Reasons to leave Taylor st...

Right, that's it: Can everybody stop leaving Taylor St. please?  It's getting ridiculous.  I've come up with a simple checklist of what are acceptable and unacceptable reasons for leaving. Please check and plan the remainder of your unrelentingly-banal life accordingly.  Ta.

The following are acceptable reasons for leaving Taylor St.:

• Death

Though still expect angry phone calls from Michal up to two weeks later, demanding to know why you haven't shown up for work at Canary Wharf.

You've been bitten by a vampire and are now a member of the undead:

Although, just come work at Bank.  You'll never have to worry about seeing the sun, anyway.

A very short list of careers, including:

An astronaut:

 But only for a country with proper space program, none of this "European Space Agency" nonsense.

 

A researcher looking for a cure for a major world disease:

 

Options include cancer, malaria, Swine Flu, and whatever causes people to like Coldplay.

 

A superhero:

Maybe Batman.  Batman would be cool.

The following are NOT acceptable reasons for leaving Taylor St:

Your visa has run out:

 

Come on guys, not good enough.  Two words: "Sham. Marriage."  Enough said...

 

Leaving to open your own coffee shop:

Don't even think about it. Andrew will find you, and he will crush you.  Then make a tasty espresso with your remains.

Leaving to start your career in 'the media', or whatever.

 

Sorry, not good enough.  London has two many hipster-y types as it is.

Extra Super Special Double Bumber Edition!!!!!

Right, better write some actual Bank goings-on, I guess:

Here are some pictures, and I've written captions above them.  It's up to you to decide if they're true or not.  HINT: They're ALL TRUE.

Zombie Jim Morrisson came to Bank to pull espresso shots. He got caught in a bush, but he still kicked ass:

 

Ross loves coffee so much, he has it for breakfast.  As in as a foodstuff, not a beverage.  He eats it with a spoon. It kind of freaks me out, actually.  Seriously, that guy is weird... Where did they find him?

 

 

 

Richard made a lovely sign for our Movember campaign.  Two-word review on our moustache progress?  "Car Crash".  Enough said. We're getting plenty of pity money, though!  Who needs self-esteem?

 

 

Ross models his fake moustache.  This is an artist's impression of what it will look like in 2042.  That's why it's upside-down.  He's in space.  It's a space-stache.  Made of lasers.  It has definitely has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I took the picture the wrong way round and I couldn't be bothered to fix it.

 

 

Ok that wasn't exactly 'Bumper', but it's Friday evening and I'm tired! Sorry!

Coming Up: Extra Super Special Double Bumper Extended Edition!!!!!

I fail at blogging.  I fail hard. If you were to compare my level of failure to something in history I reckon I'm about tied with Neville Chamberlain's failed policy of appeasement with Germany leading to World War II...

 It's not that I don't want to, I just can't handle the commitment.  For most normal people, spending half an hour once a week on a task would be perfectly acceptable.  If I do anything for more than thre or four weeks at a time it feels as if I've been asked to clean out the Augean Stables...

So to make up for that here's SUPER SPECIAL DOUBLE BUMPER EXTENDED EDITION!!!!! of the 'weekly' Bank update.  That's FIVE exclamation marks, mutha-fuckas... That's how sorry I am.

Ireland has a magazine called the RTE Guide.  It's a TV listings magazine, published every week. I guess it's a bit like the Radio Times over here.  At Christmas they made a 'bumper' edition with two whole weeks' worth of listings and many other special treats.  It was at least double the size and of sturdier stock than the regular weekly version, built to last the many thumbings of two whole weeks and at that weeks where TV watching tends to be done at a much greater rate than usual.

It'd probably contain an interview with Marty Whelan (who you won't know) and perhaps Teresa Lowe (who you definitely won't know - probably even if you're Irish). There'd be an interview with Dustin the Turkey (don't ask) It might have a picture of Gay Byrne (who?) in a cardigan beside a crackling fire.

We didn't have a whole lot of money growing up, and a glossy magazine with TV listings for lots of satellite channels we coudn't afford, and maybe a Q&A with Bryan Dobson (now I'm being deliberately obscure) was definitely an unnecessary extravagance.  Other families I knew bought it every week, and some, in what seemed like an almost inmaginable luxury, would even have collections of the magazine; an unintended archive containg nothing more meaningful than endless recaps of the week's Coronation Street and Fair City (please don't ask - it's embarrassing)

Christmas was different, though.  Christmas is when even families with tight budgets buy minor indulgences for sheer joy, and the RTE Guide Bumper Edition was one of those.  I can remember tearing it from its plastic wrapper, admiring its considerable thickness, and flicking through the glossy pages filled with  horoscopes, z-list celebrity interviews and other light entertainment nonsense.

I would pore over the pages of listings, noting all the glorious movies I would watch over the Christmas break, working out exactly schedule was needed to maximise the number of good movies one could watch over two weeks.  I would read over and over the listings for the three most important days: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Stephen's Day.  These were given in a different colour; marked out in red or green and adorned with snowflakes to differentiate them from the more prosaic offerings of the Christmas holiday. 

The RTE Guide Bumper Edition was the first real material proof that Christmas was on its way.  Picking out what was to be watched on TV was a sort of dress rehearsal for the real thing: A wonderful thought-experiment which allowed a first visualisation of an event that seemed so monumental and distant as to be largely unknowable the whole way through October and November.  Within those glossy pages was contained not just TV listings, but the very idea of Chistmas.

The RTE Guide Bumper Edition would perform its duties admirably for the two weeks it lay around the house, until it was time for it to be thrown, in its now morose and sorry state, in the dustbin along side the Christmas tree and the cheaper of the decorations.  It's demise may have been inglorious, but for those two weeks it was the undisputed king of magazines:  It was the bringer of Christmas, and it was a stately, serene mercury, confident in its position of arbiter of two weeks of festive entertainment.

I've forgotten to write about Bank, haven't I?  Shit... Sorry about that...  It's coming right up...