Still Here

I apologise oh, World of LJ, if I have been comparatively quiet these past few days, I still love you all, even the smelly bloke at the back – though in his case, a little less so, and sit here wistfully wondering what you are all up to, as I know you do about me.

I have actually posted more than it looks, but the last bout of cowardice hasn’t worn off yet, so the long rant of yesterday remains safely barricaded behind a privacy filter until I feel it appropriate to unleash it on a wider world that cares not one jot what I write¹.

Today I have been busy again. This is terrible: three solid days of busy. I didn’t become a civil servant all those years ago for this. Where is the tea trolley and the lady with the cakes? What happened to the soap issue and the free towel?

What happened to the respect?

It is days like this that I remind myself that even my towering intellect² could not have got this job in Victorian times and not only because they didn’t have computers then. It’s at times like this that I look at the recruitment exams for the Victorian Civil Service and ponder the life of a clerk in the Lunacy Commission - now safely disbanded and replaced with big men who hand out sticky stars, paper and blunt scissors to the emotionally erratic. To get a job there I should have to be able to decline many verbs in Greek or Latin (I declined Greek and Latin, but it isn’t the same thing at all), or write a treatise on the political situation in Prussia – though that last would be somewhat easier now than then, since it was wound up by the Allies in February 1947 after the Late Unpleasantness.

No, in those far flung days, it was something only the reely klever did, joining and holding down a job in the civil service and damn it, if you wanted a job in the Indian Civil Service, you had to be able to speak a couple of the local languages and understand the legal system, to boot. A social sciences degree like mine just wouldn’t have cut it. I would have needed a classical education.

I think what I am trying to say in these days of heavy workloads and economic spite is: “Mustn’t grumble”.

You all keeping well?


¹I know this to be true and I am happy with it. It doesn’t stop me getting unnecessarily paranoid from time to time. We all know that the second I let my paranoid guard (which is what they will be called when I am World Emperor) down, the undesirable will take immediate and punitive interest. That’s Karma Pixies, that is, Karma Pixies

²Let’s not forget, before you approach your keyboard with malice aforethought and write a rude comment to put me in my place, that megalomania is an accepted obverse to the coin of delusion<sup>3

3</sup>See my early entry for the Award of the Purple Prose

Still Here

I apologise oh, World of LJ, if I have been comparatively quiet these past few days, I still love you all, even the smelly bloke at the back – though in his case, a little less so, and sit here wistfully wondering what you are all up to, as I know you do about me.

I have actually posted more than it looks, but the last bout of cowardice hasn’t worn off yet, so the long rant of yesterday remains safely barricaded behind a privacy filter until I feel it appropriate to unleash it on a wider world that cares not one jot what I write¹.

Today I have been busy again. This is terrible: three solid days of busy. I didn’t become a civil servant all those years ago for this. Where is the tea trolley and the lady with the cakes? What happened to the soap issue and the free towel?

What happened to the respect?

It is days like this that I remind myself that even my towering intellect² could not have got this job in Victorian times and not only because they didn’t have computers then. It’s at times like this that I look at the recruitment exams for the Victorian Civil Service and ponder the life of a clerk in the Lunacy Commission - now safely disbanded and replaced with big men who hand out sticky stars, paper and blunt scissors to the emotionally erratic. To get a job there I should have to be able to decline many verbs in Greek or Latin (I declined Greek and Latin, but it isn’t the same thing at all), or write a treatise on the political situation in Prussia – though that last would be somewhat easier now than then, since it was wound up by the Allies in February 1947 after the Late Unpleasantness.

No, in those far flung days, it was something only the reely klever did, joining and holding down a job in the civil service and damn it, if you wanted a job in the Indian Civil Service, you had to be able to speak a couple of the local languages and understand the legal system, to boot. A social sciences degree like mine just wouldn’t have cut it. I would have needed a classical education.

I think what I am trying to say in these days of heavy workloads and economic spite is: “Mustn’t grumble”.

You all keeping well?


¹I know this to be true and I am happy with it. It doesn’t stop me getting unnecessarily paranoid from time to time. We all know that the second I let my paranoid guard (which is what they will be called when I am World Emperor) down, the undesirable will take immediate and punitive interest. That’s Karma Pixies, that is, Karma Pixies

²Let’s not forget, before you approach your keyboard with malice aforethought and write a rude comment to put me in my place, that megalomania is an accepted obverse to the coin of delusion<sup>3

3</sup>See my early entry for the Award of the Purple Prose