THE LAST DAYS OF ROME

Our next door neighbours just ordered a pizza and had it delivered to their hot tub.

I’m sure this is how Rome ended: Romulus Augustus, last of the emperors, munching on a slice of pepperoni in a flurry of bubbles while the barbarians rampaged the streets.

The delivery guy was perfunctory, delivering as he was his boxes to someone in a towel. There was a social awkwardness about it, carried out in the driveway that leads to their garden. He quickly got back in his car, crinkling with hot polyester, flicked on his lights, and drove away.

I don’t blame them for enjoying the summer. It was past 10 o’clock, and still above the street and lamplit trees, the sky was fading into warm purple. I love this end of July. The sky reminds me of so many camps gone by when we’d sit under clouds just like this, chatting about life and the universe in that way that pretty much everyone does, given a sultry breeze and a happy band of friends.

I think they’re complementing the pizza with a little Roman vino. That’s just a guess from the raised voices, and the soft chink above the noise of the bubbles.

Rome had had its day, hadn’t it? The world was moving on to the beginning of what we call medieval times, and the golden age of antiquity was coming to an abrupt end. I wonder whether Romulus had any idea of what the barbarians brought with them, of the sun going down on the eternal empire and of the end of all things. Probably not. As one person once observed, there was a day when you went out to play with your mates and it was the last ever time and none of you had any idea.

Perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps my neighbours have it right, and are just enjoying the moment with their pals in their back garden. Who knows whether tomorrow it rains and next year things are different? It’s good to make memories, and balmy summer nights at the end of July seem to be just about perfect for that.

I just hope they don’t get pepperonis stuck in the plug hole.

EGGS AND POTATOES

“Remember,” says the old Russian Proverb, “The same water that hardens the egg, also softens the potatoes.”

What does that mean, do you reckon? That it’s okay if we react differently to the same thing happening to us? We’re not supposed to expect to be eggs if we’re actually potatoes? Don’t compare yourself to how other people react?

Or just, Russian potatoes taste a bit eggy because they always cook ‘em in the same pan?

Eggs and potatoes; weird thing to cook together. If you were keeping warm in the long Siberian winter, sure, you probably would boil up some spuds and slip a couple of hard-boiled eggies into your slippers for warmth I guess. I doubt I’d eat all that stodge though.

Also, eggs have an inedible shell, and potatoes have a thin but edible skin. What’s more (and you might be different) we always peel our potatoes before boiling them, meaning that at the boiling stage, the potato has been deprived of its natural protection.

Finally, eggs start off soft - liquid soft in fact, whereas potatoes grow firm in the dark  winter soil. Before they’ve hit the water, the egg and the potato were fundamentally different, down to the molecule. I’m starting to think this proverb isn’t about the water at all.

Keep the skin on the potato, bake it in the oven and weirdly, the skin goes hard while the inside goes soft! Now that’s some engineering. I’ve no idea what happens to an uncracked egg if you bake it at 120 degrees. Presumably it blows up like a little pressure bomb; that’s an experiment I’m not willing to try.

So you could say that the same oven that bakes the potato also explodes the egg and has you picking shell out of the element.

Or you could say the same air that dries the paint also tickles the caterpillar. Or the same snow that excites a toddler annoys a chartered accountant. Or the same kind of apple that Eve munched on, also bopped Isaac Newton on the noggin.

I guess the point is about resilience. I don’t have to have everything sorted out if I’m in hot water, and I don’t have to be commando-tough to survive a little testing time. The egg is designed to harden; the potato is hardwired to soften. The caterpillar giggles and the thixotropic paint crystallises in the sunshine; the chartered account works from home and, if able to, remembers what it’s like to be a toddler on a tea tray.

I don’t know what Newton was playing at.

Everyone’s different.

SHOOTING A BULLET WITH A BULLET

We went to a family dinner yesterday, at which my sister told us that mortgages are illegal and we can all expect our money back within a couple of years.

She also seemed certain she’d be winning the lottery soon and buying all our houses for us regardless.

I love that heart so very much. I’d do the same, unquestionably, though as I’ve said before, if we really did win the lottery, I’d want to keep that news as quiet as it could possibly be - rather than declare it to the whole of the Toby Carvery.

Anyway. I don’t know where that indefatigable confidence comes from; I don’t have it. I’m the brother who would build a spreadsheet that generates 500,000 rows of six random numbers between 1 and 50, and then calculate how often an input selection of integers matches the numbers in the rows.

