My last week at home - Thursday

Peculiarly, as part of my last week at home, I’ve come up to town.

Every so often we home workers crawl out from under our rocks and meet up in London’s creative Soho to sit quietly and pretend we’re alone.

It’s an interesting example of what is probably the general perversity of human nature. I’ve been moaning about being lonely and having no-one to talk to and now I’ve got the chance I’m finding myself being, or at least appearing to be, busy so that I don’t have to engage in conversation.

What makes this particularly odd is that I’m not alone; the silence that pervades this place is really quite engulfing. There’s the gentle hum of laptops and a mumbled phone call every now and again, but even the others, the regular “people-meeters”, are as quiet as mice.

Is this simply an example of us wanting what we don’t have?

Here I am, having taken the not insignificant step of resigning and finding an office based job, staring at a screen, tight-lipped and not wanting to listen to the eruptions of banal banter that punctuate this silence.

It may have come from years of puffed-up internal monologue, but some people really are thick, or at least linguistically inept.

There used to be a man, well a recruitment agent to give him his official sub-species, sat within earshot of our little bundle of hot-desks, who talked very loudly and constantly referred to himself as “myself” and to the poor recipient of his verbal vomit as “yourself”.

It’s a simple thing, a foible really, but to me it became a sound so repellent as to make me move desk. It wasn’t so much the abuse of language that bothered me so, it was more his reasons for the affectation.

To my mind, he thought using such “lengthy” alternatives to the quicker and easier “me” and “you” made him sound intelligent.

What could be less intelligent that to misuse a tool you’ve been learning for almost all of your life?

There are probably two main things that set us apart from our closest Darwinian relatives; the use of tools and a complex language structure.

According to my televisual education there are tribes of apes that aren’t too far behind us. I bet none of them use an “ook” instead of an “ack” in a poor attempt to impress a prospective contact.

The other thing I found particularly galling was its laziness.

There are many ways to sully our wonderful language, a judicious use of archaic slang for example can often be intellectually stimulating as well as amusing.

The ibbly bibbly language used in the playground is, once you know the rules, innovative and clever. Even the “for shizzle, my nizzle” vernacular is constantly evolving.

As a taster of what’s to come I’ve found today’s remembered experience a little alarming, will I enter this new life of office work only to find my ears aflame with lazy, ugly language?

In some ways I would be sorely disappointed if this were the case, but in others I may rejoice in it’s nonsense as a grating sign of the happy proximity of other people.