Barack Obama met Michelle at work, so did Brad and Angelina – why are office romances now banned?
IT seems that Phillip Schofield isn’t the only man currently in trouble for indulging in a bit of workplace stationery cupboard action.
There’s a chap called Jack Nicholls — he’s the main talking head on Drive To Survive — who’s just been sacked from his role as lead commentator on Formula E.
What happened all sounds rather complicated and I’m duty bound to use the word allegedly a lot, but it seems there were three complaints about him doing inappropriate touching while at work.
Two, it’s said, were from witnesses to the touching and one was from a girl with whom he’d had a relationship. Which apparently isn’t allowed by Formula E.
So that’s that. Because he allegedly touched someone he was allegedly dating, he’s now to be found, during the week, at Schofield House on Barrymore Street.
And at weekends in a BBC studio, commentating on Formula One.
Because at the BBC, it seems, you are allowed to touch your girlfriend.
You’re confused? Try getting your head round that when you started work in the Seventies.
Back then, everything was allowed. So you could definitely ask a colleague out on a date. It was weird if you didn’t.
Which is why, at most Christmas parties, everyone drowned in everyone else’s saliva.
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It’s obviously different now because you can’t even be sure that the girl who you are interested in is actually a girl that day.
She could be non-binary. Or a pencil. In which case your advances could be seen as harassment, and you’ll end up in Barrymore Street as well.
To get round the problem, many companies ban workplace relationships and those that do allow a bit of water-cooler love will often send in the HR department to throw water all over you if you try anything.
So what does this mean for the office romance? If you are frightened by the concept of online dating and you can’t be bothered to sit around hotel bars dressed up like Jessica Rabbit, then the office is a sensible alternative.
Because let’s face it, you already have something in common before anything even starts.
Barack and Michelle Obama met at work. So did Bill and Melinda Gates. And Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
And where would The Office have been without Tim and Dawn?
Strange to think that today, this — the greatest love story ever screened on television — would simply not be possible.
THE “they” who glued herself to the floor during an Oxford University debate this week looks annoying.
But she’s given me an idea. Why don’t I go to her house and glue myself to the kitchen floor?
Then I can sit there playing Andrew Tate speeches at full volume while the police make me cups of tea.
I hate Armie (again)
OVER the years I’ve hosted hundreds of celebrity guests on my various TV shows, and almost all of them were very nice.
But American actor Armie Hammer stood out as possibly the nicest of the lot.
I wanted to hate him of course because no one has the right to be that good-looking or have teeth that white.
But I simply couldn’t. He stood up whenever a girl came into the room, he fetched his own drinks, he found other people’s stories interesting and he was funny.
So I was staggered when reports began to emerge claiming that behind the veneer of perfection he was actually a rapist who fantasised about eating his victims.
Mercifully though, I’ve now been de-staggered because the case has been dropped. This means he’s not a rapist nor a cannibal.
Which means I can go back to hating him for his good looks and teeth instead.
Lot of silly billies
A FEW weeks ago I bought a fleet of baby goats, and on Wednesday they were grown up enough to be taken out of the barn and put in a field, where they can be trained to not go near electric fences.
Sadly, this training involves letting them go near electric fences.
Now. I don’t have a cruel streak and I love my animals, but I have to admit the noise a goat makes when its nose gets a 12-volt zap is even funnier than the sound a James May makes when he falls flat on his face in a muddy puddle.
Or the noise I make when a goat grows tired of me laughing at it and headbutts me in the knacker hammock.
WE have long since become used to weather forecasters not being able to say what the weather will be like tomorrow.
But now they’ve lost the ability to tell us what the weather was like yesterday.
They’re so obsessed with the climate change narrative that they paint their weather maps dark red and tell us endlessly how “temperature records were broken today”.
And I’m sitting there in a jumper and a coat, wondering whether to turn the central heating on again.
FOR the love of God can we please stop printing pics of Joe Biden falling over?
It’s not news. It happens every day. It’s like endlessly printing shots of the sun setting.
Instead, let’s see some pictures – if there are any – of the poor old man standing up.
Because that really would be news.
Robert bitten by bites
VETERAN actor Robert Redford popped into my TikTok feed this week to say that in his day, everyone got all their information from a handful of proper newspapers.
But that today, it’s all just online soundbites.
And then, having made this online soundbite, he was replaced on my screen by a pretty girl in a sun dress, bending over to pick something up.
I think he may have a point.
Wokes target smokes
FOR many years, Australia and Canada have been engaged in a fierce battle to see which is the most woke nation on earth.
Canada began by insisting that all its road signs were written in French and English, even in the Yukon, where the nearest French speaker is about 3,000 miles away.
Australia then fought back by banning indoor smoking and drinking while standing outdoors.
So if a visitor wanted to have a fag and a pint at the same time, they would have to buy a house.
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Now, though, Canada has gone back into the lead by announcing that in future, each individual cigarette must be stamped with its own warning about how it’s full of poison and will give you lung cancer.
Right. I see.
So what the people who made this annoying new law are saying is that a smoker will ignore all the health warnings that he or she sees in the media, and ignore the stratospheric price tag and ignore the packet which usually features the gross image of someone’s diseased gums and then, when they take out a cigarette and notice it has a tiny warning written on it, will think: “Nah. I think I’ll have a piece of lettuce instead.”