COLUMN: November 23, 2017

A FEW months ago, I wrote a column about how I quite like assembling flat-pack furniture, and, contrary to all expectations, am actually not completely awful at doing it.

Following this revelation, I was swamped with requests and suggestions that I might like to help other people assemble bits of furniture, much as when you are washing your car somebody always tells you that you can do theirs too if you like.

I batted most of these requests back. I am not TV’s Tommy Walsh. I don’t even own a pair of dungarees.

But you cannot say no to everybody. An old friend needed some help with a dressing table, and my screwdrivers and Swiss army Allen key were laying idle, and guilt is a terrible thing.

So I went there on a Friday evening, and the advertised two-hour assembly job only took three hours, which was within my four-hour budget. And I only knelt on one bolt, which was surprisingly painful.

I finished the job, racked with the sort of pain that being hunched up on the ground while trying to screw in a table leg, with an Allen key that did not exactly fit, inflicts on a man in his mid-forties. And I was pleased with my work – I had assembled a dressing table and I had invented a number of new obscene words and phrases.

I was fed and sent on my way. My friend could not give me a lift home for a number of boring and/or spurious reasons, and so I had to walk home about two miles in the dark. And in the rain.

Now I am a slightly above-averagely tall man with a fairly purposeful stride usually. I don’t give off a “mug me, I am easy pickings” vibe. Admittedly my stride was less purposeful that night because of the knee/bolt incident, but, even so, I was limping with a certain force.

This is partly because it was raining, but mostly because my route home passed a graveyard and the street lighting was out. I am not a superstitious man, but this was just pushing my luck. I was one crack of lightning away from an episode of Scooby Doo and one crack of pavement away from a fall.

So I was not in the right frame of mind to appreciate the glowing grinning disembodied head that was floating towards me. Did I yelp? I cannot swear I did not.

Luckily, my brain reminded me that there is no such thing as ghosts and there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the smiling skull approaching me. It was a bald man in dark clothing who was reading his phone, and the uplight from the phone had illuminated only his face in the way that we used to use a torch to give our faces that eerie look when we were camping with Cubs.

As he passed me, and I adopted the nonchalant look that one who does not want to appear as if he has just seen a ghost displays, I thought about how stupid this man was.

Our surroundings were blacker than an undertaker’s joke, and there he was, taking no care about where he was stepping. He was an accident waiting to happen, the big fool. One raised paving slab and he would swallow that phone.

I shook my head, sending drops of water flying everywhere like a cocker spaniel. Home was a mile away. On I limped, barely dodging a puddle. “Bet he stepped in it,” I thought, “the phone-reading idiot.”

I was dreaming of a nice hot cup of tea and half a mile from home when my pocket buzzed. I dried my hand and pulled my phone out. It was a message from the friend I had left one and a half miles before.

“U home yet?”

Grrr, I thought. “No, not quite,” I typed in the darkness. I pressed send, then walked into a knee-high bollard.

I don’t know if you know what it is like to knee a pebbledashed concrete bollard, but it is even more painful than kneeling on a bolt. Especially if, somehow, you do it with both knees at once.

Somehow it hurt even more than the irony. “Ooyah!” I said to an unimpressed cat, while trying not to fall.

My phone buzzed again as I bent double, wincing, blinking back tears. “OK, cool. Thanks again,” the message said.

“Don’t mention it,” I said, as I shuffled home.

COLUMN: November 16, 2017

mustard — Perfectly normal trousers. Nothing to see here

IF YOU have a job, there will be days when you wish you could just pack it in.

Maybe it is when you’re on the last day of a holiday, drinking something cold somewhere hot. Maybe it is when it’s seven o’clock in the morning and you’ve just understood why people have duvets. Maybe it is when your boss asks you if you can “just” do a two-hour job five minutes before you’re meant to knock off.

The fact is, if you have a job, even if it is your dream job, sometimes you will want to leave. Because no matter how good your job is, your employer has to compensate you for your time and effort by paying you, otherwise it’s a hobby.

And a good rule is that if you have more days of hating your job than loving it, then you should definitely resign. Just shout loudly, “I quit!” like an American in a film, and walk out that door before your shift ends.

