How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors

It’s not rocket surgery.

First, get all your ducks on the same page.

After all, you can’t make an omelette

without breaking stride.

Be sure to watch what you write

with a fine-tuned comb.

Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.

It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake.

Don’t worry about opening up

a whole hill of beans:

you can always burn that bridge when you come to it,

if you follow where I’m coming from.

Concentrate! Keep your door closed

and your enemies closer.

Finally, don’t take the moral high horse:

if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.

Still at home. Hiding from your responsibilities may perhaps not be the most mature response, but at least it is a response – one that says, having carefully considered all the options available to me, I have taken the positive and proactive decision to run away and hide. In this way, I remain firmly in control of the whole situation.

And frankly, I think this mini-break may actually have done me some good. My batteries are recharged and I now feel ready to step up to the plate and face the music.

Thursday January 18th

I feared the worst as I journeyed to work this morning. Birds flapped menacingly. Belisha beacons flashed in warning. Pavements stuck out their kerbs to trip me.

Almost immediately I received the summons to Janice’s office. She was sitting behind her desk, straight-backed, tight-lipped and twinkle-eyed. She reminded me of a politburo chief with a busy morning of denouncements to get through.

She’d instructed IT to hack into my computer and retrieve my report. She paused for dramatic effect and smiled icily. My thoughts turned to Siberian labour camps. I imagined the tilling of frozen soil. Then:

‘It’s just what this organisation needs. We need to shake some columns.’

I left her office through an undefenestrated route, with her invitation to ‘stir-fry some more ideas in her think-wok soon’ echoing disturbingly in my ears.

Friday January 19th

The whole street was woken at 7a.m. by the howls of the Man at Number 29 who, in an admirable bid to get his refuse collection back on track, had left his bin bags outside overnight, only for them to be savagely torn to shreds by foxes in the small hours. Utter carnage! Flour bags in flower beds! Houmous tubs in hedges! Dolmio daubed on doorsteps! The bin men declined to take what was left of his bags’ tattered remains, of course, and the Man at Number 29 retreated back inside in despair.