Institutionalized

I started the new job. Of course the first few days were a nightmare. I was shown around and practically sandblasted with information, not that it wasn't interesting. After 9/11, apparently, they were queueing round the block in New York to give blood. What this means that if a similiar catastrophe happens here, even I, a mere administrative assistant, will be 'on call' for queue management. Honestly, you'd have thought that the day when everything finally goes tits-up is the one day you could guarantee not having to go to work. Oh well. In most respects, the job seems to improve on Waterstone's. They don't just bleed you dry. Except literally, of course. They care. So much so that they'll be sending me on a course to tell me how to sit in my chair. And the thing is, they're right to. I'm sure I've been doing it all wrong. I'm really very up for all this: I'm hoping they'll send me on a course in how to breathe, because I'm convinced I've been doing that wrong all these years too.

Though first they'll have to give me permission to breathe. I'd already sent a few e-mails before I realised that I wasn't able to send them outside the system because I hadn't had a certain form signed. Not inappropriate e-mails, I hasten to add. My God, if you can't e-mail your drug dealers from the NHS, what's the world coming to? The NHS is a drug dealer, isn't it? They are really down on Tipp-ex too. I was told that bringing a bottle of Tipp-ex in is the equivalent of taking a bottle of Scotch to work. At which point I glanced nervously down at my desk drawer.

But what, you ask, does the job involve? Oh, I don't know. It's something to do with marketing but it isn't marketing. This means that I won't be able to feed them any great ideas for ad campaigns. And I have them. How about: Get Giving...Blood! ...And Organs! I'm not too sure about the exclamation marks but I can work on that. I have plenty of other ideas too, most of them involving lesbian vampires. Which would go down a storm with the Nuts/Zoo crowd, I'm sure. I suspect, however, that my colleagues will find it all a little 'off brand'.

Still, the people seem OK and by the end of the first week I felt strangely optimistic, though there are a lot of complex tasks I have yet to master. Like making the tea. Everyone has their own mug and everyone likes it a certain way, and there's ten of them. Why is there not a course on this? But generally the outlook seems fine. As long as I don't post this blog entry.

Written the night before, when I should be finding out what a spreadsheet is

I was walking up the hill to work when a schoolgirl asked me the time. I told her it was twenty-to-nine. Since it was. She then asked me if she was late for school, so I pointed out that I didn't know what time she started. 'Half-nine', she said. 'You've got ages', I said, recklessly. On reflection, it did seem that she might have benefitted from some extra tuition.

So I have finally left the 'filler' job of bookselling, which filled twenty years or so. I am surprised at the lack of interest shown by the local and national media in this. It's a big deal. Chris's Mum wrote in the good luck card she kindly sent me: 'It's a big change for you, isn't it?' Which made me feel obliged to send her a card saying: 'Yes'.

This significant event was celebrated with tapas and drinks. Some old Waterstone's and Ottakars faces attended. Mark, for example, who is a living breathing example of what leaving Waterstone's can do for you. These days he's got a new funky hairstyle and can be seen on Facebook hobnobbing with Goldie Lookin' Chain. Can it be long before he's appearing in those Channel 5 programmes where they count down the scariest confectionery of the 80's?

It was a good night; and almost worth leaving simply to have precipitated it. No, I don't have any regrets about quitting my job.

The regrets are all about getting another one.

Don't start me off

I went to see venerable art-punks Wire play the Scala. Although their most recent album has been criticized for erring too close to pop, they thrashed out songs new and old with the punky vigour of their early days. They were enjoying themselves. Once upon a time they took pleasure in confounding expectations, refusing to play the hits (not that there were any), and staging arty diversions in the 'singer attacks gas stove' vein. Now they take pleasure in confounding the expectations of those who are expecting them to confound expectations. So convincing was their impression of a younger band that by the time they'd got to the third encore the lead singer said they'd run out of songs, and would have to play the first one again. I thought he was joking - they've been around, off and on, since the late 70's. Perhaps he was; but if so it was the kind of joke that did actually involve them playing the first song again.

Esme, former Waterstones employee, was there with her Dad. It is not generally recommended that young people 'dig' their parents' music, but when your Dad has such great taste, what choice do you have?

On the way home, at Seven Kings, we saw a notice advertising 'FREE CAT NEUTERING', a service presumably offered by someone who simply hates cats.

Work continues to feel like it is falling apart, with boxes piling up out the back, blocking the fire exit. Well it's all flammable. The fire, at least, will have no trouble getting to the exit. My response to any difficult question directed at me now goes: 'I'm leaving.'

exotic locales

We live next door to the pub, a pub everybody has heard of but no-one has ever been to; or maybe they did once but they don't really remember it. It's a very 'local' pub. We could hardly be more local, in one sense. But of course there is more than one sense. There is a definite feeling that any seat you might sit on in there 'belongs' to someone else. It might be that that person has been dead since 1972, but sitting there will still be severely frowned upon. After all, who knows? They might be back. The cemetery's only just down the road.

