Health and Safety
A short series about health, safety and malfunctioning hair mousse.
Everyone agreed he was right to lock the safety advisor in his office with a whale and thirty seven faulty cans of hair mousse. “Here, Bernard,” they said, “Have this giant hamper of booze and come and stay for the weekend.”
The problems began when the health and safety talk began. When cracking a joke that he was bipolar, flipping at will between Dixon of Dock Green and Gene Hunt, no-one was impressed.
“Is it a drill? If it was a friggin’ drill, I would have told you!” “If you ask me, I’ll bite your head off!”
He’s clearly going for the hard man attitude, and it’s really not working because his glasses are big and round and really not the kind of glasses worn by such notorious hard men as Rocky Balboa, Jean Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris.
“Get out and let us deal with the drama.”
It sounds like he’s attempting to organise a mass retreat from a pile of feuding furries. Drama! DRAMA!
Eventually, everyone went cross-eyed, and there were at least three incidents recorded of someone coming very close to having a stroke. There was nothing left to be done but to break out the whale. Bernard grabbed it from his bag and began inflating it.
It is a universally held truth that a lecturer looking at a giant inflating whale must be in want of an even bigger whale. When fully inflated, the whale scampered down through the audience and began chasing the H&S officer. He dropped his presentation and ran to his office, the whale giving chase. As he enters, remembering that his filing cabinet contains thirty-seven cans of volatile and malfunctioning hair mousse, followed by the whale, and by Bernard locking the door, it is best that we leave nature to take its own course.
As the father of the Theory Of Evolution, Charles Darwin, might have said had we used a medium to contact him on the other side:
“Who are you? What the fuck is going on?”
Everyone agreed that the Safety Officer shouldn’t really have been back at work quite so soon after being locked in an office with an inflating whale and thirty seven malfunctioning cans of hair mousse. “Bernard,” they said, “Bernard - why did only thirty six of the cans go off?” Nobody knew the answer to that question, and it’s unlikely anybody ever will.
The mess had taken the best part of three years to remove from the staircase, on account of it being an expanding foam that later mixed with a large quantity of flatulent ducklings. Everyone knew where those came from, but no-one admitted to it. It was the biggest open secret in the department for two years - beaten only by the appearance of a clone of John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. That one was hard to deny due to the incessant drum solos.
It was four years later, and the safety officer had been rehabilitated after his run in with the whale. The department had gladly paid for a good therapist to work through his issues - all thirty six cans of them - and offered him an extra year off to recuperate if he wanted it. But he didn’t. His beat called to him and he heard it.
New postgraduates got the lecture on safety, and it seemed oddly familiar, but with a new and slightly more aggressive edge. His Gene Hunt side was starting to come out a little more pointedly.
“Get your trousers on, get out of the building.”
It was getting worse; he was getting Life On Mars confused with The Sweeney. This might have been bearable had he not started to mix a bit of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) into the talk by trying to ask the opinion of the ghosts of Orpen and Conelly, the devisors of the currently-held model of phosphine bonding. Exactly how they were supposed to contribute to the safety lecture was unclear right up until the moment Orpen came in through the seance.
“I’ve told you before, I am not commenting on your safety lectures!”
Ah. This had clearly been going on for some time.
“Now piss off and give it a rest, and in the meantime, here’s the director of Hobgoblins, Rick Sloane. I know he’s not technically dead, but I’ll patch you through.”
“Hello?”
“Hi, I’m Rick Sloane. I directed Hobgoblins!”
“We know.”
“Have you seen it?”
The room fell silent, and all eyes turned to Bernard, the only person present who could possibly have sat through one of cinema’s greatest shites.
“Yes. In fact, I have a couple of questions for you… During the making of Hobgoblins, did you have your brain removed and replaced with rat droppings?”
“Er…”
“And when you made your hit film, Hobgoblins, were you in fact high on crack?”
“I had been smoking quite a bit of crack that week. This seems oddly familiar.”
“That would be because the writer of this vignette recently watched the episode of MST3k that contained those quotes.”
“Oh, really? Doesn’t that make this whole thing a bit metatextual?”
“Yes, it does rather. Let’s just cut to the twist ending.”
In the filing cabinet upstairs, the thirty seventh malfunctioning can of hair mousse went off.
Everyone agreed that the thirty-seventh can of exploding hair mousse had been the final straw that led to the Great Revolution of 2014, and that it had happened in a Tidyman’s filing cabinet was a wonderful stroke of luck for the company. They had made a fortune from sponsoring the deposing of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, then surprising everyone by sponsoring his elevation to President For Life.
Admittedly, the appointment was not without its critics. People hated success stories, and Boris’ was one of the most surprising of the decade - almost as much of a shock as the recommissioning of Mongrels for a third series.
Boris had risen to the rank of Prime Minister following the collapse of the Coalition Government in 2012, after Nick Clegg and David Cameron came to blows over whether they should redecorate the Downing Street office or just put a Tidyman’s Filing Cabinet in front of the hair mousse stain.
