I STUDY SALES PEOPLE IN THE WILD

How do you get into car sales? I’m not looking for a change of career, don’t worry. No, I’m just intrigued because I’m sitting in the car garage, waiting for the car to be MOTd and I’m suddenly noticing the sales people.

I find sales people fascinating. I’m not one, despite me liking to think I could do anything. I know I’m not built for that world, and so whenever I’m around them I feel a bit like David Attenborough, watching extraordinary creatures from a layer of distance.

And here they are. Remarkable. At some level I think these are the kind of people who end up on The Apprentice; ambitious, young, bold, charming. Sometimes calculating, and always with a single eye on the money. I’m beguiled by it sometimes - is this niceness an illusion? I seem to be falling for it. When I’m parted with my cash, will this person switch it off and no longer like me as a person? Will I be driving home in a lemon while they buckle themselves into a Ferrari?

I admire the focus of the car sales executive. They like winning, and they don’t understand why not everyone feels the same. They probably make Monopoly a nightmare. But they do know what they want, and they are determined to go for it, and that I think is noble.

Today they’re flitting about with nervous couples, anxious to make the right choice. They sit on one side of the small round table, the sales person sits on the other. Shiny shoes, pressed trousers, corporate fleece, and shirt and tie poking uncomfortably underneath. In the summer, I’d wager that fleece is a jacket, and the sales manager lets them forego the tie for an open shirt. The shiny shoes, like the shiny floor beneath them, are almost certainly perennial.

Paperwork, twiddled pen, tablet. He leans forward. Half their age, gleaming eyes. I can’t hear the conversation, but the picture reminds me of a sort of underwater scene for some reason. Perhaps it’s the fish-tank glass and artily placed plants.

My guess is that as they grow, sales people gradually realise that it’s always been about people. I’m not an expert, but it seems obvious that the real point of a great sales transaction is that both parties go away with the better deal -  both exchanging one thing for another and feeling good about it. Life is transactional, but believe it or not, it feels greatest when everybody wins.

And it’s exactly that point that makes me terrible at Monopoly.

Anyway, the car’s ready. I suppose the MOT is a transactional affair. We keep the car roadworthy, the government lets us drive it. We prove it by asking professionals to test it, they take our money and then look carefully at the brakes. Then I get in and use those brakes to avoid crumpling my car into the back of a van marked ‘Mr Squeegee’. And that would be another transactional affair wouldn’t it? See, much better when everyone wins.

BLUE

Last night we watched Blue, the ‘boy band’ performing in the Radio 1 Live Lounge.

Not exactly my choice but you know, marriage does funny things to us.

Apparently it’s 25 years since they had one of their two hits or something. For some reason they were dressed in clothes that looked like they’d come out of a Peaky-Blinders-themed charity shop.

It’s a thing for these reforming dad bands. Mark Owen out of Take That (who was something of a heartthrob in the 90s) now dresses like Compo out of Last of The Summer Wine. It’s flat caps, brown shirts and long coats. And Blue were of course, formulaically arrayed.

That’s the illusion of these bands isn’t it? Originality is unoriginal - it always was. Everything is manufactured. Even Antony Costa was winking at the camera whenever it zoomed in on his solo parts as though he were still a cheeky chappy who’d been told to look like he can’t believe his luck. 

It was hosted by Vernon Kay. Now, I like Vernon. He’s a sort of northern everyman, an avuncular host who sets you at ease. In this though, he came across as though he’d somehow secured a slot with The Beatles, but secretly, deep-down, knew that they were really just well, Blue. At one point he asked them about the last 25 years and they just said they’d been touring in other countries and hadn’t had time to be doing stuff in the UK. I raised an eyebrow.

Listen, I don’t mind Blue. You like what you like, and these guys appeal to a demographic that, let’s be honest, isn’t me. Their music is fine, but there’s nothing interesting about it. And they are fortunate to be able to do what they do, and sing their old songs to the mellow arrangement of (some of) the BBC Concert Orchestra - professional as ever. They seem like nice guys, like tattooed market traders who somehow learned to sing in harmony.

We got to the end of the 25 minutes, just as they were wrapping up an orchestral cover of Rolling in the Deep while Vernon beamed as though he was forcing himself not to check his watch.

