Guru

News that inmates at Blantyre House prison in Kent are working in a key-cutting shop as part of skills training had Guru thinking about how such an initiative would have ruined so many of the 'Great Escape' films.

Tim Robins, AKA Andy Dufrain from Shawshank Redemption fame, would not have had to crawl through 500 yards of foul inmate excrement, had he just made a key.

...Steve McQueen would not have tried to hurdle the barbed wire maze on his 650cc Triumph motorcycle and would have instead walked off into the sunset in the Great Escape,

...And Clint Eastwood AKA Frank Morris, the only man believed to have escaped from the rock, would not have been famous at all had he simply opened his cell door and rattled the keys on his pocket chain, whistling Lynyrd Skynyrd on his way out in Escape From Alcatraz

A prison spokeswoman at Blantyre House prison said convicts only did engraving and shoe repairs, and all involved were "rigorously risk-assessed".

How very trusting.

The fall of communism – as well as reuniting families, feeding starving children and reducing the number of leaking pipes in domestic Britain – has been a massive boon for Guru’s blog.

On those rare days when Guru finds himself without a bizarre HR story upon which to weave his web-friendly word-web, all he has to do is look east. Beyond that curtain, which used to be iron but now more resembles one of those tassled numbers you get instead of doors in cheap restaurants, lies a rich vein of employment madness.

Guru applauds the news that Elizabeth II (the palace dwelling person, not the Westiminster conference venue) has lined up an alternative career in the event of a Royal family meltdown.

There's clearly something in the water down at the Home Office. For it seems that whoever occupies the BIG CHAIR for any longer than a couple of minutes turns into a megalomaniac with ideas way above their station.

Just look at the roll-call of recent home secretaries: Blair's 'attack dog' John Reid, Blair's 'attack dog' Charles Clarke, and Blair's 'attack guide dog' David Blunkett. Mentalists all three.

The latest 'attack dog' to squeeze their bottom into the no-doubt top-dollar, luxurious World of Leather special issue, adjustable lounger, is none other than home secretary Jacqui Smith, whose mania for the ID card seems to know no bounds and makes the other dogs of war look like a pack of ferocious chihuahuas.

A couple of weeks ago, Guru revealed on this blog that drummers were a superior race reaching the advanced stages of their world domination plans. Now it seems that ballet dancers may be joining them.

First it emerged that 20 members of the Timisoara community police force in western Romania were being taught to dance by two former members of the small town’s opera ballet troop.

After discovering a black hole in his bank account roughly the size of the UK national debt or Mrs Guru's heating bill, Yours Truly spent this afternoon working out a personal budget at the same time that the chancellor delivered the nation's.

The trouble was, every time Guru had worked out an expenditure limit for a particular activity, the white-haired wonder that is Alistair Darling said something that made him have to change it.

Disciple Graham, writes that the idea of school leavers swearing allegiance to the Queen certainly appealed to his teenage sons. However, it seems the young shavers could not differentiate between 'swearing allegiance' and... erm... 'swearing'.

He reports:

"Their initial response was: 'What's that f****** sponger ever done except fleece the country, the ****' and 'b******* to that'.

"I tried to remonstrate with them about their use of language, but they then got heavier and started comparing HM with various body parts."

He did spell out which ones, but suffice to say that, while Yours Truly completely agrees with the young lads about the badness of the idea, such language shall not find its way onto these pages.

However, it does raise the question of who the Queen herself would swear allegiance to. And Guru has a few suggestions...

The Witch of ID (as opposed to the Wizard of Id), old Super Smith herself, must be heartened by the news that the military might of the UK is unable to keep track of its own ID cards.

Apparently, 11,000 have gone missing in the past two years, which is a fair chunk of military personnel, and does little to boost the leaking testosterone sack that is the credibility of the Armed Forces – rocked as they are by 'total success' in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fat people have fallen off the radar of late – probably as a result of reaching tipping point due to eating too many bourbon creams.