But you wouldn’t do that, would you? Because it’s irresponsible. Because you know you have bills to pay. Because you know you have to eat. Because you know that when you started that job you signed a legally-binding contract that you had to give a month’s notice.

What you would do is look around for another source of income, and, when you had found that, then you would hand in your notice.

Or maybe if you found your job so intolerable that you had to resign before you had found another job, you would spend the entire notice period looking for regular employment.

What you would not do is spend the first two weeks of that notice period on holiday, and then the next week insisting that your employer will give you the same salary and fringe benefits, even though you’re not working for them any more, on the basis that you might spend some of that money on your former employer’s products.

And then, when it became clear that the selfish employer was not going to give you all of that, you would then not threaten your employer by saying, “Fine, if you’re not going to give me everything I want, I am just going to walk away with no job. See how you like that.”

Now, I know what you would say if you were with me now. You would say, “Bainbridge, have you just used the best part of 400 words coming up with an ingenious metaphor about the government’s approach to Brexit?”

And I would say, “You are correct. You are probably one of my cleverer readers.”

And you would say, “Do you have any additions to your brilliant analogy?”

And I would say, “Oh, yes, although I am aware that all analogies break down in the end.”

And you would say, “Please continue, O wise one, to remove the scales from my eyes.”

And I would say, “OK.

“In this example, Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the right-wing press, and all their frothing chums are your sozzled mates in the pub who encourage you to quit your job immediately, to just walk away. Because it’s easy for them. They’re not at risk of losing their salary.

“And when you say that you’re a bit worried about your future finances, they tell you you’re great and you shouldn’t talk yourself down. After all, you managed before you had that job, didn’t you? Even though your circumstances then and your circumstances now are completely different.

“Because it’s easy when you’re in a job you’re not enjoying – because, say, you don’t like how many foreign colleagues you have, or you don’t like the health and safety regulations imposed on you – to focus on all the things you hate about that job, and not appreciate the good things you’ve come to depend on, like a regular pay packet, and the security for your family that comes from that.

“And you have to take into account what you’re going to lose when you leave that job, and have a proper plan to ensure those losses are as minor as possible.

“Because doing that isn’t talking yourself down. It’s being realistic. It’s proof that you’re a mature, level-headed person, and that you should not talk yourself down.

“And what your sozzled mates in the pub, with their mustard-coloured trousers and their ‘common-sense-don’t-listen-to-experts’ approach, are doing is far worse than talking you down. They’re talking you out of a job and into the gutter.”

COLUMN: November 9, 2017

This is The Good Place, a programme I currently cannot watch, which is proof I am not in The Good Place

I AM currently working on a Super Secret Project that I cannot tell you about because I am the sort of person who likes telling half a story and then making you guess the rest.

But it means that I am spending quite a lot of time in my flat, with only the occasional foray for supplies or to go to work to do my actual job for eight hours.

I have been unusually productive because I have been without internet for 10 days. But this is not one of those digital detox columns people with children called Tamara and Hugo write.

The lack of internet is because my supplier is unable to get its story straight as to why my connection is down, and has a call centre in India with an impenetrable script and an aversion to straight answers.

If I asked them what day it was they would tell me, “I am appreciative that you wish to know what day it is and I am wishing to reassure you that I am immediately going to escalate your query. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Lack of internet, of course, means lack of Netflix, which means that my series obligations are mounting up. I am not sure I will ever catch up, or will be able to have a conversation in work ever again.

Lack of Netflix also means that I have to rely on Normal Telly. Normal Telly during the day is the worst thing. It is mostly cheap documentaries about people who have enough money to buy second houses doing them up. And then they rent them out to people who can’t afford to buy their own houses, because there aren’t enough houses, because people are out there buying second houses.

All of this is to say that I have mostly been spending the past week or so in my own company. And now I feel terrible for all those people who have previously had to spend time in my company, because it turns out I am dreadful.

Firstly, it appears that I talk to myself, pretty much constantly. Behaviour I would shun if somebody were doing it on the bus is apparently A-OK when I am doing it in my flat.

