While I am well aware of this fact, it might be news to some naïve readers of this blog but I can be a deeply cynical person.

I try to think the best of individuals and their motives, but when people start gathering in groups and clubs then politics and agendas tend to come into play. And my hackles rise.

For example, you might be running a coffee kiosk selling delicious caffeine beverages to broken spirited office worker bees, in a maternity hospital car park in the centre of town, which is beside the bus stop for the industrial wastelands. The person running the kiosk is someone who spreads joy and goodness, in a place where new life is introduced to the world. However when that kiosk is  rebranded or becomes part of a franchise, then as sure as night follows day, it will soon become an ‘eatery.’ Your morning coffee will become part of ‘a movement’ (some imaginary, fake PR movement I mean, not a bowel movement). The glorious coffee while it will still taste wonderful will have become tainted with commercialism and exploitation. When you are buying from an individual you can fool yourself into thinking you too are an individual. When you buy a warm coffee flavoured drink from a chain like Starbucks then you know you are just a cog in a wheel. You can almost smell the environmental destruction, and feel the global warming on your skin, as the smiling, drooling drone (or barista as they like to brand themselves) behind the counter deliberately misspells your name on the disposable cup that will take three hundred years to bio-degrade, to encourage you to share their poor spelling on Facebook, thereby increasing marketing potential.

I’m not bitter. Although I am feeling slightly irrational and delirious this morning.

The low blood sugar is to blame. It usually is. This hypoglycaemic feeling sharpens my sense of annoyance and frustration. I know the cause, but that doesn’t relieve the symptoms. A chocolate biscuit tends to alleviate said symptoms after about twenty minutes.

The deeply irritating college intern, who has been sitting beside me for the past couple of months certainly isn’t helping. He means no malice I know this, and like all the other interns he has been hired to do boring administrative work. Why is he constantly munching chocolate, biscuits and sweets so damned loudly though? That diet might be contributing to his unhealthy wheezing and unhappy plodding around the room? Why does he ask so many questions, yet then interrupt when I am trying to answer him? If you already know the goddamned answer then why are you asking me?

To top it all off this morning, there was a company-wide email from the head of global communications inviting everyone to an ‘Inclusion event’ to ‘Celebrate diversity’ with ‘Engaging conversations’ for LGBTA Pride Month (the ‘A’ stands for ‘Allies’. I wonder does my company know how triggering and exclusionary the use of A in this specific context, is to the Asexual and A-gender communities? Should I tell them I wonder? Perhaps not.)

I know my revulsion to this corporate event is directly related to my low blood sugars and the subsequent low level, irrational rage. But even still. I’ve been around the block to know that event may be well intentioned but it is a PR exercise. It may be an event welcomed and celebrated by many. As a hypoglycaemic diabetic of advancing years I also know that it doesn’t mean that trade with countries where gay people are executed by the government will stop. I know that cash donations to gay hating politicians who offer business incentives to the company will continue as usual. I know that the moment it becomes financially beneficial to move an office to another country then this decision will be made regardless of the impact to the LGBT community and its Allies.

I think I need another chocolate digestive.