To borrow a phrase from my astrophysicist friends, it’s like trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet. Or, I guess, land a lunar rover on the surface of the moon without crushing the astronauts in it.

I don’t think she believes we did that either, by the way. Such is the inertia of an alternative narrative proponent (conspiracy theorist) - if you can see it, it probably didn’t happen.

I’m all for her winning the lottery. Come to think of it, I’m all for the lizard-illuminati who run the world, finally fessing up and giving us back our mortgages in lump sums.

“Way too many rich people,” I said, carefully, “… who are always going to want to either get much much richer, or cling on to what they already have.”

I should have asked her to explain, I think. Perhaps there’s something world-shaking coming that the alternative narrators have seen from their hours and hours of research.  I don’t want to rule it out. Nevertheless, it really seems unlikely, given the state of everything at the moment. I think I’d rather fancy her chances with the lottery.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON HARMONY

The lady is doing a cross-stitch and watching American hallmark movies. You know the kind; a pretty girl moves back to her small hometown after a failed relationship in the city. Her high school boyfriend is now some troubled heartbroken dude who wears a lumberjack jacket and chops up wood, and it’s all a bit awkward. City boyfriend turns up and he’s all suit and smarmy and our plucky heroine ends up having to choose between the bright lights and the home comforts, just as the Christmas snow starts falling.

Sunday afternoon. I like it. The curtain billows and the sun is warm. The sky is summer bay blue.

Meanwhile I’m not wasting my time! No way! I’m watching YouTube clips of a jazz musician dissecting and explaining how cool the Thomas the Tank Engine theme is. Honestly, the way it modulates through the keys using the ol’ 2-5-1 progression, switches up, switches down - ends up in A flat having started in C! Amazing! And it does all that while smoothly chugging its way into your long-term memory.

Elsewhere ‘Brad’ is pushing away Chloe’s advances while Jack is buying the local cookie store and evicting old Edgar and Mary. It’s all too much for Clarissa who’s considering her future in Hunters Valley or whatever it’s called this week.

You’ll never guess what the hi-hat Is in Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s a steam engine puffing across the beats! Love that. And the way the bridge gets you back to the theme motif! Genius.

I suppose the best tunes are the ones where the melody, the counterpoint, all the components of the music dance around a central idea, in harmony, different, unique but beautiful when brought together.

I thought about that a lot just now, here on the sofa in the open-window summer breeze.

MIDSUMMER CHRISTMAS

End of term round these parts, and boy does being married to a teacher feel like having a second Christmas.

Hand-drawn cards got pulled out of sparkly bags, boxes of Dairymilk, little bottles of Prosecco and homemade gin, necklaces and bookmarks, neatly wrapped packets of fudge and jars of sweets. Ding dong merrily and indeed on high.

It’s not just the teachers either. We’ve been to Sainsbury’s multiple times this week looking for little gifts for the TAs, the children, and, wonderfully, the school cleaner.

“Do you like Pimms?” asked Sammy just now, sliding a fresh bottle of the fruity gin from a slender wine-shaped gift bag.

“I think so,” I said. Next out was a bottle of Chenin Blanc. I like that too.

So here we are, me and ‘The World’s Best Teacher’ surrounded by the compliments of the season.

When did this start, this Midsummer Christmas? I don’t remember it in the 80s. There must be a lot of pressure on kids and families these days. And what do you do if you’ve a huge family and not much money? How do you shell out for your teachers and classmates? And what happens if you don’t?

“This one’s for you,” said my doubtlessly hard-working, overstretched, wonderful significant-other. By the way I’m not saying teachers don’t deserve it; I can’t quite believe the hours and effort they put into their work, and compared to what I do, the stress levels are seriously off-the-chart. Trust me, they deserve a thank you at the very least.

Sammy placed a chocolate orange on the table and tapped it as if to indicate that even I, someone who has barely contributed to the school year in any way at all, could still be part of Midsummer Christmas. I smiled. Well, after all - it is the season, I thought. Fa la la la la.

TEN DEGREES COOLER

It’s ten degrees cooler today, so I (and presumably 60 million other hugely relieved Brits) can stop going on about the weather.

I feel like my brain got a bit messed up in all of that heat. When I woke up this morning I was feeling really different about everything; sort of clearer, but a bit disorientated too. Outside, the grey sky rolled over the park, the trees sighed with a light breeze and the cool air blew and billowed the curtains.

It was like a tall glass of lemonade, the shade of a verandah or a darkened room at the end of a long day - except I was feeling odd.

