I should know better

Seeing George again brought back memories. Actually he was quite an entertaining and amusing colleague, provided you didn`t step on his ego or his ambition. In fact he saw it as a duty to entertain us.

One constant source of interest for the rest of us (according to George) was food. George saw himself as the Jamie Oliver of his day, and never stopped telling us of the exquiite dinner parties he threw and the exotic dishes he created for them.

Now if you really want to convince your co-workers of your skills in the kitchen, dear friends, DON`T tell them about it. Bring in samples. "Would you like to taste my lemon drizzle cake?", assuming it`s even moderately edible, will bring you much more admiration and love from a bored workforce facing vending machine coffee and Jammie Dodgers than "I must tell you about the cassoulet I made last Saturday - gosh I had so much trouble getting the goose and the just the right sort of Toulouse sausage....."

George never brought in samples. Occaionally he brought in pictures from recipe books and showed them to us. (I asked pointedly whether, if he ever committed adultery, he would take the girl to a hotel room, sit on the bed and then show her a picture of it, but it didn`t seem to change his attitude. ) And it was all SO boring!

One day a Highland girl joined the workforce. She was small and blue-eyed and had the kind of gentle lilting Skye accent that makes tourists go weak at the knees. She had also a very earthy sense of humour, which George had yet to discover.

George was in fine form. It had been a large dinner party. We sat there, bored to distratcion by the account of marinades and terrines and filo - it was very fashionable at that time to wrap everything but the cutlery and the hostess in filo pastry. Would it never end?

The little Highland girl spoke up.

"Did you do all that just yourself, Mr Anderson?"

George said proudly that he did.

"And did Mrs Anderson not do any of it at all?"

George said that he would not trust his wife with such an important culinary event. He did the real cooking.

The little Highland girl turned her baby blue eyes on him.

"And tell me, Mr Anderson - do you sit down to pee as well?"

I must say that George took the awful silence followed by the gale of laughter really well.

And after that words like souffle, ragout and julienne were strangely and totally absent from our coffee breaks.