THIS ISN'T GOING TO END WELL …

It's the company works do this week, there are few activities quite so vexing as the Office Christmas Party; that obligatory gathering of bosses and subordinates, cronies and rivals, back-stabbers and back-stabbees. Plus a horde of husbands and wives who spend the entire night planning their escape.

But, in all seriousness, there's been a bit of a darth at the pub on a Friday night in recent weeks, and now the comic-con circuit's over for another year it's a chance to have some poncy food, drink like a fish, and all with the approval of the top brass.

I often even make my annual attempt of dancing.

Still, as we all know, there are the usual hazards involved in the office bash. This year for example it's the first time in year I haven't knocked work immediately afterwards so any potential for relying on memory loss for any indiscretions will not be a suitable back-up plan. Also it means less potential opportunities for 'doing a Sherlock' and sneaking out early. It all starts before when trying to pick your best outfit, in my case it's also a partial cosplay, aimed by teaming by Twelfth Doctor outfit with a casual shirt. It basically turns the evening into a cross between 'Time Heist' and '24-hr Party People', only without a sonic screwdriver.

So what if you slept with Rose from book-keeping. That's okay, maybe nobody knows. Maybe they didn't notice you were the last two to leave. Maybe she didn't burst in this morning announcing it to the room.

Throwing a decent party itself isn’t rocket science – New Year's Eve seems to get it better than Christmas itself for some reason - just provide drinks and snacks, assemble an upbeat playlist, have a few activities in your back pocket if people seem into it, ask everyone to dress up a teensy bit fancier than they would normally, et voilà: you have a room full of people enjoying themselves.

It should be simple enough. But that formula tends to fall apart like Birmingham City's back four when it comes to the month of December and your place of work. One December, a friend’s office Christmas lunch was booked at a central London hotel. There was great excitement all morning. Colleagues put on party frocks and snowman jumpers. The occasion promised unlimited prosecco, food and an afternoon off work.

But on arrival she found the equivalent of a Christmas party industrial complex. The banqueting hall was set for hundreds of Christmas lunches for staff parties from many companies. The turkey, sausages and roast potatoes were served from an assembly line, slopped out by bored kitchen staff who had seen it all before, and were about to see it all again.

As she ate her pale lunch, she was struck by how boring the conversation was. So she topped up her glass, then had another. When the meal was over, everyone exchanged Secret Santa gifts. Hers was tat. Then she watched as a colleague discarded her carefully chosen present. She then quit in the new year.

The 1980s Xmas party was premised upon colleagues meeting outside of the workplace, 'letting down their hair' and acting out the fiction that their relationship was founded upon friendship, not economic necessity. An essential part of that ritual was to engage in behaviour that was not permissible in normal office life - starting with public drunkenness, telling truths that could not be uttered elsewhere, misuse of the photocopier, etc etc

Most of us are now aware that work colleagues don't evade HR rules by putting on a paper hat. The rules of normal office life are seen to apply at all times. Colleagues now have more diverse perceptions of what is acceptable. Views about alcohol differ, and any joke can be misinterpreted as aggressive, or demeaning.

Still what's the worst that can happen, eh ??

HATE TO DATE ...

Whilst looking for something on TV to throw my slippers at the other week, (I don't actually WEAR slippers BTW, they are literally just for throwing at the TV at things that get on my nerves, it's a better substitute for a coffee mug or a whisky glass at least anyway, it certainly saves money on television sets) I came across Channel 4's romance simulator programme "First Dates".

My god, what a loathsome programme, and like most of these shows, the emphasis is typically NOT on not so much if any permanent couplings or happy-ever-afters emerge, but on how the woman feels about the misguided imbecile across the table, promptly followed by a polite description about how she 'only wants to remain friends', based purely on the standard of his stomach muscles, and no, I don't mean the ones used to digest the horrible poncey, overpriced food he'd just forked out for in the vain hope of only being rejected half as badly as the last time he tried this massive waste of time.

In the episode I watched, a woman was so unimpressed by her date, who was doing absolutely nothing wrong other than trying to match up to the impossible standard he was being set, whilst being judged solely on how many inches his trousers and wallet packed respectively, that she spent 10 minutes in the toilet and even plotted her escape in such a way I'm surprised Charles Bronson didn't suddenly burrow his way up from underneath the pseudo-vinyl flooring armed with a bunch of gardening tools.

