Crushing ennui and timelessness

It’s really rather hard to have a good old moan about your job in public without letting slip sufficient information for a very lucky, casual but interested browser of the Internet to piece together the relevant stuff, dob you in and get you sacked. To this I add reference to the dismissal of Joe Gordon in 2005 for the use of the apparently offensive pseudonym “Bastardstone’s” (amongst other things) in his weblog.

Well, that’s not going to stop me, no sir! I was musing whilst cycling this morning, dodging rashly driven council vans and bellicose seagulls on Cathays Terrace (not to mention broken glass – one could be forgiven for supposing that the student population of Roath and Cathays wish to re-enact the events of November 1938 on the streets of Cardiff every week night) that it often feels as though an unseen hand occasionally and perhaps disinterestedly strokes the waters of my existence not caring that the wake comes smashing straight into my face. I guess I’m just susceptible to physical stimuli given that I was cycling into the teeth of a gale.

To switch to another painful metaphor, it would appear that work has also been busy unrepentantly shovelling shit into the furnace of a run-a-way locomotive of shit, bearing down on me with unquenchable fury. In a demimonde of stifled creativity such as that made up of administrators like me, I am nonetheless baffled at how pointless and repetitively unproductive meetings can be, especially between academics and their support staff. I can’t be the only one to feel that the words “schedule a meeting” actually mean “drink some coffee whilst suffering an absence seizure”. I’m treading ground well scuffed by trail blazers like Scott Adams but seeing as how we’re now a nation of service providers it must be a prevalent zeitgeist amongst 70% of the population. The last three meetings to which I was sent as proxy (the boss understandably wise to the crushing ennui of such occasions and willing to sacrifice a pawn to protect the queen) left me feeling less like I had a plan of action to further the interests of the department than like I wished nothing more than to push my hand into a garbage disposal unit. Plus I’d wasted another page of my red moleskine notebook with doodles and imagined furious rampages through the corridors of power.

Ah well, at least tomorrow’s is a lunch meeting. Now all I need to do is pretend I know how to eat with a knife and fork and I’m bullet-proof.

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Rage, rage against the piling up of shite.

It’s Local Election Day in Cardiff, and on my way out with the dog, I am greeted by the smiling faces of the Liberal Democrats’ Plasnewydd Focus Team. I had naively believed that I might go one day without being harassed by the Liberal Democrats, but obviously today was not going to be that day. Nonetheless, it was the final straw for me and my paper-thin patience. A little history, and some contemporaneous comment, would be useful right about now I think. The Lib Dems have led the council in Cardiff since 2004. My sources in the Welsh Conservative Party have indicated that they are about to take a complete pasting in today’s local election, with Labour way out in front, likely to come close to the 50 members they had back in 1999. In my opinion, this is a justified spanking. And yet I am unable to justify this on a political level. According to some of the bombastic nonsense that comes through my door unbidden every single day of the week and often on weekends too, ...

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Bike sheds and urinal ettiquette

I noticed something today, something that I had previously ignored, on locking up my practical (in every sense except cost-effective) bicycle this morning in the bike shed provided by my place of work. When I entered the enclosure (see diagram 1 below), I realised that nearly every other bike hoop had been taken, so I started thinking about which space it would be most proper to appropriate for myself. Normally, at 8.15am this is a mere formality, as I park in a nearly empty bike shed at the far end, directly underneath the security camera. Today, I'd dropped off le petit monstre at his nursery (that is not an euphemism for anything before you begin) and so was a few minutes later than is usual, hence the rather replete shed. What am I doing? I thought to myself, this is not a toilet, just take the first space available. Diagram 1. Our shed has a nifty half-pipe style roof. Great for nearly keeping the weather out, bad for bashing helmets...

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Stay angry, people.

Ed's dead, baby. Borrowed, with thanks, from the Independent I was unsure whether or not to write a post, post-election, on my post-election blues. For the most part, this was because I'm sure that political commentators, bloggers, activists, and people with far more understanding of the political landscape and the effect that the latest result would have on the lives of those for whom the spectre of a Tory government was only a bad dream, a shade that haunted at night when the lights burned low and the wolves howled at the door, had already used all of the adjectives and metaphors of despair in ways far more eloquent than anything I might come up with. I find however that I must say something, even if it doesn't help matters, to explain to myself more than anyone else why it is I feel so miserable. I will probably have no right to bemoan a Conservative government - my country still has a socialist leader, in theory if not in practice - particularly as I did very littl...

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From The Centrifuge

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