on a regular basis. 

I am compelled, when on my travels with work or simply on holiday, to pop into a grocery store somewhere in the world and peruse the bewildering selection of teas available for purchase.  I must then buy something with nice decorations on the box and some text that is presumably some poetry or an explanation of how the <insert indigenous people here> used to use it for something or other. 

This is the explanation for the Heiße Leibe  tea I once bought in Berlin.   Yes, the name was the main reason why I bought it.

For the most part, the boxes probably taste better than the contents, but this doesn’t stop me from buying more of the blessed things. 

What is wrong with me?

My compulsion to purchase bags of drinking dust has taken a darker turn.  My addiction has led me on to darker roads and the crueller, harder and generally more evil teas.

This terrifying subspecies of  herbal tea is more akin to the Sirens** who caused many a man to meet his demise on the pointy rocks of reality via the medium of muzak.  These evil temptress teas don’t just bibble on about general health goodness, but boast wildly about the literally incredible benefits and amazing results that you can expect if you imbibe said tea on a regular basis. 

My cupboard is full of “detox und wellness” from Germany,  “drainage et elimination” from France, “sem gordura” from Portugal, “dimagrante” from Italy and a million other implied good for you infusions from all over Europe and beyond.  All of which do nothing, apart from tasting of stale farts and clog up valuable cupboard space.

And I fall for this shit every time.  Every time!

So today is the start of a new day.  Today I eliminate every single pointless useless teabag that currently inhabiting my kitchen.  I will no longer buy shitty favourless teabags, regardless of the comic value of their names.  I WILL NO LONGER purchase smoke and mirror wellness teas from snake oil vendors or regular grocery stores.

I will henceforth only buy herbal teas that actually taste good like Mr Scruff’s divine offerings, that actually sort of do what they claim (like the ones that say this might make your throat feel a little less crappy), or at the very least taste of something.

And I ask Mr Grumpy Bear to remind me of this next time I am somewhat addled by the heat of a glorious vacation and I am staring, wild-eyed and slavering at the herbal tea section of the supermercado…..

*This does exist by the way.  It is awesome. You can buy it and everything!

**thank Christ the Sirens could sing. They’d need some form of talent to counteract their women crossed with a duck look, which I can’t imagine would appeal to too many men.  Although if you’ve thought of it there’s bound to be some sort of horrible pr0n of it out there on the internets. Eur.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, unless you are a minger.

As my friends and acquaintances know, it is a rare day indeed that I am faced with something so outrageous that I am rendered speechless, jaw dangling and brows knitted like a pair of caterpillars in a pitched battle to the death, unable to frame and contain my outrage with a barbed wire fence of neatly linked words.

This ultra rare, gold titled and holofoiled moment, this once in a blue moon phenomenon occurred this week when I saw the latest news item about that rotten little band of Narcissuses and would-be contestants for the Judgement of Paris that make up the charming community of BeautifulPeople.com.

You may not know (or perhaps even care) that the entire premise of this exclusive dating site is that it the members are ‘beautiful.’  These poor delicate Socratic Ideals of the human form must not have their sensitive eyes birsmirched by crocopigs and thus any poor supplicants attempting to cross the threshold of BeautifulPeople.com have to fling their prostrate forms before the members of this society who will then decide by vote if he or she is delicious enough to skip through the fields of gorgeousness or is in fact a hideous troll (there shall be no clemency!) who needs to be shoved back under the bridge from whence he or she lurched. 

Ok!  You, dear reader, are extremely gorgeous and charming and so we will assume that you would have immediately been voted into the hallowed gang (although we all know, dear reader, that you have far too much going on in the cranial department to put yourself through the humiliation of being judged by people who think the plural of product is product, when talking about haircare).  This doesn’t mean you are safe. Thanks to 6.7 in the terms and conditions of the website yours remains a life of uncertainty.

“BeautifulPeople reserves the right to move member profiles back to the BeautifulPeople rating module to be voted on by existing members. As a consequence such action could result in removal of member profiles from the website. Such action can take place from time to time or as BeautifulPeople in its sole discretion deems this a necessary action.”

