Soda - Keeping Curious

Having been near paralysed with a devastating bout of Man-Flu this week, and receiving precisely no sympathy from any of my female colleagues, I’ve decided it’s time to dispel the myths about this terrible affliction that smug women everywhere seem all too eager to believe.

1. Man-Flu is more painful than childbirth. This is an irrefutable scientific fact*.
*(Based on a survey of over 100,000 men.)

2. Man-Flu is not ‘just a cold’. It is a condition so severe that the germs from a single Man-Flu sneeze could wipe out entire tribes of people living in the rainforest. And probably loads of monkeys too.

3. Women do not contract Man-Flu. At worst they suffer from what is medically recognised as a ‘Mild Girly Sniffle’ – which, if a man caught, he would still be able to run, throw a ball, tear the phone book in half and compete in all other kinds of manly activities.

4. Men do not ‘moan’ when they have Man-Flu. They emit involuntary groans of agony that are entirely in proportion to the unbearable pain they are in.

5. Full recovery from Man-Flu will take place much quicker if their simple requests for care, sympathy and regular cups of tea are met. Is that really so much to ask? Florence Nightingale would have done it.

6. More men die each year from MFN (Man-Flu Neglect) than lots and lots of other things. (Like rabbit attacks or choking on toast).

7. Men suffering from Man-Flu want nothing more than to get out of bed and come to work, but they are too selfless to risk spreading this awful condition amongst their friends and colleagues. In this sense, they are the greatest heroes this country has ever known.

8. In 1982 scientists managed to simulate the agonising symptoms of full blown Man-Flu in a female chimp. She became so ill that her head literally fell off.

9. Man-Flu germs are more powerful than He-Man, The Thundercats and The A-Team combined. They are too strong for weak, nasty tasting ‘lady medicines’ like Lemsip, so don’t bother trying to force them on a victim of Man-Flu.

10. While it may seem like a Man-Flu sufferer is just lying around enjoying ‘Diagnosis Murder’ it is a commonly recognised medical fact that the exact pitch and frequency of Dick Van Dyke’s voice has remarkable soothing powers.

Every minute in this country one man is struck down by Man-Flu. Women, all we ask is that each of you offers them a cup of tea, some kind words and your undivided attention and care. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll beat this monstrous disease together.

Quick, lock the door and flush your lazy spoken English down the toilet…it’s a bust by the Word Police.

Before the rant begins I feel there is something I should make clear. I am neither a grammatical fascist nor a punctuation fanatic. Far from it. I like writing, I like words. These other people are just nutters who enjoy arranging shapes and would be more offended by a misplaced apostrophe than if you were to sell their children to a gang of pirates.

But one phrase which I am determined to yank out of modern speech is ‘know what I mean?’ – a saying so awful it makes the fluid drain from my eyeballs with rage and despair. Quite simply, it’s the most irritating expression to come out of people’s mouths since ‘Wassup?’ and at least that started out as being pretty funny.

What annoys me most of all about is this expression is the sinus-popping pointlessness of it. If someone had just finished explaining to me the principles of gravitational time dilation then I’m sure I’d appreciate someone asking if I knew what they meant. The answer would be a resounding ‘er, no’, but nevertheless this is the appropriate time to ask such a question.

An inappropriate time for it to be asked would be at the end of any of the following sentences:

1. I think that David Beckham’s new felt-tip pen advert is well wicked.
2. This year’s Big Brother is so the best series ever.
3. It’s not my fault if my kids set fire to the milkman.

I’m sure you’ll agree that as insightful as these statements might be, none of them are complex enough to warrant the suffix of ‘know what I mean?’ We do know what you mean. ‘You were both eloquent and succinct and we thank you for it.’

It seems to me that the only way to combat this in-growing toenail on the delicate foot that is the English language is to play these blighters at their own game.

Next time someone ends a sentence with ‘know what I mean?’ assume an expression of pure bewilderment and earnestly reply that ‘no’, you do in fact not ‘know what they mean’. Could they be more specific about the exact ways in which they feel that ‘Nige’ from Hollyoaks is a better actor than Sir Michael Gambon? Could they provide evidence to support their assertion that Wine Gums constitute one of the recommended five daily portions of fruit?

These vocal villains will soon realise that ending every dreary sentence they utter with ‘know what I mean?’ will result in them having to think about what they’ve said and actually, heaven forbid, make themselves clear.

Hopefully then, we’ll soon find this accursed turn of phrase banished from our ears and confined to the home for once popular speech along with shouting ‘not’ after a sentence to ever-so-subtly imply that you were being ironic (wasn’t it great when everyone used to do that? Not.)

I think we all know how this blog is going to end. Know what I mean?

