Blather

I'm sure I've not missed it …
In fact I'm convinced I know Dante well enough to be certain that re-reading Purgatorio word by word I will still not find it.
Yet somewhere on that dreadful mount midst Heaven and Hell there must lay hidden a door leading - via seldom trod tunnels - to a pitiful circle of Purgatory unnoticed by Dante, wherein dwell those desolate lost souls whose only path to Grace lies in numberless years of miserable earthbound penance … presenting seminars.

I spent most of yesterday stuck in a seminar with two of these poor, benighted and utterly wretched bastards.
What an awful penance they have to suffer.
Trapped in a room with twenty or so grouchy people who are only here because we need to log the hours as "Continuing Professional Development" and all we really want from them is lunch and any goodies they've brought along to bribe us into attendance.

The look on their faces as the day slowly wears away would evoke pity from Beelzebub himself. These are faces with no hope left save through a lifetime of soul-destroying seminars.
Day after dreary day, week after weary week, they can see their lives stretching away hopelessly before them; forced to endure decade after decade in a desolate emotional wasteland of dull, grey boardrooms with chilly air-conditioning and the bored, blank faces of their audiences.

The seminar … semen-hour we call it as it's usually a bunch of wank … is an utterly pointless waste of time and life; spending an hour (or sometimes a whole day) watching these poor, bereft wretches trying to wring something new and interesting from a crappy Powerpoint presentation (has that ever been possible?) and endlessly reciting their tired lines in hollow, dead voices, long-drained of emotion.

Luckily for us, we have our own entertainment in the form of our elderly and confused deputy leader, the Jedi Master of inscrutable incomprehensibility, Chris B.
Chris leads a daredevil life, playing the shawm and the serpent in a mediæval music ensemble and he is also an enthusiastic Morris dancer. Donning clogs and bells he lays about his pals with a hanky and a pig's bladder on a stick.
He is very good at it. His troupe perform at the Lord Mayor's show in London every year and are slated for a part in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics.
The remainder of his life, however, is sadly devoid of excitement and he has spent the whole of the presentation rapt with attention, scribbling copious notes.

At last we reach the bit of the semen hour where we all perk up, the bit where the hapless saps ask if there are any questions.
As one, all heads swivel to stare at our Chris.

He raises a hand and clears his throat and the poor seminarians look at him with pathetic hope dawning in their eyes; the forlorn hope of an interesting and relevant question to justify their wretched existence; a hope that will be cruelly and terribly dashed as it gradually dawns on them that this man is not their salvation but their tormentor, a dæmon (albeit a slightly fusty one in an egg-stained bow tie and tweeds) sent from Hell to drag them back down to their doom.

And now he starts …
A small fit of coughing prefaces a confused tumbling of half-words and phrases, gradually building into an avalanche of bumbling obfuscation.
"What I … erm … I suppose what I'm trying to put across here is …"
And he's off again.
A couple of minutes of this and some of the more alert among us (or at least the more awake) begin to discern the faintest vestige of a question forming.
But that fleeting glimpse of comprehension is swept away by an unstoppable tsunami of tosh as Chris gets a tad over-excited and completely loses any connection with reality.
He will not be gainsaid, however devoid of meaning his blathering may be.
Try to anticipate his question and start to answer and he will angrily shout you down.
There is now no escape for the poor lost souls and I settle back in my chair to enjoy the show.

Chris's voice leaps randomly from dreary baritone drone to alarming high-pitched squeaks and outbursts of raging incoherence but he starts off soft and reassuring, like an elderly and flatulent labrador draped saggily over a sofa, only gradually burbling and sputtering into life.
Once he gets into his stride, however, he is awesome to behold.

He wheedles and whines; he spuffles and blusters; he wibbles and dribbles; he harangues; he declaims … He would make a wonderful orator if only he - or anybody else - knew what on earth he was talking about.
He has never been known to finish a sentence.
His face the mask of a startled and somewhat resentful lungfish, he launches forth with a blistering attack of stuttering dead-ends, incoherent mumbling, pish, rhubarb and balderdash, harumphs, blathering, poppycock and piffle.

I watch with glee as yesterday's two victims turn to one another in complete confusion and dawning horror.

Like a drunken butterfly Chris can flutter around a subject for hours without ever quite alighting on anything so dangerous as the merest scintilla of meaning, let alone a fully formed intelligible notion.
Managing to string more than four complete words together (or at least words that have some relevance to one another) is a foreign and apparently alarming concept to him.

To accompany and perhaps to emphasise the complete incomprehensibility of the meaningless gibberish he is spouting, wielding his pen aloft he performs a series of wild, flailing gesticulations, frenzied stabbing movements and inexplicable hand-flappings.
He looks for all the world like a semaphore signaller suffering prolonged electrocution …
or perhaps - given his facial expressions - being surprised with a sudden enema.

The look on the faces of his victims is even more satisfying.

And he stays long after the seminars have finished, sometimes for hours on end, trapping his hapless victims by debating trivial minutiæ while they desperately edge toward the door, only for Chris to say something so quiet that they are tricked into taking a couple of steps back toward him, their faces contorted in pained realisation.
He is a master torturer and I love watching him at work.

So, girls and boys …
Be good and you might go to Heaven; be bad and you'll probably go to Hell, but whatever you do, don't ever be boring or you may wind up in Purgatory, presenting seminars.
Truly a fate worse than death.