Friday 31 December 2010

Making Due

I am working on two scripts at the moment for MY Production Company. Well, seven really, if you count the ones I’m not actually working on at the moment but plan to work on eventually – and two of these are in serious development. Veddy serious development.  Which means I take my computer out to cafes and stare at the screen for 2.5 hours a day.

I’m sure you appreciate what this exacts from a person and it explains why every single other creative gesture I have made in the past six weeks has been like opening a vein. 

I dug myself a huge hole three Christmases ago by drawing cards for my family that I sent off to Canada. I did it again last year.

This year they were anticipated.

You see what happened there? Serendipitous gesture, a breezy second attempt then – OBLIGATION.

I would like to share with you the cards I came up with. Please bear in mind that, even though I am right-handed, I make cartoons with my left hand. I stopped drawing at the age of five and this hand still remembers how to do it. But as a five year-old.

Here is a card for my niece, who began to play hockey this year:



She’s a great reader, so in this illustration she’s left her copy of Harry Potter and The Chalice of Death -  or whatever - in order to make a game-saving defensive move. Note the Christmas-themed strip.

Her sister also started hockey and is a natural. This could mean she elbows people into the boards and high-sticks centre ice, sending younger, weaker girls sprawling, but I think she’s just fast and strong:



Inside I said she was playing for a ‘speciality team’.

So far so good. Two cards for two girls I love, very satisfying and inspiring to draw.

HOWEVER.

I HAD TO DO SEVEN MORE. And paint each of the fuckers.

I began to hate my stupid cards. I hated myself for thinking of making them, I hated my family for existing and thereby necessitating this time-consuming, life-draining effort. I envied the mass produced good wishes extended by Ross And Belinda Shuttleworth – Estate Agents Who Care, and who cared with a big, fat, photocopied stamp of their signatures.

Labouring under this oppression I asked my hostess what she wanted for Christmas.  She was quick and very clear. Usually commendable in a gift-giving situation.

‘I would like a plastic case, with internal dividers, in which to keep cough syrup and plasters. Medicines. It can be as cheap as you like.’

I felt a thrill rush through me. A cheap present that she wanted! I could spend £5.00 and make her happy. How much better a result than spending £50 on something she wouldn’t want!

‘And maybe – decorate it,’ she finished ‘I don’t care how.’  She smiled.

The gift stopped being cheap.

I knew what she meant. She meant ‘Don’t put out the big bucks, it can be ugly if you just spruce it up’. She didn’t mean to be casting me into the seventh circle of hell.

And I spent what felt like a prison sentence ripping up magazines, finding appropriate images, words and sentiments for a plastic tub and gluing the horrid little things on. I felt faint from the fumes and I bent over the project the way the enslaved of Georgia curled their spines over low stalks of cotton. A strange insanity took over, where I found more words, more pictures and glued more on, in spite of the nausea. I felt body-snatched, as though I was in some weird experiment to determine my own fortitude in the face of what I was now coming to think of as overcreativitis.

I was still painting:




The girls’ dad had just recovered from hip surgery. I suggested he was giving extreme sport a whole new meaning.

In the midst of all the drawing, painting and ripping a good friend in London was celebrating his first birthday. I felt far, far away (well, an hour on EasyJet) and, even in my depleted state, I wanted to be with him. Somehow. Some way. So I roped an unsuspecting (and talented ) friend into --  what? What? Into doing what?

YES!

CREATING SOMETHING!!!

With me.

With one rehearsal and in one take, on his sofa, we sang and recorded a song. My hostess filmed it. Very casual.

WE POSTED IT ON YOUTUBE.

At this point I needed an IV.

But I couldn’t stop.  I cut and shoved scraps of newsprint onto the medicine chest. Bits of my skin were being yanked off with the Immediate Adhesive Glue and getting smeared into images of tapestry birds and an 18th century manse. In a semi-blind haze, I put words between the dividers – ‘love’ ‘life’ ‘passion’ -  knowing someday I would feel all of these things again.

Finally, in the wee hours of Christmas Morning, I finished. It looked like this:

'There is something inside truly irresistible
 for pampered souls in pursuit of cures and health' 
(I thought this made sense.)

