A Civil Service Love Story part 2: They see me trollin'

Last time in the Civil Service...

The war was harsh, milk was spilled, tears were shed, our parents told us there was no point in crying over it, but they didn't know man, they weren't there. Then something incredible happened. We put down our weapons and in the heart of no man's land we made something incredible - a Civil Service Love Story. And now for it's conclusion, but I must warn you dear reader, not all things can end in sugar-ponies and rainbow-hearts. Sometimes the milk can... curdle.

At last I left you, there was at least three participants; a battle-worn Policy Advisor with a heart full of hope (me), A white-card guy (or girl?) with the ability to pun so well that I'm convinced that he(she?) is channeling the ghost of Bob Monkhouse (let's call them Bob(ette)) and a yellow post-it note girl (or guy?) who gets easily confused and likes to represent Israel. I'd deduced that Bob(ette) liked to take what I'd done and add to in a slightly flirty fashion - think:

"Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you."

"No you can't "

"Yes I can"

"No you can't Bob(ette)..." 

"...Yes I can."

Damn! Bob(ette) had made a model of the friend-ship. Needless to say I was furious; (S)he'd made the leap from 2D goodwill to 3D. But for all my jealousy I couldn't help but appreciate the gravity of this gesture, the good intentions were literally (figuratively.. shut up) leaping from the page. But this lasted maybe five seconds before I decided to get childish:

The crane... Japanese symbol of naval warfare

Maybe it was the fact that I'd violated the spirit of friendship, maybe it was a cruel reminder that the universe is a cold and uncaring place or maybe someone out there thinks a fridge should just be a fridge, but the worst happened:

Horrific, I know

Someone destroyed the notes! I couldn't believe it... who was this hateful individual and what was their purpose?

It was at this point something in me changed. Up until now, whenever I've been threatened I try to play dead or like, that lizard that can snap off its own tail to distract predators, I try to rip off my arm (which If you've seen you can't help but deny is very distracting). But now I'd found something worth fighting for, so I decided to go revolutionary:

 Oppa Gaelic style

It didn't take long to receive a response. No one likes to take a tea break only to see William Wallace screaming at them:

God... is that you?

I'm not sure who this new addition was... he(she) seemed somewhat fatalistic but they were willing to do what's right in the face of injustice so we struck an uneasy truce (in retrospect, their tone seems as if it's The Voice of the Civil Service speaking to me). Horribly, that had this effect on Bob(ette):

Having only just negotiated a truce with the Civil Service, I was naturally feeling a bit worn down. So I freaked out emotionally:

Being a little more level headed than me, s(he) suggested something more reasonable:

But then caved:

It was a good effort, but I'll be damned if I'm being outshone in the last round:

Dinosaur Detective... coming September 2013... get hyped.

But in all my competitive fervor, I missed a very important detail on Bob(ette)'s last note:

Now I'd joked that what s(he) was doing was a bit flirty but this was something else...

I had no idea whether Bob(ette) was a Bob or an Ette, a ghost of a well-loved comedian, a manifestation of people's love for their milk or the fridge come to life. What was I to do, should I call?

Find out in Part 3....

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Oh sod it, I'll tell you now, here's the transcript:

*Ring ring*

Bob(ette):

 Hello? (Man's voice)

George:

 Hey, is this the guy from the fridge?

Bob (definitely Bob now):

 ...

George:

 Fridge guy?

Bob:

 Uh... yes, that's me

George: 

Ha! I hope you weren't expecting a beautiful woman to be calling...

Bob:

 Haha... uh..

George:

Uh, wow, yeah, well that was fun... are you still working here?

Bob:
No, No, I've left.

George:

That's a shame, hey this was -

*HANGS UP*

George:

...Whuuuuut

I sat there in shock. Bob had thought I was a woman this whole time. How could he think that? I draw the most manly.. wait. Pikachu, yeah that's pretty cute... a love heart with "I choose you too", yeah that's pretty girly... a friend-ship with a smily face, yeah that's not exactly something a lumberjack would draw... my handwriting isn't particularly masculine either. This whole time I was just trying to savor friendship against the backdrop of war, but in actual fact I was leading Bob on. I'd become... a real life internet troll. Like those guys who pretend to be 16 year old girls on chat sites... but in a fridge.

Well I told you that not all love stories can end well. Sometimes you think that special person you've made a connection with, despite all odds, is actually just me - drawing dragons and pirate ships on milk cartons. But there was still a lot left to figure out. Bob might have fled the scene but who was yellow post-it girl(guy?), had I really been contacted by the Voice of the Civil Service? Which tyrant had disposed of all our notes? Had any of this actually prevented my milk from being stolen? Tune in next time, for more tales from the civil service.

Edit: If Bob can see this: I'm super sorry and your death star is awesome.

A Civil Service Love Story part 1: I'm not fridgid

I take pride in the fact that no one knows what I really do. It's not that my job is particularly secret, just that it's extremely difficult to convince anyone that you're tall dark and mysterious when you're none of the three. However, three things are common knowledge: I work for the civil service, I'm a policy advisor (which is perfectly vague) and my job seems to involve a lot of milk.

shark milk.

It's a cliche, but one based entirely in fact: British institutions function exclusively on tea. But whilst this is the key to their power, it's also bred a sick underworld of tea-drenched civil-servants where the difference between a tea with milk and one without is usually a knife in a colleague's back. We exist in a world of austerity where resources are short, and it seems the only way to safeguard your dairy is with a sufficiently violent threat:

May be susceptible to hobbits.

