3 posts from July 2009

NVQ Land

Yours truly is doing an NVQ in NVQing.  I’m very sorry; I know I’m being silly. I’ve atoned for my sins now and it’s…err…thinking…still thinking but I’ve only attended three sessions, honest guv.  Yes, I’ve got it; it is an NVQ in Assisted Suicide Level 2.  No, that can’t be right, surely.  Let’s start again by actually spelling out what NVQ stands for.  It is the National Vertical Queen; that sounds a bit rude, the Queen Mother was never vertical, oh well; it must be the Nautical Variant Queen or how about one with the queen bit taken out, the Nautical Variant Qualification, got it at last, phew!

During the first session, the dear lady from Burgess Hill, or was it Bexhill, that can’t be right because she comes into King’s Cross, anyway, the sweet dear lady was a little shocked when I produced a rather large case containing various implements to do down the riff-raff.  The electric chair didn’t work, in fact it caused a black out in Sauf East London [sic].  That meant I couldn’t try out the nice mahogany electric guillotine, made in Germany, circa 1941.  Just as well really since I couldn’t understand the instructions. I was about to bring in the firing squad when Dartford Jean said, stop!, this is supposed to be about social care and all you’re doing is trying to kill people; that’s funny, I could have sworn she was Walton-on-Thames Brenda but no matter.

The lads from the hostel weren’t half mad at not getting their £25 Tesco voucher which was a pity really, especially since I’d spent a good hour or so explaining the pecuniary advantages of being executed i.e. zero cost of living expenses and all that.  Moving from being an executioner to a social care worker in a few minutes is less difficult than you’d expect.  For instance, both roles probably come under the auspices of the Third Sector.  Both arguably are jobs that aren’t done to make a profit and both use the recovery model.  In the case of the latter, let’s take an alcoholic for example.  I could aid him or her by assisting with a detox/rehap.  Using the recovery model sensibly, a client at some point will hopefully be able to get a flat and a job.  On the other hand, with my German guillotine they’ll recover from being a heavy drinker in about one and half seconds, not bad eh?

Once I’d convinced Staines Deirdre that I was serious about my NVQ in care thingamabob, she agreed that I could carry on.  In the past, I’ve usually known the title of the course I’m taking, how the assessment will be conducted and when the bloody thing will actually finish.  This time in church parlance, it’s all a great mystery but I’m hopeful all will become clear and now, dam, Northampton Lil wants to come to my hostel and assess me.  Oh god, why can’t she just stay in NVQ land and leave me be.

I’ve been thinking of writing a play called, um,  NVQ Land.  Geographically challenging, the play is set in Swindon and then moves to the Windows of the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre.  The time is 8.15pm, sorry am, and the date is 11^th September 2001.  The plot, a sort of Romeo and Juliet, is about two students from Swindon who are undertaking a stage 3 NVQ in catering at Swindon Technical College with an additional examination in…I do apologize, this is becoming tasteless but now I’ve started I ought to continue.  The two principal characters are Brian and Audrey.  They already have the much coveted NVQ Class 1 in ‘how to teach sales representatives the art of selling things to people  who believe in Santa’ i.e. pills which make us all look 25 again and actually stop the ageing process.  These pills were made by Brian’s Uncle Bob, in his garden shed in Frome, Somerset.  Uncle Bob has an NVQ Class 2 in ‘being nice to people you don’t like’ – the British Foreign Office were the invigilators in this instance.

The play is quite salacious in parts and starts with Audrey getting bonked by her tutor before achieving an A star in the practical part of the course.  In fact, Audrey’s grade was the highest ever achieved in this bit of an NVQ and it made the national headlines.  Pretty soon, the soaps caught the bug and the entire cast of EastEnders signed up for an NVQ at Barking College in acting. Even the players in Australian soaps signed up too, to do an NVQ in interpreting the shenanigans of the secularists in the French Third Republic - in French of course.

