I was off work on Wednesday and Thursday. Illness had finally struck me down, after a brave, futile struggle against the forces of bacteria-dom. I’d survived the bloke next to me going down; I held out when the guy opposite fell too; but the final straw was spending a weekend with friends, one of whom was just recovering, and the other succumbed while I was there. Against such forces, it was perhaps inevitable that Tuesday saw me wheezing and spluttering with the best of them, and Wednesday and Thursday were spent accumulating sick leave.

I have to say though, that I’ve had a lot worse. These particular germs were pitched at the perfect level: unpleasant enough to stop me from leaving the house, but not actually SO bad as to otherwise majorly impact my lifestyle, as long as said lifestyle involved copious amounts of slumping in front of the TV. And funnily enough, this was something I could cope with, since I had a big enough video backlog that I didn’t have to watch any Australian soaps, Richard and Judy or Tellytubbies (C,TM,All rights reserved). I kinda wish I’d preserved some of the phlegm for later ingestion, as this was the sort of illness that I’d like to have available on tap, for whenever I get too many unwatched videos.

If I was perfectly honest, I could perhaps have struggled back to work on Thursday. But on the other hand, I probably shouldn’t have gone in on Tuesday. And besides, everybody ELSE had at least two days off — I don’t see why I should be penalised, just because I possess a resilient and effective immune system. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? It also helps to concentrate the mind of the boss, especially if you can plant a small seed of doubt that you were, perhaps, attending interviews for (inevitably better-paid) jobs, and not ill after all.

Unfortunately, my Scottish Protestant upbringing means it’s just not worth my while to skive off work, because the guilt complex kicks in, and I fail to enjoy it. If I leave the house, I suffer massive paranoid pangs along the lines of “what happens if the boss phones?”, which can not be assuaged by even the bleedin’ obvious solution i.e. claiming you were crashed out, doped to the eyeballs on a lethal combination of Lemsip and Strepsils. Thus, if I claim to be off work, I *have* to stay home.

But in this case, it was no hardship. Even now, on Friday night, I turned down three separate invitations out, preferring to spend a quiet evening at home with my sinuses. Otherwise, I feel fine. I just sound like shit, and believe me, you do *not* want to know about the stuff that I’ve been coughing up. [Think the evil twin of Flubber, and you’ll be getting there] And this is all the result of a minor, trifling ailment. God knows what I’d be like if I ever came down with something serious.

Just been reading a review of ‘Ice Warriors’, which is the new ‘Gladiators on Ice’ program which stars on ITV (natch!) tomorrow night. Apparently the games “look more painful”, yet the only injury during filming was a cameraman who fell over and broke his wrist. There seems something mildly deceitful about this: providing the illusion of violence without delivering the goods, a bit like a porn movie with simulated sex. The POINT of the exercise escapes me.

But this is the problem with all TV game shows; they all work on the principle “only bet what you can afford to lose”. Which is, of course, no fun at all; where’s the appeal in that? The thrill in gambling, and particularly in watching gambling, is multiplied enormously when the loss is significant: what’s a tenner to a millionaire, but when it’s the rent money at stake… For we remain a blood-thirsty race, and the game shows we get at the moment are all comedy and no tragedy, all triumph and no disaster. They portray materialism purely in positive terms, a sanitised capitalism, air-brushed of all imperfections like a Playboy model with a heroin habit.

Being honest, the most fun in such things is inevitably to be had when the contestant loses the car which he (or she — greed is fully an equal opportunity employer) has just had within his reach. This is the same impulse which drives a significant percentage of the viewers of ‘Ski Sunday’; a desire to see someone hurtle into netting, or better still, a tree. This is a perfectly respectable part of human nature, and one which should be celebrated rather than denied, since it drives much of human achievement. Where would the field of medicine be without those cavemen who went “Cooool…” when everyone else was going “Ew, gross”?