PS

For anyone who thinks that I’m precious about my copy then I suggest you take a look a Giles Coren’s heroically livid email to a poor Times sub-editor who had the audacity to juggle with his words. Read this rather colourful outburst and you’ll all appreciate how restrained my own policy of gritted-teeth and grumbling really is…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/25/pressandpublishing.thetimes

On 25th June 2008, a scruffy, monkey-faced young copywriter from the Together Agency posted a blog on this site, and then there was silence…

No one knows what happens to the missing Soda bloggers. Some say they were eaten by hungry otters. Others say they built a raft out of stale Rich Tea fingers and set sail for South America.

But after a month of eerie emptiness, the team investigating their disappearance thought they’d better post something to reassure any loyal Soda readers that the search for the missing bloggers goes on…

Anyone with any information, such as a trail of biscuit crumbs leading out to sea or a sighting of a particularly well nourished otter, should post their comments here. With your help we can restore the bubbling of the Soda blogsters back to these very pages.

I’ll be honest. When England bumbled their way to non-qualification for Euro 2008 I would have rather spent the summer living in an underground network of caves than ‘enjoying’ the tournament.

But as my sulkiness is only outweighed by my laziness, I decided to moodily slump in my chair and watch the stupid football with the stupid 16 teams who are marginally less rubbish than stupid England.

To my surprise I’ve absolutely loved it.

Firstly, I’ve discovered that watching football is actually good fun. As a Newcastle and England fan I’ve literally met more monkeys in the last few years than I’ve experienced memorably happy football moments.

But as soon as you become a disinterested spectator, you discover that, without the miserable spectre of inevitable defeat and the crushing reality of your own team’s sheer awfulness, watching football is just a great bit of banter.

And if the team you side with at the start of the game looks like it’s in for a beating there’s no need to worry. You just switch your allegiance mid-match. Russians, Spaniards, Swedes - it makes no difference to the ‘floating fan’. If they’re buying the victory cocktails (and if they’re Russians they invariably are) then I’m happy to nail my colours to that mast. Well, stick them on with blu-tak at least.

It’s the same with Wimbledon. Now that the painful spectacle of the entire English middle-class pinning their sporting hopes on a hapless man-chimp simply because of his good manners and sensible hair cut has ended, I can actually enjoy the tournament. Let’s face it, no one really wants stroppy Scot Andy Murray to win so why not just be a floater and jump on the party bandwagon with anyone who looks in with a chance of winning?

Trust me, it’s the only way to enjoy sport – no tears, no disappointment, no swearing at professional athletes who earn 5,000 times my yearly salary but are still unable to kick a ball into a goal from 12 little yards. Just game after game of fickle, unburdened glory basking.

And if you think there’s more to enjoying sport than just being on the winning side, then you might as well jog on back to Henman Hill. Better hurry though, you might miss Cliff Richard.

Returning to work after a holiday is always an unusual experience. Mainly because it’s one of those rare moments in life when you get to see how much impact you actually make on the people around you.

From what I could tell the only thing that had been affected in any way since my two weeks of drinking cheap Spanish gin and turning increasingly pink and sore on the beach was that the quality of biscuits in the office had dropped sharply.

At the very least I’d hoped to find things in some minor state of crisis, with clients threatening to burn down the building unless my immediate return to action could be arranged.

But no, a dearth of Jammie Dodgers in favour of some stale, misshapen Pound Shop biscuits was the only sign that my absence had even taken place, let alone been the source of misery, desperation and catastrophe I’d been not-so-secretly hoping for.

So now I’m left to absorb the sad revelation that a better class of crumbly tea time snack is my only significant contribution to my colleagues.

Maybe I should just stay away longer next time. I reckon a few more weeks without proper Hob-Nobs and I’d soon be getting the hero’s welcome I’d been dreaming of during my cocktail-fuelled, sunstroke-ridden hallucinations.

Either that or next time I go away I should bring some sweets back.

It’s been a week and the devious minds that do their foul business in this office have been lying like politicians in order to meet the ‘Shite (talking) Club’ challenge.

Quite frankly some of the untruths that have been shared with me this week have left my faith in humanity stale and crumbled like the cheap Custard Creams at the bottom of our biscuit tin.

So with no further ado, lets dive in to that pit of propaganda that is ‘Shite (talking) Club’…

• In the spirit of international relations one unscrupulous chap has been telling unsuspecting Australians that the UK is actually twice as large in the summer as it is in the winter due to the powerful British tides, and that every year the River Thames dries up completely. It would not be surprising if these ‘facts’ were now being taught in every secondary school in Australia.

