Hugo Rifkind, writing in The Times today, has a piece about the leader of the Australian opposition, Kevin Rudd, eating his own ear wax.
I have absolutely no idea why anyone would wish to do this, nor eat their own bogeys, but at least our revered leader, Gordon Brown, can go one better. Guido Fawkes picked up some time ago a film showing Gordon Brown exploring his right nostril and then appearing to consume said exploration.
Anyway… there we are. Seems as good a way as any to kick off the weekend of Halloween and the clocks going back.
Dropped in at The Bollo to have a very late lunch. The Chiswick Business Park is nearby. This modern monument to mammon is an architect designed palace of Thatcherian-Blairite work for modern business; patrolled by company support service staff wearing yellow and there are signs everywhere proclaiming “Enjoy-work.com”.
Reminds me of a city in Italy designed by Mussolini. I caught the end of a programme about it late on television the other night.
To my eye… Chiswick Business Park, structural and minimalist though it may be, has little soul. F*xtons has a head office there, which may be exciting for some, but having looked around the Enjoy-Work.com website I needed a restorative drink. I enjoy work and working. I just happen not to like the flatulence of the Chiswick Business Park as ‘conceptualised’ in the Enjoy-Work.com website. Chacun a son gout, as they say. I used to belong to Esporta, a gym based there. I pretended to use the gym a few years ago by nipping up there for the odd swim and steam bath. They were distraught when I left. I was one of their best customers – the type of customer who pays an annual fee by standing order and who does not clutter up the place by ever going, apart from a few short days after New Year.
Anyway… be that as it may… The Bollo was full of people from Chiswick Business Park, possibly escaping from the place early on a Friday, talking at each other, fuelled by alcohol and laughing frantically in that way people do when they go out with people they don’t really know. I thought of Orwell and all was well.
I sat outside. The drizzle was light – the green canopy outside the pub allowing me to ‘file my report’, enjoy a glass of Rioja and smoke a few Silk Cuts – and that is where I am now, at 4.15 pm.
The nights are drawing in. Soon it will be dark at 5.00 pm. The exotic flora and fauna, disporting themselves in the late Indian summer of recent weeks, are now huddled inside like badgers and only appear outside very occasionally, if they smoke, to have a very quick cigarette.
Soon…. winter will begin its slow journey from the Russian steppes and the North, down through Scandinavia and Northern Europe, to breathe cold air across our sceptred maritime island.
Those left outside are equipped to deal with the change in the weather by nature. They are smokers who have adapted their bodies to cope with hardship by inhaling hot smoke laced with nicotine and numerous noxious and toxic chemicals. As David Attenborough might have said, if he was narrating this nonsense, these ‘external creatures’ are the true survivors. Global warming, floods, a new ice age, will not trouble them. They will be there at the going down of the sun.
Back to enjoy work…
***
I rather like this George Orwell quote: Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
Chiswick business park sounds the sort of place where edible earwax would make a nice treat