We're having a Director's Meeting. The big five. It's like the permanent members of the UN security council hunched around the table, awash with spread sheets and fizzy water (that exploded when I opened it) except that I'm sure they don't send Uganda out for sandwiches first.
Oh yes, I really do hold a position of considerable authority here. Imagine if you too had to decide what everyone had in their Pret a Manger sarnie. In fact, entrusted with this monumental task, I did the sensible thing and put aside my psychic abilities and asked. I assumed that China's request for foie gras and a half bottle of Montrachet was a joke, and I ignored the delegate who asked for Miso Soup - I mean, even without the Superman t-shirt I do not yet have the power to keep liquid hot for extended periods time. Then, like Red in Mad Men, I sashayed off to Southampton Row with my shopping list, and distributed the food to Russia, United Kingdom, China and Russia, before asking America who had been too busy running the world for most of the morning to be consulted, if he would prefer ham and Gruyère, salt beef or whichever of the prawn or egg salad that China decided against.
He made a face.
Psychic abilities should have been left switched on.
Goddamit, Uganda might be one of the poorest and heavily indebted countries in the world but it's trying its ruddy best...
And it was willing to eat the want nobody else wanted.
In this case it was salt beef, though there had been a secret longing for the egg mayonnaise which always has pleasant connotations of children's parties.
China asked me if I had a glass and, having searched around my person just in case I had stuck one in my bra and hadn't noticed (which may account for Red's massive bosom), I took my essential two X chromosomes, jumped up, ran to the kitchen to fetch one, gathering up another two which I set before the other delegates all filled, dutifully, with water. Nobody even looked up.
I'm so glad I didn't have an expensive Oxbridge education.
However, had I been lucky enough to have had such a thing it might have helpful for the other important part of the meeting - the minutes. It's awfully hard to write anything meaningful down when your interpreter isn't there and everyone is speaking Serbo Croat whilst pouring over spreadsheets across which tiny numbers march, seemingly without purpose. I don't have a head for figures. I don't have a clue what they're talking about. Nevertheless I scribble away energetically, whilst writing bullet points in my head for an article the Times have asked me to write and file by four o'clock, though I expect the meeting to last until three which is when I should go home but will instead sit at my computer and slam out 1,200 words of solipsistic drivel.
This is what you call multi-tasking.
And you wonder why women aren't running the world?