• The same gentlemen has also been informing people that Horse Fighting is a legitimate recognised sport, and is due to receive Olympic recognition in time for the 2012 games in London. Most worrying of all is that it now appears that Horse Fighting is, in fact, a popular combat sport in the Philippines (making us wonder: which came first, his lie or Philippino Horse Wrestling?)

• One young lady’s boyfriend has been conducting a campaign of lying that deserves commendation for his sheer commitment to the lie. He has maintained for many years that Ainsley Harriot is actually dead and the BBC, terrified at the prospect of falling viewing figures on ‘Ready, Steady Cook’, have been conducting an elaborate Weekend-at-Bernies-style scheme to maintain the illusion that he is still alive (and annoying). Even I’m half convinced by this.

• It seems that celebrity-death-lies are favoured amongst the more ghoulish members of our team, with one of our crafty colleagues claiming that 1980s film ‘legend’ Steve Guttenberg actually died in 1991. Rather than letting his back catalogue of epic cinematic masterpieces grow stagnant, Steve’s brother Rudy did what any sensible sibling would do and merely assumed the name and identity of his actor brother, thus allowing the Guttenberg thespian legacy to live on. Worryingly, the gent who is championing this most dubious of tales is a little bit too convincing and there are uncomfortable murmurs in the office that it might actually be true…

There have been other corkers put forward including the claim that Mr T is Ice T’s uncle; the explanation that it never snows at the seaside due to the salt in the air and the allegation that KFC Chicken is genetically modified so it has 8 wings.

My own effort for the week was when I successfully convinced a gullible friend that Swiss cheese contains holes because, in a bid to destabilise Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the Second World War, German spies had taken to planting grenades inside large cheeses in a bid to discourage the Swiss from offering shelter or support to the French Resistance.

The Swiss nation was gripped by fear as countless people lost their lives in cheese-bomb incidents, and historians have dubbed this period of the war as the ‘Yellow Death’.

In order to stop the increasing amount of exploding cheese fatalities the Swiss employed ‘Pousser Fromage’ officers (Cheese Pokers) whose job was to poke all Swiss cheese several times with long pipes, from behind a sandbag bunker, to check for explosives.

But the Swiss found that the improved aerodynamics of the holey, grenade-free cheese contributed positively to its flavour, texture (and calorie content) and adopted the device in their traditional cheese-making process. And thus it remains until this day.

Thanks to a sincere, authoritative delivery and the sheer elaborateness of the lie my friend was totally convinced and will only now realise, as he reads this blog, that he has been lampooned like a bomb-filled block of wartime cheese.

So, as he frantically backtracks to the many people he has undoubtedly shared his new historical ‘knowledge’ with, I feel that two lessons have been learnt by us all.

Firstly, believe nothing anyone tells you ever. And if your Swiss cheese has no holes in it, put your cracker down and run.
Â

’Twas the beginning of summer
And to old London town
The girls from Together
Had made their way down.

They were joining a contest
But not just any old race
It was the Playtex Moonwalk
That was due to take place.

A full twenty-six miles
In naught but their bras
They did march through the city
By the light of the stars.

And in that famous old river
The moonlight did gleam
While the girls did their best
To not get ‘stabbed up’ by teens.

Meanwhile the boys in the office
Were filled up with pride
They couldn’t walk to the kettle
Without a stitch in their sides.

And the crowds they did flock
And excitement did ripple
With one eye on their time
And one eye on their…performance.

And now that they’ve done it
For this reason we’re glad
They may not look too healthy
But they don’t smell too bad.

Welcome to ‘Talking Shite’ Club. The first rule of ‘Talking Shite’ Club is that you must always talk (shite) about ‘Talking Shite’ Club.

One of my favourite, and most shameful, ways of passing the time is to invent the most elaborate lies I can think of and then deliver them as sincerely and with as much authority as I can muster to my closest friends, colleagues and family.

To my eternal shame (who am I kidding? It’s a source of everlasting pride really) I told my lovely girlfriend on our first date that Steven Segal has been Oscar nominated for his performance in Under Siege.

I never told her the truth. Eventually someone did when she proudly piped up in a conversation about ‘Big Steve’ with this little nugget of ‘information’ she’d been carefully nurturing for a moment such as this.

Understandably she was mocked mercilessly and, when she told me, I was left to bask in the triumph of my carefully seeded lie which had grown into a mighty oak of humiliation.

Of course, now our relationship is based on two fundamental principles which will remain with us for the rest of our lives:

a. She will not believe a single thing I tell her (which caused a few problems when I was helping her revise for her driving theory test).
b. She thinks I’m a childish idiot.

Nevertheless, I encourage all of you to take out full membership of ‘Talking Shite’ Club.

It’s a fantastic way to see how far a ludicrously unbelievable falsehood can spread before it makes its way back to you (via some chump who gleefully recites it back with such smug confidence in its truth it may as well have been passed to them directly from a burning bush).