Having re-entered the restaurant for her date, she spent her time telling the poor dopey sod that was losing a day's hard-earned wages in the vain hope of being allowed near her pelvis on a sub-rental basis that would have Blockbuster Video sobbing into their cornflakes, that she was looking for the opposite of him , before eventually being won around and agreeing to meet again.

This got me thinking.

Generally speaking feminists seem to want to encourage women to date and have sex casually from 21-28 ... while they focus on their 'career'. The trouble is that when these women do decide that the grind is too hard and start looking for an out, at 28 they are doing so at exactly the point at which it is perceived that their market value is passing it's peak and heading into terminal decline as the 'biological clock' starts ticking and they need to start dropping sprogs.

Bull.

If men who are 28 were to realise that 28 wasn't a good 'time to buy' as far as women are concerned, the game would be up. Women wouldn't be able to leap off the career ladder in their late 20s and early 30s with the ease that they presently can.

In addition I have always found it fascinating that when an older woman dates a younger man it is celebrated by everyone these days. It's a subgenre of both film and adult entertainment all on it's own, yet when a 46 year old man dates a 21 year old woman, it is still mostly demonised, it's made me think even more consciously about what minimal age of the girl I could potentially engage with is, as I'm knocking on the door of pre-middle age. I even have second thoughts about the age of girls I add to my social media accounts these days.

What I find funny in both of these situations is the fact that nobody seems to question that maybe both people actually like one another, or if the younger girl is manipulating the older man. I hear all the typical shaming that goes along with older men dating younger women. Co-incidentally it happened to someone I know a while back, and it actually sounds she was damn lucky not to have joined the ranks of single parenthood as a result due to his global philandering.

All this flashed through my mind as I read about Hatr, the very latest 'hot new dating app' that launched last week and promises to bond potential lovers over the things that they loathe. Overturning the traditional cheery positives (“Love the cinema, ice skating and anonymous sex behind a bin ?? Meet Maisie, 34, from Bolton … ”), Hatr allows eager singletons to form relationships based on their mutual aversions instead of what actually floats their boat.

Boy, oh, boy, that sounds right up my street. Romance through ranting, dating for the post-Brexit, Trump era, let’s really get that negativity out there, more openly expressed misanthropy in the world might just be what we need. Brendan Alper, the ex-banker who founded the app, says: “What we hate is an important part of who we are, but it’s often swept under the rug.”

Sounds interesting, as this very blog is founded on the principle that I think that rolling up your sleeves and having a damn good rant on everything is a key part of a modern, civilised society. I have always said if there's one thing I know to do, it's how to moan about things I don't like very much.

I actually, and somewhat ironically, hate the principle of online dating itself from a start, seeing as it would be perfectly possible for me to use a profile picture of Ryan Reynolds and tell a load of complete and total lies about myself to the point where anyone logged on to my profile, they'd be gobsmacked if they met me in real life that I'm not a gay 1970's pornstar-cum-astronaut.

But to be able to set up a profile based on the stuff that really grinds your gears and really, REALLY gets up your nose ?? Brilliant. I can now legitimately use my dislike of reality TV, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, environmentalists, the EU, the Green Party, people who vote for Jeremy Corbyn, people who think Comic-Cons are for nerds, ham hock, horribly overpriced coffee, gym wankers, girls who are obsessed with guys with six-packs, burnt toast, cosplay snobs, Aston Villa Football Club, Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, internet pornography, Simon Cowell, Jean-Claude Juncker, the E! Channel, late trains, cauliflower cheese, shoe shops and fashionistas to potentially find a romantic partner.

Nothing could be more destigmatising.

And yet, and yet, it fails to escape the fact that is one of the key dangers of the internet; this irresistible hobby of giving everything a verdict. A judgement, a thumbs up or down. One minute you're giggling as you hate 100 concepts in a minute on Reddit, the next you’re giving a hotel no stars on Trip Advisor, roasting a friend’s wedding photos on Facebook, trolling columnists on the Guardian website and voting down all the solo songs from the members of One Dire Erection.

Again, just a typical day for me.

It’s easy for the first thought on anything to be negative. It's something I face at work everyday. It takes a small effort to push through into kindliness. With a five-minute pause, you might wonder whether the lady who forgot to put a syrup shot in your coffee at Starbucks was feeling a bit lonely, or suffering a bereavement you didn’t know about, and choose not to damn her business in public for all eternity, just in case.