I know all you see is a mess of colours and some chick glancing through an arched doorway (notice the tapestry birds behind?) and my fingers, inadvertently indicating where bits of them had ended up. But this blur is an accurate representation of my own vision of reality (if you look closely you will see I’m in my pyjamas – I hadn’t left the bedroom in 36 hours).

Just as I began to consider the virtues of the anchorite’s life – hermits don’t make presents for nobody, no how – my niece skyped me. I skyped back. It was Wednesday.

 Stephanie Young: I just finished drawing and painting all the family Christmas cards. I started on Sunday!!

(I think you can sense my tone. This, however, was her response:)

[08/12/2010 01:15:06] LN: YAY!
[08/12/2010 01:15:07] LN:: YAY!
[08/12/2010 01:15:09] LN:: YAY!
[08/12/2010 01:15:12] LN:: YAY!
[08/12/2010 01:15:24] LN:: YAY!YAY!YAY!
[08/12/2010 01:15:26] LN:: YAY!

[08/12/2010 01:15:37] LN:: i cant wait to see mine

Christmas morning and my friend opened her plastic tub under the tree. She squealed, yes, squealed – she oo’ed, she ah’ed – and the sight of her sweet and happy countenance, even if she was lying through her well-bred teeth and thought it the greatest monstrosity of a collage ever to impose itself on human sight – began the thaw. I was warming up.

I heard from my niece:

We got your cards today! We love them. I especially like mine!! Hei hei! And Dad's!

Then my mother:

Your lovingly-created Christmas cards are getting much attention - we all are very impressed with your artistic ability - I  think of you when I look at them - and feel very blessed to have you as part of our family.

And I heard from the mother of my one-year old friend:

That was so beautiful. What a lovely lovely gift. The birthday boy was transfixed as soon as he heard your voices. I almost heard him say 'angels' to himself.

All losses are restored. I’m the fullest woman on the planet. I’m awash in gratitude.  I beg to decorate boxes, I’m beginning next year’s cards. I can’t believe I have the honour of being able to sing with someone I love for someone I love:


(And I’m still writing the  *!%* plays…)

Friday 24 December 2010

A Carol. For Darryl.

One of the glories of writing for the company (and they are manifold: Chris bringing me cups of tea, hovering over my shoulder saying “Oh, he wouldn’t do that” with a smile that says I can fix it now or wait until she writes 'He wouldn't do that' in the margin being just one of them) is that all experience is grist for the artistic mill.

Last Christmas, for instance, I found myself in a seemingly ordinary but deceptively dramatic situation that in the movie version would be enacted by two women over 35 (Gilian Anderson and Gwyneth Paltrow I’m thinking), featuring, as it did, my sister and me.

This high octane story unfolded in the local strip mall of an Ottawa suburb, a prime location for last minute shopping. I wanted soapy, lotion-y, bath oil for my sister-in-law and a film voucher for my nephew. Catherine ably escorted me to a spacious gift shop, luxurious with towels, creams, jumpers and slippers - a seasonal cornucopia. I bypassed the rabbit-fur mitts and eye-lash curlers and followed my nose to a fragrant cloud of bath accessories - Avocado, Mint & Mango, Lemon Flavoured Honey. If a woman wanted to eat her soap it was perfect. I was delighted by the teeming choice then overwhelmed by it.  Which was best? I inhaled, compared and re-shelved salts, suds and oils as Christmas galloped closer. Just before my pension kicked in I settled on ‘lime’ and we headed to the till.

There was someone in the queue beside us, not moving, gazing down. My sister, very polite, said 'Excuse us..?'

He waved a courteous hand. 'No, no. I've been here most of the evening already. Don't wait for me.' He stood in front of a pile of scarves, hats and gloves.

We looked at him and the pile.

'I can't decide,' he said.

We were sympathetic. We probably said 'Ohh, that's too bad' or 'We know how you feel' – the trauma of rejecting Succulent Peach-Melon was haunting me still - and he said 'Yes.' He pulled out a non-descript black-and-white wool scarf.

'My sister. She's 26 and artsy..'

Catherine, not missing a beat - he was about 5'11", brown hair, straight, falling into his eyes, glasses, nice face - mid 30s - , turned to me. She smiled and held her arm out in my direction.  'Hey!' she shouted. 'You're 26! And definitely artsy.'