The exciting climax takes place in the aforementioned restaurant when Audrey and Brian have to serve a lightening breakfast in about 20 seconds – speed really is of the essence here so Uncle Bob helps too.  At this point Eastbourne Sheila steps forward and tries to present their certificates, just before Uncle Bob hands out the elixir of life pills.  Not too far way, another group is taking the practical in ‘the art of flying jet liners very close to skyscrapers’.  Unfortunately, the examiners on board were unable to complete their task.

Finally we return to Swindon, where in honour of Audrey and Brian, an NVQ is established entitled ‘The Art of Tasteful Bogs’ [sic].  The play closes to the theme tune of Neighbours.

G’day.

Andrew

London Bridge is falling…

I was leafing through The Sunday Times recently when a rather sad item caught my attention, namely, a young Cambridge graduate who killed himself by jumping off an office block near London Bridge.   He hailed from North East England, was brilliant etc; was working for a bank and then decided to end his life because of some sort of investigation into the way he was using his computer.  I then got to thinking about this some more.

I suppose many people have a sort of idealized vision of the Oxbridge set, a kind of Brideshead lot who apart from being very beautiful and clever, gently glide into well paid jobs anywhere on the planet and are very happy too.  With this poor guy, there were pictures of him at Cambridge with chics and whatnot and then he was dead.

There were little pen pictures of his friends with double firsts in this and that; one guy  - a brilliant mathematician – was living in NYC and was doing something on the web, other were doing similar web type jobs and I realized it was a load of old cobblers.  The key adjectives here are brilliant, awesome, wonderful, fantastic, in other words, meaningless twaddle.

This poor guy had a very strange C.V. On the face of it – at only 24 – he’d been a BBC journalist, worked abroad, publishing I seem to recall and none of it was really true.  I mean, these days you just do a bit of work experience such as 'researching' for an MP, let ‘em shag you silly and hey pesto, you’re a leading academic on constitutional history.

Delving further into the article, he seemed to have a lot of friends who lived around Borough High Street, all terrifically clever, awesome in his or her intellectual capabilities, holding parties and being very happy and, and then I remembered that I too have got friends in the same local.  Hey, his friends and mine may have even met, on more than just a few occasions, perhaps even at a party.  Let me explain some more, dear, dear reader.

Two of them used to live by the cash machines on the corner of Borough High Street and the road going to Waterloo, I think it’s called Southwark Street. Being very welcoming and friendly, they used to frequently share their living space with quite frankly, everybody.  Another lived across the road near another cash machine with fine views of Southwark Cathedral and very effective air conditioning indeed.  There was even another living close to the Post Office; he had air con too plus additional living space often frequented by the said Cambridge graduates. There was one mate who lived for a short time by, yes you’re guessed it, by a dodgy cash machine and had to share is bedroom with all and sundry; the air conditioning was still standard though.

My mates and Oxbridge all used to meet in the local Sainsbury’s for economic lessons. Lesson one was 'money as the medium of exchange in an advanced western capitalist economy’.  My friends never quite got the hang of it, leading to rather embarrassing incidents with security guards but no matter, they understood the basic concept of paying for something although the practical side had much to be desired – C+ for effort anyway.

Back to the poor young man from Cambridge who jumped to his death.  The whole thing about Mr. Waugh’s book on between-the-wars Oxbridge is that connections and money is often the key to success.  My mates with the air conditioned flats could have told him that.  Even David Cameron with an Oxbridge First had to ring up his uncle in Buckingham Palace to get his rejection letter to work for the Conservative Party overturned.  Winston Churchill failed to get into Sandhurst and he had to ask for help too. 

I have a horrible feeling that our friend from the North East was starting to release how the world really worked.  I think that Cambridge is a complete dump personally.  It’s a Fen town  - all chavs and yokels with a sprinkling of teckies- with some rather fine chapels and churches, OK, libraries too but it’s nothing compared to London.  I feel sure our friend would have picked this up.  Then moving into the world of banking I mean, how boring and dodgy, especially we’re now in the midst of a severe UK slump presided over by Gordon Brown as Chancellor - who was so clever that he went to university at 16  - and his special economic advisor Ed Balls; they say that Mr. Balls’ intellect is awesome., balls. 

Cheers.

Andrew