I think I must have been seriously overheated. Circuits snapped, facts lost, simple tasks forgotten - like a computer that was churning its way through CPU power and slowing into a dead-stall. I’d felt fine, I thought. If you’d had a conversation with me, you’d probably not have noticed anything different; it was just that I was running very slow. Today, it seems, an overnight reboot has reset everything.

I’m sure I’ll be back to my normal self soon enough, whatever that means. I just have to start up all the applications and programs that tick over in the background, you know, the things that make me sort of me. Hey, maybe I’ll actually end up ten degrees cooler? You know, sort of closer to Fonzie off of Happy Days. Perhaps that’s what the reboot is all about?

Seems unlikely doesn’t it. I was always more of a Richie Cunningham, looking on with awe as Henry Winkler waterskis over the shark-infested water. And it would take more than a reboot for me to attempt that kind of thing, even in the heat, let me tell you.

BRITAIN IN THE HEAT

Apparently, in the heatwave, Blackpool Victoria Hospital propped its doors open to keep cool… and was subsequently overrun with seagulls.

We must be such an amusing country. I mean other places have had this stuff figured out for a long time. Here in the UK, temperatures in the mid 30s, or even in the mid minus 30s are actual front page news.

Mind you, there are other things we’ve got really quite sorted in our long, temperate history; things like constitutional democracy, the principle of the rule of law, tolerance of difference, and of course, how to make a jolly good cup of tea.

Well you know, mostly, anyway.

I read somewhere that in a heatwave you should copy what they do in Middle Eastern countries and dress in robes. I don’t have any robes so I thought about fashioning a sheet into a toga. Then I remembered that at some point, my wife will come home, and I don’t need to give her another thing to worry about.

Meanwhile, the runways are melting, Chester Zoo are giving their animals ice creams, and the Queen’s Guards outside Buckingham Palace still had to wear their bearskin hats and be watered by police officers.

It got to 36°C here yesterday, and if anything, today feels like it might get hotter, just as they predicted. How in the world did Britain ever conquer all those hot places? We dressed in red, sweated our way across the globe and boiled ourselves in our tea-tents. It must have been like seeing clowns scrabbling over the desert - with muskets and cannons. Sometimes I think we should just have stayed at home.

Well. It’s before 9am and it’s already 29. Yesterday afternoon I had to turn off the fans for a meeting and I was cooking like a turkey within minutes.

Our only consolation is that this, we think, will be the last day of it. If not, I am definitely fashioning that toga.

STICKY PLASTIC WEATHER

Someone posted on social media about how the weather presenters used to use yellow, sun-shaped stickers on the weather map, and now they just use gigantic red-zones of danger and death.

I remember the sticker days. A man in a grey suit and dark-rimmed glasses would hold a pile of plastic symbols in one hand, and stick them one-by-one to an actual board behind him while he explained which areas would be dripped on by a cartoon black cloud with a giant blue rain drop. Sometimes the stickers would slip off the country, which was always a giggle.

The computer-aided heatmap of today is much more precise. That’s how we know we’re in the ‘amber zone’ today, and not in the dark red, boiling trapezoid of central London and the Midlands. There might be a climate change agenda in the way it’s displayed (which is, I think, what the poster was getting at) but nevertheless, I think it’s much more helpful to have the precise information.

I am at home. We’ve rigged up blinds and pulled all the curtains, plus I’ve got the fans on. I’ll also run a shallow bath of cold water later, just for sort of paddling in. Right now, my thermometer says it’s 25°C inside and 27°C outside, but the prediction is that it will go up by 5-7 degrees in the next couple of hours.

The Twenty-First Century weatherman (open necked shirt, computer graphics, friendly manner) actually said that ‘typically, thousands of people die in heatwaves like this, and there’s no reason to expect this to be any different’.

And that’s it, isn’t it? We don’t live in the days of the sticky plastic weather symbols any more. We live in the age of forest fires every summer in Europe, of Australia gradually becoming uninhabitable, and of days in the UK that are hotter than the Western Sahara, where real people, our neighbours and friends, are likely to become seriously ill or even die from the heat.

Well anyway. Hot and getting hotter. Take care out there.

EXTREME HEAT NEXT WEEK

That rain didn’t come to much. And now next week, they’ve predicted (gulp) two days of the mercury hitting the mid-30s.

I remember being in Italy when it hit 38 once. I thought that was a temperature you’d never see in the UK. It wasn’t humid in Perugia particularly, just the kind of hat-melting sunshine that bakes you like a dry oven. I ate a lot of watermelon, thinking of home and the cool winds of the Home Counties.

