Call me picky

Now I live out in the sticks, I spend quite a lot of time in the local shopping centre. Last week, it got rid of its Metro, Stylist and Shortlist display stands. When I inquired why, I was told that they made the place look untidy.

Call me picky, but if untidiness was really their concern, I would have recommended getting rid of the bouncy castle, helter skelter, Chinese fake handbag stall, oily purveyors of little known skincare brand samples, randomly strewn garden furniture and the owl display that extorts a fiver out of you for looking at the owls. And never mind the local populace who aren't exactly dressed for Bond Street.

I humbly beg you to kindly cut it out

There are a number of qualities you need to succeed in PR, which I lack. One is extreme levels of efficiency and organisation. Another is a desire to remain in the background, while someone else takes the credit for the thing you killed yourself writing. A final one is the ability and desire to be arse-lickingly obsequious to the client and it is this last one that leads to emails from certain colleagues to clients starting with: "I would kindly ask you to approve the attached..."

This is wrong. Seriously, it's wrong and it's also increasingly prevalent. Yesterday I saw a sign in town reading, 'We kindly ask you to order your drinks at the bar before taking a seat.'

No.

It should be, 'We ask you to kindly order your drinks etc'. It means 'to be kind enough to'. If you yourself are kindly asking someone to do something, it possibly implies a level of threat if they don't that is quite clearly not present in the PR-client relationship.

I do notice however that how I react to this sort of thing depends who writes it. The other day Putin-bot Mary Dejevsky wrote 'fractious' when she clearly meant 'fractured' and within seconds I was penning foaming emails in green courier. Dave Eggers on the same day used 'amenity' in a way that I had not previously considered correct and I found myself willing to believe I'd learnt something.

Anyhow, I'm going to have a lot more time for green tinted emails (and blog posts) from next year because for the reasons outlined in the first paragraph and a few others, I am quitting my job in a couple of weeks' time.

Quite what I am going to do instead, I don't know. I've reached one of the sign posts on the way to dodgy mental health that I have learned to recognise - the inability to raise the energy to put on socks. In December, this leads to not going out and that's not a good thing.

Exactly how stupid do you have to be to fall for this?

Worst phishing email ever.

Pivot on this, you divot

One of the most aggravating things about my new employment is the lingo. I have no idea if it's a PR thing but:

• we don't contact or email people, we reach out to them
• we don't agree, we align with each other 

and most annoyingly:

• we don't change direction, we pivot.

These things aren't just wrong, they are utterly pointless - they are (mostly) longer than the plain way of speaking and they really add nothing. 

Does anyone have any idea where this rubbish came from, so I can reach out to the original perpetrator with a machine gun?

I'm just nipping to the loo

It's quite depressing listening to myself at times, thanks to some verbal tics I overuse. Everything is either 'super' or 'fabulous', which is annoying enough but I've recently noticed that when in need of the facilities, I invariably 'nip' to the loo. I don't 'pop', nor do I 'go'. I 'nip'.

There is something frightfully, curtain twitchingly apologetic and and coy about this. I do not like it (plus 'nipping' implies a degree of speed that, as I get older, is not quite accurate). It needs to be replaced and I feel that a degree of alliteration may help.

If I were male I could point percy at the porcelain but I'm not.

So henceforth I may:

• lurch towards the lavatory
• totter to the toilet
• feck off to the facilities
• creep off to the cludgies
• make a kamikaze strike on the khazi
• bugger off to the bog
• reel off to the restroom
• slouch towards the sanitaryware
• shuffle to the shitter
• crawl to the conveniences
• wander off to the WC
• piss off to the pissoir
• clear off to the comfort station
• pootle to the potty

and so on. Any further suggestions?

Update: when travelling one can of course head to the heads.

The Scottish person's guide to heavenly phenomena

• Northern Lights - full cloud cover
• Solar eclipse - full cloud cover
• Lunar eclipse - full cloud cover
• Supermoon - full cloud cover
• Meteor shower - full cloud cover.

Still, I suppose it saves me from blinding myself on Friday.

Hot air

I've been known to boast on a number of occasions that I have seen the Northern Lights from my spare bedroom window. I'm moving shortly and have picked a new place to still have a view north for this very reason.

Turns out it's Grangemouth Oil Refinery flaring off.