“That’s that then,” I said.

“I can’t believe you’re still watching it to be honest,” said Sammy, looking up from her phone, uninterested.

Unbelievable.

MONASTIC MESSAGING

Well it lasted until 6:30pm. There’ll always be someone who breaks the silence.

I wonder if monks have the same trouble. Unbroken reverence for hours, and then a brother accidentally stubs a toe, or just forgets and blurts out the football scores? Seems unlikely.

But that’s different isn’t it? That’s organised community discipline - something that doesn’t really apply to WhatsApp messages. There’s no Abbot giving homilies about messaging etiquette. There’s no holy book offering guidance on how to use emojis - no, we’re left to figure it out as a group, with a vague belief that mob rule will sort of figure it all out, and we, dutifully, will understand the rules.

Today has seen a return to the trickle-torrent of messages. I’ve sent a few, I’ve read a few, I’ve rolled my eyes at a few. Actually, I think it would have been great if the Bible had talked about emojis - I sometimes wonder whether my reactions to things are quite right. It was only recently that I discovered that the thumbs-up is passive-aggressive to Gen Z and that they use a coffin or skull instead of the laughing-crying face. Perhaps we should all resort to using words instead of hieroglyphics.

Or perhaps we just just use fewer ways to communicate. The monastery manages it - and there’s something very appealing about the simpler, quieter, medieval life.

THE DAY WITHOUT WHATSAPPS

Exciting news everyone. It’s just after 4:30pm and I’ve not had a single WhatsApp message or reaction so far today.

All groups quiet on the western front, the eastern front, and every other front then - no nonsense in the family chat, no pings or stickers in any of the church chats, no personal messages, nothing.

It’s kind of glorious.

I can’t remember a day like it! I mean even on Sabbath days, though I’m not there to see it, my phone gets stacked up with messages waiting for me on Sunday morning. Sometimes it’s triple figures! But this is different. Nobody has said a thing since about 9pm yesterday.

Will it last the whole day? I have to say I am doubtful. But as the sky turns from grey to black and the street lamps pop on, it seems more possible at least.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I’m tempted to stir the still water. What is it about us that we feel the need to poke a stick in a millpond to watch the ripples? But if I did message someone now, it would just pollute the stillness, wouldn’t it? If someone replied, I might never have known how long this day might last. No, I must resist.

There’s something beautiful about the silence.

A BOILING ROOM IN THE WHITE HOUSE

I had a very real dream last night in which I went to the White House and sat at the back of a meeting with President Trump.

Not just me, lots of advisors and reporters and TV cameras and the like - and not in the Oval Office but in a boiling sunlit room somewhere where everyone was squeezed a little too close together. Not him of course: he was sitting behind a very shiny desk, holding court as though he’d deliberately wanted everyone there to feel uncomfortable.

I feel wary sharing dreams. I wonder whether they accidentally reveal more about me than I’d like.

I don’t quite know what the meeting was about but at some point, the President looked at me. I could tell somehow that he saw something different or unusual about me. I had caught his eye.

“How about someone from the back of the room?” he said, suddenly. The reporters all went silent as he pretended to flick his gaze along the back row of wooden seats. “You,” he said, landing on me.

A question swirled in my head, something to do with my work I think. I must have made it sound incredibly relevant to the US government, and I must have sounded eloquent because the next thing he said was, “See, the Brits always sound like the smartest in the room, believe me. Well, the second smartest.”

Everyone laughed. And suddenly the alarm clock was beeping and the room was dark and for some reason I was in a bed in England on a Tuesday morning.

Question. Why would I dream that? It was so weird and so real. Am I dreaming of significance? Is there something about me using words in high places? Why would my brain exaggerate and elevate its own eloquence? Or is this just a continuation of me thinking about which questions I would ask him? After all the things I thought I would ask, I’d ask him something about work? Really Matt? To be honest, in the dream I was trying to stay out of it altogether. He picked me out.

Anyway. It’s now gone 9am and it still feels a bit real. I even feel jet lagged, as though I’d flown back in the few head-spinning seconds between Trump latching on to me and the clock beeping.

You know, I’m not sure I want it to mean anything.

