Five Reasons Why Sloths are ideally Suited to the Modern Office Environment

1. Every office needs a slow-poke to blame missed deadlines on.

2. A sloth sleeps most of the time. If he’s asleep, at least he can’t hog the MFD to print out his kids’ party invitations, chat endlessly about who’s invited and who’s been left off the  guest list because ‘she's a biter’, or catch you out with impromptu fire drills while you’re trying to watch Shittyflute.

3. Sloths only eat leaves for lunch. This means they will not use the tiny kitchen to microwave last night’s curry leftovers, ensuring everything that is subsequently made there –  from Simon’s Micro-Chips to Maria’s tomato cup-a-soup – tastes vaguely of turmeric-infused turkey. Leaves are inoffensive lunch fodder. Leaves can get no-one’s back up.

Is it home time? 

4. Lady sloths do not engage in maddening, super-discrete, barely-there office flirtation. One will not give you a nickname, laugh too hard at your jokes or compliment you on your Spongebob cufflinks. When a sloth is interested, she will clear her throat and let out a scream so loud and blood curdling it will shatter windows and make everyone else in the weekly catch up meeting a little embarrassed, actually. You will then have your cue to ask her out for a drink on Friday.

5. A sloth has principles. He simply refuses to pretend to be working any harder than he actually is, even when the boss walks by and peers over his shoulder to see whether the ‘nose-to-the-grindstone’ pep talk he gave on Monday has sunk in. He is, in other words, the kind of slacker you could go to the pub with.

Why Wigan is Cool

As you head North into my home town of Wigan on the railway, you will pass under a bridge with the words ‘welcome to hell’ spray-painted across it. You may laugh. You may gulp. You may decide you’ll stay in platform 4’s café as you wait for your connection, rather than venturing out of the station, lest you fall deeper into the seething pit of this Northern inferno.

Your fears, I think, would be unfounded. If hell is filled with bakeries that sell meat and potato pie sandwiches as a local delicacy, then I’ll happily go on sinning. If people in hell are so friendly and helpful that they will cross the street to tell me my lace is undone, lest I trip and fall headfirst in front of the 601 bus to Leigh, then like Mark Twain, I’ll go there for the company.

The pies and the populace aside, there is one particular reason why Wigan is, in its own peculiar way, sort of heavenly: it is the least pretentious place on earth.

In this ex-mining town in the North West of England, a pie is filled with beef, spuds and gravy, not butternut squash, beetroot and quinoa. This is a place where the market’s make-up stall sells knock-off lip gloss, lip-tattoo wands, Miracle Pout Stain, Triple Thick Tint, and Diamond Plumping Collagen Effect Gel Sticks from a giant black bin labelled ‘lippie’. When I get off the train at Wigan North Western, I breathe a sigh of relief and my heart rate steadies, because I know that no-one here is going to ask me to ‘tease out that idea to a greater level of maturity,’ or tell me to develop a ‘suite of communication materials’, or say ‘you and I need to sit down outside of this room and have a conversation about that’. Wiganers will always simply say ‘let’s talk about it’.

Bullshit withers and dies here. Even industries that have spent decades completely awash with baloney, such as Hair and Beauty, have retained a little integrity in this place. Wigan hairdressers will not greet you with smiles so fixed that they may well have been caked in half a tin of Elnette. They will not drip feed you compliments. They will not give your hair ‘directional’ layers without asking. They will, however, take your bag and jacket and lob them in a cupboard, sit you down, give you a back-to-front polyester jacket to wear and say, ‘What we doing?’ while attacking your knots with a comb.  Your hair is not your crowning glory, your statement to the world or a reflection of your true self, as dozens of slimy shampoo ads would have you believe. It is hair. The same stuff that covers the floor and clogs the drains. And they will treat is as such, so help them God.

Why does this matter? Because people are bored of being lied to. People are bored of spin, of calling printers ‘multi-functional devices’ and being forced to accept ‘tall’ as a synonym for ‘small’ in coffee shops. People are tired of language being used to manipulate and fool rather than to reveal. As a nation, we are drivel-fatigued.