I have quite a serious crush at the moment on a seriously pretty barmaid at the pub me and my colleagues go to on a Friday night, not that I'd ever tell her, but also because she can be quite comically bad at what she does (she's a true Penny from The Big Bang Theory in every sense of word), but that doesn't stop you from planning what University your kids are going to go to.

Ironically, that's what stopped me from actually making any further progress with the only girl I ever snogged, at the old pub we used to go to, almost three years to this very day. She's now going out with a Norwegian man-mountain who looks like he eats raw hippos for breakfast and could chop down a tree with his bare hands.

Why ??

Because at the end of the day women as a species are still amongst some of the biggest absolute sheer f***ing hypocrites you'll ever meet. A few years down the line, you’re welcoming your beloved through the door with an exhaustive chorus of everything they’ve found annoying, depressing or loathsome that day, dumped at your feet like so many litres of old bin juice, transforming the evening into one long, grim, joke-free episode of Room 101.

Maybe I should mention that when I set up my Hatr profile …

GENERATION GAMES

Voting eh ?? What a messy business. As the dust settles on the second General Election in three years, it seems that anyone who actually won was considered to be the loser, and those who lost were running about clutching their parts waving their hands in the air claiming the kind of victory not seen since we sent the Germans packing in 1917, 1945 and of course, 1966.

In my last post I made a point about the older generation needing to vote the save the younger generation from themselves and their idea that we can live in a something-for-nothing, everything-can-be-free world, arguing that a Labour government would chase all the wealth and inspiration out of the country, forcing anyone with savings and a job to pay through the nose for so many things that other people want that they wouldn't be able to buy anything for themselves other than a cheese sandwich and a packet of Smarties, even if they did double overtime every day for the rest of their lives. Even though the final result of this election meant a bloody nose for the forces of common sense, I thought about how much of the coverage seemed to focus on the views of the very old vs the views of the very young. A bit like the parties themselves I suppose, both having plunged off so far to the left and the right that I'm amazed nobody has thought of the term 'cleavage politics'. Until now. Maybe I should form the first political party to fill that particular gap. Our campaign slogans would be something to behold …

Anyway, opinions differ as to the exact parameters that define each group, but the "baby-boomers" are generally thought to have been born between 1946 (the results of the post-war 'baby boom', when people were so happy to be back home alive after six years of fighting and being bombed the bejesus out of that they jumped, en-masse, into the sack and literally shagged for Britain …) and the early 1950s. The millennials, on the other hand, are usually defined as being born either around the turn of the millennium, or a little earlier.

The boomers don’t like the millennials because they think the younger generation are spoiled, impractical, feckless, whiny, easily-offended SJW's glued to their mobile phones, scared of hard graft and obsessed by reality TV and status, disrespectful of the sacrifice of their parents in wartime and more interested in posting a selfie to social media and playing video games than getting a job and doing anything useful with their lives. The millennials, on the other hand, see the boomers as a bunch of racist, Alf-Garnett / Victor Meldrew-esque` old fogeys that have pretty much ruined everything for them. They’re living too long, taxpayers’ money is gushing into looking after them. They’ve 'ruined their future' in Europe, kept house prices high, meaning young people can’t afford to buy. Workplace pensions are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. They're against gay and interracial marriage and keep buying music in a physical format.

Boomers are, by and large, Brexiteers and Tories. They remember when they were young themselves at a time Britain was great when, in the 80's, under Thatcher, your house was worth more than Egypt, and think that coming out of Europe will be a doddle. Millennials have never known a time when we didn't have to bow down to meddlesome foreign politicians, there was no channel tunnel for immigrants to sneak into the country through, Calais was a holiday destination, and how much of a fuss there was in order to JOIN, never mind want to leave the EU. Not me though, or a large number of us that are currently more concerned about the here and now. The ones that always have to end up paying no matter who comes out on top. The ones living out the consequences of the actions of both.

So then, who are we, if we’re not boomers or millennials ...

Why, we’re Generation X of course.