I stared at her, motionless. Speechless. The gall of her suggesting I was hovering near the same decade as a 26-year old sucked the breath out of my thorax. I recovered enough to say 'Yes - ' and, desperate to find something I could sign up to exclaimed ‘ - I'm artsy!'

I turned to the scarf. It was nothing near what a 26 year old 'arsty' person would like and I was about to disabuse him when he said

'I know that's right for her.'

I paused and regrouped. Catherine, still on track, said 'So, what's the problem?'

'I'm buying this for my brother-in-law,' he said. He pulled out another scarf (much nicer than the one for his sister). 'I'm sending these both a long way away and they're going to open them at the same time. They'll both open their presents and they'll both get - '

'Scarves,' Catherine said.

'Exactly,' he said.

I nodded, looking at him. 'And then they'll think "Hey - what is wrong with – “‘ I studied his face. ‘Tim - Bill - ?'

'Close,' he said.

'Fred?'

'Darryl,' he said.

' " - what is wrong with Darryl that he is so devoid of imagination that he gets us both the same stupid thing."'

'Exactly. And what's worse, what I really like are these expensive gloves. That I want for myself.'

'They're the nicest thing in the pile,' Catherine observed.

Darryl nodded.

I turned to pay for my lime-scented bath beads and body butter.

'Maybe you should make something, Darryl,' I said.

I heard Catherine snort behind me. Darryl looked up.

'Something out of macaroni,' I continued. 'We all like to get things made of macaroni.'  I consulted the 15-year old cashier. 'Don't we? Maybe macaroni in the shape of - Celine Dion.'

'Maybe Celine in sea-shells. Shellaqued,' Catherine offered.

Darryl looked at us. I noticed he was really - very  - cute.

He sighed.

'Too much like what I got them last year,' he said.

He became much cuter.  I shrugged.

'Put lights on it.'

He considered.

'Maybe I should just follow you two around.'

I got my change from the cashier who said 'You guys are crackin' me up' from behind his acne.

We were cracking us up but we had already out-stayed the amount of time you can reasonably-spend-at-a-till-with-a-stranger. It wasn't as though we could offer to buy him a pair of nail clippers or socks in the hopes of continuing conversation. We couldn't say ‘Let me top you up. Burberry? Hermes?’

We all paused in our no-man’s-land of social exchange. I almost asked 'Do you come here often?'  but what would that yield? It was a shop in a strip mall. He probably came every week. So what? We didn't.

We wished him good luck and a merry Christmas.

'I'll probably still be here at that point,' he said, gazing back down.

'We'll toast you,' Catherine said. 'We'll say "To Darryl" on Christmas Day.'

We de-briefed in the parking lot.

'We should have got his number,' she said. 'Or given him yours.'

It was cold; the wind chill made it twenty below. We walked fast, dodging cars at very dangerous intersections to get to another shop in the mall. I felt hounded by a large van that seemed to be closing in on us.

'It's okay,' I said. 'These things either work or they don't.'

Catherine sped up to join me. I thought we’d cleared the van when suddenly it pulled up beside us and the electronic window buzzed down. A young man in a beard and winter hat leaned forward and smiled.

'Sorry. I wouldn't run you down so close to Christmas.'

I gave him the thumbs up. We saw him stop and park.

'Let's walk faster,' Catherine said. 'In case he tries to get us on foot.'

'If I'm supposed to see Darryl again,' I said, panting with the exertion of avoiding the potentially-dangerous-guy-from-the van, 'he'll appear, Poof!  in front of your car, just as we're leaving.'

'And then we'll run him over,' she said.

'And at least I'll know - '

' - it wasn't meant to be,' she added.

' -as he flies over the hood.’ I was suddenly saddened at the thought of accidentally flattening my one viable option for a Christmas drink in town.

We got the gift certificate for my nephew and returned to her van. No sign of Darryl.

'You're better off,' she said as we motored quietly home, thinking of the pile of gloves and scarves. 'He obviously had trouble with commitment.'

Of course the real gift in writing the life you live, besides offering material for your producer to hawk around the theatres in central London, is that there is a chance, there is a real and serious chance – work with me here – that Darryl is at his computer as we speak.

That now, right now, glancing out the snowy window of  his Toronto office (he’s Canadian but very urban), he is remembering the odd exchange with the friendly sisters at the cash register in the Ottawa gift shop on the blue-cold Christmas Eve last year. He lifts his Conran Shop mug, full of fennel tea. He puts down the mechanical pencil with which he is designing the new Gallery of Art and Artists for the Aix-en-Provence Conservatoire des Intellectuels et Poseurs.

