This is a guest blog from Boxette

The concept of going to the office is a bit 1980s these days. Habitual wearers of Stan Smiths are more likely to be found hanging out in places where the walls are stripped bare of plaster, manfully downing flat whites and broadcasting their achievements on the free WiFi, tweet by tedious tweet.

But what about the non-hipsters who also work virtually? They may not own a pair of rollerblades; they may not like Apple products; they may be sensitive to caffeine. But these refugees from Croydon, Dagenham and Merton still need a safe place to roost.

So it is for me, Nigel and Terry. For several years we’ve held strategy sessions in an eatery on the upper floors of Victoria Station. This café, named after one half of a 1960s pop/folk duo that is sadly no longer on speaking terms with the other member, is arguably the most dismal meeting place of its kind. No natural light; plastic booth seating you have to crawl in and out from; formica tables and wipe-down menus. All the atmosphere of an airport terminal. And service that can best be described as disinterested.

I used to ride the escalator to this place with a sinking heart. Here we would lay out our spread sheets, worry about Euro emissions legislation while I tried to catch the waiter’s eye to ask for green tea. They would never have green tea. Each time I toyed with the idea of bringing my own teabags for the next meeting, but would never remember. Within two hours I would feel lightheaded, suffering from sick-building syndrome, or too much hot chocolate. I would feel grubby. I would be questioning my career trajectory.

And then, one day as I rode the escalator past the mobile phone sellers, gold buyers and accessorisors, I had the shock of my life. The café was being ripped apart. Torn down. Remodelled. The one constant in our working calendar had closed.

At first I felt euphoric. That’ll show them, Terry and Nigel. Now we’ll have to go somewhere they don’t serve herbal tea with milk. Somewhere where we’ll feel in command of our destiny.

Real life isn’t like fantasy. The three of us were forced to traipse through shopping malls outside the station looking for somewhere to sit. Finally we found a popular café franchise with a French name. Magnifique? Non. The table was too small for Terry’s spread-sheets. We jostled for elbow room. The waiter cleared away our cups too quickly and the room was just too popular to hear yourself think.

That’s when I learnt to value what I had lost. The old café was so sparsely populated that you could have the table as long as you liked. It had all the ambience of a tired office building. Then I had an epiphany: an old-style office, with its broken ceiling tiles and tepid water cooler was what we had been subconsciously seeking all along, we peripatetic work-from-homers.

Out of nostalgia I climbed the escalator up Victoria Station the other week. A cosy little bistro had colonised the space, all soft fabrics and amber lighting. The kind of lighting by which you can’t read the small print menu. Background music that would distract from serious conversation, and a waiter with an expression that said ‘Come hither’. Not the kind of welcome I was hoping for.

I suppose they call it progress, but Terry, Nigel and I have been forced into a new kind of Odyssey as we search, in vain, for a new unfashionable space in which to ply our trade.

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I was walking near Kensington High St the other day and saw the faces of a young Japanese couple beaming with glee at something behind me. As I turned round to see what they had seen they were both eagerly taking out their ipods to capture the auspicious moment. Behind me was the office, London headquarters maybe, of EMI. And I had been taking it for granted for years! I live with a default distrust that applies especially to corporations. How do you love a corporation when you know that their main aim is to take your money? I get a similar feeeling, often in Kensington too, when in this wintry weather practically everybody with money is wearing a moncler puffa jacket (do they still call them puffa jackets?). Retailing at many hundreds of pounds these jackets are mostly the badge of social standing and disposable income. But, my imaginary interrogator tells me, they’re such good quality.  My lip curls in time honoured fashion. I remember when I lived in France and had to endure the well-worn mantra about how impossibly difficult it was to pass the French teaching qualifications, the Capes and the Agreg, and how you had devote yourself body and soul (corps et ame) to study over many years to pass this exam. And yet, are all teachers in France geniuses? Not by a long chalk in my experience of the matter. I think all the hysteria about these exams tells us more about one aspect of French culture and its thrall to administrative authority than it does about the exams. In the same way, Japanese youth and upper middle class aspiration are what lie under my imaginary microscope rather than the money-generating mechanisms that are EMI and Monclair.

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Sometimes it can happen that you see a video from a few years ago – maybe at somebody’s house – and someone – maybe somebody you don’t like – uses a word or turn of phrase on the film and you know he or she picked that up from you because it was your way of referring to something, and moreover, you still use that word or turn of phrase, and you feel oh I’m going to stop using that word or turn of phrase now. That someone has contaminated that word or turn of phrase, stolen it from you.

Alternatively, sometimes you have a word or turn of phrase and a few years later it’s everywhere in the press or on the telly. Has it slipped through from person to person and ended up being used by a powerful person or powerful organisation and now become common currency, all originating from you? Or are you just a conventional mind and others have thought of that word or turn of phrase, many people, and the mass of tide has ended by making that word into a common one? I mean, there are only so many words or turns of phrase that can be invented. Yes, it’s probably the latter.