It's all a bit of a contrast with my old local the Green Man, which held a beer festival over the weekend. Or a beer and 80's music festival, as it seemed to be: A-Ha's greatest hits were playing as we walked in. Later, we had the pleasure of seeing the landlady, in what might have been Austrian national costume, dancing to Star Trekkin'. It will be a long time, I imagine, before we will be permitted to see the landlady of the pub next door doing anything like that. And thank God for it.

Of course it's quite possible that I hallucinated the whole thing after a couple of pints of 'real' perry.

During this wasteland of time without internet (as we awaited our connection), Mat and Amanda have got engaged, thus forming the composite creature 'Matandamanda', which could be a small African country, or maybe some kind of antelope. It happened in Spain, and we were alerted to the fact by a typically languid text from Mat, which went something like: 'Yeah I asked Amanda to marry me and she said yeah.' You wondered if the question itself had been popped in a similiarly casual fashion, not so much 'popped' as 'exhaled'. But apparently it was a lot more dramatic than that. They were teetering on the edge of a cliff and being menaced by wild boar and giant spiders; or this is the way I heard it. Whether true or not, it seems as good a preparation as any for married life. I wish 'Matandamanda' well, and fervently hope that she avoids the usual pitfalls - becoming a brutal dictatorship, getting eaten by lions, and so forth.

the cat's revenge, and other stories

The walk to work has lengthened somewhat. It continues to do so. The other day, on the way home, a completely new road appeared between Mount Crescent and South Drive. I swear it wasn't there before.

It isn't the only mysterious thing that has happened. The other day we returned home to find the door to the loft - which previously we had tried and failed to open - gaping wide. It was as though some invisible force had burst it open - like the wind, for example. Or, more likely, a ghost. The previous tenants (South Africans) had a cat, which they offered to us, and which we refused, leaving us faintly troubled by the thought of what might have happened to it (its food dish still waits, empty and forlorn, outside). They may well have sacrificed it to the gods represented by the ceramic dog's heads on the greenhouse; if so, perhaps its spirit still lurks... In the form of fleas, at the very least.

Work goes on: it is hard to believe that it will end soon and resume again in a different form, as in a reincarnation. People have actually suggested that I am doing something 'brave', something 'admirable'. If I'd ever thought that I was doing something admirable, I'd definitely have thought twice about it.

Still, there are definite signs at Waterstones that the end is nigh. More Pets With Tourettes has come in. Regular readers will recall how I championed the original, defending it as a blazingly original work of modern fiction. Sadly, the sequel is a travesty. A cockerel which says 'Big cock'; a cow that says 'Mootherfucker.' You see? Puns, layers - they're trying too hard. It's too sophisticated. They should never have got Salman Rushdie involved.

The other day a little child came in with over ten pounds in small change, which he'd saved up to pay for a book and a down payment on the next J. K. Rowling thing. It's the kind of situation that makes people go: ahhh. He's saved all his little coins up. Ahhhh. Of course it's annoying in reality. I had to laboriously count out pound after pound in one and two pence pieces. The till was swimming in change. All very cute, kid, but for Christ's sake you're nine and you haven't got an Amex card! The world is leaving you behind.

queue of spiders

Now it can be told: I have a new job. I am to be working for the National Blood Service as a 'marketing services administration assistant'. That's at least one word too long in my opinion; although at the same time I would quite like the word 'blood' to be in there somewhere. 'Marketing services administration assistant of blood.' That's a bit more like it.

So, a job that doesn't involve selling books. No change there then. They warned me about 'unsocial hours' in the interview - that I might sometimes have to stay until 5:30! I stormed out of the room at this point. Still, I got it somehow, despite my terrible performance on the test - involving something called 'spreadsheets'. Just another NHS blunder, I suppose.

Because getting a new job after over a decade in the same one wasn't stressful enough, I have also moved into a new house: one of the only bungalows around here not to have had an extra storey added to it. Or to have had anything done to it since 1956. Space, yes, is an issue: Ross had to have four vertebrae removed before he would fit. And it has its little quirks. The fan in the oven that won't turn off and causes Dave to wander the house at night, driven mad by its 'infernal buzzing'. The pagan statuary in the garden. The spiders... The other morning Ross opened the front door to go out and a moderately-sized spider walked right in, as though it had been waiting out there all night. Possibly, the previous tenants ran some sort of spider hotel.

And of course the letting agent somehow failed to mention that the place is built over an ancient Indian burial ground; well, don't they always?

But was Copperfield Gardens really so wholesome? Only now have I worked out what was bothering me about the van that was always parked there, advertising 'Nicks Tyres'. Amazing that the lack of an apostrophe can make so much difference, turning a nice bloke with his own business into a thief who advertises.