Hello hello I'm back again!

I have just returned to work after five weeks leave and wanted to email my colleagues with "Hello hello I'm back again" as the subject for my message.

But I decided not to for two reasons:

1. The people I'm emailing are mostly too young to recognize a Gary Glitter song title from about 1972. In fact none of them were born then.
2. Gary Glitter in not longer a valid subject for silly musical puns since his multiple convictions for child abuse.

So I didn't use it for my email subject.

I keep getting caught out by accidentally using quips involving people who are now Persona Non Grata, but were previously popular subjects for comedy.

Greeting a colleague in the office kitchen I said "Now then, now then" whilst miming holding a cigar. NOOOO, big mistake and not funny, especially in the BBC!

Then at a Christmas party when I was playing a doodling game I said "Can you guess what it is yet ?" while wobbling the drawing pad. That didn't go down well either.

No one sings Two Little Boys any more.

Luckily I don't watch sport, so I don't know any Stuart Hall catch phrases that I could trip up on. Does he have any?

Moving away from my social faux pas, I am now back at my desk overlooking the A40 (elevated section) pretending to work. It is just twenty three days until my leaving party in the BBC Club, and I'm trying to be productive. But to be honest it's a struggle to get enthusiastic about being a Business Analyst once again, it is just as exciting as it sounds.

WOMAN AT A LIVELY, HAPPENING PARTY   - "Hi what do you do"
ME                                                                           -  "I'm a Business Analyst"
WOMAN                                                                 -  "Oh there's my friend over there, excuse me.."

I never meant to be a Business Analyst, I kind of slid into it. Do you ever feel that you stay the same and the world slides around you? Life is like a succession of doors that you pass through, and don't end up as the sort of person you expected to be as a youth.

At the age of twenty one, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to be. My preferred career as a Rock Star never kicked off because I'm totally hopeless at music. When an audience is clapping along to a band I have to watch everyone else to know when to clap. During anthems when everyone waves their arms in the air in time, I'm waving the opposite way to everyone else. I have the same sense of rhythm as Steve Martin in The Jerk.

So I started doing jobs, (notice I didn't use the word "career") which lead into other jobs. At age of thirty  I thought I had made the right decision by going into IT, which was quite the thing in the 1980's. But having worked in IT for thirty years, I feel it may have been the wrong choice. But what the hell, it paid the mortgage and the people in it are mostly nice.

So now I'm in the twilight of my career in technology, and on the cusp of starting a new life stage called "Selfishly Enjoying Myself".

Changing the subject completely (it's my blog and I can do what I like), I went to the AGM of my club on Sunday. It's a water sports club, but I won't tell you the name to protect the guilty.

That meeting was two hours of tedium and a woeful misuse of the few years I have left on Earth (I'm hoping for a Ronnie Corbett life expectancy, rather than a David Bowie).

The Chair of the meeting did a good job of keeping her cool running the meeting when faced with a small but noisy group of windbags blowing enough hot air to take a balloon into the stratosphere.

If I had had been Chair I wouldn't have been so polite:

"Just get to the point you pompous fart, you're the only one who likes the sound of your voice"

or perhaps:

"How many ways do you have talk about the same petty point you tedious twat!"

The Chair proposed  a change a minor rule that most members have never heard of, apart from the pedants who have nothing better to do than read the rule book. Life's too short to read rule books, and those wankers were denying me the sirloin steak I had waiting for me at home.

Luckily my wife came to the rescue, with a stroke of genius. When the windbags were tossing some tiny point of law back and forth, I texted her to say I was bored rigid. A minute later she phoned me on my mobile. I was sat the the front row of the meeting (I shouldn't have arrived late) and I haven't quite mastered the art of silencing my phone in an instant, so I had to dash out of the meeting room with my phone under my coat to muffle the ring.

I dashed into the men's toilets to talk to her while inhaling the smell of warm wee from the stained lino. She explained that she rang to give me an excuse to get out of the meeting, and it worked! I exited the clubhouse hoping that everyone else at the AGM thought it was an emergency, rather than Julie saving me from Death by Tedious Twat Talk.

I was able to make good my escape while the rest of the members suffered the rest of the AGM in silence through gritted teeth (apart from the verbose dolts).

The steak that I cooked was really good, here's my recipe.

• Take the steak out of the fridge an hour before you cook it, to reach room temperature.
• Put the frying pan on full heat on a gas ring.
• Rub a little oil on eat side of the steak, and season it with salt and pepper.
• When the frying pan is scorchio, slap in the steak, it will sizzle and smoke.
• DON'T TOUCH IT FOR THREE MINUTES!
• After three minutes, turn it over and cook it on the other side for three minutes.
• Take it out of the pan, cover it to keep warm and let it rest for five minutes.
• Eat the steak with chips and peas. Have some ketchup if you want to, it's your steak.