See?  Even if you are deemed beautiful enough to get in through the door, there is no such thing as certainty in the beauty stakes; you are ankle deep in the colloid hydrogel of public opinion and you will never know when that capricious harlot will shove you arse deep into the mire of rejection from the “exclusive virtual world for the aesthetically blessed only”.   

This very disaster befell a number of members in January 2010, when they were required to resubmit themselves to the vote, after observant members put in a series of complaints about some people letting themselves go over the holidays:

"We responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage. This is the same as having them re-apply," said Greg Hodge, the managing director.

So judged they were, and only a few hundred were permitted to keep their chufty badge of beautifulness.  5,000 individuals were deemed simply too grotesquely fat for the members’ delicate sensibilities and were duly requested to sling their pudgy, repellent hooks.  It puts me in mind of that scene in Mary Poppins, when Mr Banks has to do the walk of shame, which included his brolly being inside-outed and his bowler hat being punched through.   Imagine the erstwhile beauty being forced to hand back her hair straighteners and have her eyeliner pencils snapped in half before her very eyes.  She is obliged to relinquish her designer clothes, which are to be replaced with a capsule of High Street outfits, accented by some pieces that have been “designed” by Kate Moss.  Humiliating!

This is all well and good: idiot turning on idiot like rabid dogs in a pit of offal is extremely entertaining and has been many a TV show’s raison d’etre, but is it real?  Is it a cautionary tale against thinking you are all that and a bag of chips, eating the chips, becoming a chubber and then being treated like a leper, shunned by your community and doomed to wander the streets of averageness and mediocrity for ever more?  Or is it an awesome PR stunt? 

Please be upstanding, Golden Goose PR.  Yes, dear reader, I am saddened to inform you that it was indeed a very clever piece of PR called Festive Fatties.

“Festive Fatties was a moment of inspiration on a wintery walk through Hyde Park. We spotted some good-looking couples stuffing themselves with fairground food from Winter Wonderland.  It made us think of the Beautifulpeople.com members and whether they would be pigging out like the rest of us this Christmas.” said Miki Haines-Sanger, Co-founder, for the PR Week article .

And, boy oh boy, did it work!  They maximised every penny of their measly budget of £10,500 (plus $20,000 for PR Newswire) to get the kind of results that would leave your average marketer or PR person wracked with tears of bitter jealousy:

“Within 24 hours, there were 48,000 new applicants to Beautifulpeople.com. During peak times, the site experienced 700 applications a minute. It received more than 2.2 million hits in the days following the story.”

And it gets better:

“Ad revenue increase of 400 per cent in the three days after the campaign launch

- Traffic increase of 700 per cent between January and April 2010

- Increase in overall revenue of 900 per cent between January and April 2010

- In January 2010, Beautiful-people.com was ranked at 9,345 in Alexa's list of most visited sites. By February it had climbed to 1,700”

In essence, idiot baiting, using idiots as the bait. And making $25 per month from every Idiot that made it over the wire. I salute these brave PRs for this fantastic effort, in giving us a bit of a laugh at the expense of the Idiots as well as perhaps taking the worst of the Hollyoaks and WAG wannabes off the streets and out from under our feet.  But…and it is a big but:  it does make me a little wary of the latest story of humiliation at the hands of the beautiful people.

Apparently a disgruntled ex-employee lodged a virus in the old system which allowed 30,000 fuglies to flow out of the shadows and into the light, like a wave of cockroaches scuttling towards an open refrigerator, and gain membership to the site without having to go through the tiresome voting process.  This could not be put up with, as was explained by that perennial charmer Greg Hodge "We have to stick to our founding principles of only accepting beautiful people – that's what our members have paid for…We can't just sweep 30,000 ugly people under the carpet."

Imagine the bump that would cause.

All 30,000 little cockroaches have been forcibly removed from the refrigerator of gorgeousness and paid back, but head exterminator Hodge still felt bad for "unfortunate people who were wrongly admitted to the site and believed, albeit for a short time, that they were beautiful".

