Chairman of Culture


As the Chairman of the Culture Committee, for the inaugural event I had to stand on a desk this evening and bellow at my colleagues. I stood there, wearing my jacket turned inside out to display the bright red lining, and declaimed to the masses how fortunate they were. After telling them how important I was, I leapt down from the desk, only to clamber back up again to introduce myself as the evening’s entertainment.

It feels disingenuous as best to introduce yourself as "the stand up comedian": "hi," you might as well be saying, "I am very funny, and you will all laugh at my jokes". But I’ve never been too self-aware. I was tempted to do some audience interaction (ask every one of my colleagues where they work, or pry into their social lives) but I decided it was probably best not to. Easier to stick to easy stuff, like the friendliness of passengers on public transport, or the curious way that Changi Airport and Prison are adjacent to one another.

Perhaps too quickly, I was done. People cheered (and you have to hope they weren’t cheering just because they were glad I had finished) and then I introduced the man who had brought the wine for us to taste.

He’d brought something like two cases of wine, and there weren’t as many people in the office as I’d expected, and id had nothing to eat since a lamentable sandwich at lunchtime (the Subway Veggie Delite is certainly not delightful) so a few mouthfuls of wine were enough to get me bent out of shape, and then compulsively eating olives as though that would make me into a better person.

Still, I learned something or other about wine from Bordeaux being made from Merlot grapes, or something. I wasn’t really paying as much attention as I should have during the spiel about wine, my brain having been psyched up by the effort and thrill of performance. It was nice to be able to demonstrate to the rest of the office that I’m not just somebody who sits at a desk and thinks about things, but this triumph was mixed with worry about getting home to find my baby going crazy at my wife.

I shouldn’t have worried. Baby went to sleep, wife was calm, the house was at peace. I spent my time blundering into furniture while my wife looked at me incredulously (we’ll probably discover tomorrow that it was non-alcoholic wine and my brain was ruined by placebo ethanol), then tried to decide where to go on holiday in South America. And so to bed.


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