True enough, the UK record is 38.7°C - recorded a decade after my student excursions in Perugia - but the boffins think that’ll get smashed on Tuesday, perhaps even up to the 40s! My brain stops working at that heat, so I shall be indoors with the fan on.

Lots of talk about climate change of course. Heatwaves are a talking point, but also a marker post, a glaring reminder of global warming. Even in our lifetime, without graphs or data, it seems obvious that the Earth’s climate is shifting, and that can’t be good.

“Oh it’s just too hot now,” says everyone in Britain, fanning themselves.

“You should’ve been here in the long ‘ot summer of 76” reply the over-50s. “They even made a Minister for Drought!“

“What happened to him?”

“Well, soon as he were in cabinet, it started bloomin’ rainin’ didn’t it?”

Every single heatwave.

Anyway, it is going to be hot next week, regardless of the long hot summer of 1976, and that does need some preparation, if not a government minister.

I’ll probably freeze some water, get the fans on early, take it easy. We should probably get some watermelon too. Always loved that.

ANTONIO AND ANDY

It hasn’t rained for quite a few days. Nevertheless, I can feel it in the hot air.

I’m out in the park, chilling after the working day. The grass is cracked and yellow-brown, the leaves are rippling in the warm dry breeze. It’s cloudy, but in that muggy, stuffy sort of way. Over the valley, the skies are a dull dark grey. It won’t be long, I guess.

An ice cream van tinkles in the distance. Rusty chimes stop mid-phrase. A dog barks. It reminds me of Vivaldi’s Summer - the stillness before a cacophony of angular violins stabs like lightning off the beat. I don’t think we’ll get any of that though.

Rain would be welcome. I’m so hot I think I’d just stay out here and guzzle it in like Andy Dufresne outside Shawshank. Glug, glug, glug, freedom!

I’m not doing so well at work at the moment. I don’t feel particularly clever and I keep making silly mistakes. Unfortunately in my last job there was someone who leapt on those things in front of everybody else, and I fear it’s rather damaged me. We all make mistakes I know. Nobody’s perfect, I know. Some things are just expected though. And I still feel embarrassed when they get spotted.

A heavy spot just splashed on my leg. Pizzicato strings. Another. Dink, dink… dink. The soft cello warbles, the harpsichord pauses.

I’m going in. Turns out I’m not quite Andy Dufresne today.

THE DAY I MADE UP A JOKE

I thought up a joke.

Q. Why don’t you need a thesaurus to tell if God is holy?

A. Because there’s no sin-in-him.

Thank you. No applause necessary. Oh sit down you, it was nothing. Honestly, this is too much, people - it wasn’t even that f- oh you’re what now? rolling on the floor laughing? Well I’ll be. Oh really. Too kind, too kind. Really too much.

Yeah jokes aren’t really my thing. Like card games, I can never remember the good ones. And I’d be terrified of getting halfway through and forgetting the setup line, or the punchline, and then blustering my way out of it. Joke-telling is a bit like that, I guess - you drive a bus-load of people towards a big laugh and you hope to goodness you’ve got the confidence to get them there via all the right stops.

Sammy and I were talking about jokes the other night. I told her someone had taken a flippant comment I’d made on social media, and used it back at me as though they’d thought it up. A rehashed joke is never as funny the second time around.

“It’s a bit like kids going ‘Knock Knock. Who’s There? An apple. An apple who? An apple in the fridge, hahahaha,’” I lamented.

Out of nowhere, Sammy burst out laughing, but laughing in that way I could rarely aim for. Then, I laughed because I’d picked something that I’d intended to be the opposite of funny, and it had been accidentally hilarious. And that kind of thing is funny.

And that’s why I think joke-telling might not be my forte. I don’t have the confidence or charm to capture a room with an absolute corker. Better to drive the bus by accident, I think. And anyway, if I can make my wife laugh, that for now, is quite enough for me.

ROYAL FANS

“Royal family fans worried about Prince George” blares the latest clickbait article. Oh no! What’s wrong with Prince George? Is there a problem with the eight-year-old third-in-line to the throne? Must we panic?

Nope. They were worried about him getting too hot in the royal box at Wimbledon, where, admittedly he was wearing a little tie and jacket on one of the hottest days of the year.

Who are these fans? You don’t read in history about the ‘fans of Henry V’ chanting from the terraces at the Battle of Agincourt. How did the Royal Family acquire ‘fans’, and what do they do, other than worry about the Queen and wave Union flags up the Mall?