I noticed how much I was doing it a couple of days ago, when I embarked on a running commentary on emptying the washing machine and hanging up my pants and socks on a clothes horse.

“Right, just get these out of the machine. Where’s the little detergent bowl? Oh, inside this sock. How did it get in there? We’ll never know. Take them over here. Oops, dropped one. And another one. Just dump them here. Go back for the other two. Put these pants on the clothes horse. What? How is this a clothes ‘horse’? Who invented a standing rack for drying clothes and then said, ‘Hmmm, what shall I call it? You know, it reminds me of a horse, because this is a thing that exists and horses are also things that exist’. Hang on, I should have two brown socks…”

Secondly, it appears that I have become unapologetic about making involuntary noises. I had previously been conditioned to apologise after, for argument’s sake, burping, and did so even if nobody was around. But now I was doing it freely, lavishly, without embarrassment. This is bad because what if I brought this behaviour into the public arena?

There was only one thing for it. I had to rejoin humanity. And where better than the cinema? The cinema is just like a big Netflix, except it shows films you might want to see rather than what was left in the video rack at the back of the off-licence.

I sat alone in the back row, but not for long. I was joined by a group of young men who had all come to the conclusions that Lynx was an adequate substitute for a shower, and that cinema etiquette – in essence, sit down and shut up – was a bourgeois convention from which we should all be freed. It was like sitting next to gibbons, but gibbons given to speculating what might happen next in the film.

It was the right thing to do. Because it made me feel so much better about my enforced solitude. I might be the sort of person to tease you with half a story, but at least I don’t want to punch me.

COLUMN: November 2, 2017

handdryer — A hand dryer designed for the purposes of drying hands and probably only hands

MY good friends were celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary – their tin wedding. I don’t think anybody is quite sure why 10 years is tin. It seems fairly stingy for double figures.

Perhaps somebody from New Zealand was asked for how many years they had been married and they replied “ten”, and there was some confusion.

The point is there was a party and I was invited. The invitation said “dancing shoes” which was encouraging as far as it goes, but is not an iron-clad dress code. So I decided to wear a suit, on the basis that it is always better to be overdressed than underdressed, unless you are an undercover detective infiltrating a family of Mafia naturists.

A suit requires a shirt, and I pulled my good white one out of the wardrobe, gave it a once-over with the iron, and slipped it on.

There is never a good time to discover that one has unusually sharp elbows, but this was a particularly bad time. I had somehow put my elbow through the shirt sleeve, as if I had started to transform into the Incredible Hulk, but then thought better of it.

The only suitable looking shirt that was not also in the wash was a light blue one. I do not know why I own a light blue shirt. Light blue shirts are accidents waiting to happen. Anyway, it was late October and quite chilly, so it was probably going to be fine.

I donned my suit and my dancing shoes – to be honest, they were just shoes, but any shoes can be dancing shoes if you have the right attitude – and headed out in the cold for the party…

The temperature was just right in the village hall. I was comfortable. I sipped a glass of wine and chatted to some old and new friends and it was all tremendous.

But it was a slow start on the dance floor, as is often the way at these things. Nobody wanted to be first, in the same way that nobody wants to be the first out of their seat for a standing ovation. I nodded at a fellow party-goer and gave her the “I suppose if nobody else is going to do this it had better be us” look.

And as we got up, we jostled others, who also stood up and headed to the dance floor, whereupon we all cut a rug.

It is hard to describe my dancing style, but I think the most accurate term would be “disturbingly enthusiastic”.

In fact, my exertions brought on a degree of perspiration, and my face glowed. In fact, I was glowing like a pig. I excused myself and headed for the Gents’, to splash some water on my face and cool down. I did this, and looked up at the mirror and saw that I had developed what I can only describe as a dark blue bib.

The light blue shirt had sprung its trap. I might as well have worn a neon sign saying, “This man’s sweat glands are in perfect working order. It’s a good job he had a shower before he left.”

Then I realised I had no way to dry my face following its splashing. There were no hand towels, and the only method of drying anything was a hot-air hand dryer.