Rather than relying on traditional methods of pest removal, Hodge has gone for the option of sending the swamp donkeys a “carefully-worded email, trying to be as sensitive as possible” and, for those folks who are finding it hard to come to terms with the fact they have a face that is more akin to a melted welly than a work of art, they have kindly and sensitively set up a helpline to help the Morlocks face and accept the fact that they are fat and ugly.  These people are all heart.

Oh, yes, and did I mention that the alleged virus rapidly became known as the Shrek virus?

This latest story surrounding this website, its ridiculous premise and even more ridiculous attitude to the world, makes me want to throw my hands up in despair.  Is this what we’ve come to as a species?  If I wasn’t so plain lazy, I would invent a time machine so I could go back to that day when the first little fishy thought ‘Sod this water lark! Let’s get with the air and walking thing’ and tell it not to bother. 

As it stands, I’ll simply try and wedge my jaw back into my face, put a restraining order on my eyebrows and try to forget that this dreadful website exists. And maybe get some guidance on what real beauty is from someone whose thoughts I actually respect.

On the bewildering nature of jobseeking

Occasionally I am hit by a feeling, as I am sure most other people out there in the world are, that I am doing the wrong thing.  This tends to happen when I have had a frustrating day at work or when I hear about someone else doing something so indescribably awesome (living in Barcelona but also sailing the high seas; being a trapeze artist; chucking it all in and taking up surfing professionally) that I cannot help but indulge in a small session of lot bewailment and wondering what I am doing in all the other places in the Multiverse. 

Don’t get me wrong: I am pretty good in my chosen career and I love the place where I work, but after listening to a particularly scathing attack by the much vaunted and deservedly celebrated Rhod Gilbert, (a person whom incidentally I admire above others due in no small part on his ability to sustain high levels of vitriolic and eloquent fury, when lesser mortals would self-immolate due to the power of their unbridled rage) on my profession of choice, I did wonder a bit what does a grownup do if they what to change careers but have no idea what they would do instead.

Because, you see, there are all sorts of careers advicey resources and places that young people can access, but I am told most of the good ones/free ones are totally ageist and rubbish and don’t let older folk at the goods.  And I have memories from trying one of those services ‘cough cough ahem’ years ago, when I was doing my A-levels (note I didn’t say A1/A2 or whatever they are called nowadays, which fairly accurately reflects my age, when qualifications were straightforward and all was nought but fields).  

I went along to the careers advisory place in town, and I got to use the latest technology and answer a series of questions on a computer which would then analyse my responses scientifically and then give me a shortlist of jobs I could consider.  Unsurprisingly, the list that the special scientific computer programme returned was more of a ridiculously long list incorporating every mortal thing from funeral director to stockbroker via event manager and accountant. 

I recall sitting at the workstation, feeling simultaneously under- and overwhelmed.  Underwhelmed by the basic usefulness of the program which took 45 minutes of my young life and did not help me in any way apart from giving me a massive list (I suspect the “program” may just have been a spreadsheet list of all careers possible, for all the scientific analysis it performed) and overwhelmed by the sheer size of the list and the number of careers that I hadn’t thought about let alone knew existed, leaving me with the onerous job of finding out what the heck a Wrinkle Chaser, a Pathoecologist, an Ocularist or any number of other odd careers were.

Suffice to say, I generally ignored the ‘advice’ that I was dispensed – n.b. for ‘advice’ please read ‘epic list from a computer’ as that was the extent of the support given by this place, because the human being at the counter by the door gave me more or less the same level of help as the pot plant standing next to the workstation – and decided to make my own way in the world.  Which was cool and has worked in its own way. 

But now what does one do?  Where can one go to find a new career path? I Googled the phrase “Job hunting”.  On the first page I was greeted with the Wikipedia page, whose initial description left me feeling little short of depressed:

“Job hunting, job seeking, or job searching is the act of looking for employment, due to unemployment or discontent with a current position. The immediate goal of job seeking is usually to obtain a job interview with an employer which may lead to getting hired. The job hunter or seeker typically first looks for job vacancies or employment opportunities.” 

And left me with the suspicion that the type of person who needs to look this up in order to understand what job seeking actually means is probably not the person whom anybody wishes to employ.

