Last Sunday
It's Sunday afternoon and I wish I were in Blackpool, where Lancashire are 232-4 against Durham, and our captain is into his second century of the match. The BBC's commentary is a substitute. It's gentle -- the commentators' inoffensive jokes receive a response of a couple of seconds of rapid nasal exhalation.
No news, ten days on, from my interview. I was startled yesterday when a colleague, who works in the kitchen, told me that he's got an interview for the same job on Friday. So none of us have got it then, and they've re-opened the advert? I don't know.
I hadn't told anyone that I've had an interview for it. Outwardly I was encouraging to him; inwardly I was outraged that someone who is not the sharpest pencil in the depot, who never listens to you, and has to include his identity statement that he is dyslexic and "has" anxiety, into every monologue, might be awarded the position over me. In that asymmetrical way that can characterise work relationships, he likes me, and is always comparing me favourably to the other union rep. He gives me out of date food which would otherwise end up as a rat's dinner.
Today
I didn't get the job. It's too early to know if my competitor got it.
Yesterday, due to engineering works sending my train round a funny way, I ended up having an hour-and-a-half to kill in Trina's home town. Fifteen minutes before we were to arrive there, I sent her a speculative text, asking if she were free. She was.
She met me at the station and we went to the pub opposite for a coffee. I was a bit disappointed that my colleagues on the train didn't see us embracing and kissing at the ticket barriers, and then felt a bit pathetic for wanting them to see me in Trina's arms. "Hey look at looby! The old bastard's still got it!" like a scene from some elbow-nudging seventies TV comedy.
I came home dog-tired on Friday, sleeping open-mouthed on the train from work, but dredged up enough energy to apply for a position as trainee guard based at Trina's nearest station. I had little time to complete it, so it was mainly copying and pasting from an old application which had got me on to the next stage previously. I altered a few details to try to defeat any duplication-detection program they might use and submitted it with twenty minutes to go before a midnight deadline.
I haven't got a plan. I often do this -- applying for things requiring upheaval if they come off as a provocation to my future. More simply, I am desperate to get a job with a predictable roster. I like Trina's company, which can sometimes slide into getting turned on. We never act upon it, which makes the desire more intense, and then self-conscious, and we get all circumspect again, and laugh; we haven't drawn up our constitution yet.
This weekend, me, Kirsty, and the two younger of my daughters are going north to see our family's semi-adopted daughter's graduate art show at Newcastle Uni. She explained her art to us at Christmas and my very inaccurate memory of it is that it's something to do with x-ray pictures of food they give to long-term elderly patients in some sort of mental home. Me and Kirsty are staying with my mum in Middlesbrough while the gals stay with the graduand in the Toon. I must try not to drink too much. My teetotal mum calls alcohol my "medicine".