‘They know my name’ he thinks to himself and swiftly he searches. ‘Darryl. Scarves. Macaroni’.

And ‘Dion’.

The engine hums and he is moments away from landing on this page, on these words, on this story of our meeting.  Brief keystrokes will lead us back into the conversation we never finished as Christmas was dropping from the frozen sky into our waiting hearts.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that would be a miracle.

Well, gentle readers.







‘Tis the season.

(Merry Christmas.)

Stephanie anticipates the miracle...


Friday 17 December 2010

A Seasonal Peace

I’m in Belfast for Christmas. Friends have bought a house in a part of town they don’t want to name because, depending on what you call the neighbourhood, you’ll make somebody nervous. She says she lives behind the cinema at the bottom of the hill. Everyone knows what she means and everyone stays relaxed.

I have never felt a town that loves relaxing or the idea of it more than Belfast.  It’s been a long time coming. They lived tensed up for quite a while. I think they’ve earned it.

Witness a conversation with a dog-owner at a bus stop. He wore a knitted hat. The young boxer worried my glove while I explained my accent (Canadian by way of London) and heard about a sister who loved living in Toronto.

‘I love it here,’ I offered, trying not to sound as though I was in an Affirm Your Neighbour’s Country competition. ‘I think Belfast is wonderful.’

He looked at his feet and the unexpected snow – three inches in the past week – and I watched the top of his knit-hatted, white haired head. The dog stopped wagging. No one moved.  I began to feel nervous, in this once nervous-making part of town. Was he offended? Was I not supposed to like it? I glanced casually over my shoulder for the bus.

He finally looked up. His eyes were very blue.

‘It’s a great place to visit. It’s a miserable place to live.’

My friend, also Canadian, explained later that night.

‘They feel embarrassed.  Because of The Troubles,’ she said. ‘You’re a visitor. When you think of Belfast, you think of violence.’ She shrugged. ‘They’re sorry.’

Which, of course, you’d understand. Like coming from the family with the badly behaved boy. The one who throws Molotov cocktails at the school windows even though you know he’s a soprano who loves pigeons and the girl next door. No one cares. They’ll point to the windows and move their kids out of the school.

I didn’t think of this in the moment, wondering if he hated his job or had a terrible commute, but my bus arrived and I was spared asking a ridiculous question that could have roused memories of dead relations or vendettas and had who knows what effect on the dog.

The bus moved out of the nervous-making district (which side is nervous? How do you tell which side is which? I’ve heard someone say you can tell the Catholics, they’re smaller – they’ve always had less to eat) across a bridge as the hills behind the city appeared between the buildings, giving the town an old-fashioned, almost fairy-tale feel, as though you’d walk towards  them with your belongings on a stick.

We pulled up beside my favourite view and I leapt out to get a look at City Hall - lit up for the season and surrounded by steaming market stalls promoting food from Around the World.  Huge crowds stampeded the French hot chocolate stall and queued for nougat from ebullient Italians. I’d visited with my friend on the weekend as she bought lunch from the (well-ordered) German pavilion.

‘There’s still a sense of not quite believing it,’ she said, negotiating a sausage the size of a Dachshund. ‘You couldn’t have done this, even a few years ago. All these people, public building.’ She shook her head.

I looked at the shoppers and diners, clutching their chapatis and beef jerky, kids in Santa hats, their fathers carrying trees. I felt moved. Things can get better.

I joined the milling hoards and turned south, pleased with my orienting between the city centre and the university quarter (no reason for my smugness – it’s a straight line) where I was going to fetch a boot I’d dropped off for repair. I wasn’t merely looking forward to being able to wear something besides the one pair of shoes I’d brought on holiday, I was going to see the Cute Cobbler again and maybe get a bit of local admiration.

I don’t think I’d been fooling myself when I’d gone in the first time. He looked me up and down and spent longer talking about how little he liked computers and how much he liked movies than our exchange as patron and customer warranted. He wasn’t tall (Catholic?), probably 35 with the bright blue eyes I was beginning to recognise.