I panicked and grabbed some toilet paper from one of the stalls to dab at my face. But it shredded and became trapped in my beard and I had to use more water to free it.

My face was soaked again. I couldn’t go back out like that – people would have thought I was having a cardiac arrest.

And then I had an idea. There was nobody else in the Gents’ and nothing else for it. I crouched down in front of the hand dryer. Maybe I could direct the air onto my face and chest.

But my face could not activate the sensor. I had to be lower…

Which is why the next man to enter the Gents’ discovered me on my knees, waving my hands in prayer to the hand dryer god.

“It’s my shirt,” I explained. I don’t think he believed me.

And it didn’t even work. I’ve expelled more hot air huffing onto my glasses in order to clean them.

So, next time I go to a party, I’m wearing a wetsuit. I should get away with it. As long as I’m wearing my dancing shoes.

COLUMN: October 26, 2017

walking-2620907_1920 — A man walking, much as your writer did

I OCCASIONALLY have to travel by bus. It is possible I have already mentioned this in a previous column. By “occasionally”, I mean twice a day. It would be insane to travel by bus once a day, unless you wanted to go progressively further from home.

Unfortunately there was a bus strike. Now, I am all for the right of workers to withdraw labour in the event of a dispute, but this one affected me, and that is not on. Being forced to make alternative arrangements is easily the worst thing that can befall me because it just increases the number of events that could turn out badly.

But this bus strike was special, because it coincided with my local train station being out of action for three weeks. And the next nearest station was 20 minutes away. By bus. I can only assume that there had been an unusually productive meeting of the Inconveniencing Bainbridge Society (IBS, appropriately enough).

I don’t have a car, taxis were going to be as rare as taxis during a bus strike, and there were no lifts on offer. I had only one option left – Shanks’s pony. I was going to have to walk four and a half miles from home to my office.

So, the time came for going to work and I set off in the sunshine, like Hillary up Everest, and after about 10 minutes I walked down a hill and reached a bus stop. There was an elderly man waiting some distance from it, equidistant, it turned out from that stop and the opposite stop.

“Flipping buses, eh?” he said. “I’ve been waiting for ages.”

The poor man, I thought. “Oh, no, sorry! They’re on strike,” I said. “I’m walking to work because they’re off.”

He thanked me, and I went to go, when he said, “Hang on, is it all the operators?”

“No,” I said. “Just the one on this route.” At which point he explained that another bus would be along soon, operated by a different firm, and that would take me to a mile from my office.

This was a sort of victory, I thought. “When does it come?”

“Oh, in about five or 10 minutes.”

I did a tiny airpunch, and the man started to tell me the story of his life, with a level of detail that meant I now know more about his life than my own. Sometimes he would stop and ask me to explain my own poor life choices. It was like watching a very long episode of This Is Your Life, with no celebrities I had heard of, while occasionally experiencing a Chinese burn.

It was the longest 10 minutes I had ever spent in anybody’s company, and I sneaked a look at my watch. It had actually been 30 minutes. “Um, what time did you say that bus was due?” I asked.

“Ooh, any minute,” he said.

I walked over to the bus stop and looked at the schedule. Only one bus used that stop, and it was on strike. I returned to the man, my stomach sinking.

“Does… Does the bus I want stop over there?” I pointed at the bus stop opposite.

“No, lad,” he said. “It stops up there, up the hill. But sometimes it comes past this way and if you put your hand out sometimes the driver stops for you.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and ran back up the hill, to the bus stop I had apparently ignored earlier. The bus had been there 20 minutes previously, at roughly the time the old man had indicated.

Then I trudged back, past the old man, who is probably still there for all I care, and onwards to work, now at least half an hour late.

And about 30 minutes away from the office – precisely the time I had spent at the bus not-stop – the skies became a putty grey and parted to empty several swimming pools on me, and not especially gradually. I had no coat as it was sunny when I left.

And then, as I approached my office, dripping like a sponge, I saw a bus, run by a non-striking operator, which stops about five minutes’ walk from my home, and which it had not occurred to me I could catch.