Admittedly the chance of us getting barbed-wire death matches (ideally involving lingerie-clad cuties) on primetime is probably slim. Though with the advent of digital TV, they’re gonna need something to fill all those channels, and I will state categorically that there WOULD be a market for it. Until then though, let’s have people take risks on these game shows. Want to win a new car? Fine, but if you lose, we get your current one. Fancy a house? Give us your deeds first. Yes, it would be cruel. But boy, it’d be gripping television.

Can I just start off by saying that the world has gone mad? One hundred journalists converge on a sleepy country town because two pigs have escaped. Sheesh. And *I* thought it was a slow news week…

Couple of updates. Of course, since writing my anti-anti-drugs rant, it has come out that the Cabinet Minister in question was none other than Home Secretary Jack Straw. Couldn’t have happened to a better bloke — kinda puts his moralistic rants against the BBFC into a true light. Sure, the BBFC had passed three porn flicks, but I’ve seen one of them and, believe me, civilization in this country is not about to collapse as a result. Seems that Straw would have been better off trying to keep his own house in order, and letting the rest of us get on with watching “Charlie’s Private Sessions” or whatever.

The work situation continues to fall apart. I was shifted next to the boss on Monday — and as a result, wasted half the week trying to get everything working again. Five feet may not seem like much, but in computer terms, it’s several galaxies. On the orders of my boss’s boss, I also had to take down my ‘I Love Callisto’ sticker, which is now lying face-down on my desk. The purpose of this is hard to judge; it was apparently in case any important visitors came out of my boss’s boss’s office, but I can’t recall the last time anyone important visited our FLOOR, never mind him. The sheer pettiness of everything that’s going on at work right now truly defies belief.

Life is quite hard enough as it is. The long haul up from Christmas to Spring is always the toughest part of the year. When it takes the repeated use of a cattle prod to get me out of bed in the morning, it’s clearly not going to be a good day, and things tend bad to worse from then on. What I would personally favour is an extension of the already semi-official Christmas shutdown — never mind until January 5th, go for broke and make it March 22nd.

For what, in general, would you miss? Not a bank holiday in sight, the only two feast-days of note are Burns Night and St.Valentine’s Day. Sports-wise, forget it, apart from the Superbowl, an overblown, steroid-crazed spectacle which is usually about as exciting as a Serbo-croat testcard [You can tell I’m a Vikings fan — our season usually ends, quite sensibly, around New Year]. The weather sucks. Travelling in to work, the train carriage becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet for bacteria. The delights of a cold beer are strangely muted when the temperature is below zero anyway.

What I should really do is emigrate to Antipodean climes for six months, but for that, I’d have to rely on the remote chance of a lottery jackpot [Not so much remote, more “bleedin’ inconsequential”, especially since I don’t usually buy a ticket, which is, I admit, something of a minor difficulty vis-a-vis becoming a millionaire]. Taking three months sick leave might pose a problem as well. So, instead, I’ve got to grin the rictus-like smile of a Lemsip’d up cold victim, throw another pig onto the fire, curl up and dream of warmer days to come — knowing full that when they arrive, I will bitch incessantly about the heat, stink, sweat and grime of summer in the city…

It’s not been a good first week of 1998, as far as personal liberty in Stalag Luft HSBC goes. First off was the new timesheet regime, which means we now have to account for our time, not on a day-to-day basis, but hour-by -hour. No more majestic sweeping of two days a week into the nebulous bucket labelled “Live System Support”. Instead, it will be not-so-majestic sweeping of one hour per day into “Downtime: miscellaneous” (going to the toilet, getting the coffees in, phone calls, and other, perfectly legitimate ways to avoid work) and “Admin: timesheets” (trying to remember what the hell you spend the rest of the day doing). I suspect that when they realise we’re spending three weeks per year on this bureaucracy, the system might go the way of all the others, and be quietly abandoned on the scrap-heap of office automation.

