From Jester To King XIX

Do you remember going to the office each day just to be with people and chat? Those offices like hollows you could take refuge in. Back in the womb. They sucked you in and made it hard to leave them. You could lose yourselves in those offices. And it didn’t matter what you did workwise, it really didn’t make any difference at all to anything because you always got paid. You could do whatever you liked and things would go on and no one paid the blindest bit of notice. But oh the boredom, the interminable boredom. Seemed to go on forever, the boredom. Do you remember us all walking around a little bit like zombies? Do you remember us playing the game of this is just what you do? Breathing that office air? The office air which was a principle odour of clean against the backtang of cologne. Do you remember that feeling of work being this all-encompassing thing its tentacles round you? Do you remember how it was really everything? Work living in you rather than you living in it? Do you remember those sofas and board rooms, the glass tables? Do you remember the brush carpet? Do you remember the low light and the half-light and the neutral walls and the corridors you could just walk around and about going on for hours? Remember the big marble floor tiles? Do you see now that these places were like Japanese business hotels? Do you remember the reception and how they made people wait with you just waltzing on through? Remember your card and your name and your grainy pixelated photo that proved you? Do you remember the suits? Feeling tight around the waist and the belt and your throat pinned down into a done-up collar? Remember the girls? No, forget the girls. Do you remember the coming and the going? To and fro. Feeling useful and purposeful? Do you remember them coming in with their tasks? Do you remember that pen you used to take notes with? And the meetings? You could have drinks, but you only ever had water? Sitting round good little boy, not saying nothing. The tiniest movements at meetings, always holding the door. Wasn’t it great to feel useful, to feel part of something? To be told what to do, to have something to do. To be praised. To be excoriated. To be something either way. To interact. Just to feel that the world had an agenda and you were part of it. And all those special numbers for each matter, and the time recording. Do you remember just going into the place and sitting at your chair behind your desk all day for hours and hours and hours? Do you remember the library you could sit in and take your time in and breathe, books you could look in? Do you remember that amazing feeling of being able to say you worked there? Balloony. You were undeniably good enough as a person. Do you remember how people reacted? In exactly the way you expected and wanted. Yes indeed. Like you were really something, part of something. And do you remember those deals, laying the papers on the table? Gradated, one behind the other ready for signing. £250m, £500m, the revolving facilities and the special purpose vehicles and shell companies and then all those funny things you could do just with tax. Had to be clever for tax. But so many people haunting those corridors that you could chat to, whose presence you’d feel Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, people people everywhere, passing by the warmth of those people with your paper in hand and the tasks that they’d set you, don’t deny it there was a spring in your step, they could see your purposefulness, oh how you’d trade everything to be back with that purpose, before they lifted the veil, and you realised that purpose was false. You were full like a balloon then and now you’re popped and a tiny bit wiser, but you’re not full anymore that’s the problem, there’s no better than being like a balloon.