In this atmosphere, straight-talking towns like Wigan accidentally, wonderfully,  appear to hold the antidote.

Wigan should be marketed to the world as the spiritual home of plain English. Executives should come here on retreat when their waffle tolerance level has been exceeded and when their brains are frazzled from too much ‘greenfields thinking’ to restore themselves to sanity. I’m going to convert the old textile mill into a rehab centre to house them. The room service menu at this centre will be healingly straightforward – think cheese on toast, not Croque Monsieur; fish fingers, not locally-sourced cod strips encased in golden breadcrumbs.   I imagine these execs gazing through their open windows across the canal, listening to passing parents chastise their kids is gloriously straightforward terms, and their spirits reviving at the sound of it, as if it were birdsong.

‘Welcome to Hell’ should be scrubbed off that railway bridge and replaced with the phrase ‘it is what it is’. This phrase is not a resignation to crapness. It is a philosophical standpoint. It embodies the town’s honesty, it’s refusal to tart things up, to fool itself, or you. Wigan is all knickers and no fur coat. It is a town without lippie.

Physics

In my high school Physics lessons, I sat next to a big-haired, day-dreamy girl called Jenny. I also sat next to Jenny in art, where she spent three double lessons drawing the stubble on her portrait of George Michael, hair by hair. It goes without saying that here was a girl who needed a creative outlet. It also goes without saying that, in Physics, a creative outlet was far from forthcoming. We were allowed to draw diagrams, of course, but they had to be rendered in a particularly dry and unexciting way. Mrs. Calderbank did not want to see a n artist’s impression of a wooden toy car being zoomed across a too-short desk to prove the existence of gravity, thrust and friction. She wanted a pictoral resemblance of functionality. To Jenny, this seemed like a cruelly wasted opportunity.

Physics, as far as I could see, was alone in its complete opposition to creative expression. In Chemistry, at the very least, she could make a firework displaying using magnesium ribbon and a lighter borrowed from Joanne Rutter. In language classes, our imaginations were given free reign, particularly when we were asked to translate French into English. PE, if nothing else, gave the opportunity to devise creative ways to avoid having a shower. The most inventive thing to happen in Physics occurred when Alan Christopherson created an electric circuit using his train-track braces to make a bulb light up.

To counteract this monotony, Jenny and I regressed to childhood. We adopted a lamp from the cupboard, and named her Leila. We dressed her in a post-it-note ra-ra skirt and gave her tippex eyes and lips. We pulled threads of silk from our ties and gave her hair. We went slowly, quietly mad. Miraculously, we left with B grades, and an alarming inability to remember a single fact about the physical world that surrounds us.  

P.S. Speed equals distance over time.  

Bumble Bees and Killer Whales

Once, when I was about seven or eight, I accidentally put my hand down on a bumble bee. It really, really hurt. In fact, I have only ever felt pain like it on two occasions since: once while getting my eyebrows threaded, and once after being hit by a Renault Clio.

When I tell my bumble bee story, I generally receive one of two responses. People either say "Were you alright?' or they ask 'Did the bumble bee survive?' One could argue, on the basis of this, that there are two types of people in the world: Bug Huggers and Bug Haters. I have to admit that I am firmly rooted in the latter camp. I think my family is the cause of this. For as long as I can remember, our under-sink cupboard has been stuffed with an arsenal of fly spray and ant powder and slug pellets. I was raised to believe that it was perfectly acceptable to flick a ladybird, stand on a spider that was giving you the stink-eye, or spin 360 degrees like a champion discus thrower and put a moth out of its misery with one smack of a slipper.



In fact, it's fair to say that my family were suspicious of most creatures, both great and small. We had no problem with animals that kept their distance: killer whales splashing about in Antarctica caused us no difficulty, they could go about their business freely, but a neighbourhood cat or a squirrel or an aunt's over-excited sheepdog was usually met with distrust.  As a result, I now have no great affinity with animals at all, and when my friends debate whether Alsatians or Chocolate Labradors are more beautiful I have only one response to hand, a response that dare not speak its name in animal-loving company:  "Neither. They're dogs."