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I used to dislike sprouts. Many people dislike sprouts, especially when they are young. Now I like sprouts. The taste is the same but the taste needs to be interpreted by the brain, which has lots of other information concerning sprouts, like the fact that they are nostalgic to me now because my feelings about them as a child were so strong and, maybe, the fact that I know they are doing me good. The nostalgia thing is what plays with me most, I think. I enjoy getting up in the winter on a  cold and frosty morning when it’s still dark outside. Again, nostalgia. A route back to the mysterious land of the past.

The brain fiddles with you. The same happens with colour and language, I read this week that it is not necessarily that the Ancient Greeks (Homer, the wine-dark sea) did not see the colour blue through their eyes. They had no specific word for it, so the brain placed the colour elsewhere. Brain scans have apparently seen activity in the brain which imply the viewing of a black and white drawing of a banana as to some extent yellow because we know its usually yellow.

The implications of this go far in things like Neuro Linguistic Processing and sports psychology, but have always done in literature. The sprout is a touchstone of our surprising, wayward sensibility. The sprout makes literature possible.

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Uncle Joe and Auntie Peggy had a three-wheeler car when I was little. To me at the time this was the most glamorous of cars, because it was cute and because it was owned by Joe and Peg. Joe and Peg possessed a kind of Punch and Judy glamour. They went away on foreign holidays to Spain and Yugoslavia and visited Capri where Joe had an in-depth conversation with Gracie Fields. I didn’t know who Gracie Fields was but it was one of the names you heard grown-ups bandying about. They did home movies. They took us to Hyde Wakes once a year, picking us up from my mums and dads thrillingly without warning. They gave us money for ice cream, Joe using the verb ‘wack’ (the only time I have ever heard this before or since) as in ‘Wack this out between you’ as he cascaded a stream of coppers and silver into our expectant palms. There is a photo of them somewhere in their heyday. They are walking smiling hand in hand down some promenade somewhere and you can see the white three-wheeler in the background, like Noddy’s car. I remember my mum saying how silly they were to be holding hands like that at their age. Sometimes they let me sit in the drivers seat and pretend I was driving. In a sense I was destined to love cars. But then it didn’t happened. We didn’t get a family car until I was about fourteen and by then the deep palimpsest of bus routes was sunk within me. I never saw the car need. What happened was that I outgrew the Joe and Peg car moment, and the dad car moment came too late.

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Buying presents for my olde dad was never easy even when he was a younger dad. Once my sister made him a ‘tool box’ from a shoe box and crepe paper that she had seen on Blue Peter. He had thrown it out by Boxing Day. My mum made him get it out of the bin and parade it in front of my sister again, This time with gratitude. This act was alien to my olde dad even then. Now, forget it. On Boxng Day we were at my other sisters for dinner, and DVDs of the children when they were little were put on. I myself am hardly able to contain my boredom, but olde dad is completely uninhibited: He suddenly acquires a bad back (not even the bad shoulder!) and he has to be ferried home. Suits me. We got back in time for Match of the Day. Olde dad took a yellow card for the lads, as they say. This year I didn’t bother. Got him some chocolates. Everybody else had taken the clothes options already anywy. Longjohns; woolly hats; jumpers galore; gloves; thermal socks. It makes no difference. Two years ago I bought him quite an expensive posh jumper from some fancy shop. I saw it was still in his cupboard unwrapped yesterday. And last year I got him some fur-lined leather gloves. They’ve vanished and he’s back on the old acrylic £2.99 gloves he’s always worn. So there’s no point bothering. You learn to treat the whole business as ritual rather than real life. You repeat the lines laid out for you because new ones won’t be heard anyway, and you worship the old objects once more on the altar of the olde dad. It’s the only way. Bend unto it or be swept away! Resistance is futile. All hail the power of the olde dad ritual!

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We are sitting in the living room at nine o’clock in the morning. Olde dad is having his first cup of tea. I am having my first cup of coffee. Olde dad had not yet put his teeth in. I have not yet put my eyes in.

– You know where is bread. You know where is turkey, says olde dad.

– Yeah. I’ll just have a banana for breakfast.

– Ah.

– Have you got your choppers in yet?

– What?

– Have you got your choppers in yet?

I know olde dad’s choppers don’t go in till 9.30 but you’ve got to ask to oil the wheels of conversation.

– You know where bread is, you know where turkey is, says olde dad again, as though it is some saying of the ancient world.

– Ah, I say.

– What are you having for breakfast?

– I’ll just have a banana.

– What time is it?

– Half-past nine.

– Ah! What are you having for breakfast?

– I’ll just have a banana.

– Have honeyhoops.

– A banana’s all right for me. I think I might have another cup of coffee though.  Push the boat out.

David comes down from the bathroom.

– You had breakfast? asks olde dad.

