An Anthropologist Writes

The Office Children™ are wary of eating anything that includes traces of vegetables, fruit, meat or fish and insist on buying their lunches from the chemical waste department of Smallville's dodgy supermarket.
This cess-pit of salmonella and out of date, plastic-wrapped horror is situated next door to an organic food store and right opposite a lovely local bakery but The Children have never dared venture inside either emporium through fear of not knowing what actual food looks like and so accidentally buying a lunch of squid-ink pasta, unbleached flour, rollmop herrings and molasses.

As a result of their unwise purchasing decisions (usually of out of date stuff to save a few pennies) they regularly spend afternoons moaning in pain and running back and forth to the bathroom for sessions of arse-gravy mayhem. This happened to poor Jason yesterday after he ate what the plastic wrapper claimed to be a 'chicken tikka' baguette, and prompted a theory from Mike that rather appealed to me.

The theory posits that the supermarket starts the week with a display of 'chicken and mayonnaise' baguettes, any unsold examples being re-labelled 'chicken tikka' by Wednesday when they've become suitably aromatic, and by Friday the remainder are sold as 'mixed cheese'.

On a slightly more palatable note, Jase brought in a cafetiere last week (a French Press to you Colonials) as he was rightly sick of the powdered 'coffee' the office provides and had been driven crazy by the aroma from my own yummy coffee each morning. He brought in a nice organic fairtrade coffee ('I didn't know what to buy so I asked the lady in the shop, who sold me the most expensive stuff') and followed my directions as to how much to use, then he put the kettle on. Holding up the cafetiere he asked 'Do I put the milk in now?'
After I'd finished laughing I felt quite touched at the innocence of today's 'yoof.' Raised on pre-packaged microwave meals and junk food they panic when confronted with a vegetable, a cut of meat or (God forbid) a fish. In Jason's case, he had only ever known powdered 'instant coffee' and was left helplessly confused by his cafetiere.
Having made his first cup, however, he went coffee crazy, with the result that he spent most of the day running to the bathroom to enjoy the inevitable emetic effect of real coffee on a digestive system that had never encountered it before.

I have decided that the only way I will survive life with The Office Children™ is to regard the experience as anthropological research. I feel not unlike Jane Goodall with her chimps.
The experiment continues.

Life With The Children

As those of you who have been subjected to my rants on the antisocial network will know, one of the side-effects of my move from Metropolis to Smallville has been that I have inherited three young and unruly children. Jason, Matt and Craig are 23, 24 and 25 years old, though I can never remember who is which age as they all behave like hyperactive two-year-olds. If nothing else, sharing an office with them has reinforced my belief in the wisdom of not breeding.

I am used to a spacious and quiet office (or working from home with classical music playing softly in the background) but now find myself crammed into a room the size of my former workstation with three idiot children and a ramshackle tangle of prehistoric alleged ‘computers’ that sound like vacuum cleaners and are about as useful for my 3D work.

Over the past half-century I have managed with some difficulty to rid my life of the sheer fuck-awfulness of four particular circles of Hell, namely: football, television, ‘popular’ music and junk food. Inevitably these are the four main topics of conversation with the Office Children. Oh, and boobs. A good half of each day finds them ‘perving’ (their term) photographs of women on Facebook for ‘boob action.’ The rest of the day is taken up with arguing about football, raving about crap celebrity television and singing (ear-buggeringly badly) along to execrable chart hits.

Today (and bear in mind that the morning is only half over) we have had football, moaning about the shit office heating, eBay crap and the idiot family who turned up last night to collect Matt’s old sofa in a compact car full of kids and let their screaming brats run riot in Matt’s flat while they discovered the sofa would not fit in their car before asking him to deliver it for free, last night’s celebrity TV, Craig’s’ lucky’ shin-pads, who in the office is the biggest bell-end (Nick from the back room), strippers, football, video games, the ’shaggability’ or otherwise of the women in the local shop, burgers, last weekend’s binge-drinking sessions and just how much Matt vomited, football, boob-perving, football, Craig’s sister, what they would do if they won the lottery, why the only piece of classical music Jason knows is the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and what that tells us about him, bad pizzas, moaning about the office computers, arguing about the smegging X Factor, bitching about old girlfriends, a waste-paper fight, hobbit jokes (Craig is a hobbit; honestly, he could pass for Frodo in an identity parade), football (I hate fucking football), Parisian hookers, the worst kebabs available locally and football.