My good friend Sara, on the other hand, is a classic Bug Hugger. On a recent holiday to Menorca, she and I hired a car. As we drove, a bumble bee flew in through the open window. In this situation, my family would consider it the front passenger's moral duty to roll up the Michelin Road Map of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and whack the bee, leaving a great orange smudge above Rotherham to serve as a reminder of the crime. Sara merely opened a window, hummed serenely and gently encouraged the bee to reach its car-exiting potential.  She too believes her respect for insects comes from the teachings of her parents, "Although they did quite often kill wasps".

In spite of our differences, Sara and I are prime examples of how these two types of people can rub along perfectly well together, given a little effort. I do not judge the folk who see beauty in bottom-sniffing canines, or tragedy in squished beetles. Sara, in turn, kindly overlooks my abject cruelty.

Having said this, it is always useful to know upfront which type of person you are socialising with, particularly when eating sugary foods outdoors. If you want to find out which type of person you are speaking to, feel free to tell him or her my childhood bumble-bee story.

If anyone asks, the bee did not survive, and I was fine after a gin.



Moths beware

Mankinis

 

Here's an interesting fact about the word 'mankini': it is one of a handful of words that made it into the English dictionary back in 2008, along with the words 'prequel' and 'chugger'.

 

I have always believed that necessity is the mother of invention when it comes to the coining of new words. The word 'prequel' would not exist if Hollywood hadn't gone through a phase of dishing out back-stories to blockbusters. If we didn't hear the phrase "can I just stop you there, Smiley?" from charity muggers every time we walked down the high street, the abbreviation 'chuggers' would be unnecessary.  So why has such a, shall we say, specialised word as 'mankini' been absorbed into the language at all? Where is the demand? Who, prior to 2008, was gesticulating wildly trying to locate the word for a bright, lycra, stretchy man's thong with built-in braces?  Who can we blame for this? 

 

I cannot answer this question, and doubt you are scrawling down a list of names for me either. You may be thinking that, as everything around us has a name, there is no reason why dreadful male swimwear should be an exception. I disagree. There are plenty of things in the world that are created and sold and consumed whilst remaining nameless. The little triangles that stick the corners of your photos down in albums. The rubbery thimble-type thing I put on my finger so I can turn pages quickly in work. Most of the fiddly bits you get in polythene bags when you buy Ikea furniture.  These things are left untitled, and the world continues to turn.

 

Having said this, that rubbery thimble-type thing that I use in work has never been worn publicly by a celebrity. If Oprah Winfrey went around with one on her pinkie, it would soon be bestowed with a name. Finger Bonnet. Paper Poker. Office Accelerator 3000. The mankini was worn by Sacha Baron Cohen in a comedy film, and movie magazine editors needed a caption for the eye-watering promotional photographs. "Sacha Baron Cohen wearing a nameless obscenity" simply wouldn't do.

 

Since being labelled, mankinis have thrived, and have found their way into all good fancy dress shops, to be bought by best men and forced onto unsuspecting grooms on their stag dos in Amsterdam. My friend's husband was one of these Unfortunates. She showed us the photographs of him clasped inside one, like a forest creature in a steel trap. His eyes were shiny, his smile was panicked, and he was almost certainly angling himself to show us his best side. Perhaps having the correct word for his outfit helped him to verbalise his pain.

A Most Unsuitable Fellow

As the Great Raymondo is without a beau at the moment, it is with some dismay that the man she speaks about most to her beloved family is one ‘Victor McDermott’, Mastermind and Dictator of her blog, John Peel her Blur, Bolton-born and Cardiff-Based Man of Mystery.

As they are all anxious to see me married off to a Nice Chap, and the V-Man has a strong and noble name, my borderline nosey family have taken a somewhat impertinent interest in him.

On my most recent return home, mother wished to know his age, his relationship status and whether or not he has children. Cat ‘The Deserter’ Edwards decided, without a shadow of a hint of a fraction of a doubt that he is secretly in love with me. Father innocently mumbled ‘Helen McDermott’ while innocently preparing some bread and butter to eat in front of an innocent episode of Crime Watch.