So what are your other options?  Thankfully the internets has a suggestion or two. You could use one of those new whizzy careers programmes which seem to be, in essence, a slightly slicker and faster version of the careers list.  I just tried the University of Kent's Careers Explorer and got this uninspiring list of potential careers:

Bank Manager - Retail

Purchasing Manager

Retail Merchandiser

Secondary Teacher

Chartered Accountant

Management Accountant

Operational Researcher

Banker - Investment/Securities

Marketing Manager

Systems Analyst

I am one of these already and, as for the rest, I would rather pull my own face off rather than do any one of those careers.  Do I look like a gitwizard?

What next? Traditionally if a man wanted to ‘forget’ all he had to do was rock up at the gates of the local branch of The Foreign Legion, sign up with a fake name so that he could escape his past, and spend the next however long sweating in the sun and forgetting whatever it was that originally made him think that signing up to the Foreign Legion was a good idea.  Times have changed and as you can see, the Foreign Legion has a pretty swanky website, and, seemingly, some quite good recruitment packages and a good monthly wage. But you do have to give you real name these day and (and this is a very big but) I don’t think they allow girls in.

Inspired by the young man in a poem by Michael Rosen poem from the fantastic ‘You Can’t Catch Me’,  which involves running away and joining the Merchant Navy (I can’t find the poem online, but if any of you can, let me know.  It is wicked!) I thought about living the life travelling the world and getting to wear supercool white outfits.  But while this would please me greatly for a short while, I think I’d be happier following the actions of Rosen’s young sailor and coming home the very next day and drinking up all the gravy.

Rapidly running out of ideas, I started typing the phrase “how can I become a mercenary” into Google, somewhat unnerved by the rapidity of the predictive text, fully discombobulated by the 9,000,000-odd results that appeared, and deeply irritated by the fact that most of the people posting these questions up couldn’t spell for toffee.  I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t like any mercenary type work being done to me by someone who couldn’t even write their invoice properly.  I think my ability to wield my words bedecked with mostly correct spelling and grammar makes me overqualified for the job.  That and the minor issue of having no warrior skills in particular to boast about, preclude a career as a soldier of fortune.

There’s nothing for It, I simply have no other option but be grateful for what I’ve got.  Considering all the other jobs I am doing in the Multiverse, the really awful ones - Puzzle Piece Checker, Flatulence Analyst, Cat Food Quality Controller or any of the other jobs listed in the 8 worst jobs shortlist  – things could be worse.  A lot worse.

I could be a traffic warden.

What colour is your rhino(virus)?

After a fun yet possibly ill-advised Friday evening in the garden without my scarf and woolly hat, I have fallen foul of the dread disease known as the summer cold.  This germy foulness is undoubtedly one of the most annoying weapons belonging to the gruesome Pestilence who, whilst not being as superbadass as Death, is still able to make life a misery via a number of poxy afflictions on the world: ingrown toenails, e-coli (beansprouts in Germany: a sign of the Apocalypse?), Kerry Katona (a little bug that latches onto the pre-frontal cortex that inhibits the ability to make any sensible decisions and causes the sufferer's reading abilities to instantly flatline, and Sepp Blatter (a vile disorder which stops the secretions from the conscience gland).

I am also dealing with the great blocked nose switcharooo, which is apparently a good thing according to certain meditation folks, who also say it is good to force your face to switch between nostrils when rattling air in or out, because:

“When the right nostril is dominate [sic], it's the better time for physical activities, eating, asana, *doing.* when the left is dominate [again, sic], mental activities as well as resting, meditating, *being*--studying--included!”

Alternate nostril breathing is only one of myriad pastimes for folk who like wearing loose linen and sandals whilst trying to achieve oneness and a dialog with the self or other such time-fillers which are supposed to be good for you, but in the case of the nostril domination game, my right nostril is completely stuffed and not even the insertion and prodding of a puffer fish with string tied around its little fin) will unblock it.  So I’m stuck with the “resting and meditating” nostril which may go some way to explain why I feel less than dynamic.

