Saturday 10 August 2013

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...

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