So that day I only used the bus once – going home – proving that it really is the act of an insane person.

COLUMN: October 19, 2017

I DECIDED to go for a walk in an attempt to take advantage of the last bit of sun this year had to offer. An actual hurricane was on its way the following day, and I thought it would be nice to see where the trees were before they were blown over.

There was a destination in mind – a park I had last visited several years ago – but no route. All I had was a vague sense of the direction in which I would have to walk.

I pulled on a coat, looked in a mirror, and realised that I would have to do more to look less “prime suspect for any crimes that might have occurred in the vicinity”.

The trouble is that I have a shifty look about me. Even in the most benign of circumstances, I look as if I am scoping out the exits. If you combine that with the coat I was considering wearing, which is great if there is a sudden shower, but in every other circumstance looks designed for nefarious purposes, then you can see my difficulty.

I swapped my coat for something less practical. Yes, I might have been caught in the rain, but at least I would not look like “a lone man in a park”. If the past week has taught me anything, it is that women have enough trouble with actual sex pests; they don’t need me to make them uncomfortable too.

I started out on my journey, and immediately pulled out my phone in order to check the route. Then I told myself: “No, you are a human being who for the first 38 years of his life had nothing to direct him save an A-Z and some persistence.”

The persistence is important. Some people are born with a sense of direction. I need a map to get to my kitchen, and even then I’m probably holding it upside down. But if you persist, eventually you reach your destination. It just means that you visit quite a lot of locations beforehand.

And, besides, what if it took a long time? There was a pub/restaurant in the grounds of the park. I could get my tea there. This was going to be great.

It was not long before I was in territory I vaguely knew, and not long after that I was in alien territory. This is because whenever I visited this park, I approached it from my previous home. I’d have had to have got very lost indeed to have come this way. And now, coincidentally, that is what I was.

I thought about my phone again. “No,” I said. “You’re going to ask somebody for directions.” But there was nobody about. It was Sunday afternoon. I was on a road, but I hadn’t seen a pedestrian for ages. The only people I saw were occasional drivers, and jumping into the road to flag somebody down to ask where a park might be is not in my skill set.

And then, as I walked past the walled golf course, in the distance I saw him. A respectable looking man in his forties, a man who had also spent time finding an appropriate coat, walking with purpose. Surely he would know.

I quickened my pace towards him, more than ready for a nice tea. I noted a pile of three car tyres incongruously piled up against the wall of the golf course, but thought little of it.

He reached the tyres before me, but, instead of walking by them, he turned towards the wall, stepped on them, and tried to climb over the wall.

He dealt with the task much as I would, flailing, kicking away the top tyre into the road, presenting his bottom to spectators, as he tried to pull his body over. I briefly considered assisting him, but he was clearly up to no good, so I walked by, allowing him to be “prime suspect for any crimes that might have occurred in the vicinity”.

Persistence paid off. Five minutes later I was walking through the gates of the park. And the only other people there were dog walkers. I could totally blend in as Man Who Is Looking For His Dog. “Krypto!” I shouted. “Come on, boy!”

And so I headed finally to the pub. An aluminium fence surrounded it. “Closed For Refurbishment”, a sign said. “We Apologise For The Inconvenience.”

I suppose I would have known had I looked on my phone.

COLUMN: October 12, 2017

I HAVE spent a silly portion of the past week trying to get rid of my money. I am not dying, nor was this a Brewster’s Millions-type scenario.

It is just that I have a jar of change that I top up with the shrapnel I have in my pocket at the end of the day, and I realised there would be a few soon-to-be-worthless pound coins in there.

It will amaze those of you who see my byline picture at the top of this column that I remember the replacement of the pound note with the old pound coin. “But you are only a strip of a hint of a boy,” you say. “I bet you can’t remember a time when a JPEG was something you used to hang up your dishcloth. I bet you can’t remember when the Yellow Pages would hurt you if you dropped it on your foot.”

But in fact I can remember when Top Of The Pops was on a Thursday AND I can remember Top Of The Pops, so it feels odd to see something that was shiny and new and “the future” become defunct. And I work in the media.