Thus the cycle of ‘fib to fact’ is complete and you can laugh at them, call them a ‘gullible goldfish’ and (depending on your physical strength) push them victoriously to the ground.

The Challenge 

So now I’m laying down a challenge to the various creatures that skulk and scamper around my office. Over the next week they’re going to unleash their own unbelievable ‘truths’ on an unsuspecting loved-one and send me details of their deceptions. The most audacious will be honoured on this very page, so keep your devious eyes peeled.

To inspire them all to make a start, here are a few of my proudest moments during my years as founder member of the club:

1. If you don’t put up your tent properly when you’re camping, slugs will break into it at night and eat your eyeballs.
2. More people die each year from butterfly attacks than shark attacks.
3. In terms of density and adhesiveness, goat’s cheese is a sturdier building material than concrete.
4. It’s impossible for left handed people to write with squid’s ink.
5. If a regular garden frog was sent into space the pressure would cause it to swell to the size of a small rhino.

Good luck clubbers. Remember, maintain eye contact, keep a straight face and don’t let the guilt of the cruel thing you’re doing to people who trust you eat away at your very soul.

Everyone else, watch this space for the results. And for god’s sake, trust no-one…Â

It’s very rarely I feel so passionate about something, I am compelled to put down my junior Sudoku puzzle, blow the dust off my soapbox and climb on board my high horse. But, sadly, that’s the situation I currently find myself in.

But what exactly is the outrageous set of circumstances that have awoken the sleeping beast of moaniness that lies behind my cheerful, if not a little oblivious, exterior?

Is it the increasingly volatile and complex problem of bringing peace to the chaotic streets of Iraq? Is it the haphazard way in which the political system in this country chases its own tail on a high speed gravy train while the poorest people in the country stand at a leaky, vandalised bus stop hoping to squeeze onto a shabby single-decker of limited opportunity?

Er, no actually. It’s the fact that I have to walk down four flights of stairs just to get a cup of tea.

It’s a scenario made all the more unbearable by the fact that the awkward and demanding gang of chimps I share an office with each insist their cup of tea be made to such specific criteria I might as well be picking out  a gift of underwear for their mums as making them a cheeky mid-morning brew.

For example…

‘I like my tea to be weak, milky and with one precisely level spoon of sugar. Except on my birthday where I will partake in an extra sugar and an accompanying Bourbon biscuit.’

‘I like my tea to be strong, but not too strong, and stirred precisely thirty times in both clockwise, and counter-clockwise directions. And I want it in my favourite Aero Bubbles mug.’

‘I like my tea to lap gently against the rim of my mug to remind me of the Cornish seaside cottage where I spent my summers as a child.’

And so on.

Why, in the name of all that is boiling and watery, can we not be given a kettle upstairs, so the ordeal that is the ‘tea run’ can be brought to a welcome end?

Granted, there are some characters in the office who should not be allowed within 100 yards of anything hot or electrical (I suspect some of them even have ASBOs to that effect) but surely responsible adults such as myself should be permitted to enjoy tea-making facilities at my fingertips.

After all, isn’t that every Englishman’s right? Surely even the most dangerous and violent criminals in the prison system are given access to a kettle that doesn’t involve a 20 minute round trip?

I say this. Brothers of the Brew, let us unite and down tools until our demands are met. Let us not produce a single scrap of work until a gleaming new Tefal sits in the corner of the room where we shall worship it like the Aztec God of Quenched Thirst.

Be under no illusion, I’m not just a lazy man in need of a hot drink to dunk my Jammie Dodger in. I am a crusader for the rights of my fellow, biscuit-dipping man. I am the Che Guevara of the PG Tips Pyramid bag. I will not be appeased by a bottle of concentrated Ribena to put in our cold water or other such distractions. Nothing will steer me from the path on which I am now inexorably set.

Unless someone else goes and fetches me a brew, then the whole thing will probably just blow over.

Telephones ringing and emails are flying

People run to the toilets and are secretly crying

The inbox is growing, the outbox won’t budge

Tired folk snooze til you give them a nudge

Fingertips bleeding and eyeballs are groaning

Headaches and earaches from all of the phoning

The writer is scribbling, the designers design

Perpetual motion, til the job’s out on time

Once ‘brilliant’ ideas have been chucked in the bin

The biscuit reserves are desperately thin

One eye on the guidelines, making sure that they match up

Meetings and meetings, then meet for a catch up

The whole building rumbles with running about

People swear at the printer as nothing comes out

But then there is peace, and the work is complete

After days without moving, people rise from their seats

They gather their coats and vow, with a grin

To see in the weekend, with less tonic than gin