Prince George will be alright. He has a lifetime ahead of hot sun and stuffy suits - this is probably great training. What’s more, I reckon they’ll have air-conditioning up there, given that the dress code for entry is ‘formal attire’ - Wimbledon would have built in some vents under the seats, I’d wager; all the men are required to wear jackets and ties - it would be expected for the royals to set the best example.

I’m not advocating the use of the word ‘subjects’ though that is undoubtedly what we are. I think ‘supporters’ is better than fans - we hold up the Queen as our head, our example, our banner. And yes, we don’t all do that, I know, but if we’re dividing her subjects into ‘fans’ and ‘non-fans’, then surely ‘supporters’ and ‘detractors’ might be the term to use, rather than equating a whole family to a sports team or reality TV celebs.

I think supporters is what they need, especially given their future. Though perhaps for future Wimbledons, and for Prince George in the royal box, an actual fan might be a good idea too.

SEASIDE BLUE

The sky is seaside blue today. I really like it. Cloudless, just like it is on holiday. When I see the trees, or the roofs of houses in the village, it’s less of a stretch to believe that the ocean might be just behind them.

Oh the sea! White foam and green waves, deep and glistening, rushing and roaring, waiting for me with sparkling wet sand, pockmarked with ocean-washed pebbles. There, just behind the Co-Op where the seagulls rip old chips from discarded newspaper and tired kids drag sandy surfboards back to their parents car.

I mean it’s a good job the sea isn’t lapping around the Co-Op car park. That would mean the South of England is having a very bad time of it. Perhaps it would better to imagine our town somehow transported to the coast. Then the sea could be just over those trees.

I’d just go and sit and think I reckon. I’d go and think about how stressful it is trying to buy a house. Or about imposter syndrome in a job you’ve been doing for a year and what that means. I’d watch the waves rush in, see the little boats stacked up on the misty horizon. Then I’d put my head back in the grass and listen to the gulls on the breeze.

Well. Anyway. It’s nice to see the sky looking so hopeful.

TATTOOS, THE BIBLE, AND THE WHY

I don’t know if this is controversial or not but I’m increasingly veering away from blindly following the Ten Commandments.

It’s tricky isn’t it? If your driving instructor tells you to slow down, that’s a command you should probably follow. If a notice on a country walk says ‘Danger Ahead’ you can certainly trust it, rather than just hurdling the fence and teetering off the clifftop.

I think that’s how a lot of people see the Bible too - a set of impersonal commands shouting at us in capitals from the depths of Leviticus. You choose how to respond. Some go along with the signposts, trusting in that implicit authority; rebellious pagans (and unfortunately a lot of Christians think that that means entirely everybody else) are quite happy to jump the fence and stick two fingers up at their driving instructors… and crash or fall to their untimely deaths, presumably. Or, have a jolly fun time on the way down.

Here’s where I’m at then, I think. I trust the Authority, but I’m also keen to find the heart behind the why. In other words, following isn’t a problem, but blindly following might be.

Let’s take tattoos. In Leviticus, God tells Moses to forbid the Israelites from marking their bodies. A lot of us (me included) stopped right there. It specifically says ‘Don’t get tattoos’ so I wasn’t ever going to get tattoos. But I never really paused to ask why. What’s the heart of God?

Well. It turns out that in Egypt, tattoos were a permanent mark of slavery. And in Canaan, the land the Israelites were headed for, the native Canaanites would print on and slash their bodies in commemoration of the dead. No wonder God didn’t want the Israelites to do that! He was calling them to be different, to stand out from the culture they’d been rescued from, and to be pure in the culture they were called to. That was how they would be known as his own. In addition to the historical context, I also found out that the actual word ‘tattoo’ was only added in the 1700s. The context adds a lot of light to the question of how this verse applies to us.

And that’s the point, I think: finding the context. In the same chapter (Leviticus 19) the people are instructed to: leave the edges of fields unharvested so that there is always food for the poor; respect the elderly by standing up in their presence; leave good healthy margin in life; keep clothing simple, and not to eat meat that’s more than three days old, among other commandments.

For each of these, there’s a really obvious why:

1. Looking after the poor is the right thing to do. After all, it could so easily be you. Don’t be greedy.
2. Older people need to sit down more than younger people do. It will be you someday.
3. If you physically burn out you’ll have nothing to give anyone, and poverty will find you.
4. Dressing simply is sensible in the hot sun and dusty wind.
5. Fridges haven’t been invented yet, and meat goes bad really quickly.