While I admit our unusual Facebook introduction would make a wonderful, if long, answer to the question ‘so how did you two meet?’ (and it is almost worth us getting wed just to tell it) Victor, like The Four Unfortunates who preceded him as Leading Male in my life, will not be the man I meet at the top of the aisle while wearing a dress similar to that worn by Tristan’s Second Wife in ‘Legends Of The Fall’ to The Sound of Pachabel’s Canon in D with Cat the Deserter and Eleanor the Cat Collector in tow. And here are a few reasons why:

He has a partner, affectionately nicknamed  “Er Indoors”, who I suspect may be long suffering. He recently informed his 275 Facebook friends that ‘Living with ‘er indoors is like being in a recurring episode of Rising Damp.’ This kind of talk does not fit into the Great Raymondo’s dream of a Man who speaks to her and about her with Respect on all Occasions, (and allows her Outdoors once in a while, at the very least for a half-an-hour run around in the back garden in her exercise ball). ‘Er Indoors, if you’re reading this, don’t suffer in silence.

In the ‘favourite quotes’ section of his page, I found the following gem: ‘Women are great: a good one can be trained to do almost anything’. This sentiment, as my mostly female readers will agree, is just not cricket.

He seems a little confused about what motivates him. He lists his interests as “Cash” and “Love and Peace”. The Great Raymondo thinks a man who pursues both at the same time would not get anywhere fast, and would end up in a fist-gnawing, conscience-addled heap. Her Dream Fellow, indeed any bloke worth his salt would already be in possession of one and in pursuit of the other.

And, perhaps the most pertinent reason of all, Dear Readers, is that I Have Never Met the Bloke, and quite frankly, he may well be an absolute, stark raving, knife-wielding lunatic.

Perhaps I will enjoy the single life some more :-D

Victor: It's Not You, It's Me

Letting The Side Down: The Easy Way



As I have often stated on application forms and in numerous job interviews, “The Great Raymondo has excellent team-working skills, and understands the importance of working as part of a group to pursue a common goal”.

When asked to give examples, I may talk about past family situations, when I have successfully passed the gravy to my sister Cat ‘the Deserter’ Edwards, so that we can reach our common goal of getting fed; or about work situations, when I have successfully and repeatedly passed messages on To The Right Person, and have been known to use kick-ass phrases learned from Eleanor 'the cat collector’s Management-Trainer mother, such as ‘how can we find a mutually effective solution to this problem?’

There is one area of life, however, in which I am inclined to let the side down on a regular basis : when practicing team sports. When forced into a line up of 7 for netball or of 5 for hockey, my mad-sharp team-working skills seem to disappear: my once famed communication skills dissolve and I am unable to express my thoughts in phrases other than ‘I’m sorry!’ ‘I didn’t see her coming!’ or ”@*&!”; and I utterly lose sight of the common goal (or, on some occasions which I do not care to recall, I aim for the wrong one).

 

This fact was well known to fellow classmates of the Miniature Great Raymondo. In PE lessons, I was often the last to be picked for a team, and regularly found myself on the bench. In fact, my esteemed classmates would sometimes pick the bench for their teams before picking me. It was certainly much more skilled defensively, and unlike the Great Raymondo, always remembered that in netball it had to Stand Still when in possession of the ball. I always struggled with this hugely counter-intuitive rule, and after catching the ball would gallop off like a wild horse in celebration, imagining the sound of the ref’s 'foul' whistles were merely the sound of the wind as I sliced through the air like a lightning bolt.

Proficient as Goal Defence

When playing Rounders (losers' baseball) I always snapped up the position of Right field defender, and would go so far rightfield I was almost up against the railings. At this distance, and with so little to do, I would be left to Make My Own Fun, and once I took off my team’s sash to see whether or not I could tie my hands up to such an extent that I couldn’t free myself. It was at the Eureka moment when they were bound in such an ingenious way that not even Houdini could free me that the ball, (possessed by wily demons, as most balls are), decided to fly in my direction. Of course, I was not in a position to do much about it.


In conclusion, If you really wish to see the Great Raymondo let A Side Down, put her in a pair of hockey socks, stick her in a cold muddy field and tell her to have a positive mental attitude. Something deep inside her will rebel, everytime.