Nothings and triviality (En)

Watching in a short period of time productions from Aardman Animation (the “Wallace & Gromit” and “Shaun the Sheep” series) and those directed by Simon Pegg (his Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy), I can’t help but imagine a mashup where the main character from one of Pegg’s films is suddenly trapped in the Wallace & Gromit universe (like it happened in “Hot Fuzz,” for example), where Shaun of the dead is fighting the Were-Rabbit alongside Shaun the Sheep, and both Shauns drink lots of beer at The Winchester pub, surrounded by zombies, androids from “The World’s End,” blocks of cheese, giant vegetables etc.

(And no, it’s not a job for bloody AI, of course. Addressing it to whom it may concern: stop it, get some help; your Christmas series is scary enough).

***

From now on, I am a devoted fun of “Private Eye”: until now, I had no clue that their classified ads page wasn’t real.

Champagne rioters from “Extinction Rebellion,” take all reasonable precautions, please.

***

When you know that it’s a quiet time between Christmas and New Year, what are you, as a mediocre writer who is trying hard to fit in with the renowned media outlet, going to do in order to zhuzh it up slightly? To annoy your audience, of course, merely suggesting that each and every one of them is a prime example of hoi polloi that tries hard to keep up appearances and fails. It would’ve been funnier, however, had she not used words like “rat poison,” lol.

The true tipping point came when afternoon tea moved out of the home. Today, no self-respecting hotel is without one. Dismantling the conventional wisdom that the hours between lunch and supper are designed for doing – not yet more eating – is a sure-fire money-spinner in an otherwise unprofitable period for them.

Which makes you the frivolous filler between the real guests who are there at breakfast, and the real money that’s taken at supper. Your insignificance is marked by the frequency with which you’re not even seated in a library, let alone the dining room. In the lobby, you eat from coffee tables, because nothing says luxury like cramp-inducing crunches over carbohydrates.

You perch on oddly architectural armchairs, designed for brief waits by the concierge desk, not an interminable ordeal that starts too late (forcing you to skip lunch and thus sit down dizzyingly ravenous) and ends just before supper (so that you’re turned out onto the street at dusk, your microbiome ravaged by sugar, your biological clock bulldozed and the rest of your evening stretching desolately before you). ©