All of this has been accompanied by the most excruciating, out of tune falsetto singing by the tone-deaf trio to a selection of shit-awful chart crap, rap songs, bad Elvis film songs, thrash metal and farmyard noises from iPods and YouTube. Add to that a bout of belch-tennis (thank God they’ve not yet started their regular rounds of ‘fart-tennis’ that would gag a rat) and the usual graphic descriptions, comparison and rating of their most recent poos.

Only one of them has ever read a book (Craig, who managed to struggle through the first Harry Potter tome but got no further). Matt does appear to follow the celebrity scandal magazines but he’s probably just looking at the pictures. Jason plays bass in a thrash-punk band but is the first to admit he only knows three notes.

There’s an old Larson cartoon depicting Satan leading an elderly man into a room filled with banjo players, saying ‘and this is your room, maestro.’ I am beginning to wonder whether I dropped dead of a heart attack running for my last London train and have found my eternal resting place here in this cramped and freezing room filled with shrieking idiot children (currently belting out Queen songs and revealing their opinion that fat-bottomed girls make the rocking world go round).

And it’s only Tuesday.

Buy This

This is the delicious little mediæval house where the strange creatures from the previous post live.
It sits right in the middle of Smallville on the pedestrian shopping street and as you can see, it's for sale if you have some spare cash and are in the market for something 14th century.

WTF Monday - Smallville Folk Special

Meet the locals.

These fine folk have been appearing in the high street just lately.
I'm beginning to get that 'Wicker Man' feeling.

Hokay, so maybe it's not as bad as this (my old commute), but the drive to Smallville still has its own little peculiarites.

Especially during harvest time, when the roads are filled with these blighters travelling at 5 mph for miles between farms.
Oncoming traffic has to get up on the verge and wait for the behemoths to pass and those of us stuck behind them get to work late.
Hey ho.

Quiet Corner

Hey, it's half-past week already. Stand on tip-toes and sniff the air; there's a faint tang of weekend on the breeze.

Up until a couple of weeks ago this was my familiar morning walk along the Thames during my seven hour a day commute. By Wednesday I would be desperate for the week to end.

In Smallville, however, every day feels like a sleepy Sunday. Here's a quiet little corner (the whole town seems to be made of those) with quaint, pastel cottages clustered around the church.

Relax. The weekend will be here in its own time.

Meanwhile, Back In 1972 …

Before I hung up the old cape I would satisfy my gadget lust in the Metropolis branch of the Apple Store.

Now I'm back in Smallville things are … er … somewhat different.

It's worth clicking on this to enlarge it enough to appreciate its full glory.

Yes, I know they spelled wizard wrong but I have a feeling this is not so much for Harry Potter fans as ageing acolytes of Roy Wood's early seventies glam rock band, 'Wizzard.'

No, I have not yet dared to venture inside but I suspect that when I do I shall not find rows of gleaming Macs to play with but dusty shelves creaking under the strain of ancient PC components and cassette-powered 4-colour video games consoles.
Which might actually be fun come to think of it.

Size Isn't Everything

Yet more of the culture shock I am experiencing on hanging up the cape and moving back to Smallville:

Both Metropolis and Smallville boast banks …

In Metropolis they are boastful,

and in Smallville, beautiful.

I know which I prefer.

A River Runs Through It

More culture shock from my recent move.
Both Metropolis and Smallville boast a river.
See if you can guess which is which.

Goodbye Metropolis, Hello Smallville

Big news from the Small Glass Planet this week:

Having served my 99 year sentence on the commuter trains from Hell, I am at last out on parole and shall never again have to endure the 4:40AM alarm calls, the early morning scream of horror, THIS and being forced to go to bed before nine every night when all my friends are out enjoying themselves.

For anyone sufficiently masochistic, here is a link to all my old posts about the sheer Hell of my commute. If ever I think I've made the wrong decision and get all nostalgic for lunchtimes in St.James's Park I shall click that link and read the tales of terror within.

Yes, I have finally left Metropolis, hung up the cape and have taken a job at the architectural practice of an old college friend in Smallville. Look out Lana Lang!

I plan to post a series of photos from Smallville which should illustrate the degree of culture shock I am experiencing.

This is the kind of food shop window I am used to in Westminster:

Fortnum and Mason of Piccadilly.


And this is what I shall have to get used to from now on:

Francines Home Made Pies
of Thoroughfare, Smallville.

As you can see, the apostrophe has not yet reached this far into the wild. I hope one day to pluck up enough courage to try one of Francine(no apostrophe)s pies and will let you know whether the fare is thorough or not.

More dispatches from Smallville soon.