"Here, you look like you can sing ... have this!" It was the size of the OED and I was starting to get scared because every carol ever written would take all night and into 2013. In case I've not mentioned it before, my favourite and oft ignored carol is On Christmas Night All Christians Sing - it's right in my singing range as I'm the child of heavy smokers.
"I'm not in Gareth Malone's league you know. I never made it to the school choir." A blatant lie because I didn't feel like singing Silent Night with Matron nearby on the descant part.
"Never mind ... you'll soon get the hang of it." Thus I was frogmarched off to take part in an impromptu carol service for the patients; and it was lovely. And they gave me a mince pie.
Spirits lifted, it made light work of a long shift. Not so the next day when I trotted in to be told I was needed urgently in a Feedback Session. Confused, I wondered had I been flat during O Little Town of Bethlehem or, as everyone does, missed out an entire verse of Hark the Herald Angels?
Imagine my stark horror at being shoved into a boiling meeting room with a group of assorted P's and R's - pharmacy, physios, phlebotomists and radiographers. Plus one Raven perched on the end of the nurses.
After three of the most tedious Powerpoint presentations I've had to endure [nothing tops the Data Protection Act ... nothing] and like Dr Who's iconic stone angels, I was praying for the lights to go out when we finally got to what's laughingly called 'The Staff Satisfaction Survey'. Now there's nothing wrong with these if they're honest but I suspected some employees had been slightly economical with the truth, especially as our happy little band scored bottom in the category relating to team work. Our group leader asked for feedback and bravely, I ventured the following,
"Could it be that some people don't care about the impact their thoughtless actions have on others?"
"Such as?" asked the management.
"Well, someone borrowed the monitor cable from my PC yesterday for five hours without considering the impact it might have on my workload." i.e. I couldn't do any work without elbowing a colleague out of the way. The assembled company were horrified at such an act of inconsideration and vowed it would never happen again except that when I got back upstairs, ironically the vital cable had once again disappeared.
Earlier, I mentioned probably the most overused word of 2012 - Iconic. There ... I did it again.
And every day on the BBC or in the press, some idiot who can't use a dictionary misuses the word in relation to music. Sometimes I feel like ringing Points of View but to save on the cost of a call, let's clear up the muddle here and now. Please checkout any website you like for icons - in fact, there's a museum of them in Clinton, Illinois featuring not one reverential painting of Led Zeppelin in concert. However, this picture is of a car park in Leicester and the one I was forced to visit on Saturday as there was no room at the inn ... also I'd had an odd compulsion to visit the 8ody5h0p and wish them all greetings of the season.
I'd just dropped off a slab of 70% chocolate to keep Sandra going for an hour or so and spying my previous employer's logo I felt a glowing tide of nostalgia. How fortunate then that Caraway and her partner blocked my way with a welcoming hug and, after a brief catch up in the aisle, the moment had passed. Sometime later, I returned to the car park with soaked feathers and laden like a pack animal, so imagine my irritation when the pay machine refused my cash. Use my switch card? Oh dear me no!
Eventually, we were ushered to an alternative machine by a bully in a high-vis jacket - I wonder if he does crowd control at weddings? To appease the grumbles, he quipped,
"This is an ICONIC car park ... it's historic." I was at school when it was built and it's an eyesore, even if it has been featured on Top Gear. Imagine my joy when the bloke in front of me made light of the situation.
"Mate. This thing you call a car park is a pile of 1970s pre-stressed concrete and NCP would do us all a favour if they sold it to the Army for target practise."
I was sniggering up my sleeve until I realised we'd all been charged an extra pound for queuing. Anyone got the Army's phone number?
Tip of the Blog: LindyLou, one of the lovely ladies I work with in The Bunker marked the end of her shift on Friday by proclaiming,
"I've got to go to Asda now ..." and promptly burst into tears. Grateful there's only a few of us on Tuesday, I dared to ask,
"God ... how many are you catering for?"
"Three!" And she carried on through half a box of tissues.
From the bottom of my heart, may your turkey be golden and glossy, bacon crisp and all the trimmings taste delightful. Give the pudding to the birds, they need it.
Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year.
the Ravens.
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