And I love him.
I absolutely do.
But…
But what?
I don’t know.
But isn’t the very existence of a ‘but’ enough? And now I’m not talking about his lovely bum.
How do you know? If someone is the one, I mean? How do any of us know? It was easy for Barbie – Emma and I decided for her that Ken was Mr Right. But who decides for the rest of us? We have to do that for ourselves, which hardly seems fair. It would be so much easier if we all came with a label saying who we belong to.
Maybe Alex is my Mr Right. Maybe I just haven’t found his label yet?
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under my feet;
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven', W.B. Yeats
Bollocks.
It’s Monday morning. Quite how it can be is beyond me. It only feels like five minutes since I switched off my computer and dumped my dirty mug in the office sink.
I contemplate phoning in sick. This is not a first. I contemplate phoning in sick every Monday morning. The possibilities are endless – I could put a peg on my nose and pretend I have the flu. I could tie a scarf tightly around my neck, cut the air supply to my vocal chords and pretend I have tonsillitis. I could come out with complete gibberish and pretend I’m hallucinating – though I tend to come out with complete gibberish a lot of the time, so this probably wouldn’t be terribly convincing.
I never actually do phone in sick. Not because my excuses are not entirely plausible, but because I like to think of myself as a conscientious employee, persevering with the rest of the rat race in the face of sheer boredom.
I used to be depressed when I woke up on a Sunday morning because I knew I was going back to work the next day. Now I’m depressed when I wake up on a Saturday morning, because I know that the next time I wake up I will be going back to work the next day. I spend Monday to Friday wishing my life away for the weekend, and Saturday and Sunday depressed that the weekend is almost over. Which, if you think about it, leaves only Friday available for not being miserable, when I’m too stressed out after a whole week in the office to really appreciate it.
I must get out more.
I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.
This is not a statement of fact, by the way, merely a mantra I am trying out.
I’m saying it to myself every morning as I make my way into Penand Inc’s head office in the misguided hope that it might eventually come true.
It’s not working.
I have a terribly glamorous job, you know.
I sell pencils. No, really, I do. I sell pencils. Okay, so I’m selling myself short. I also sell pens. And pencil sharpeners. And Post-It notes. In fact – take a look around your desk – anything you can see, the chances are I sell it. Or, at least, I work for the people who sell it.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. I never intended to sell pencils for a living. No, in actual fact, I was meant to be the next Carrie Bradshaw. Not necessarily being paid to write about sex, but being paid to write at least – being paid to do what I love. It doesn’t have to be Carrie, of course. I’d settle for Kate Hudson’s character in How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days.
How To Give Up Your Dream Job And Sell Pencils Instead.
How To Convince The Bride-To-Be That Peach Only Suits A Peach.
How To Tell Your Boyfriend You’re Not Sure He’s The One…
The plan was to move back home and look for a journalism job in London after my finals. But then Alex got a great job up here with a high profile law firm. And I wanted to be with him, so I stayed too. I got a temporary job. It was meant to be a short term thing. Just until I had paid off some of my (rather hefty) student debts. Just until I began pursuing my ‘real’ career by pestering unsuspecting editors of local newspapers to give me a job.
That was five years ago.
I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I chant as I walk through the automatic doors, smile sweetly at Marie on reception and swipe my ID card to let me through the security door.
I often wonder why they make it so damned difficult to get into this building. We’re really not that keen on getting in, after all. It would make far more sense to make it harder for us to get out, if you ask me – getting out is much more popular.
I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I continue up the stairs to the second floor. It was my New Year’s resolution never to take the lift, on account of the fact that I’m supposed to be on a diet. Because I’ve just been asked to be bridesmaid. And because I ate far more than my fair share of a Christmas kilogram tub of Cadbury’s Miniature Heroes.
Not that I’m a fatty or anything. But I could do with losing a pound or two, because I’m sure peach looks even less attractive when you’re wearing a spare tyre underneath it.
Anyway, it’s the second week in January and I haven’t succumbed yet. Apart from the day after the office Christmas party (held on January sixth for reasons I will never understand) when I was feeling particularly hungover. But that doesn’t count, because it was a Christmas party, and so technically still December. Okay, so I’m a cheat. I hold my hands up. But everyone knows that New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken.
My heart sinks when I see my desk. Plummets, in fact. I don’t know why I’m even vaguely surprised. What did I expect – that Mary Poppins would pop in over the weekend, click her fingers and magic everything into its correct folder, drawer and filing tray (not that I actually have any filing trays to speak of)?
I’m surprised I’m not forever being disciplined over the state of my desk. You could actually grow things in the mugs that have, on occasion, been found on my desk. They say mould produces penicillin, don’t they? If that’s right then I’m pretty sure that the contents of a mug that was (allegedly) found on my desk last week could probably have saved a small community from the bubonic plague.
I don’t know what happened really. I was such a tidy child. I would spend hours tidying my already immaculate bedroom. All my cassettes were neatly filed in alphabetical order in their wall-mounted plastic storage cases, my white pants were kept separate from my coloured ones, my socks separate from my tights, and all my games were stacked neatly on top of the wardrobe in size-order – Game of Life and Monopoly at the bottom, Yahtzee at the top. If I ever found a loose playing piece I’d painstakingly slide out the relevant game, open it up and put the piece away in its proper place before