A chocolate-themed away day

It's an awful thing but the earworm I've had jingling round in my head this past week or so has been the old theme tune for Uncle Rubbish's Tiny Tots' Tea-Time Toy Time Time:

"It's time for tiny tots' toy time once again.

It's time for tiny tots' toy time once again, yes it is.

It's time for tiny tots' time,

It's toy time for tiny tots.

Yes, it's time for tiny tots' toy time once again, yes it is, oh baby."

Which is entirely unfair, probably, perhaps. But there have been times...

These are difficult and uncertain times and it should surprise nobody that nerves are frayed and tempers on edge and people are feeling threatened. It would be inhuman to expect any different. The problems arise from the ways that people deal with this.

I will offend some of my readership by suggesting that men and women tend to behave differently in these circumstances. Don't care: in my experience it's generally true, with the inevitable occasional exception to keep life interesting. Men, even the best of us (and God knows, I'm not!), go in for a lot of posturing. I've done it myself in my time: you think you're a rational civilised human being then one day you realise you're sitting in an office doing gorilla posturing. Go into any testosterone-fuelled office and you'll see a lot of unconscious yawning and people leaning back with their hands being their heads and armpits in full flourish. Blokes do lots of ritualised "I'm bigger, more virile and more masterful than I really am" nonsense, most of which is utter bollocks (literally and figuratively). Women under threat are generally (generally) quieter, subtler and more dangerous, the primary aim being to undermine, belittle and/or exclude "the competition" by whatever means. And sometimes those means can get pretty horrible.

The library service is mostly staffed by women. Most of the time this is a good thing: there's not a lot of macho idiocy getting in the way of business. Unfortunately when times get particularly bad, like now, we can find ourselves having to manage our way through some very unnecessary and unseemly unpleasantnesses.

It makes me tired: we don't have time for this sort of nonsense.