Post-doc

My doctor called me in to have my dropsy knee drained. I followed her down the corridor. A skirt with a fine checked grey and black pattern to her knees, black tights, black boots just below her knee. Black woolen V-neck top with elbow-length sleeves. I felt better already as my eyes fixed on her tightly-skirted arse. Bit thin, if we're going to get fussy.

She washed my knee with iodine, put a needle in, and drained some brown liquid of a colour that I thought ought not to exist in the body. Afterwards she sat next to me on the examination bed at a distance which I thought was too close to be professional and married and pretty. She said that she'll send the liquid off for analysis.

"There are some other matters we might like to discuss," she said, with a show of politeness, alluding to my alcohol intake and the fact that the nurse adjunct was in the room. I don't care who knows about my drinking, and would have been nonplussed about discussing it there and there, but she was keen to arrange another appointment to signify the importance of the information she is to convey.

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There is something I need to tell you. I've told Kim and Denise, and now it's your turn. I've abandoned my PhD.

I liked the social side of the Phd, and I've had many enjoyable drunken evenings, often with Lancaster's Management School through the introductions of Linda, who has wandered off with an attractive Swedish Economics professor she fancies rather than an impoverished pisshead from Lancaster she doesn't. I liked the way that we drank Leeds University's stock of welcoming wine dry on our introductory day, whilst all the time I was glancing at the gorgeous Departmental Secretary, with her black hair and her oatmeal coloured below the knee skirt and black tights and flat black shoes, and a manner that perfectly stopped just short of familiarity.

But why do it? I liked my supervisions. I liked the feeling of being an apprentice. My supervisor picked me up on the differences between em and en dashes and whether the phrase "post hoc" was sufficiently naturalised to not require italics. He is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met and he pushed me to my feeble intellectual limits. I developed an occasionally sexual attraction to him, glancing at the outline of his trousered cock while he picked up on every scatterbrain thought I had and made me blink with the effort of meeting his intellect. I dissembled my failure to do this through the deployment of a large vocabulary, which I often use to conceal my lack of a single original thought. Every time I left him I felt joyous. I used to then meet Kim in The Angel, gabbling on a high of not having to think, my tumbling talk meeting its pisstaking equal in her.

But I'm having a good life now and I don't need to do it. I am aware of my own mortality and I lack ambition and the work ethic. I live on advantageous terms in my house through the kindness of a good friend, and have a few hours of well paid editing work in which I have to pretend I speak good French. I understand my daughter Melanie's desire to be a tramp. I am differentiated from beggars by a minute sliver of circumstances, luck, and choice.