Conversation between people who share nothing in common besides space and time is usually referred to as ‘small talk’, presumably because no ‘large’ issue - such as your break-up, obscene personal debt or recently diagnosed case of the crabs - is appropriate for discussion.  So we look to the skies, and find within it’s dolorous shades sufficient inspiration to stave off any awkwardness until a chance to escape arrives.

            This doesn’t work in an office.  The problem with having conversations at work is that ‘small talk’ has to be stretched over six hour periods, which even the most creative thinker would struggle to extract from last night’s weather report. 

One way to slice off an hour is to share a verbal ‘about me’ section with the colleague your stuck with, which means you joke about not always making it to lectures on time and they talk about their children.  Another way to strangle the breath out of a few moments is to divulge your recent holiday plans, meaning you play-down your gap-year while they discuss some place warm like Zante, Corfu or Butlins. 

But the supreme method of beheading those soul-mauling minutes of protracted small talk is to stick to the one, true, common-ground…

‘This morning really seemed to drag, didn’t it?’ 

‘I can’t believe how busy it’s been.  It’s never this busy’ 

‘Yup!  The last ten minutes are always the longest…’

          
            If you suspect your son or daughter is using cannabis, check for one or more of the following.  Are they withdrawn, red-eyed and prone to snacking?  Are their jumpers and t-shirts littered with tiny, tiny holes? Do they think they are the first people in the world to ‘hear’ a base-line?   If you answered yes to any of the above, then rejoice: they’re probably Cool.  For now.

            The problem with smoking hash every day when you’re no longer a teenager is that it’s embarrassing, rather then awe-inspiring, for your peers that don’t.  Trying to conduct a proper conversation with a stoned adult is like trying to coax a monkey down from a tree: you’ll never make the cage your holding seem worth bothering with when the view they have is just… so… beautiful…

            Too much of it makes you paranoid: anyone who claims otherwise is either new to it or paranoid of the fact people think they’re smoking too much.  If prove is needed, throw a quarter of grass in front of two stoners and instruct one of them to half it for the other: it’s the mild, mild West. 

            If only it could really be how Cheech and Chong, The Coen Brothers and Kevin Smith would like us to believe.  They should make a gritty, realistic film about the horrors of hash-abuse: people buying too much pick-a-mix, leaving their front doors open and sitting quietly at the dinner table with their parents.

          
             Applying for a job requires you to do the most fundamentally un-British thing you can ever try and do: talk about yourself without irony, self-loathing or modesty.  That’s why job application forms are the countries least favourite things to fill out after tax-returns.

            The key to gaining employment is to deceive, at every stage, the people who wish to employ you.  It’s all a matter of semantics.  Your job during school as a dishwasher becomes ‘Deputy Kitchen Assistant’.  The time your shop floor manager asked you to put a poster up was an example of ‘creative arrangement of Point Of Sale material’.  Your tendency to spend the morning in bed unless the TV’s on too loud in the other room is ‘enjoying working either on my own, or as part of a team, to achieve targets and results’.

            An interviewer will always ask the same one question to which the correct answer is always any but the honest one: ‘why do you want to work here?’.  While your mind repeats the need for casg your mouth waffles something about vibrant retail environments and fresh challenges.  The face one must wear in an interview must always be one of unassuming interest, alternating between raised eye-brows and stern nods.  The right answer the previous question inevitably occurs to you mid-way through giving the wrong answer to the present one, which is sympathetically referred to as ‘nerves’.

            Appealing to prospective employers is the same trick as appealing to a Grandmother you rarely see: coming across as a well-rounded, wholesome person who at a later date will deserve some money.