Born in Chicago, raised on the city streets, his momma taught him the basic facts of life.

That was my Angry Chimp, my muse, the one who brought us the classics:

Years have gone by and in the past day or so, I’ve become aware of the angry chimp residing in my head. My chimp takes over when I’m tired or depressed, when I lack the capacity for reason, bypass rationality and just let rip.

The chimp in everyone is the emotional thinker, it doesn’t deal with facts, just feelings. My chimp is going to be trained to behave, but today has been a bad day and it has been well and truly unleashed. In the office, the air was blue, at home, I lashed out. All because of a combination of tiredness (yes, from a boozy weekend) and a little bit of stress from having to balance the moth-like fluctuations in demands from the people who I’m there to help.

Reflecting on things objectively is useful because it was actually a really enjoyable day at work; the stress I experienced wasn’t because of lack of control, or inability to achieve the tasks, but more to do with managing the expectations of others, offering reassurance, allaying their anxieties at an important time for them, ensuring that I delivered. Which I did, for them at least.

Added to the mix was a telephone conversation with a stressed academic in which I told her that she had a week longer for a deadline than she thought, which then descended into our usual discussions about our dogs and her sending me the details of a house she’s thinking of buying in the Derbyshire Dales.

All in all, not a bad day, but I really must maintain a tight control on the primate within.

The hypnotic gastric band
I’m hungry again, despite being given a huge bowl of pasta for dinner at my folks’ earlier on this evening.

Clearly this freezing weather has set my metabolism racing, or maybe I’m just a greedy fat pig. I think I can blame my inner chimp for this flaw in my personality too, this inability to control what I eat and to maintain a healthy balance when it comes to food and my resultant weight.

Short of getting an actual gastric band fitted, which alongside vitamin D therapy must be the ultimate in embarrassing treatments I could request from my GP, I’m going to do the next best thing. No, not the coffee and cigs diet again, instead I’m going for the “Hypnotic gastric band”. Yes, it’s a Paul McKenna book, yes, everything will get kicked into touch as soon as I’m faced with a large Domino’s Mighty Meaty, but it’s got amazing reviews.

Now that I know that I’m (probably) not going to meet a premature end from terminal cancer, I really must start preparing myself for a longer life in which the last thing I want is to be left a dribbling wreck with somebody having to wipe my backside because I’ve had a massive stroke (in the medical sense). I’m also fed up of feeling like rubbish and looking rubbish. Most important of all, if I ever get into the position to get jiggy with it with somebody, I’d like to be able to get my ankles behind my head.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to get my ankles behind my head.

So, sensible eating and smaller portion sizes. Not to mention early nights and lots of sleep (she writes at 11.20pm)

Ice
How do you correct somebody’s poor use of language without making them hate you? Do you want to be popular who can’t use their native language correctly? It’s Ok with my little niece, she knows she forgets things and it’s easy for her to pick up bad habits from her school friends, it’s also easy to correct her and it does sink in.

Unfortunately, you can’t speak to grown ups in the same way as you’d speak to a young child, so when they come out with things like “youse” instead of “you”, what the hell do you do? I know what chimp would do:

“It’s YOU, fucking YOU! There’s no such fucking word as YOUSE and YOUSE WENT is utter fucking nonsense. How the hell did you get a job speaking like that?? Surely you don’t write “youse” in e-mails, so why do you say it?”

I could write a memo. Or do that wonderfully passive aggressive thing of putting up a notice and laminate it to make look important. Passive aggression is useless, it just prolongs the agony without any certainty of success. Aggression is the only way forward.

Of course, it being winter, we’re often met with icy cars in the morning that we have to… that’s correct: de-ice. You don’t defrost a car, you defrost a bloody turkey. You defrost something in which all the water content has frozen, not something that has a coating of ice.

For fuck’s sake.

Don’t get me started on hung/hanged. Just… actually, maybe the world would be more how I’d like it if I let my chimp just take over. Repressing it just makes me annoyed.

What did I do with my cattle prod?