So, the question is: is it okay to search for the why, or, if God just says it, that’s enough? And it matters what you think about this because there are bigger issues than tattoos and feeding the poor out there.

Personally, I think God is longing for relationship, for dialogue, for us to both seek his heart and to trust him when he sends us those warning signposts. But both approaches start with a good relationship. I don’t want to blindly follow - this isn’t Nineteen-Eighty-Four and God is not Big Brother. I think trust and relationship go hand in hand.

I still won’t get tattoos though. But if I did, I would absolutely be weighing it up in prayer, choosing wisely, considering what I truly believe about why God wants me to honour my body, and what that says to the world about him.

In the end it’s always got to be about that hasn’t it? Honouring your parents, keeping the sabbath, not having idols, respecting people and their property, not being resentful or jealous, showing kindness to strangers and foreigners and being generous to the poor - it all tells a story about how much we honour and glorify the God of hope and love, in a world of darkness and despair. And the more I think about it, the more I think that that might be the why.

FEELING BETTER IN THE GARDEN

“You feel better being in the garden, don’t you?” said Sammy, smiling.

We were watching Gardeners’ World, a programme that showcases all things garden, and in this case, the Hampton Court Flower Show.

“Yes,” I said, thinking.

I was thinking about how eventually we turn into our parents. And about how being in the garden is probably in my Dad’s top three things in the world, and about how unlikely it would be that I’m now watching Gardeners’ World.

I spent years pushing back against it. Walks out would always involve my Dad giving the Latin name of the roadside blooms, explaining about which conditions are best for so-and-so’s alliums and roses, and stopping to chat with people about dahlias. It was always so embarrassing.

And yet, I don’t think those people were always embarrassed to talk about their gardens. I think they loved it. I think they enjoyed someone who appreciated that very English drive to create splashes of colour and comfort, bulging veg and glistening flora just outside their houses.

And I understand it more these days. We’ve started to grow tomatoes, potatoes, peas, and chillis in our little garden, ourselves. It’s relaxing to see how those little fighters have pushed up through the soil, burst into the sunlight, and are starting to flower and fruit.

She’s right. I do feel better being in the garden. It’s helping me grow. And in our next house, I hope we’ll have good opportunity to create a space that makes us feel amazing.

CHIMPY AND THE BRAIN

I’m sure it used to be a simple equation: I am hungry; I need food; there’s some food; I should eat it; high five, self! Problem solved.

The problem is that, post-wedding, my brain hasn’t quite caught up with the new ‘rules’. And in the current system, if you work from home and you eat the last tin of beans, say, or that portion of lovely homemade vegetable soup, or an entire packet of Bakewell slices when you’re home alone… it turns out it’s not the best.

But the brain still switches into the old routine, like a chimp at an all-you-can-eat-buffet. I am hungry; here is food; I should eat food.

But no chimpy, no. No high-fives for you. Put that packet of M&Ms down.

This state of affairs has led to me visiting the kitchen on something of a loop, opening the fridge door, staring at the lush contents like an explorer staring at a verdant new world, and then closing the door again (plunging paradise back into chilly darkness) and going back to my desk in the spare room. And repeat.

It is better for me. And I actually don’t mind too much really. It’s nice to be organised. I’m just a bit of a snacker, it turns out. The equation might be more complicated, but you know, sometimes the tamed chimp is the best.

Plus. Two can play at that game; I’ve hidden the Jaffa Cakes.

LEAVING AT THE RIGHT TIME

I went to an old colleague’s leaving drinks last night. He’s not old, I mean the colleague-ness is old, as in, he’s from my old work.

I left the pub as they started doing shots, a sight which, since an incident in 2011, has always been a key indicator that it’s my time to leave. When the tiny glasses of sambuca and tequila come out, it’s a short slope to a long drop, and so drop out I did.

I was surprised to find it still light. It was around 9pm and the summer clouds hung over the station. Long strands of purple and silver stretched across the rippled sky. I headed for the bus.

I miss those moments. Working remotely is okay but it’s the friendships I miss. My old colleagues, only just back in the office, felt similarly.

“Covid’s changed everything,” said one, gesturing with a flick of the hand. Even so, I saw more of my old colleagues last night than I have any of my new ones in the last year.

That being said, I came away more certain than ever that I had left at the right time, and jumped ship well. Things aren’t perfect in my new job, but from last night’s conversations, I’m convinced staying there at my old one would have continued to be more and more soul-crunching. It is good to know when to leave; even better to be reassured that you did so at the best moment.