SMALL PLATES

And as night follows day, the bus home again follows the bus there. Though the bus there took two hours and fifteen minutes in the end, so I’m kind of hoping for something a little quicker. Imagine having to do this every day! I’m pretty made up that the train is and always was my best option.

We all went out for lunch today in a swanky Oxford ‘small plates’ wine bar. It’s the kind of place that paints the walls dark violet and has bronze frames for pictures of chickens. ‘Small plates’ by the way, is code for ‘fancy tapas’.

Fancy tapas. It’s a swizz! I’ll tell you what they’ve invented there - starters at main course prices. Out come the ‘small’ plates with roasted peppers and tiny sausage rolls. There’s fish (hake) that could have revived itself in a fish tank, and little pots of truffle butter and oil for flatbreads and chunks of wholewheat loaf, and some swirl of salmon teriyaki with a kind of undefinable mousse and all manner of stringy garnish - tiny bean sprouts and seeds and black blobs of oily sauces.

“Best thing is,” had said the waiter, “To order two or three plates per person and then you’ve got a good range.” Yeah, I’ll bet. Not great for allergies though.

But my main problem is of course that the dining experience needs a main course. It really does. What small plates gives you is a bewildering array of the first course - and you can hardly believe that any of this will actually fill you up - followed by dessert. In effect it’s a restaurant where you have to have a prawn cocktail and then a knickerbocker glory - though obviously not from the 1970s. It’s gazpacho and cheesecake, pate and sticky toffee pudding, bruschetta and a tiramisu! Where’s my lovely mains?

I had to get the waiter to put a pen mark by everything I could eat. He was kind enough to do that. Then I persuaded him to leave the menu with me so that I didn’t poison myself.

I’m sure actual tapas isn’t this complicated. I think the idea must be to craft a flavoursome meal from a variety of components, brought out to you one by one. That’s fine in Spain, and if that’s the idea then great. But when they brought the fries out after I’d already polished off some scallops that would have gone perfectly well with them, I did start to wonder about the format of it all.

It’s dark out there. I can’t see a thing. It feels a bit like being on an aeroplane - though, ever so slightly less exciting. And all the way home I feel as though I’m missing out on the far better way to travel, the train that links me between two buses either side like a lovely filling in a well-made sandwich. Or, indeed, the main event in a three course dinner.

Small plates indeed. Tsk.

RAIL REPLACEMENT BUS

They’re replacing the bridge at Oxford station this week. Trains are messed up, so perhaps unbelievably today, I’m taking the bus… all the way there.

I do like an adventure. Right now the bus is crossing the Thames, and through the rainswept window I can see the great river stretching wide and dawn-grey beneath the bridge. It’s a new perspective. Normally I cross the river without even thinking about it.

Quite the adventure then! The houses are grander this side of the Thames - bays and balustrades, wide porches and garret windows. The roads are leafy too, though on mornings like this, those bushes and trees drip with rain rather than dappled sunlight.

I don’t have much idea of how long this bus takes. I imagine I’ll be later than normal, which, I admit is quite alright in the grand scheme of things. It’s certainly better than the dreaded rail replacement service that would have awaited me at Didcot today. That would have taken longer and is far less predictable.

We’re in the countryside now. A wood of spindly silver birches flashes by, then a green field speckled with white gulls. Now horses, farm buildings, copses and telegraph poles. I have no idea where we are, which is strangely appealing to me. Sometimes we want to know too much; it stops us believing, and makes faith much harder.

Apparently the temporary bridge at Oxford station will be made of polystyrene! I’d love to know the physics of how the same crumbly stuff that’s used for packing could be compacted enough to walk on. Maybe I’ll embrace that mystery next time and trust it’ll be alright, literally crossing that bridge when I come to it. But it isn’t today.

KING OF THE THERMOSTAT

I’ll tell you what I like. Extra jumpers. On a day like today when it’s chilly working from home, and when the month is tight, and so you are with the heating, an extra jumper is a lovely thing to slip into.

Sammy’s at work today so there’s nobody to suggest an alternative. I know her alternative; it involves the thermostat. No, today, I am king of the thermostat, and I have decreed that it shall be left alone.