But what is the common cold?  According to Medscape Reference, rhinoviruses (RVs) are small (30 nm), nonenveloped viruses that contain a single-strand RNA genome within an icosahedral (20-sided) capsid. Rhinoviruses belong to the Picornaviridae family, which includes the genera Enterovirus (polioviruses, coxsackieviruses groups A and B, echoviruses, numbered enteroviruses, parechoviruses) and Hepatovirus (hepatitis A virus).

All of which sounds far more unpleasant than my visions of sneeze droplets being filled with the tiniest rhinoceroses floating about like dandelion clock fluff which, on being inhaled by an unsuspecting person, become the angriest tiniest rhinoceroses that bang about in your head. 

Under this circumstance, you’d just better pray that you had a white rhino in there, as it is more chilled out than its almost identical relative the black rhino, but maybe you can tell by the severity of the cold. Perhaps you could try stuffing some leaves up there – they like leaves, I am told – or approaching it slowly, but mollification of a black rhino is unlikely and foliage up the schnozz is not a good look.

With this in mind, I looked at other ways of persuading the cold to vacate my face and was surprised to learn that over my thirty something years on the planet, during all the colds I have suffered, I have been blowing my nose all wrong! 

I didn’t even know there was a right or wrong way of going about these things. In my screaming ignorance, I assumed that as long as you used a tissue not a wall or a yak, and that said tissue was in the region of your conk, all you needed to do was have a good toot and all would be well.  Thank you to WebMD for disabusing me of my preconceptions, for showing me the error of my ways and teaching me how to blow my nose:
 

“It's important to blow your nose regularly when you have a cold rather than sniffling mucus back into your head. But when you blow hard, pressure can move germ-carrying phlegm back into your ear passages, causing earache. The best way to blow your nose is to press a finger over one nostril while you blow gently into a tissue to clear the other.”

Sensible, yes, and certainly a little patronising (although if a grown person needs to be advised as to how he or she is to blow his or her own nose, I do wonder if they should be allowed the internet or even outside) but the rest of website has some pretty good advice - I would say that, it is telling me to eat some of my favourite foods – which a reasonably sensible individual may choose to follow.

A word of warning, however, on indiscriminately taking advice from ‘experts’ whether on the nets or not.  Any person that tells you to ingest/rub on/sit in a natural ingredient because the anti-bacterial nature of said ingredient helps treat viral infections, is clearly a nit and should be ignored, or for that matter, anybody who swears by antibiotics.

I shall be taking the advice of Ben Goldacre, and accept that there is really nothing that can be done.  I will wait for the tiny nostril rhinos to get bored stomping around and pretend to myself that I am doing something ‘good’ by following my tried and tested process:

Ingredients

100 ml of whiskey

Honey

Lemon

Method

Take the honey and lemon.  Throw them in the bin.

Drink the whiskey.

Go to bed.

Repeat as necessary.

And I can bet that, thanks to my rigorous regime, in a few days -  maybe up to a week -  I will be feeling fine and dandy once more.

Gazing into the Apprentice Abyss

This week has been a week of watersheds, new discoveries and regret.  And all three of these culminated into one moment in time.  The critical point at which my life would change forever came about at 9pm on Wednesday when I wandered into the living room and noticed that the other half had put The Apprentice on the goggle-box.  Up until this time, I had managed to avoid this travestuous excuse for entertainment: I didn’t even know who Stuart Baggs was (although subsequently it pains me to have to for once in my life agree with the purveyor of darkness that is Piers Morgan when he said he had the business brains of a lobotomized aardvark). 

“Welcome to the nadir of your miserable life, ladies and gentlemen.”  The announcer didn’t say.  “please leave your standards at the door and listen to the sounds of souls shattering as they debase themselves before the grand throne solely for the sport of the Dark One himself, Lord Sugar, the twisted evil pubic gnome and his chattering minions.”

But he may as well have done because, as I sank into my seat, I felt the black waters of despair begin to lap about my feet and start to rise with a slow inexorability only seen in the movement of glaciers. 

The line-up was an unprepossessing gaggle of cretins and lickspittles.  I have nothing to really compare them with, having previously taken the policy of jamming my fingers in my ears and shouting “Lalalalalala! Go away!” whenever anyone tried to discuss the toadying lackeys that grasped and clawed at the coattails of the Dark One on previous series, but if the brief was to scrape the bottom of the barrel of humanity I do believe they managed it.