So I had just a few days to get rid of the old-style pound coins still in my possession (four), and so I visited the vending machine in work to buy a can of fizzy pop. I dropped an old pound coin in the slot, but it fell through the mechanism, as these things occasionally do, and was spat out again.

I tried a second time, with the same result. But, instead of picking up the money and walking away, perhaps to visit a local shop in order to get rid of this coin, I was briefly confused by my mission.

I was standing in front of a vending machine, it had not accepted the coin I had proffered, and so I automatically found a coin of a different denomination – a £2 coin, put it in, and chose the drink before I could stop myself.

That one worked and the vending machine gave me a drink and my change – a 10p piece, a 20p piece, and an old-style pound coin. Now I had five almost-out-of-date pound coins, and a drink I didn’t really need.

Later that day I managed to exchange a couple of them in Greggs in an attempt to “keep it real” and also have a steak bake. I now had three nearly-useless pound coins, which was disappointing but at least some progress.

Even later that day I alighted from the bus and remembered I needed to buy a couple of items from my local small version of a large supermarket. They would take care of the last of my dangerously-close-to-pointless pound coins.

I was delighted. I was spending money as if it were going out of fashion, which, technically, it was. I picked up the items excitedly.

But then, just as in front of the vending machine, I was confused by my mission. I remembered I needed bleach, and kitchen roll, and, oh, some milk, and I picked them up and suddenly it cost more than the change I had on me. I would have to use my card.

“No,” I thought. “I will not be defeated now.” Instead I went to the cashpoint inside the shop and withdrew £10. And then I marched to the automated checkout, and put my plan into operation.

I fed £13 into the machine. It would be weird to have handed £13 to a cashier, but machines only judge you if you place an unexpected item in the bagging area, and all my items were completely expected. The worst thing that could happen would be that I got my three pounds back, and I was prepared for that…

The machine gave me change. Three pound coins – ALL NEW – and an odd amount of copper. This was a result. I punched the air. Now all I needed was a five-pound note.

I heard the whirr of the automatic change maker. But it did not give me the money. “Please, no,” I thought.

The machine had run out of fivers. It spat out five pound coins. Five old-style pound coins. Because everybody had been trying to get rid of their own before the deadline.

So now I have five beautiful round pounds, which would grace any collection of obsolete coins, and will accept any reasonable offer for them. Cash, obviously.

COLUMN: October 5, 2017

fishchips — A quantity of fish and chips, similar to those which I ate that Friday night

FOLLOWING a trip away, I visited a couple of youngsters of my acquaintance. Traditionally I would have brought back a gift, but circumstances of the sort regular readers of this column would understand had mitigated against this.

And so I promised that I would bring one on my next visit. I have to point out that the youngsters concerned are uncommonly well brought-up, and had not demanded a gift. Nevertheless, a promise is a promise…

I had a day off the day before my next visit. It was a Friday and I had spent most of that day in the company of a much-loved TV celebrity, and then on an unfamiliar bus in an unfamiliar area.

There is little worse than an enforced trip on an unfamiliar bus in an unfamiliar area. It combines the tedium of being on a bus with the low-level anxiety of a) not being entirely sure the bus is going in the right direction; and b) not being entirely sure where you have to get off. If I wanted to feel like that I would just think about my own life.

I arrived back in town at about 4pm. Although I was off work, I was meeting workmates for a colleague’s leaving drinks at 5pm. It was at that point I remembered my gift promise.

It was no problem. I knew what I wanted to buy, and at 4.30pm I had both items in my relieved hands. But then I realised that I was going out for a drink with people from work, and these things usually wander, and I was going to have to remember the bag of gifts when I left each place.

It was a recipe for disaster, so I took the bag to my office, even though it would clearly mean the massive inconvenience of having to explain to everybody why I was in the office on a day off. I would pick it up afterwards before getting the bus home.

I dropped the bag at my desk. Nobody asked why I was in on my day off. They must have just thought I had been quiet.

Eventually a group of us went to the bar, where I had a couple of drinks. There was talk of going on to somewhere else. But I remembered I was visiting the youngsters early the next day, and really this was where I had to bow out. Luckily, the editor of this column, who is only just finding out about this as she reads it, was also leaving, and she offered me a lift home.