My entrance into the shop today was announced by a quaint-sounding PING. He appeared from behind his counter, holding a shoe. He recognised me, found the boot and handed it over before I produced my ticket. We made a lot of unnecessary eye contact as he demonstrated his handiwork. I took the boot and ran the zipper up and down myself.

‘I just need them to fit over my jeans,’ I said – also unnecessarily, but obviously wanting to give him the image of me in this irrefutably sexy footwear, worn in an obviously trendy fashion.

He – I have to say it – twinkled at me. Rather intensely. He took the boot and re-zipped what I’d undone, smiled a little and said

‘S’wella foam.’

I paused and leaned forward slightly.

‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

‘S’wella foam,’ he said, indicating the boot. Nodding and still looking intensely.

‘Ah.’

I waited. Perhaps he would say something else that would make these syllables intelligible. He brandished the boot again, smiling. Expectant.

It wasn’t going to happen.

And I thought – fuck.  I’m being flirted with, I KNOW I’m being flirted with, I can TELL I’m being flirted with and I have no idea what to say because I have no idea what’s been said. I made another valiant attempt.

‘Say again?’ I said, leaning so far forward my face was parallel with the cash register, giving the impression I had developed a frenzied zeal to understand the workings of a shoe shop and was about to jump the counter to find out How Things Were Done Around Here! or I wanted to jimmy the till.

He remained calm. He was from Northern Ireland. He’d seen worse.  He pointed to the boot and spoke again in the secret code that he assumed I would understand as English.

‘S’wella foam,’ he said, smiling and nodding. Putting my boot in a bag.

Tears rose in my throat. I was getting what I wanted – my GOD, he admired me, the brilliance of his glance catapulted off the twinkleometer – but I had no way of enjoying it. I swallowed and became very still. I spread my hands out slightly before me, evoking Jesus at the Last Supper. I lowered my voice and spoke slowly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t have the pleasure of understanding you.’

He pulled the boot back out.

‘S’wella. S’wella. It’s cold. It’s good for boots.’

Clanking and hissing indicated a new-forming synapse in my brain. A circuit connected. I screamed.

‘It’s the weather! It’s the weather! It’s the weather for them, for my boots.’

 ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Here’s a wee bag for ye.’

Both boots went in. I was panting, replete and triumphant. It wasn’t the kind of intercourse you’d usually write home about, but we’d come from total incomprehension to full communion. I had to add up my change twice before saying ‘This I usually understand’ inspiring him to remark ‘I’ll bet you do. And much more besides - ’ and there I had it. My local moment.

Of course I left my gloves and had to lean my bike, turn around and run in to get them which gave him the opportunity to twinkle further and say if he’d seen them, he’d have called me back.

In a gigantic retail outlet this afternoon I stopped to listen to a troupe of school children sing ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ and ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ with bits of holly stuck on their shirts.  They were directed by a conductor who half-way through forgot the words, guffawed, turned to the audience and murmured ‘Och, I’m brilliant’ and I laughed with the shoppers. But an arrow had already hit my heart, seeing people four-foot high, open and unafraid, not far from the nervous part of town, singing songs of peace.

This Christmas in Belfast - s’wella foam.



Belfast City Hall, December 2008
 


Friday 10 December 2010

Cafe Confidential

I write in cafes. I know this is cliché. David Mamet has written a book and that’s its title, Writing in Cafes, that’s how commonplace it is for writers to write in cafes.  When I go to cafes to write I see flocks of other writers, writing. We don’t look at each other, although I am aware of all of them and spend a great deal of energy imagining sex with most of them, which I’d rather you not tell my mother. This can mean I don’t get a lot written but quite honestly I’m surprised at all the writing that seems to get done. What can these people be writing that is possibly more interesting than what is going on in the café?

Par exemple. This below, overheard last month in a café in Queen’s Park (it’s close to trees and I can cycle there in under twenty minutes). Two girls, teenagers, one of them, shiny with nail varnish and lip gloss, huddled over her steamy, foamy, single skinny latte; her friend, less lacquered, drank tea and listened.

‘I is so messed up. I is an idiot. An idiot. I don’t even like him. I don’t even like him, I is such an idiot. When he kissed me, yeah? I was like No, no, don’t, I don’t even like you and I was so, whatever, and then we were kissing and kissing and kissing.’

Her friend spoke in a tone of honest bemusement.

