Meanwhile, the office is slowly emptying and the amount of feasible work I can actually do is rolling to a festive zero. I need technical help from Patrick, who isn't here. I'm not sure anyone who actually is here really cares whether I'm here or not and it's all adding up to one decisive course of action for me.
It's kind of odd, this. It feels like Christmas is over already, not just beginning. The empty desks with their switched-off strings of fairy lights look more like they belong to January than to December. Ian and Pavel have gone, leaving their runway of illuminations behind them. Erica's tinsel bristles between the monitors, catching the light as the air conditioning tickles it. Some engineers are having a conversation about encryption. Bleak.
What happened to bring-your-toys-in day? That was always a thing - Buckaroo on the carpet, or, if you were lucky, the Millenium Falcon in a space battle with an X-wing, swooping over the classroom tables and pencil pots.
Then, a little older, that magic changed but it was still very real - the Christmas assembly. I was in the orchestra, with a short length of tinsel wrapped around the bottom of my clarinet, and "Hark the Harold" (Mr Roach had a weird sense of humour) in Bb, on a rickety music stand in front of me.
Mr Davies would read a Betjeman poem, the Headmaster would recite John chapter 1, they'd give out the Rosebowl prize to one of the Sixth Formers (just for being brilliant I seem to remember) and then we'd all walk home in the crisp blue afternoon, with O Come All Ye Faithful still ringing in our ears.
It's clouded over today. And I don't care much for email encryption. Oh, and would you believe it... Patrick is here. He's been hiding, I think.
You know what else I think?
I'm going home.
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