George the Guilt Explorer

Hello, my name is George the Guilt Explorer and I have a very important job. My vocation in life is to guilt trip people, on behalf on my client, into doing something they really should have been doing anyway and hopefully with a smile on their face. It doesn’t always work of course, popping me into a cookie jar or a case of beer, is always doomed to failure and sometimes violence. But on the whole I have a pretty good strike rate, and I get to explore some strange places.


This week I have been hired by Mr Goonerjamie. He’s quite a nice chap despite being a workshy Househusband, have you ever heard of such a thing? I would never dream of sending Mrs Georgina out to guilt explore whilst I sit indoors leafing through girlie magazines (you think your models are full of plastic, you should see mine). Although to be fair, the wife does guilt trip at an amateur level, but usually when I forget to put the toilet seat back down, or when I bring home drunken Lego friends.

Anyway, I digress. Mr Goonerjamie set me to work straight away, and boy did he give me a huge challenge to start with. His teenage daughters’ room.

On the whole it looked quite tidy, most of the clothes were hanging up and I could tell what colour the carpet was. Then I came face to face with the Wastebin Mountain, and it was tall. Four weeks worth of sweet wrappers, body mist canisters, tumble weeds and discarded homework. I started to climb, narrowly avoiding a cotton wool avalanche and a nail varnish spillage. It took me all day but I eventually made it, and there I stayed until I was noticed two days later. Two long days with nothing to do but read her facebook updates and listen to loud recycled music, it was hell.

Eventually I was noticed with a quizzical smile, and the waste bin was duly emptied, success.

I walked across the landing and over to daughter number two’s room, she’s only five so I wasn’t expecting too tough a task. What I found was a teddy bear skyscraper piled half way up to the ceiling. It was a soft climb, but no less arduous, and I almost fell to my death when a button eye came off in my hands.

I was noticed quite quickly, and my presence had to be explained, but teddies were tidied and re-settled in the Hanging Gardens of Fur.

Next stop was the Toy Room where the boy could normally be found. It looked like a crime scene in there, broken toys and half eaten jigsaws.

I started to fear the worse, and my suspicions were confirmed when he picked me up and tried to use me as a lollypop. I accepted defeat and got the hell out of Dodge City. There is only so much I can do.

My next task was Mrs G, or the artist formerly known as Imelda Marcos as she is oft referred. There were shoes, boots, flip flops, slippers and effoffbiatch shoes. I could only gather a quarter of them together, I’m not a miracle worker, and I waited for her return from work.

What happened next wasn’t pretty, and nor was her reaction. I was thrown across the room in an explosion of expletives, and there I lay as she started to write what I can only presume was a ransom note.

It all got a bit confusing then, with an evil laugh she marched me down the stairs and into the kitchen. There I was placed into a greasy metal room, and with a slam of the door I was pitched into darkness. I let my eyes adjust to the dark and could vaguely make out some strange smelling lumps of blackness. Some smelt of rosemary, garlic and potato, others of beef or chicken fat. If I had been a lazy good-for-nothing Househusband instead of a hard working grafter, I would have realised sooner that I had been placed in an oven that hadn’t been cleaned in six months. As it was, I only realised this when Mr Goonerjamie placed a dirty metal tray above me and things started to get warmer. Could this be it, the end of all things guilt?

Aromas of olive oil, tomatoes and garlic washed over me, then a smell I couldn’t quite place. A smell that I vaguely connected to the night Mrs Guilt made me take Viagra. That was it, I can smell plastic melting, who on earth puts burning plastic in a pasta sauce? OH NO it’s me. I’m melting. I’m melting. I can’t even see my ‘Made in China’ tattoo any more. Let me out, let me out, tell my wife I love her and to not feel too guilty.