"Mmm." Thanks for that.
"Still, you've had a nice break."
"Yeah," I said automatically, then, "No wait - no I haven't! It's been long but it hasn't been nice."
"Well, you've had a nice long break anyway," replied my Dad clattering dishes absent-mindedly.
Right. My Mum calls this the 'word tube' - which is when my Dad has things he has to say, (out loud) to satisfy some mysterious criterion that none of us know about and does so apropos of nothing. We can sometimes be three conversations ahead of the pileup of sentences in the word tube.
Alas, the niceness of the length of the break hadn't compensated for the distinctive lack of niceness at having my Mum in hospital.
We broke her out of the acute stroke unit on Friday. Stacked with leftover New Year balloons and piles of cardigans, we helped her into the passenger seat and drove her home. She's doing really well and it's great to have her back where she belongs. Especially with...
... work tomorrow. Yep, the Great Return to the world of software engineers, table football and the Nestle 3000. I dread to think what emails await me there. Plus the inevitable "Did you have a good Christmas?" conversations. I wouldn't mind this year, if I could say what everyone else says:
"Yeah it was quiet, uneventful really. Glad I wasn't here though! How about you, Matt?"
"Well, let me begin..."
The Great Return. This morning, my friend Rory said he 'couldn't work in an office because of the tedium of it being the same every day.'
There is a part of me that knows we all feel this way. The sameness is not the constant stream of predictable safety we convince ourselves is charming and cherishable - it's death: slow, dull, unending death by photocopiers and kitchen chit-chat. That's why we need little lifelines - practical jokes, boring conversations and political battles magnifying the tiny things into massive dramas - whose name comes first in an email? Why did you copy so-and-so in?
... oh and the world war that begins every time someone's favourite mug goes missing! These are our entertainments, reminding us desk-bound-battery-hens that we still belong in the human race where real people have real dramas and that we haven't lost the ability to swing through the full range of our homo-sapien emotions while tapping away at our keyboards.
It's not quite the way I wanted to change the world.
Rory's an estate agent. He's very good with real people. I imagine he knows how to sell expensive items as well as hold interesting conversation with wealthy and sociable home-owners and buyers.
"Right, the bins go out tomorrow as well," said my Dad pulling a fork through a tea towel. My Mum, perched on her mountain of cushions with a digestive in one hand and the handle of her walking stick in the other, turned and looked at me as if to say, 'Don't worry, he's not looking for a response. Those are just words escaping from the word tube.'
As I suppose (on reflection) are these.
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