The end of another week and I’m still feeling a certain calm after my break in Switzerland. I have started blogging it, but it takes longer than anticipated. There is so much that has to be remembered, so much that can’t be said, not here, and so much that should just be for me. I’ll give the facts, the occurrences, the places and the people – the rest is exclusively mine.

Yesterday was the corporation’s 15th anniversary and we were obliged to attend a BBQ and softball game. I was willing to make myself available for the BBQ, only because there was free food (which I knew would horrify me anyway) and drink. Yesterday’s rain made for a change of plans and instead of a sports day, we would hold a pub quiz. After receiving an over enthusiastic email requesting our passionate participation (???) – does this imply that we are to stuff our faces and drink as if possessed by drunken demons, well, they need to take these things into consideration before using terminology like that, you never know who you’re addressing.

I went, reluctantly, Friday’s aren’t good for me, not always, they carry with them connotations and only leave me feeling like I’d rather be somewhere else in contemplation and quiet tranquillity. A colleague suggested that we take his car as we were also expected to make our own way to the venue. Since neither of us bothered to print out the directions on how to get there, and given that he had left his GPS Navigator behind, we found ourselves getting lost, much to our amazement. We made several attempts to find the venue, and on our last attempt we decided that if we weren’t successful, we would do the right thing and go home.

Of course, we weren’t able to find where we were supposed to be and we were on the cusp of going home when I saw a sign planted like a lonely lunar flag in the middle of a roundabout. Without thinking, I pointed and said ‘there it is!’ at which point we both realised, with great disappointment that we were now obliged to go as we could never say that we got well and truly lost, that would be lying. I let myself down, I’m not supposed to be that attentive on a Friday afternoon.

At lunch time I made sure that I went out for lunch as I know by now to expect nothing but shock and horror at the food that would be available at something like a corporate BBQ. Walking along Ealing Broadway I was accosted by yet another person trying to get me to sign away a certain percentage of my life’s earnings to save humanity. The council hires out sidewalk space to organisations participating in professional begging. Antipodeans are recruited to help raise money for them. They are lined up, at distances of about 30 metres apart, and they descend on you with such enthusiasm that you can’t help but think they must be paid per signature. There is no way these young and dirty street urchins could possibly even know who they were begging for. They must be trained up in the morning TGI Friday’s style, and I can imagine some English version of an American optimist and energising sales enthusiasm booster getting them all pumped up for the day’s begging. Why do these scamps feel they need to behave like jesters in order to make you stop and chat? Flopping about, telling you to smile, can you stop and chat. There are two things you should never tell me, one is that I ‘Have to’ do something, the other is ‘Smile’. I’ll wipe the smile right off your face.

I regularly have to stop and tell the little mongrels that I work here, on this Broadway, and every day when I step out for lunch there is always an army of infected clipboard wielding clowns begging for someone else, that they are not the first people to ever blemish the street-space with their special brand of ‘caring’. I test their optimism and hope to the last, I give it to them straight and they are obliged to tell me to have a nice day. If they don’t, I’ve won you see - but what they don’t realise is that they never can. They might as well go and sell plastic shit made in china by walking around London neighbourhoods like a dirty little Dickensian chimney-sweeps with a great big overloaded bags of fake Swiss army knives breaking their backs, a well practiced greeting spewing from their hungry little gobs, getting door after door slammed in their sooty little faces, only to have their resolve tested time after time and eventually broken down to the point of dark and miserable depression. Have a nice day. Yes, I will thank you, nice kindly fuck off and leave me alone. Mind you, if this did happen to them they would only be replaced by another organisation begging to help save them from the sorry depths to which they’ve submerged.

Back to the BBQ – We arrived and made straight for the bar. People were hanging about looking as disjointed as I was feeling. I can never work out if its interesting or infinitesimally boring how people take on certain roles in groups, like alpha monkeys, beta monkeys, jokers, sages and bitches. The quiz was followed by a brief and infinitesimally boring (of this I am sure) history of the corporation. It was clearly compiled by two people, the guy delivering the questions and someone else who had to have been from Germany. All the questions were about the corporation and the rest were about German football. I was expecting questions like ‘How many people died in WW1? And name them.’

Thank God we were plied with cheap Champaign as this assisted in blocking out the pain and helped make the table cloth more interesting. We were then told to go and get food from the BBQ, one person from each team at a time, that way none of us could actually sit down and eat together, and that’s exactly what happened, we all got to sit in a rotation of watching one person eat, and as each person got to eat the others either sat with a finished plate or no plate at all. By this point I had given up and stopped thinking about it, now it was funny and the urine was there to be extracted. This was indeed the most interesting eating ritual I had ever seen. When I saw what was coming back from the BBQ, I shuddered and said a small prayer thanking Saturn and its beautiful moons that I was not obliged to eat. Everything, including the scrapings-from-the-abattoir-floor burgers and pumped-with-antibiotics-concentration-camp-battery-chicken kebabs were completely charred, black, properly burned, to a cinder, I’m not joking, they were actually burned, black.

I had a bread roll and a raw vegetable kebab. It was neither delicious nor satisfying, at least I could exercise my right not to get cancer from carcinogenic and charred fuel. Strangely enough, the building next to us on this sports ground had recently burned down, and the gutted and charred remains were there in all their glorious and hellish splendour, and I wondered if this was where they grilled the food, or at least used it as a source of fuel for what they called a BBQ.

I convinced my colleague that it was time to leave, so we did. I remained in a state of bewilderment as to how these people can think that we like doing this kind of thing, it’s as if we’re their ‘Sims’, or loyal little hamsters. Either that or I’m just a grumpy young man, a corporate Atheist, a non believer.

On a lighter note, as we all know, 6 months ago the daddy of Gonzo journalism blew his brains out because he couldn't take the pain in his broken leg, well...

Hunter S Thompson's ashes are to be shot into space by a cannon, read about it here