Electric prayer candles, St Peter's, Clerkenwell. Put 20p in the slot and one lights up. Put another 20p in and it starts to move up and down ...
The Great Annual Christmas Slack-Off has begun.
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The volume of emails I'm receiving from friends currently in work (I use that term very loosely) has begun to increase. Here, in the middle levels of the Northern Hemisphere anyway, it gets dark early in the afternoon, people are thinking about the Christmas break and the already high background level of drunk people in the UK is rising significantly.
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I tried to order a new lens for my SLR a couple of days ago. Mindful of the growth of Internet based fraud I telephoned my order direct to the usually very reliable Bristol Cameras. Two minutes into the order process I realised the guy at the other end was off his face, pissed drunk. Him quoting me back a scrambled debit card number, laughing randomly at several points in the conversation, then totalling the order at £200 less than it should have been gave the game away. Delivery due probably 17th July 2026 - at which point I can look forward to a) nothing, b) completely the wrong thing , or c) some combination of a) and b) costing me £14,000.
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Shortly after ending the call, I had a guilty thought that maybe he wasn't drunk. Maybe there was a faulty heater in his office and at that very moment a group of hard-pressed telesales executives were gradually succumbing to the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. After some reflection I decided that, no, he probably was drunk. Anyway, even if I was wrong and he was now dead from gas inhalation, carbon monoxide suppresses the onset of rigour mortis and somebody would be able to extract my order from his cold dread hand without too much effort, provided he'd got it down right in the first place.
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That's Christmas for you. All over the World people are either drunk, sneaking out of the office to the shops or sitting in front of PCs twiddling idly.
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So, here I am, receiving a steady and growing flow of 'how are you doing emails?' and vaguely Christmassy humorous file attachments and Internet links from bored office-bound chums around the World.
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Favourites of the day so far include the Cheesy Jesus site …
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http://cheesyjesus.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=11
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… packed full of the tackiest Catholic memorabilia that money can buy.
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Then there's the story that UK shop Santas are being monitored by dedicated CCTV installations to ensure that they're not paedophiles. The first question that struck my mind was how can we be sure that they're not Islamic fundamentalists? After all there's plenty of room for a headscarf under Santa's hat and anthrax in the Christmas presents? What about the risk of an Islamic Santa packing his sleigh with Semtex and slamming his reindeer slap bang into the front of Buckingham Palace? Our Government should be doing a lot more to protect us.
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Christmastime is also a golden opportunity to catch up on office chores. It's normally quiet and there's not much work going on. What better time is there to meticulously clean your mouse ball and turn your keyboard upside down and grab a free lunch based on the remains of your previous 300 lunches? I was particularly well-blessed in that regard as I spent many years in a travel based job. This meant that I had a lot more in the way of exotic goodies to nibble on than my London-based colleagues when I turned my laptop upside down. Bread crumbs from Italy, desiccated ham fragments from Mexico City, specks of fried chicken coating from Manila, all bound together in a mass of cigarette ash and tobacco particles. The whole World would look back up at me from my desk in buffet form.
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Ooh, I feel peckish now …
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