Combing through MPs’ expenses is at once fascinating and disturbing, and not just because they’re squandering my taxes; examining what people spend their money on (or, er, our money) is so telling, but also invasive and intimate. During one of the thousand of temp jobs I had in my formative years, I was asked to sort the receipts of a manager who’d been shipped overseas from his base in the US to save the company; they were covering his living expenses.
This chap handed me a sheaf of crumpled grocery tapes which revealed that all he ate was tuna fish, soy sauce, and jelly babies. Every couple of days he would buy about twenty tins, a mixture of tuna packed in water and tuna steaks, which I guess were what he ate when he was feeling fancy. And four or five bags of jelly babies. Once a week he went to a Harvester-type restaurant and ate a gammon steak. Admittedly, he had the figure and the tan of a serious body builder, so I should not have been surprised, but nonetheless to be privy to the strange dietary secrets of this otherwise apparently normal guy was strange: from that day forth, I couldn’t speak to him without being distracted by the preoccupying issue of whether he didn’t have some rather serious digestive problems. And mercury poisoning.
I didn’t last much longer in that office.
