Works Christmas lunch today. This was taken the before the carnage. I've not been to a works Christmas lunch for a long long time, probably over ten years. They are a funny hybrid of forced jollity and having to sit with colleagues which necessitates small talk unrelated to work. There's something about small talk with work colleagues. We see each other every day like integral family members we can't live without. Yet outside of the work environment, that glue of familiarity which holds our respective lives together begins to unravel. In the desperation of keeping the conversation going we began a few word games. 1) Who has been the most famous person you've met? 2) Could you do without a towel to dry you, or cutlery to eat with, 3) If you were a biscuit what would you be? and finally if you had super powers, would you fly or want to be invisible. As you can tell the long winter afternoon just flew buy without noticing.
There was one topic of conversation which is new. Very on-message. Simply, after we pulled our crackers and read the appalling jokes, the general consensus was why in this day and age are cracker manufacturers persisting in including single use naff plastic presents (destined for landfill, or worse). Long have we as a society complained about the naff presents in crackers, but that's where it ended, they were just awful, that was part of the Festive ritual. Society had changed, grown up in fact. Now it is not the naffness (if that's a word), but the environmental impact producing these pointless trinkets is part of. In our case 19 trinkets destined for the bin after lunch. I have kept my pointless trinket, a tiny plane resplendent with Soviet style wing markings. God its tacky, but as I have been told, it is a Chinese fighter plane, a Mirage. Maybe then we're just seeing things which aren't there with these pointless single use trinkets. Or maybe they should not be there at all.
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