leaving, returning (not necessarily in that order)

At work I have been mostly upstairs, assembling epic post-Xmas returns. People seem to imagine that, just because I am not stationed behind the counter, I’m not working. They think I’m upstairs sipping cocktails or something. And what if I am? I can still do my job. Have they not heard of high-functioning alcoholism? It’s very stressful assembling returns, especially as the majority of the books you send back these days are going to be pulped. It takes a hardened heart to put children’s books about fluffy animals and holocaust survivors’ memoirs into a box marked ‘DESTROY’. One doesn’t quite have the same problem with Jordan or Sharon Osbourne of course, but how can you consign to its doom - as I had to do - a book called Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus? Not without reading it first anyway. I did, and it is as good as it sounds: amusing and instructive.

I suppose I ought to mention that, at the age of forty, I am finally leaving home. Am I excited? Of course not. I only get excited about films, books or CD’s. Real events just make me apprehensive. You have to bear in mind that I’m moving in with someone who talks loudly in pubs about ‘having fleets of spaceships with really cool names’, so that, to the casual listener, he sounds insane (he is in fact, involved in an online game called Eve). The other night he said this: ‘I’m going to make money on turbo squid. All I need is a realistic head’, and I thought for a moment that I’d stepped into a parallel universe.