And when the whinging, moaning, slapping and fighting is all done and dusted, we’re the ones that are going to save the world. Generation X-ers were born from around the first third of the 1970's to the early 1980's. The children of the boomers. We didn’t even get a name until Douglas Coupland wrote a novel about us in 1991, and for a long time people thought Generation X meant we were a bunch of greasy-haired, weed-smoking, baggy-jean-wearing, Hooch-drinking slackers who would never amount to much. But, oh man, we’ve come of age now. We’re mainly in our late thirties and early forties, and boy, this is our time.

Generation X has the benefit of possessing the best characteristics of both the boomers and the millennials, and few of the downsides. We know how to work hard and we know how to play hard. Generation X-ers are very industrious, because we went to school to learn, not to be lectured to. Boomers don’t understand the internet, millennials were raised on it. But Generation X created it, then dove into the glittering waters of this brand new thing, and made it what it is today. We walked around with phones the size of rucksacks, playing snake, and sent the first text-messages. We knuckled down and worked hard and now we write books and make TV shows and direct movies based on the things we used to love when we were kids ourselves, to preserve them for the millennials whilst they try and come up with something new. We stream the new series of "Game Of Thrones", but binge on our DVD box sets of "The X-Files".

We still get up early to go to work, and we come out in the middle of the night to fix your burst pipe and reset your wi-fi. We appreciate the finer things in life, but know how to take our brains out of gear and have a laugh. We grew up with few people from outside our ethnic group, but because of that we didn't care about racism, because it wasn't something we manically obsessed over. Culturally, we never had it so good. Generation X invented indie, grunge, Britpop, dance, techno, and any bloody musical genre of worth that you care to name. We transformed the Eighties and we owned the Nineties. We had alcopops and ecstasy and we were fearless and stupid and happy, but we still got up for work on Monday morning, no matter how bad we felt. Ours was the era of Cool Britannia, the last true, genuine, pre-Facebook people's movement, and we didn't care who was along for the ride, because everyone was welcome. (Mind you, we also thought that MySpace and the Nokia N-Gage was going to the be the next best thing, but hey, nobody's perfect …)

Boomers live in the past and fear the future. Millennials feel they ARE the future and are ignorant of the past. Generation X acknowledges what has gone before, learns from it, and resolves to shape the future into something better without tearing everything up completely. We don’t throw our hands in the air and say the job’s a bust, let’s give up. We don't create viral memes and whinge and moan on Instagram. We know we can’t go back to those mythical halcyon days, but we still take time to be nostalgic about it, even though we know we can’t just rip it up and start again. We work with what we’ve got and try to make it better. We change things from the inside out.

We're evolutionists, not revolutionists.

Yes, Generation X had some things easy. We were paid by the state to go to university. We remember when it was easier to get a job, not having to compete with floods of unskilled immigrants. Then again, we remember three million unemployed. We remember the systematic destruction of UK heavy industry. All without Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. However, we also remember the stories our parents told of us the 'Winter of Discontent' that was caused by a Labour government just as left wing as we are seeing the party today under Corbyn, how it nearly brought Britain to it's knees, how it almost left our parents homeless and how much we want to avoid the same fate. We remember how happy we were to see Tony Blair and New Labour in office in 1997, then were also shocked to see his support for the Iraq War and how much uncontrolled immigration he had allowed, arguably triggering the very path of history culminating in the events of this week.

Generation X is unique because nobody has had lives like we’ve got. Boomers were old by the time they were 40; millennials have ages to go yet before they hit that milestone. Generation X is pushing back the envelope, of getting older like never before. We can do the shopping, still go to comic-cons, but still read books, pay the bills, read our comic books and play video games. We can be 'adult' all you like, but we’re still kids at heart.

The problem with you millennials and boomers though, apart from the fact that you both think you're right and you're both robbing each other of each other's futures, not that you’d never admit it, is you’re too alike. You’re both insular, in different ways. You’re both selfish. You’re both so blinkered and blinded by ideas of your own personal utopias, and you think you’re the only two factions in this petty little fight of yours. But you forgot about Generation X. The children of the boomers and the parents of the millennials. We're not going away, we’re still here. Working hard, playing hard, innovating, learning from the past and planning the future, all with a healthy dose of irony, humour, cynicism, experience and wisdom. 

So have your little generational war, let the rest of us get on with our work, and when you’re done, don’t worry, we’re Generation X, and we've got this in hand.

Just don't expect us to have to pick up the bill for BOTH of your mistakes …