But living in such an environment, where all you love can disappear in a moment, will harden a man's heart. This isn't the sort of place you expect to find genuine human sentiment... but one day something incredible happened. I'd decided to arm my milk with a picture of Pikachu, mid thunderbolt, when this happened:

What was this? A trick... an attempt to lower my defenses? Or a genuine olive branch? I couldn't be sure. All I knew was that I was feeling things, things that I thought were long sing lost. So I did what came naturally and acted like a school girl.

Too forward? You're damn right. But in a war zone you have to grab whatever makes you feel alive with both hands. Or you know... hitchhike on someone else's...

Picture 'enhanced' because I'm bad at cameras

Now there was a third involved, a needy third, but a third nonetheless. This was all starting to feel like that Christmas football game in the trenches where the British, German and French soldiers all put down their weapons, walked out into no-man's land and started leaving each other messages in the fridge. So I decided
take down my own barbed wire, and swapped pikachu for this guy:

 Excitingly this happened:

I started trying to see what I could decipher about these two kindred spirits, adrift in a warzone like twinkling lights in the dark. Apparently white-card guy (girl?) likes to take my ideas and add to them (was this flirting?) and yellow post-it lady (man?) gets easily confused:

and is Jewish...?

Then I discovered that white-card guy/girl is actually the ghost of Bob Monkhouse:

Naturally I was annoyed by the quality of Bob Monkhouse's puns so I decided to draw better waves than he could but hide my jealousy in an expression of friendship:

That's all for now, but there are still so many questions without answers; who are my note writers? Was I sure this wasn't a trick?... I definitely haven't being paying attention  to the milk levels throughout this saga..., was Bob Monkhouse's spirit really haunting the fridge's ventilation system? Is this love? Is this love? Is this love? Is this love, that I'm feelin'? Stay tuned for part 2...

The Sycophantic Fox

So blogging. I've been relatively self-conscious about the idea; I tried it once before when I first moved to Japan in a blog called 'desu desu' and it lasted for precisely two posts in which I spent the first complaining about a certain way of talking about Japan and then the second completely contradicting everything I'd just said. In a way, if a blog is an accurate reflection of a person's thought process then it was a complete success. I suppose it's because by writing a blog you're presuming that you have an audience of people who are happy to hear about your thoughts and opinions. Christopher Hitchens once told a class of eager students that if you want to be a writer, you shouldn't feel like you want to write, you should feel like you have to.He went on to say; "If you can talk, you can write..." and noted how happy they all seemed to get before delivering the final blow; "...and how many of you like to hear each other talk?" 

But I do feel like I have to write, or rather, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that if I tried to write something ever again, they'd kill me - I'm not sure I could go on living. That sounds super melodramatic but writing's a refuge and it's a lot like someone saying "You can never have nesquik again" sure, you could find something else to drink, but could you exist knowing it was somewhere out there? So, who wants to hear me talk? Well, tell you what, here's what I have to offer: I'll be using this blog mainly to track harebrained schemes, flimflams and distractions of which there are many - these include various blanket fort designs (currently I'm working on a pulley system that involves only minor burning); my ongoing quest to find the not-quite-so-perfect-burger (this has nothing to do with any of that 'best burger in London' nonsense you occasionally read about in Time Out, and everything to do with finding an exact replica of the Big Kahuna burger in Pulp Fiction); My ongoing love affair with two civil servants in a fridge in the Department of Important Things (which will be code for the place I work and should cover my ass when I reveal Government secrets – haha of course I won’t. No. Please, I don’t want to live in a Russian airport); bits and pieces from the children’s book I’m writing, The Cloud Shepherd; reviews of J-Pop girl bands and dinosaur detective-fiction. The last one’s not true…

...yet.

I realise that I’ve spent my first blog post just talking about blogging which both makes me wonderfully meta and an ass. I'm okay with both of these. The title of the blog comes from a long and pointless poem called The Sycophantic Fox which is itself based on Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow. The story talks about how a fox encounters a crow with a piece of brie in its beak and charms it into singing a song. When the crow sings it drops the brie which the fox eats and wins the fable (that’s how fables work). I picked this for two reasons: 1) The poem is great and is almost a nonsense poem. Learning nonsense poems is a statement of political intent to waste yours and everybody’s time and it should be your civic duty to do so. 2) A few days ago I was eating a sandwich in the park. A crow came very close to my bag, pecked at my shoe and squawked at me. I kicked at it then threw a bottle top, which it stole. During all the commotion I almost missed the two other crows approaching from my 4 and 6 o’clock’s and it was then I realised I was being hunted. This is exactly the sort of thing the raptors pull in almost every Jurassic Park film and crows are essentially their evolutionary cousins. I sort of tried to be like Red Typhoon in Pacific Rim (no one saw that film) and attack with two arms and a leg in each direction. The crows seemed embarrassed and decided to leave and I’m sure if it wasn't for my extensive knowledge of dinosaur hunting patterns and robot movies I’d probably be dead - or sandwichless. Anyway, long story short, no there’s no profound reason why I choose the title and no deep emotional connection to the poem. I just like the fact that the crow got screwed over. Crows are jerks.

Jerks.