Wednesday
In WhatsApp conversation with a friend- how are we coping with the ongoing madness? ‘Having to monitor the beer situation’, he admits. I concur: ‘I know- this alcohol-tracking business is unforgiving. I downloaded one of those Apps. A month in, the day-to-day graph looks like the cityscape of Manhattan’. I share that I’m looking to bring it down a notch or two in the architectural splendour scale, and solicit his professional opinion on which town/city scene should complete the analogy (my friend is an architect). ‘Go Brooklyn’, he shoots back. ‘It’s also a beer’. ‘Kronenbacher, 3 for £5 in Morrisons; dangerous!’, he adds, conspirationally (if not perhaps so helpfully). ‘Good advice, on both counts’, I reply, all the same.
Waking up, turning the ‘phone on- Guardian news page. The first presidential debate has happened overnight- heated, fractious, tit-for-tat accusations of historical wrongdoing. Somehow this opens up a rarely-visited drawer in my own mind labelled: ‘My acts of historical wrongdoing- the bare facts’. Letters/emails I didn’t reply to. Friends I carelessly lost touch with. Girls I failed to make happy. Note to self: don’t start the day by clicking on the news pages. There’s a reason why it’s called doom-scrolling.
It’s National Inclusion Week at work. Today’s team-bonding exercise: The Trusted Ten. ‘List the ten people in your life who you most trust (avoid including family members, if you can)’. Then for each one, define them by (a list of categories follows- race; religion; sexual orientation; class; something called ‘communicative preference’ which refers to a sliding scale between introversion and extroversion). In the shower, tweaking the list in my head. The beer-monitoring WhatsApp guy is in with a bullet at number three. Also several other white middle-aged arts-degree-educated working class-background blokes with part-Irish heritage (this is the point of the exercise; to get you to challenge your unconscious biases towards associating with those in whom you recognise similarities to yourself). I want to slip in the manager of Stockport County at Number Ten, but I’m not sure if it’s against the rules. Not because he’s a family member (he’s not) but because he’s not exactly a close acquaintance- unless you count the time you exchanged nods and pleasantries in the timber aisle at B and Q. I ponder over exchanging him for a female Nigerian social-entrepreneur from among my professional network, then chide myself for gaming the system in favour of my non-unconsciously-biased pretensions. ‘Who, exactly, are you trying to impress here?’.
Thursday
A day full of spare-room Zoom-meetings ahead; the first one at the unholy hour of 9:15AM. Stood over a pile of clothes laid out over the bed, selecting the outfit. The second-smartest pair of blue work trousers comes adorned with an unevenly-shaped white stain of uncertain provenance, just above the left knee. But it will do for Zoom. Anything can do for Zoom, round about knee-level (or indeed, nothing).
Coverings at the mouth/nose level, on the other hand, remain obligatory by government decree. Charlotte’s made us all one each at the sewing machine; the material for mine originated as a blouse which belonged to a 1993 Victoria Park flatmate named ‘little Sally’ (so-called to distinguish from fellow 1993 Victoria Park flatmate ‘Big Sally’). Lent to my sister, it was never returned, so ended up at the back of my wardrobe for the best part of thirty years until its present emergency requisition/repurposing. A lovely orangey/peachy kind of pattern (I mean the colours, not the fruits); but the elastic strap is a thou out- a thou short, meaning it pulls my ears forward and outward, making me remind myself of a Second-World-War street urchin, captured in grainy monochrome clambering across a bomb-site in a gasmask. Not the sort of look I’m after for trips to the Spar for a pint of milk, so I prefer to employ the neckerchief-sort-of-thingy that Charlotte’s mother got me for Christmas ten years ago. That was when I used to have the motor scooter, and the neckerchief, of Oxford brand, is designed to protect the fashionably-conscious two-wheeled motorist from windchill. Stepping out into the neighbourhood with it wrapped nonchalantly round the neck, I feel like a Hell’s Angel, semi-retired in SK2. Or Yasser Arafat. Or a twenty-something Socialist Worker placard-bearer on an anti Poll-Tax march, circa 1989.
Today’s ‘Inclusion Week’ exercise: ‘Share a photograph of yourself when younger. The team take turns to guess who it is. Then tell them something about your childhood; this can lead to a short group conversation’. Everyone else, apparently, has sent in baby pics. You’ve sent in the only childhood picture of yourself you have in the house (the others are all at your mam’s, 250 miles away). You’re 13- maybe 14- in your school uniform, squatted down at the bottom of the hedge in the front garden of the house at Olive Place; you would have just moved there, to the Council estate, from the slightly-posher (by Fenham standards) semi-detached houses where you had spent your primary school years. Smiling up at the polaroid, flaxen shoulder length hair shimmering in Spring afternoon sunshine (you had just finished your paper-round). You’ll probably share with them something about the life-saving availability of social housing in late-industrial North East England. Or about how the haircut was modelled on the Leeds United midfielder Tony Currie.
