I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [25]
I was panicking. There was no point spending my time conflating two well-known phrases or sayings into a third that, while making grammatical sense, had no value as a metaphor. Or was there? I thought for a moment. No, there definitely wasn’t.
Somehow I needed to chill the eff out. If I was a drug-doer I would probably have spliffed myself into the middle of next week. But I wasn’t (although – full disclosure – I had taken two paracetemols from my first aid kit and administered a splodge of Savlon to an ankle graze sustained at London’s [CHECK NAME OF STATION].)
In the end I sorted myself out by using a simple but effective visualisation technique taught to me by either Paul McKenna or Russ Abbott, I forget which. Hang on, no, it was Ali Bongo. Taken from the teachings of Buddha (I’m guessing here), the idea is to imagine yourself as someone with the characteristic you desire. In the case of Bongo, he would think of a cuddly old cat lying in the sunshine. Before a big show he would spend 15 minutes purring, licking his imaginary paws and hanging his head over a bin trying to bring up fur balls. And by the end of it? He was as cool as beans.
For me, though, cats weren’t the answer. No, the answer was Roger Moore. I locked myself in a toilet cubicle and spent the best part of a quarter of an hour visualising myself in A View to a Kill, taking on the evil Max Zorin, sailing under the ocean in a submarine disguised as an iceberg and having it off with Grace Jones, the first black woman I have ever slept with.
And by the time someone started banging on the door wondering what all the noise was about, I had reached a zen-like state of calm. As it turns out, though, I was right to be anxious about the editorial meeting. There were some seriously large-brained people in that room. Those in attendance included Christopher Morris (anchor), Rosie May (environment), Kevin Smear (roving reporter), Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan (economics editor) and yours truly (sport, plus the Paralympics).
I picked a chair and sat down quietly and effectively. It was a good start but I needed to do more. I took a deep breath and prepared to introduce myself. But as soon as I heard the level of their chit-chat, I froze. They were using words, ideas and concepts that you simply never heard in Norfolk. Not even in Norwich.
I resolved to keep my mouth shut until I’d acclimatised. Phrases swirled around the room. ‘Where does Labour stand on that?’ ‘It’s over for Milosevic.’ ‘Alan, could you pass the biscuits?’ ‘This Rodney King thing is going to be massive.’ ‘GDP’s down by 0.5% this quarter.’ ‘Alan? The biscuits.’ ‘The Home Office aren’t going to comment apparently.’ ‘Fine, I’ll get them myself then.’
How in the name of holy living heck was I going to bust my way into this conversation? I don’t know, I answered, inside my head. On the table next to me was the tea urn. Now this was a plus point because I loved tea urns. Still do. There’s something very reassuring about the concept of hot beverages dispensed from a lovely big drum.62 Of course your problem with any kind of communal drinks station is the sugar bowl. People put the spoon back in the bowl after stirring in their sugar. No problem with that, you might think. Well think again. The residual moisture acts as a caking agent, forming the granules into unsightly asymmetric clumps. Worse still, those clumps are stained a grubby brown by the tannin-rich tea. Not nice, not nice at all.
And let’s not forget the germ issue. Putting a damp spoon back in the bowl is the tea-drinking equivalent of sharing a needle. And I did not want to end up with the tea-drinking equivalent of AIDS.
Instantly it struck me that if their ‘thing’ was intimidating intellect, my ‘thing’ could be beverage-related hygiene. Of course I later remembered that I already had a ‘thing’, namely sport (plus the Paralympics). But I wasn’t thinking straight, which should go some way to explaining what happened next.
Kevin Smear (roving