The plague of exploding hair mousse cans that had swept the land in the summer of 2011 had almost been eradicated by early 2012, but one had managed to break through the security cordons and go off in the very seat of Her Majesty’s Government. Her Majesty had not been amused at having to scold her Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.
“One is not amused by this petty squabbling. If you do not start behaving this very moment, one will dissolve Parliament and call a General Election.”
“Sorry, Ma’am,” the terrible twosome intoned as one.
“Now, any more of this, and you know what will happen.”
“We understand, Ma’am.”
“Good.”
Queen Liz, as she was known now that she was down with the kids, made to sit down in a sophisticated and majestic manner. This failed utterly when David Cameron’s whoopee cushion went off, and the ensuing scream was heard across the land.
“GET OUT, AND TELL THAT BUNCH OF SPONGERS IN WESTMINSTER THAT PARLIAMENT IS DISSOLVED!”
The election was tense and exciting, but the result was clear-cut. Under the leadership of the recently-defected Boris Johnson, the Ealing Waitrose Liberation Front swept to power with a majority of 107.
May 2010 had brought the Great Repeal, and February 2012 brought the Spiffing Ideas Bill. Fezzes were now legally cool, Gentlemen had the right to bare arms, since it got rather warm in the summer, and bicycles were a legal requirement for anyone wearing a suit.
Summer rolled around, and the London Olympics had contributed to a general sense of unease when local Chavs had looted the Stadium the night before the opening ceremony, leading to the wondrous sight of a burning Vauxhall Nova being lit by David Tennant using a zippo whilst reporters from around the world tried desperately to file reports using their webcams. Within ten months, Tidyman’s had stepped in and started running their fateful ad campaign.
“We won’t get fooled again, now we’ve got a Tidyman’s!”
Tidyman’s had made carpets up until they had been lampooned on A Bit Of Fry And Laurie, after which they switched to making filing cabinets. Upholstered ones. Upholstered using offcut shagpile.
Surprisingly enough, hot pink shagpile proved resistant to hair mousse staining, and it was a Tidyman’s that extinguished the last known exploding can of hair mousse. The particular filing cabinet has not been seen since it was stolen from the British Museum in 2017, but a photograph of it remains, and it is now missing presumed rusting.
But in the final days of 2029, it is said that one retired safety officer had bad dreams…
Everyone agreed that Scotland leaving the United Kingdom had turned out to be an unexpectedly good idea, and the fact that it had coincided with the decommissioning of Sicily had been incredibly useful. A series of charges demolished the links between Scotland and England along the line of Hadrian’s Wall, and the Highlands were sailed south to take their new place just off the coast of Southern Italy. The Mafia were very pleased to take up residence there - it was just so much easier to get good whisky for their parties afterwards.
Of course, Sicily had been on the ropes for a while, and the small plague of exploding hair mousse cans in 2013 had really brought the whole issue into the public eye. Previously, everyone thought they were supposed to be worried about Venice falling into the sea. People had sold t-shirts, wristbands, even organised benefit concerts. That last idea hadn’t really helped, though.
The idea was modelled after Pink Floyd’s performance in the lagoon on a floating stage as part of the Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour in the 1980s. An event that had gone down fairly well in history, aside from minor skirmishes between the locals, the concertgoers, and the roadies.
The local dignitaries never stood a chance.
So the stage was set and the bands begun to play, but unfortunately Skrillex’s deep, deep bass lines caused some of the gossamer-thin logic still holding Venice up to sever, and the entire city tilted 1.1º towards the lagoon. Thankfully, everyone was polite enough to just get on with life rather than complaining about it - though Skrillex did get mugged outside his hotel that night.
But in the end, Sicily started to sink first. Geologists claimed it was something to do with plate tectonics, preachers claimed it was God’s punishment for tolerating the existence of lemons, and Professor Brian Cox declared it to be ultimately irrelevant on a cosmic scale then proceeded to get ridiculously stoned. Like, [11]. Seriously.
Scotland’s journey to the Mediterranean was smooth sailing, apart from Alex Salmond forgetting to put suncream on and turning as pink as his surname’s homonym. The Scots were happy, the relocated Sicilians were happy, and that was really all there was to it. The remainder of the UK, having now dubbed itself Lunar Energy Sparkles after a Pagan revival, enjoyed their newfound freedom.
People had predicted endless Tory majorities in elections, and they may well have been right if there had been any further elections. The arrival of a small Pantheon of Pagan Gods had rendered the concept of Government somewhat fucking moot.
Hecate was enjoying her new office, but she didn’t like the Tidyman’s filing cabinet. It was covered in lurid pink shagpile carpet, and contained a small cylinder. She fiddled with it a bit, trying to unlock the secrets it held. She was sure it was important, but she had no idea how.
Eventually she just put it back in the filing cabinet and forgot about it. She needed to unload the dishwasher, anyway.