I explained to my leaving colleague why I was leaving before him, made a big deal of my regret at not being able to go on to the next place, and we shook hands, then I left with my editor. No bus for me – I was delighted.

Normally I work on Friday nights. I took advantage of being at home at 8pm by buying fish and chips, eating them, and then flopping onto the sofa. This was indeed the life. This was what normal people with lives and a knowledge of what is happening in Coronation Street did, and it was great.

I kicked off my shoes and settled back. I was going to have an early night and be fresh for the youngsters in the morning. But first a spot of telly…

And then I remembered that the bag of gifts was still sitting on my office desk.

A promise is a promise… I said a rude word, put my shoes back on, and blasted out. Rarely have I been so disappointed to be on a bus on a Friday night.

I disembarked and walked quickly towards my office. If I timed it right, I would return to get the bus home without having to wait half an hour.

But as I closed in on the office I saw a gang walking towards me. They were my workmates, including the leaving colleague. How could I explain why, two hours after leaving them to “go home”, I was now 50 feet in front of them, AND get my bus home in time?

I could not. It has taken me 700 words to explain it to you.

Which is how, on a Friday night, I found myself in circumstances of the sort regular readers of this column would understand, i.e. crouched behind a car outside my office, hiding from 20 people I see every day as they walked past.

COLUMN: September 28, 2017

burger-2600973_1920 — One of those hamburgers they have these days

LAST week I had some annual leave because otherwise it would have just built up and then I’d have to have taken it all at once and when I returned there would be somebody sitting at my desk and my editor would say: “We all thought you’d left. We’ve taken on an absolute moron to do your job. And he’s twice as good as you.”

During my week off I visited a couple of bars in a different city with a man who had cut himself shaving his head and, until we noticed, had been going about the place as if he had a head injury, and I failed to win a pub quiz. It was a vintage week of not going to work.

On my last day off, I decided to have a treat to ease myself back in. I was going to have one of those posh hamburgers, because nothing says “luxury” like some mince on a bap.

I went to a branch of that “no frills” burger chain. You know the one, it’s all red and white, and corporately designed right down to the last detail to look as if it hasn’t been designed.

It’s so austere it’s just about on the right side of “You’ll eat what you’re given, peasants.” At any moment you expect a man in a white coat to come in and sluice the floor.

After rubbing my eyes a few times when reading the prices over the counter, I paid for a bacon cheeseburger with medium fries and a Coke, and looked for the smallest possible table that a single person could occupy while still being in some comfort. I did not want to sit on a high stool in case I had to move in a hurry.

I watched the crack hamburger operatives in the kitchen assembling various meals. They clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and I congratulated myself on my choice of restaurant. This was going to be an excellent incredibly overpriced beef roll and chips.

They called my number – of course I had a number – and handed me a brown paper bag, trays being the sort of hoity-toity frippery with which this aggressively “no frills” restaurant has no truck.

Inside the bag there were a burger wrapped in foil, some napkins, a white plastic cup filled with fries, and some extra bonus fries scattered around the inside of the bag. And as I extracted the white plastic cup, more of the fries made a bid for freedom.

You see, the very worst thing in which you can hold fries is a white plastic cup, because they are prone to fall out spontaneously, or if you disturb the pack by removing one yourself. And they do not absorb oil, so your hand, as it gets further into the cup, becomes coated in grease.

It was a shame as the chips themselves were delicious. They had skin on – peeling spuds presumably being an affectation – which made them taste of potato. If only I could have emptied them onto a plate, but plates were considered another frill.

And so I unwrapped the burger. It seemed surprisingly heavy. As it turned out, this was because they had given me a double cheeseburger instead of the advertised and ordered bacon cheeseburger. I decided not to push my luck and tucked in.

It fell apart immediately. The bun had no structural integrity. You know how if you make a cheese toastie and leave it on your plate for a minute it develops “toast sweat”, making the bottom slice soggy, because the water vapour can’t escape?