– I had some toast.

– You know where bread is, you know where turkey is.

David asks me: What are you having?

– I’ll just have a banana, I say

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This morning I was awoken by the carbon-copy of a conversation I had already participated in six months ago when I last stayed here, but this time it was my brother David playing my part. Olde dad says I have to go to see doctor. David says what’s wrong? Olde dad says I’m bad. David says where do you feel bad? Olde dad says everywhere. David says why don’t you have a cup of tea and see how you get on? David was up early to go for a walk in the hills. Olde dad had handbagged him in the hall.

After a cup of tea the crisis was nearly past. The doctor was forgotten but I had to go to the chemists for pills (olde dad calls it the pharmacy for extra gravitas).  I said let’s push the boat out and have another cuppa. Olde dad takes two types of pills. One called Somethingaprazzle which is for his stomach; the other is an ibuprofen type pain-killer for his shoulder which aches now and again. I tell him he’s gor a bad shoulder because he sits around all day and a bad tummy because he eats shit. I try and phrase it nicer than that. But he wants to be taking pills. He is astounded and dejected that he isn’t iller than he is. Everyone of his generation is now dead – wife, brother, sister, all the family of his wife, all those uncles and aunts of mine in Manchester or Australia – all dead, all gone, and he’s left with the younger generation who don’t understand anything. And he isn’t even ill! He’s actually fighting fit. It’s a scandal! He’s hunting round for an illness to have. There is decline, of course there is decline, but there is no big enemy. He’s involved in a skirmish but he wants a battle. The other day he went to the dentist. The dentist said what’s the problem? Olde dad said I’ve got a bad shoulder. I try imagining the look on the dentists’s face. Olde dad is like Fabrice del Dongo in Stendhals’ novel La Chartreuse de Parme. Fabrice rides all the way from Italy to a place called Waterloo to fight next to his hero Napolean but when he gets there he kind of misses the battle. Wherever he rides off to, the battle seems to have shifted on from. He sees some horses disappearing over a horizon; he hears some explosions in the distance, he spies some soldiers in fancy hats who might be generals, but he can never get himself into a centre where the key action is taking place. He is always on the margins. He’s like a man who comes to the dentists with a bad shoulder.

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We are sitting watching Bony M on Top of the Pops 2. It is Christmas night entertainment. These are the big hits of 1978. My dad turns round and looks at the clock. What time is it? he says. Eleven o’clock we say. Morining or night? he asks after a moment’s hesitation. Look around. We’re all around sititing watching the telly. The blinds are drawn. What do you think? I don’t know, he says, looking round. I can see his point. Here we are in 2014, watching a programme from 1978 with a confected simulacrum of a pop group singing about the exile of the Hebrews to Mesopotamia hundreds of years before Christ as though it were an update on a package holiday by a low-cost carrier.. A few minutes later the same question. Is it eleven at night or in the morning? Night, dad. That’s why it’s dark outside. It’s dark in the morning too. He’s right there and all. A few minutes later the same question. At this stage Abba are singing a happy song about being in love. !978. That was all up the spout by then too. They were divorcing. Basically, my olde dad’s main relationship now is with Time.They track each other; lose each other’s scent; lay traps for each other. I thought there was something wromg when he was eating his cereals after Christmas dinner, which we have about five in the aftrnoon. I suspected then that Time had given him the slip. If he does not follow his strict regime of events in the day, mostly food events, he’s adrift. Last night at half-one I was still trying to get him to go to bed so that I could sleep in the living room. He was still convinced it was the morning. He kept saying I haven’t done anything today.I just got up.. There is a passage in Proust where the narrator is astounded as to how each time we wake up from sleep we wake up with our own identity intact. It reassembles itself from the swirl of sleep in a sudden, miraculaous adjustment every time we wake up. With my olde dad that miraculaous reconstruction that should happen every time we wake up is starting to disintegrate.

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I am sitting on the sofa in the extension part of the living room trying to read and I can hear my brother talking with my olde dad in the living room proper. My brother says: do you still take yourself to the barbers? There is a silence while my olde dad tries to understand the question. I too try and understand the question. I shout out from my sofa: What are you talking about? How else can he get his hair cut if he doesn’t take his own head there! Nobody can take his head there for him, can they?

My brother perisists:

– Do you still go to the barbers in the market square?

– What market square?

– The market square next to Crown Point.

– I don’t know where you mean.

– The square next to Crown Point where they used to have a market.

– What?

– In that square where they have a fountain next to Crown Point.

– Ah!

– Where they have a fountain.

– What?

– They have a fountain in that square.

– Do they?

– Do you still get your hair cut in that square near Crown Point where they have a fountain?

– No. I have hair cut in market square.

– That’s what I was saying.

– No no, I go to market square to get hair cut.

– That’s what I was saying.

– No I go to market.

My brother gives up. I return my eyes to my reading matter.

peoplearerubbish.com

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