Friday
Opening the stifling double-glazed spare room window, letting the morning sights and sounds of the neighbourhood flood in. The back-end of the school run; a smartly-dressed young mum in ‘late for work’ mode striding five yards ahead of a tiny child in a billowing pink anorak, who struggles girlfully to keep up. A royal blue transit van parked up underneath the window-ledge, containing two middle-aged workmen straight out of central casting; the bloke in the passenger seat leafing through the pages of The Sun newspaper, his mate at the wheel scoffing at a bacon barm freshly purchased from the baker’s next to the Spar shop; an empty packet of McCoys Cheese and Onion crisps laid crumpled between them in the centre of a cluttered dashboard. The familiar backdrop: the constant hum of the electricity substation, turned up to eleven this morning, as it powers the rush-hour hair-dryers, power-showers and commercial bacon-grillers of SK2.
This morning’s Team Inclusion Week Exercise: ‘Walk In Someone Else’s Shoes’. The Zoom screen-grid already populated with the now-so-familiar (in 2D, anyway) features of your dozen closest colleagues. Taking turns to share (whatever we are comfortable to share) about our upbringings and how they have shaped us. I arrive late, catching only the very end of one of the newer members of the team’s courageously open account of overcoming (I think)- early-adulthood mental illness- so can only nod along sympathetically as others offer her their reflections and support. Encouraged, others take turns to open up: stories you wouldn’t expect/ would never get to find out in the ‘normal’ 3D office-work times, whatever they were. Tales of childhood poverty; of step-parental depression leading to suicide; of an identity crisis occasioned by the move from small working class town to the big city; and the one that brings the house down: our only ethnic minority colleague’s tale of resolutely marrying for love outside of her culture (she’s Bengali; he’s Gujarati; her family did not approve)- and how this has led to still-unresolved heartbreak and rifts. ‘I don’t regret it for a moment, though’, she concludes. ‘I love that man and I knew I wanted to spend my life with him and have children with him. It is honestly the best thing I have ever done’. The quiet bravery the young woman exudes and articulates reduces several of us to tears (admittedly, not difficult in several cases; it’s been a trying few months).
I’m already late for my first ‘actual-work’ work meeting of the day, so offer up to the room my own whistle-stop How-I-Got-Here tale. How my mam’s Irish great-grandmother rescued her family from extreme poverty by scratching a living from her Northumbrian mining town doorstep, selling matches to the passing colliers. How through sacrifice and hard work that house grew to become the town’s grocery store, and my Grandad the first man in Bedlington to own a car, and my mam the only of her siblings to get into the Grammar School- travelling by bus every day into the big city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. How, meanwhile in that big city, my dad’s grandad was building a cottage industry which grew to support a lucrative factory, making carbonated water for the masses- a necessity, in the days before adequate household water supply. How a fortune was amassed- and disappeared- no-one knows where or how- and how as a consequence my dad’s dad ended up working- like everyone else in the city’s East End- in the shipyards. How my mam and dad met: young sweethearts; she five years younger, the Convent School sixthformer swept off her feet by the Bob-Dylan-alike extrovert University boy. These bits get laughs and happy sighs from the room. A later bit, which I can recall directly- how my mam and dad’s idyllic suburban existence with teenage me and my younger sister came aground against the rocks of the 1980s recession, and how this led to our own sometimes chaotic scrapes with poverty, and how we don’t know how things might have ended up had it not been for the actually-life-saving move over to the Council Housing on the ‘wrong-side’ of the neighbourhood tracks: these bits are heard out in compassionate silence, even as my tale fades away (I’m not sure in what detail I’m comfortable with sharing; or at what point in the tale it should, for the purposes of this exercise, end).
Looking forward to the weekend- When Saturday Comes. The Pandemic-delayed opening set of fixtures in the National League; Stockport County getting their campaign underway with a long haul to face another of the early promotion favourites, Torquay United. In normal times, me and sixteen-year-old Frankie might have joined a thousand-strong away contingent in a beer-and-lemonade happy pilgrimage South-West, singing in the train-aisles all the way there and back, win draw or lose (let’s face it, probably lose). But these are not normal times, and no away supporters (or home supporters for that matter) will be admitted. Instead Frankie has shelled out £9 for the privilege of following the action live from our living room, streamed via YouTube from a ghostly Plainmoor (commentary included). ‘If you watch it with me dad, will you be giving me £4.50 for your share?’ the boy asks. ‘For sure son. For sure I will. In the fullness of time’. This daft, quick-fire exchange of one of our time-honoured double-act routines brings a laugh from each of us, as he rushes off to college and I head off up to the Zoom-room. We’re both thinking the same thing: ‘At least some stuff hasn’t changed’.
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