However, as Guru dunked his 15th custard cream in his afternoon tea, he was reminded that, despite the National Audit Office's insistence that tubsters are a burden on the state – costing all of us £2.5bn – employing lardy lummocks does have its benefits and perhaps recruiters should be targeting the... ahem... more generously proportioned individual.

Just ask Julius Caesar, top roman and all round, self-delusional nervous nellie...

Producers of daytime chav-baiting TV programme the Jeremy Kyle show, photographers on weekly breasts-and-bums mag Nuts, and whoever is behind that mysterious everyone-talking-about-nothing website Facebook are sure to be circling Thursday 15 May in huge red ink on their wall calendars.

They will be planning plenty of action that day to capture hugely inflated audiences – for 15 May has been declared National Work from Home Day.

What with poet laureate Andrew Motion no doubt pre-occupied penning an ode to Prince Harry’s exploits in Afghanistan* – and Philip Larkin, Lord Byron and Pam Ayres unavailable, it fell to David Adams to write the end of show poem for the 2008 Association for Coaching Conference.

This free form effort showed scant regard for classic poetic structures - hardly surprising Guru supposes given that Adams had to make it up – sorry create it – as last week’s event rumbled on. Yet let no critic say that Adams, himself a coach in creativity, did not capture the true spirit of the event. His 149 line epic, if not quite in the same league as say Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or Longfellow’s Hiawatha, nevertheless captured the sense of purpose that pervades coaching.

Guru has been away. And once again the Olympics has demonstrated just how small the world is by bringing a level playing field to all corners of the... erm... globe _ although, admittedly, from a scientific and mathematical perspective, this is clearly impossible outside the realms of quantum physics.

Returning from a ‘fact-finding’ mission to the People’s Republic of China at the weekend, Yours Truly was confronted by the a rail system in chaos, a road system in chaos and absolutely nothing worth watching on the TV – pretty much like the home of Confucius then.

Initially, Yours Truly was sat on a snow-bound train watching workmen scurrying about on the rails ‘fixing’ something or other, looking every bit as busy – albeit freezing cold – as the Chinese workers he’d seen only days before just outside Beijing.

Then on the UK’s premier roadblock – the M25 – with its endless streams of yellow-jacketed, fully coned-up ‘workers’, who seemed intent on making the madness last as long as possible, he was reminded of the cracked and scarred muddy main routes around Guangzhou and the teams of jolly, mostly female, road crews striving to fix up the main routes to Olympic glory.

As Confucius might have said: "The path to success is long and rocky, and filled with potholes."

But these similarities do bode well for the UK’s very own Olympic adventure currently taking shape in the east of London.

Following a weekend in which the world's top clown George W highlighted the true meaning of Easter by embracing a great big rabbit, Guru notes that the misguided influence of the church over our daily lives has, nonetheless, reached epic – not to say epidemic (at least in Africa) – proportions.

Teachers, dontyajusluvem? Guru certainly does – especially the well-equipped variety that like to hand out extra-curricular activities (but that’s another story) – and keeps a key eye on their annual get together at the National Union of Teachers conference.

Considering strike action for the first time in the last 10 minutes, the NUT conference always lives up to its name and this year has been no exception.

And now the nutty boys and girls have set their sights on the Armed Forces.

Disciple Steve, has alerted Guru to the benefits of being called Steve, being from the South East and being a ‘capricorn’.

Apparently a spurious survey by recruitment firm Reed found that uncontrary to popular belief, people who live in the most affluent part of the country command the highest salaries.

Shockingly, its survey also confirmed that women earn less than men and that older workers expect to earn more than younger staff.

And if it’s big money your after, then steer clear of Northern Ireland, which pays its workers substantially less wonga than everywhere else.

Guru woke with a start the other afternoon when his wind-up wireless crackled with the news that six in 10 people have fallen asleep at work.

It then went into a review of the England football team’s performance in Paris, during which it seemed all 11 players dozed into a terminal slumber, but it turns out the items were unrelated.

Watching another compelling Boat Race at the weekend reminded Guru of some fun to be had in the office on one of the quieter days in his busy schedule.

It's a little less energetic than last month's hurdles but nevertheless, worth the watch...