Imagine what happens when you wrap a burger in “no frills” foil. All the moisture gets trapped inside, making the bun damp. And a damp bun is never going to be up to the task of keeping the component elements of an admittedly tasty burger in position. You might as well use candy floss.

So every time I took a bite, I lost a pickle or some onion onto the table. Because, of course, I had no plate. And my face was covered in burger debris. Halfway through the burger I looked as if I had been starved for a month, then forced to eat stew with my hands tied behind my back.

It was all incredibly stressful, and exactly what I needed. Because it made being back at work seem like a piece of cake. Eaten off a plate, with a fork.

COLUMN: September 21, 2017

Some pasta, with an absolutely ruined packet of Parmesan cheese

LYING is what separates us from the animals – that and horrifying hygiene regimes. Hamsters don’t lie. Dogs don’t fib. Cats… well, let’s gloss over that one.

When was the last time you heard a goldfish tell a porky pie? They don’t, unless they’re fibbing when they say: “I don’t remember.”

And dissembling is not necessarily a bad thing. “No, no, you look lovely in that.” “Mustn’t grumble.” “Fine, thank you. How are you?” They are all lies, told in order to grease the mechanism of human intercourse.

If you do not believe me that lying is not necessarily a bad thing, bear in mind that the biggest indicator that somebody is a Grade A pillock, to be avoided at parties and in pubs, is that he “calls a spade a spade” and “tells it as it is”.

But some lies are awful. And there is one lie that is the worst of all. We are not talking about piffling lies like “Brexit won’t cause any pain at all” or “We’re gonna build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it” or “Really, it’s no trouble at all”.

And the worst thing about this lie is that we all fall for it, every time we hear it. It is a flaw in human nature.

I fell for it twice in five minutes this week.

I came home last Wednesday to find that the light had gone off in my fridge. Further inspection uncovered that a circuit had been tripped. I switched it back on. The light came on in the fridge. It made the usual fridgey humming sound. And everything was still cold.

“Phew!” I thought. “No harm done. It is just one of those inexplicable things and everything is going to be fine.”

Sometimes we lie to ourselves. On Friday morning, it was warmer inside my fridge than outside my fridge, and my freezer could have been used to prove bread dough. My milk was becoming cheese, and my cheese was on its way to becoming blue cheese.

A man told me my fridge-freezer was not working, and that he would replace it the following Monday. I had to throw out the food in my fridge-freezer, and by the time Monday came I was tired of eating food that had come out of tins or had been chosen from a list behind a counter.

I had my new fridge-freezer and decided I was going to buy some food to put in it. That night I would dine like a king, if a king of a small and insignificant nation who travels on buses to keep in contact with his subjects. I would have my favourite pasta dish – a mixture of bacon and cabbage and chilli, with a dusting of Parmesan. I bought the items, stocked up my wonderfully cold fridge, and began to cook my tea.

I took the packet of bacon, and that was when I first fell for the lie. “Easy Open”, it said on the packet, near a tiny unattached corner.

I knew what was supposed to happen. I would pull back the corner, and the top of the packet would cleanly come away, enabling me to access the appropriate amount of bacon. Then I would replace the top of the packet, protecting the rest of the bacon from the elements.

What actually happened is what always happens. I pulled back the corner. It reached the bit of adhesive attaching the top to the packet, decided it was far too forbidding an obstacle, and came off in my hand, because the glue used in this packaging is the strongest adhesive known to humanity, stronger even than the glue used to attach the first sheet of kitchen paper to the roll.

Then I had to stab the packaging with a knife, and tear it back, take out the bacon, then put the plastic wrapping back. Except the wrapping didn’t go back. It just curled up, as it always does.

Five minutes later, I fell for it again. “Easy Open”, it said on the packet of Parmesan. It was not. The packet ripped in two, and it was only my weirdly good reflexes regarding cheese that prevented it from flying into my mop bucket.

The fact is, there is no such thing as an “Easy Open” package. Exert not enough force, and knives are required. Exert too much force, and the package destructs like a Bond villain’s volcano lair.

And that is no lie.

Gary Bainbridge

A Website By The Above-named Writer

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