Second up was the unilateral declaration by the new Chief Executive Operating Vice-Deity (or some such similar, meaningless title) that the Dress Down days which had happened on Friday, were to be finished. So it’s back to shirt and ties for us now: as a protest, a large number of the department have taken to wearing the company tie on Friday (see a previous editorial for bitching about this fatuous waste of money), and finding the most horrific shirt they can to clash with it [in my case, a white shirt covered in huge black stars. It’s brilliantly awful]. The dress down days were great; they broke down barriers and improved working relationships, as well as the obvious point that when you are comfortable, you work better. AND I got to show off my enormous collection of really cool T-shirts. This seems to be less important than the “image” presented to our clients — even though, in the Siberia-like outpost of the company where we work, clients are rarer than hen’s teeth.

Third, and on a more personal level, muggins is looking likely to be lumbered with the delights of the early shift. This means being at your desk at 7am in the morning — which is, as you can imagine, pretty incompatible with life as we know it. Negotiation is currently under way to see what compensation we’ll get for having our social life wrecked one week in four; but whatever it is, it won’t be enough. There is NO amount of money in the world that will make me leap out of bed at 05:30 with a song in my heart, and a spring in my step. Only recreational pharmaceuticals, in life-threatening amounts, would be up to that task.

Between all this, and the imminent prospect of losing my nice, comfy window seat in favour of one next to the boss (which as any student of such things will know, is a passport to menial tasks galore), I am giving serious contemplation to changing my job, after nine years here in once capacity or other. The only thing keeping me here are the share options, and if the Asian stock markets continue to do their impersonation of a brick, even that won’t be much of an inducement. Maybe 1998 will be the year I finally rip loose and head for the Elysian Fields of free-lance computing. On the other hand, that might mean I have to do actual WORK — which most of the time isn’t a serious threat where I am. But if the current climate continues to deteriorate, I might have to reconsider…

So I’m sitting there in front of the news, watching a report on the prime minister’s son who sold some gutter journalist cannabis, with a nice cold tin of Stella in my hand. And I realised the solution to the entire drugs problem.

Legalise the lot of them.

Every one. Dope, E, coke, speed, smack and crack. It is, in fact, NO GODDAMN BUSINESS of the government what we put into our bodies — though our PM would have us think otherwise (thank you, Mr.Blair, for saving me from the approximate one in a billion chance of contracting BSE off a T-bone steak. Now, FUCK OFF). Their role should be limited to merely advising us of the risks that we run.

The problem, as I see is, is not drugs per se. Society doesn’t mind them: it tolerates alcohol, caffeine and (just about) nicotine. What people dislike is drug-related crime. Legalisation would help in two ways. One, no need to spend vast amounts of manpower and effort chasing after people who are, on the whole, no threat to anyone apart from themselves. Secondly, and probably more importantly, if drugs were legalised, the cost would plummet, and there would no longer be any NEED for people to burgle and rob in order to fund their habit. When was the last time you heard of a cigarette smoker mugging someone for the cost of a packet of B&H? This all seems so blatantly goddamn obvious that it should not need pointing out.

In health terms, it would probably also help. Most of the problems with drugs are because you don’t know whether you are getting 99% pure Colombian nose-candy or Vim. The potential for screwing up is obvious, when you don’t know how much to take — what IS the correct dose for drain cleaner anyway? Give it to Glaxo, and they can produce exactly the right amount, in pharmaceutical purity. When THAT hits your skull, there’ll be none of this “are you feeling anything yet?”, I can assure you.

What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this stance is that I’ve never even TRIED any illegal drugs. I’ve occasionally wanted to, but the nearest I came was getting some amphetamines for a weekend when I was doing two consecutive all-night film shows. I didn’t need it, so I returned it, unused, to the kind individual who had given it to me. I actively HATE the smell of cannabis, and would willingly concede that anyone smoking it in nostril-shot of me should be hung, drawn and quartered. I just don’t need drugs, and tend to think that the only people who need their minds expanding are those with terribly small minds to start with. Drugs, in any case, don’t expand your mind, they just give your critical faculties a good kicking. Drink six pints and every woman looks like Pamela Anderson. Drop an E, and you can dance to the Greenwich time signal. Smoke dope, and Vic Reeves seems funny. Take LSD, and the meaning of life can be found in the patterns of the clouds.

It can’t, of course. But if you want to look for it there, why not? Me, I’m off for a beer to see me through into 1998. Happy New Year.