Tuesday Night/Wednesday Morning
Late Tuesday night, me and Frankie tune into the CNN rolling news, and come under the spell of a crack team of fast-talking men In black suits who, with the assistance of a dizzying array of ever-evolving map-based interactive granular-level-wall-graphics (and presumably, of copious amounts of strong black coffee) keep us enthralled through the night with the twists and turns of the presidential election: swing-state action in pivotal rust-belt states that this time yesterday we wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint on a map of the country, never mind follow analysis of their County-by-County psephology: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan. When I finally give up the ghost at 3:45AM I’m on to my seventh cup of strongly sugared tea since what should have been my bed-time, and the breathlessly staccato-voiced anchorman (Scott, we think his name is, or possibly Wilf, or maybe even Wolf) is updating us that the knife-edge count in Pennsylvania looks set be decided by imminent returns from postal ballots in the Democrat-favouring outer-suburbs of the City of Philadelphia. A history-determining twenty Electoral College votes (and we didn’t know what they were either, twenty-four hours ago, before we became experts on matters constitutional) hang in the balance.
Three hours later, when I come down again for breakfast, Frankie is still on the couch, fast asleep. He wakes with a start:
‘What’s happened? Has he won yet? Has he lost? He’s not lost, has he?’
‘It’s still too close to call, love. Still too close to call’
I manage a couple of hours of semi-distracted work in the Zoom room, then fall asleep on the carpet. Shortly before lunch, Frankie wakes me up- his big-footed steps from the attic-room virtual college space preceding a joyous announcement:
Pennsylvania has turned blue! 200 votes ahead now! It’s on the BBC!’
Sunday
It’s all over. It’s been all over since Friday lunchtime. I’m on the ‘phone to my sister.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Oh, I think it’s marvellous. Frankie’s over the moon. Brexit, Johnson, Trump- that’s all he’s known. For the first time in his life, the good guys have won’.
Our version of the topical agonized post-victory-mortem of the left-leaning liberal Europhile broadsheet devourer ensues, in which we recognise that ‘Joe’ (as we are now calling him) may be no saint, and there may be some important blemishes on his record- the Iraq war being one- but that all things considered, what we have here is a Victory For Hope Over Hatred and therefore Something To Celebrate. We determine to heed the sage advice of Billy Bragg, a man who we have considered an authority on most important aspects of Life on Earth for upwards of three decades now: ‘The Yes-buts can wait, until tomorrow’. Or, as Abby sums it up:
‘You know what- anything that takes the Klu Klux Klan down a peg or two- that has to be a good thing, right?’
Tuesday
I applied for one of those high-minded Guardian-reader-type jobs the Friday before last. Kind of by mistake. It came up on an email notification (from the actual Guardian Jobs website- you guessed it) and to my surprise there was nothing in the job description that blatantly disqualified me, so I started doing an application, and was still there at 5:30PM, putting in the finishing touches. I pressed ‘submit’, and tried to forget about it (with intermittent success; the week-long Transatlantic rollingnewsathon did help). Yesterday/Monday, a post-lunch cursory glance at the emails on my phone:
‘Congratulations. Your application has proceeded to the next stage. You are invited to attend an interview…’.
The communication throws me into a tailspin, of course. On the one hand, this is a tremendously exciting opportunity- to be part of a collaborative team doing some important stuff around harnessing the power of culture to bring about social change at a national level (God, I’m thinking in their corporate language already). On the other hand: What Was I Thinking Of? Haven’t I had a lovely little number here in Manchester’s fashionable Westside these last ten years, supporting its Not-For-Profits, helping them to do grant applications and so forth? Don’t I work with a lovely, tightly-knit team of like-minded people, who’ve even come to form a vital Zoom-based support group during these trying times? If I got this bloody Guardian job, anyway- how would I break it to them? Shouldn’t I just stay where I am? What was getting into me?
This morning, I’ve slept on it. Look, what’s to lose? In the surely-massively-unlikely event that I impress them so much in the interview that they actually offer me the job, I could still turn it down. Tell them I didn’t mean to apply, it was all a mistake, and I’m sorry to have troubled them. I log on to the recruiter’s website, and click on a page with a selection of video interview slots. There’s only two left- clearly the other candidates haven’t been hampered in their response by the gnawing self-doubt that plagues my every waking/working hour, God love them. Well if they reckon they’re up to it- why wouldn’t I be? Why shouldn’t I be? I click on one of the remaining slots. If nothing else, just to stop the voices inside my head from arguing with each other. It gets so fucking exhausting.
We’re set for Wednesday week at noon. We’ll see.
Thursday
A busy morning timetable offers a window between back-to-back calls at 11, so I effect a hasty escape from the Zoom room and head down the road to The Jolly Sailor, or at least to its car park, where the management of the once-again locked-down pub have set up an alternative community-serving/ money-spinning venture, in the form of a one of those dark-wood-panelled vintage-effect coffee-purveying caravans you see at festivals or trendy market-square foody evenings (or you used to, when such things were still allowed). It’s doing a roaring trade; when I get there the young blokes who normally serve behind the pub bar are busy at the gleaming new espresso-machine, plying their new trade as a two-man hipster al-fresco barista team. Considering they are still beginners, they’re making an impressive-enough fist of meeting the caffeine-related requirements of a giggling, non-socially-distanced queue of students on their mid-morning break from Frankie’s sixth-form college: a cappuccino; a decaff Americano with hot milk; a medium soya latte with a pain au raisin on the side. All the same there’s a note of melancholy seeping out of the twenty-something duo up there in their steamy cage; you sense that they’d rather be where they are truly in their element, behind the bar of the building beside us, serving the regulars with pints of bitter and pub-size packets of cheese and onion crisps. Or maybe the two of them are just as hungover as hell at this unholy hour for operatives accustomed to motoring the night-time economy to be up and about, and they would rather still be in bed. I’m still weighing up the probabilities when suddenly I’m at the front of the queue.
I order an Americano (medium, hot milk, two little paper packets of white sugar and a wooden paddle-shaped stirrer to stir them with) and presently settle down to partake of it, on a black-painted-metal park-style bench in front of the closed-down bank premises which bookends the row of neighbourhood shops thirty yards from my front door. As I take the plastic lid off my recyclable cardboard cup, a three-man crack squad of burly Council employees emerges from a miniature kerb-side municipal vehicle, and proceeds to round up the fallen leaves from the pavement, using the hoses of great reverse-vacuum-cleaner-type contraptions whose engines are strapped, like astronauts’ air-supplies, to their backs. As one of the workmen sets to work around the legs of the bench, the two of us briefly encapsulate the unspoken chasm opening up among the working population: the college-educated knowledge worker, on a leisure break from the safety of his Zoom room, and the manual frontline-operative, for whom engagement with the outside world has remained during these times not a luxury, but a necessity. Rising from my bench-perch, I catch his eye and essay a comradely remark, shouted over the din of the air-motor.
‘I’ll get out of your way, mate- don’t want to get blown away here!’
The maskless workman responds with a cheery grin and a thumbs-up. Dodging a mound of crispy-brown leaves which I find he has expertly herded into position around my ankles, I take my leave, heading back to the Zoom room for a last check through the morning’s emails before lunch.
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