One Day in History

Well, firstly apologies for the delay. It has been a very busy couple of weeks. There have been job interviews (well, a job interview), gigs (two - the Bull & Gate in Kentish Town and The Horn in St Albans), romantic dates (with the lovely FM), and an awful lot of arguments and general humptiness (principally with the Beast of Willesden Green but also a falling out with the Dame over his stage demeanour). Also YD appears to have taken becoming thirteen somewhat seriously (as in 'I am now a teenager so I am going to become uncommunicative, moody and don't try and hug me, OK!') which I have found a little difficult as whilst I am used to that with OD, it was a bit of shock to see YD conform to stereotype too (and with such speed!)

However, no time to write this up now but I will attempt to bring you various snippets over the coming days. In the meantime, I – like thousands of others – contributed to the ‘One Day in History’ mega-blog of 17^th October (www.historymatters.org.uk). Here was my bit. Rant, moan, etc.

---- Tuesday 17th October ----
There is nothing like starting the day with an argument. This morning, like nearly every weekday morning for the past month, was no exception. Since OD moved in with me last June, I have found it increasingly difficult to get her out of bed for school (if I can achieve that at all). Year 11 is her GCSE year. According to her recent Academic Progress report she is currently set to achieve two ‘C’ grades and fail everything else. This time last year she had anticipated ‘A’s across the board. Yep - things have really gone down the tube.

In order to get to school for 8:45, OD needs to leave my house at 7:45. I always wake her at 7:00 and give her ten minutes to doze before calling her again. When she started Year 11 in September, she would invariably rise at this point. However, six weeks later and this is no longer the case. “Ten more minutes” she calls out to me. I give her five and call her at 7:15. Then again at 7:20. At 7:25 I enter her room: “You have twenty minutes to get ready for school”. Five minutes later and still no sign of movement. “You are now going to be late, it is just a question of how late” I shout through her door at her. She ignores me. I re-enter her bedroom. She is sitting cross-legged on her bed, texting. “Get out my room” she shouts angrily. “Get up for school and I will” I respond. “Fuck off out of my room” she yells back. It is now 7:35. She sneers at me: “I can’t get up when you’re in the house. I used to get up when you went to work earlier”. I point out that the reason I changed my hours of employment was because that was the very thing she wasn’t doing and neither was she going to school. We exchange a few more shouts and I go downstairs, hurl a cereal bowl at the floor in temper and stomp out. Now who is the child and who is the adult? “You’ve really annoyed me today” I tell her before I leave. She just smiles. Mission accomplished then.

My day at the office is the same as most of my time there. I have a variety of dull and uninspiring clerical tasks to complete, a number of which I achieve whilst some roll over to tomorrow. I buy a flavourless lunch from an over-priced sandwich chain in Cheapside and spend the afternoon looking at my PC screen and arguing with our external Auditors about why the controls being in put in place for our SWIFT message transmissions are so severe. My company have outsourced their IT infrastructure services. They monitor the SWIFT transmissions. However Audit now want us to monitor their monitoring. Why? If the messages are not being correctly despatched or safely received, we’ll soon know about it as the business itself will complain. So is there any purpose to this new initiative? No, not really. None at all in fact.

I’ve never understood why Audit departments are held in such high regard when their chief function is to state the obvious and increase one’s workload with an ever burgeoning number of needless reports. Each year you spend hours explaining why things are done they way they are to some fresh-faced graduate who is looking to impress his new paymasters with his diligence and then twelve months later the exercise is repeated all over again with someone completely different as the graduate has either moved on to a new client or departed the organisation due to terminal boredom. In the meantime you are faced with ever increasing levels of pointless paperwork just so someone upon high can tick a box with the word ‘yes’ next to it. Pointless? Who said that!

I left work at 6:30 and took the drain to Waterloo station where I met FM at 7:00 and we dined at the nearby Thai Silk restaurant. The place was packed (all the more surprising for a Tuesday) and so I was glad I’d booked a table in advance. After the meal (which was pretty darn good; they do a mean green curry) we retired for a couple of snifters at a local hostelry before I walked FM back to the station and she wended her way home to Richmond. As third dates go it was, I feel, a success. I eventually reached my home in beautiful downtown Watford just after midnight. OD was asleep and on the kitchen table was a note saying ‘my skirt and jumper are in the washing machine’. I took them out and hung them on the collapsible clothes horse before getting to bed around half-midnight. Six hours till the alarm then - and another argument, of course.