So there I was, stuck on the sofa, watching two groups of people who are allegedly highly successful business wizards with all the mad skills a business ninja requires to be the superest best ever display anything but.   The shambolic nature of, well, everything they did, made me wonder if any of them had ever given a presentation, pitched an idea, worked on a project or, for that matter if any of them knew how to spell the word ‘business’

But on to the task at hand: create an app with a global appeal with the winners being the team whose app has the most global downloads.  With a silent Banzai charge floating around their collective ears and very little going on between aforementioned lugholes, they ran at the project with a level of enthusiastic incompetence that would make Raglan and Lucan of the Light Brigade say “Gosh. Steady on chaps.  Perhaps we should think it through.”

The boys’ room was one giant love-in, with lots of stroking and positive reinforcement and self-congratulation (“Aw we’re brilliant!  Nice one geezer! Go us!  We’re like totally amazing!”) whilst they devised an app of such naffness that only salesmen, readers of redtops, estate agents and recruitment executives would enjoy. Oh and people who buys a certain type of app to then show all their mates:

“Look!  Look!  It’s a pint but on my Iphone.  Brilliant!  But check this out, when I tip it, it’s like I’m like drinking it.  Look! Look! The pint’s emptying.  Awesome.  Wasn’t that cool.  Brilliant.”

The girls were not faring much better, but were working in a far healthier, challenging, confrontational (some might say bloody-minded and argumentative) way:

 “Oo - i had this idea where we can do a thing and get you know, people to, erm, join the thing and it's a thing with, erm, tiddley-faddley rinky-dink bits…”

“Shut up.  Stop talking.  Now.”

“Let me tell you about my idea.  I want to tell you about my idea.  So you’re sitting next to the person and he says, uhh, no wait, he asks you, um like where are we and then you can like, um, no wait, um.”

“Shut it. Don’t test me.”

“But…but.”

“No. Can it.”

(Much glaring and planning of epic slagging off session later.)

Stuff happened and people said some stupid things – the default setting, I believe for the cringing whelps desperate to show Dark One their worth by offering up their own dear granny for the trampling over, by stabbing of as many backs as possible and fighting each other to get to the ultimate boot licking position.

And the result? A couple of crappy apps which managed to get the perfect balance of banality and naffness that would get Idiots from around the globe stabbing furiously at their portable devices and one of which even incorporating a side serving of lazy racism – Welsh people, valleys. Geddit? – that would only appeal to a few lobotomized aardvarks across the world.

We also saw a few bloody noses and bruised egos, the beginnings of a few hate campaigns and a raft of mind-meltingly stupid quotes that are already being jotted down and snickered over by the highbrow and lowbrow alike. 

“'I'm not a show pony, or a one-tricky pony. I'm not a jack-ass or a stubborn mule, and I'm definitely not a wild stallion that needs to be tamed. I am the champion thoroughbred that this process requires." 

And there was me, Jim Eastwood, thinking you were an idiot.  Note to self: Champion thoroughbred.  Not nitwit. 

"My positive approach and very good looks make me stand out from the crowd." 

Thank you Vincent Disneur, for your modest self-appraisal. Was that sweat or essence of handsomeness oozing out of your pores when you were tanking your pitch?

As the episode wound up, the Dark One was positively crackling with malevolent glee, as the spineless project manager vacillated between his choices for who was to get the superkicking in the Boardroom (a place that is mentioned in hushed tones, we are on sacred ground doncherknow?) and having delivered his opinions in a manner that put me to thinking of a West Highland Terrier chewing on a dead snail, the Dark One did his mystical pointy finger thing and uttered the magical words:

“You’re fired.”

And, before our very eyes, one sweaty contestant was consigned to the dungheap.  But what of the rest?  A collective mopping of brows, feeble attempts at self-justification and the working out of which fellow-competitor to screw over next.

