And so ends a series of days that I want to forget. In the final analysis only two full-time members of staff lost their jobs, all contractors (a dozen maybe) lost theirs, and there will be no recruitment for some time. There will be no bonuses this christmas, no pay rises, and a good atmosphere has turned bad. The directors thanked everyone for their cost cutting gestures.
So I’m still where I was – employed – and will be for the forseeable future. I’ll be getting up at 7am, showering, finding some clothes, drinking a cup of tea, eating some cereal and leaving the house at 8am for the next few months. I’ll be getting the tube from Tooting Broadway to South Wimbledon, then walking to Wimbledon proper listening to my headphones and watching every single person who walks past me the other way for some unusual or interesting feature. Then I’ll be sitting at Wimbledon, then getting the 836 that goes to Woking with the Japanese man who looks like Hunter S Thompson, and arriving in Weybridge at 902, then walking 20 minutes to the office where I’ll turn on my laptop, then either waste time or work very very hard, depending on where deadlines fall. And so on and so on.
The American author Richard Ford says (via Frank Bascomb in The Sportswriter) that a sign of maturity is (I’m paraphrasing) to accept bad things as they are and recognise that things have to stay that way, and to get on with moving forwards. He’s right, of course.
So yes, on we must march.
As the real Hunter S Thompson said, about something completely different:
The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that’s rare — for me, at least, because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old. So it’s a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fucking from start to finish… and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls. So maybe there’s hope. Or maybe I’m going mad…
Indeed.
Today Hade knocked over a cup of tea on the table. It covered Fultime magazine but, inexplicably, she had moved Martin Plumb’s luxury Johnny Haynes book to the other side of the table only moments earlier. The Maestro was saved from tea by powers beyond our influence. Somehow this makes me happy, makes me feel optimistic. If Johnny can somehow avoid tea trouble with the odds stacked against him then perhaps the planets aren’t all messed up after all. We shall see. Still no news on Andy Johnson, but that might change soon, eh?
