That's enough of the knockers, let's be proud

How inspiring it is that the weekend's olympic hand-over hand-job was sponsored by Visa. That's Visa, the credit card company. It's how we're going to pay for it, whack it on the plastic then next month put it on another, keep shifting it card to card, we'll be fine. Then one February HM Treasury will forget to do the necessary because it's a short month and we'll be up for late payment charges and the full sum and before you know it there'll be geezers round to take away Britain's every last lamp post, paving slab and house brick. There'll just be lots of households sitting on mud with nothing left but their 32" plasma screen tellies and SkyPlus dishes, the bailiffs can't take those away, it's the law.

The last major infrastructure project we delivered on time and under budget was the Bridge on the River Kwai. And then we had the Japanese Imperial Army providing project management services.

Never mind Paula Radcliffe exhibitionistically taking a crap for the edification of the public on the Embankment. If you want a vision of the future, take what my friend saw from the bus the other day: imagine a middle-aged balding man in a Hackett shirt and shorts using his mobile to video a kid in a knock-off Moschino t-shirt getting mauled by his own Staffie in a pool of blood outside a Favorite Fried Chicken. Forever.

Maybe you know her

She's quite small, though sturdy. Often she bumps into things, just as often is bumped into. Sometimes she breaks things without meaning to and she holds her pint glass in both hands until she gets about half-way down it.

She has our full attention, because she tells these stories so well. This one's about the last time she got dumped. She says something like:

'...she puts on this big responsible voice and I think oh, here we go.'

And she makes a facial expression that I can only describe in words as that of a person who has no choice but to be slapped very hard across the face with a large wet haddock and is trying to prepare for it as best they can.

Which is hilarious there and then, we're all pissing ourselves, and then she makes more of her ex-girlfriend's voice, hangs her head like someone getting told off, it's so funny.

Then walking home it doesn't seem so funny, in fact it's bloody tragic. If it had just been a humourless whinge I'd have forgotten all about it, but after the falling about laughing it seems so unfair, this always getting knocked over in the playground.

E.M. Forster 'The Longest Journey' (1907)

"He passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value."

Konferenz

Part of the conference centre site is under construction, creating diversions around hoardings. The diversions are well sign-posted and curve about as if a product of intentional landscaping. Posters on the hoardings, images of the town itself, three miles distant. You are here. You are not here.

Along the pathways the human components move. Purposeful, encumbered by bags or trundling wheeled cases, alone or in groups. In the morning.

Inside the centre, the rooms, the coffee, the awful coffee. Sessions spawning break-out sessions like raiding parties into subdivided rooms, returning with flipcharts, those bloody flipcharts.

The coffee, indigestion. The flipcharts, enervation. The taxi from the airport, indifferent disorientation.

Lunchtime. Two delegates have strayed from the building and have found their way to the station. They look longingly at the shop, with its newspapers, chocolate, fruit juice, basic stationery and distress purchase items. Then they look at the OV-chipkaart gates, open for now but potentially thwarting their path to or from the shop.

Light rain outside, early dusk, the windows of the main hall indigo. Except for one on his feet, the inmates feel the drowsiness of cats. They fiddle fretfully with personal communication devices.

Then the last handouts. Feedback forms. Autumnal shower of exhausted post-it notes.

Release.