As the closing credits rolled, my head was buzzing with thoughts and questions. They do all this for a measly quarter of a million?  Is your dignity and professional pride worth £250,000?  What on earth could possibly be the job prospects for an Apprentice reject?  Surely nobody in their right mind would employ a person who not only displays stunning incompetence but also clearly hasn’t got the nous to keep his or her uselessness under wraps?  How can such nincompoopery be permitted in a public forum?  Do I even care? 

As Neitzsche said in Aphorism 146 of Beyond Good and Evil:

“When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

I’ve watched the Apprentice now, and my soul has been dirtied and some kind of dirty you just can’t scrub clean.

But why tea lights? Why is it always tea lights?

Yesterday morning at 10.20 am I found myself standing in the dark, staring at a door like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl.  Like the little Match Girl, I was hovering in the gloom feeling cold and desperate, but unlike the protagonist of the sad story about the dreams and hopes of a dying girl I was not alone. No lonely vigil for me: that morning I had easily 100 people standing in the shades of artificial crepuscularity waiting and yearning to get through the doors.

My presence in this place was entirely unplanned: my morning was supposed to consist of noodling about in the sun, not this.  Not lurking like a troll under a bridge on a perfectly good day.  Certainly not standing in a line of cretins whose idea of a good trip out on a Sunday morning is going to IKEA and, to be extra certain that they do not miss a single moment of the experience, have arrived long before the shop actually opens.  Why would you do this?  Why, if you know the shop opens at 10.30, would you arrive up to half an hour early so you can stand around in the dark? What kind of insanity brings a person to do this?  I suppose the kind of insanity that leads people to queue overnight for a lousy half-price sale at Currys or swarm through the doors of Selfridges to try and snag that once in a lifetime bargain or, the Saints preserve us, to camp overnight to attend a JLS book signing.

The reason why I was lurking at the entrance to IKEA, with the thought “Man, I hate IKEA!” running repeatedly through my head is neither here nor there, but I must emphasise at this juncture that I was in this queue by mistake.  I had absolutely no intention of getting there super early, as can be evidenced by the fact that I thought the place opened at 10 and so was quite taken aback when we pulled into the car park to find it pretty empty, with cars circling like vultures round the concrete pillars, their lights sweeping across the entrance and bouncing back from the startled eyes of the expectant Morlocks; only the promise of brightly coloured, affordable homeware keeping them from scattering further into the darkness. 

I parked up and drifted across to the Gateway to Heaven beyond which could be found the Escalator of Destiny, the Hallway of Unimaginably Fabulous Lifestyles, the Caverns of Unintended Purchase, the Maze of the Wizards of the Storeroom and finally the home of Nommi, the Norse God of Meatballs.  Mmm, tasty tasty meatballs.  So popular, they have their own Facebook page.  But I digress.

What is this phenomenon?  Why are we prepared to go through the stress, disorientation and misery and the innumerable bags of tea lights and spoon covers that we somehow find ourselves clutching onto when we emerge exhausted at the other end?  What is it about the place that gets under people’s skin? Why does it make people act weirdly, and I mean seriously weirdly? With people actually dying?  Where even ’celebrities’ fall foul of the urge to buy tea lights, which just going to show that nobody is immune to the unintended purchase effect.

Because it’s IKEA, that’s why! We flippin’ love IKEA.  Everything. Especially their delightful naming conventions, which seems to be a great argument against nominative determinism.  Charm the egg slicer and Fantastisk the napkin, are two golden examples of the product not really living up to their names.

So it is perhaps understandable that, back outside the Gateway to Heaven, excitement was at fever pitch as the hapless security chap switched on the Escalator of Destiny, wandered over to the door and fumbled with a large set of keys.  An actual cheer went up when the doors finally open and I, with my eyes rolling like a fruit machine, joined the throng of mong disappearing through the entrance, eager to part with their cash on things that they never knew existed, let alone wanted.   

And one hour and forty precious minutes later, I emerged battle-worn but victorious, having successfully negotiated every obstacle, even the deadly Sirens (cheap coffee and even cheaper hotdogs).  With dignity and wallet mostly intact, I stepped into the light and back to humanity with only one thought on my mind.

“Man, I love IKEA!”