‘I thought you were supposed to be so angry with him you couldn’t speak to him.’

‘I was! I know! I is an IDIOT. Please, please next time I do something with him, you just tell me No . Because I didn’t even like him before he kissed me but when he holds my  hand – it changes everything. You know? How did we get like this?’

‘We used to be in control and they liked us.’

‘How did we get like this? When did it change?’

They drank in silence. The first speaker sighed.

‘I is safe this time because I didn’t like him too much. I just didn’t let myself like him too much. He didn’t break my heart. But I is an idiot.’

She spoke with poetic resignation. I could feel her friend nodding behind me.

Weeks later I was writing in a cripplingly quaint pub in Mayfair – no mobile phones allowed, coal fires burning. I could see just the back of a brunette head, seated opposite a soft-spoken man, several years her senior. She was slightly drunk.

‘He is the most disgusting, repulsive and horrible man, he is a disgusting excuse of a human being. He repulses me. And he’s with her and I quite like her. She has a wonderful personality and the body of an angel. It’s her face, of course. Poor thing but you couldn’t not like her, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like her. And here I am, all wrinkly and obese. She’s thin as a rake but I like her. Whereas he is repulsive. He had the gall, the gall to contest our pre-nup. Can you imagine? No, no, can you imagine? I just never want to think about him again or hear his name again. Which is difficult, because I quite like her.’

I saw them rise, ten minutes later. She was 35, 5’5”, probably ten stone. Not obese.

Finally, today I was leaving the bathroom of a pub in Notting Hill about which I will tell you something for nothing. This pub is just three doors down from the Kitchen and Pantry, a favourite haunt of children in push chairs, who bring their de-caffeinated mothers desperately seeking re-caffeination, older gentlemen and writers. I came at lunch and it was heaving, as is almost always the case, and couldn’t find a seat.

My bike was locked and it felt like a hassle to unlock, get on and cycle the streets, peering into crowded windows hoping for the seat that seemed increasingly unlikely at lunchtime in Notting Hill, so I decided to scope the ‘hood on foot. I went east for 68 seconds before I stumbled into the Duke of Wellington, at the corner of Portobello and Elgin Crescent. I’d seen it before and never been in – probably because I’m seldom looking for liqueur and almost always looking for space, two preferences which make most pubs ineligible. This pub was different. It was huge, wood-panelled and it was empty. I had a cup of peppermint tea and six tables to myself. I highly recommend it.

I visited the ladies room before I left and, just as I was emerging, I heard someone in a stall weeping. It was a strange, dispassionate sound, almost bored. As though she was fulfilling a civic duty to cry in the first cubicle of The Duke of Wellington ladies’ loo. I hovered at the door and my mind splintered into a dozen different scenarios:

SY:                  Excuse me, are you all right?
Her:                 (sobbing) What?
SY:                  Is – is there something wrong, are you all right?
Her:                 (sobbing)

 SY:                 (thinking) What is the protocol, does her not answering mean it’s best to leave and if so, how, now I’ve made contact? ‘Did you see the match? What a result. Go you Gunners! Bye now.’?

SY:                  Do you need anything?
Her:                 (clearing her throat)

Pause.

Her:                 Do you have a knife?

SY:                  (thinking, panicked) Is this rhetorical and just a dramatic expression of a suicidal tendency without any real threat? Is she trying to sever a knotty bit of string? Or is she asking me if I have a knife because she has a knife and she wants the shanking opportunities to be fair?

SY|:                 (patting her pockets, laughing falsely) Not on me.
Her:                 It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

At this point in my fantasy we begin an exchange on the inherent meaninglessness of life and I manage to point out the liberation of this perspective, which inspires her to burst forth from her cubicle and buy me lunch, because I was actually quite hungry, and she is so impressed by my acumen and kindness, she introduces me to her clever and hilarious attractive, single brother. Who appears at the bar just as the wind catches my hair and the light touches my cheeks.

In truth, I crept out of the room, sending silent and heart-felt good wishes for all the times I’d cried in public and wished I’d been left alone. I wondered, though, had I sat outside her cubicle long enough would I have heard her, talking to herself or on her mobile saying to a friend ‘He is disgusting but I is an idiot.’

Which, in some form or other, seems to be what a lot of my writing is about, so perhaps it all comes full circle in the end.