I think I’m turning into my Dad. No bad thing, but an interesting development. He went so far as to tape up the thermostat and label it with a sticky saying ‘Do not touch!!!’ (Exclamation marks all his own). I thought it was funny at the time, not exactly realising it had a ring of destiny to it. Sammy asked me about my childhood the other day and I couldn’t remember him taking any days off except at Christmas and holidays. He worked hard for us and it was a terrific example. I can’t begrudge him his exclamation marks…

Although nowadays when I go to their house, it’s like the tropics, I might add! He does his jigsaw puzzles and his sudokus in a t-shirt!

Anyway, it’s cold today and I’m in two jumpers, enjoying the cushion of warm air they’re providing. Outside, the shimmering grey world looks wet and miserable, as though someone left a grey painting out in the rain. I’m kind of glad to be indoors today to be honest.

PETER CROUCH’S TWO HUNDRED WHITE T-SHIRTS

Ex-footballer Peter Crouch is in an advert at the moment, for a washing powder. In it, he compares his grubby white t-shirts to much more brilliant white examples in order to show how easy it is for white to fade to dingy grey without you realising.

Not with new ‘Super White Sparkle Shine Washing Powder’ though. Alright - I made that name up, but you get the drift. It apparently gets your whites so white that you can see them from space or something.

But then the joke at the end is that Peter already has hundreds of brilliant white t-shirts. You actually see him prancing about between the racks, doing the ‘robot’ I guess. I assume that now he’s figured out how to keep them all white, he’s saying he doesn’t need so many?

It made me think. If you are significantly wealthy (as no doubt Mr Super White Sparkle Shine Let’s All Do The Robot is) does it make you less sensible about what you buy? I mean having two hundred white t-shirts seems like an indulgence.

I can’t afford a helicopter. If it was as cheap to me though, as a packet of Biscoff biscuits is, or even comparable to a holiday in Italy, would I just fancy a helicopter one day and then… buy it? That seems daft. But you know, I can’t rule it out. I’ve bought Biscoff biscuits on a whim before (and eaten them even more whimsically, I should add) and I’ve been to Italy a couple of times. Is it the same thing, just scaled? Would Elon Musk kick back with Bezos and Gates and chat about super cars as though they were Lego sets?

I doubt that Peter Crouch really does have two hundred white t-shirts. It just sounds like an awful lot of washing, and I’m not sure Abby Clancy’s the kind of person to tolerate her house being dwarfed by an enormous washing pile. Even the makers of Super White Sparkle Shine must admit that eventually t-shirts need to make it to the laundry basket.

SCHEDULED MESSAGES

Two things today.

One, WhatsApp should let you schedule messages. I’m telling you - that would change my life. Imagine! I could dream up all the things I have to say that pop eloquently into my head at 11pm… then send them at the exact time they’ll have maximum impact. Boom!

Two. It occurred to me today that I have no idea how many floors there are in the London office building. We work on Floor 2. I’ve had no need to go above Floor 3 until today, and as I was climbing the stairs to Floor 5 (which looks exactly like Floor 2 and Floor 4 by the way), I started to wonder. What would happen if I kept going? There were stairs to Floor 6. I was looking for a free booth to make a call.

I ended up on Floor 7, nestled into the capacious sofa of the reception area for an undefined company with fancy logos printed to the wall.

But is there a Floor 8? Probably. It felt as though I was inside the Infinite Hotel paradox.

I looked out of the window up there. Skyscrapers tower over chimneyed roofs - glass monsters in an old world. I saw the Shard above a rooftop, its familiar forked apex poking into the grey sky. The old NatWest building too, loomed behind some grey slates, itself now dwarfed by blander, taller blocks. I’m pretty sure it was the tallest in London when I was a kid. Progress: the things we build stay the same while the things our children build around them just get taller.

Which is why, WhatsApp, you need to move with the times and give us a schedule button! Sure, we’re going to keep on accidentally starting a group call, and yes, no-one in the history of WhatsApp has used it for a group call*, but that’s beside the point. What do we want? Scheduled messages! When do we want them? Tomorrow morning at 9am in each time zone. Progress eh.

*I feel as though I should point out that this is a rhetorical device I’ve added for comic effect. At some point, my wife will read this post and she will definitely tell me I can’t prove that nobody has ever used WhatsApp to call everyone on the chat. All I will say is that I was once lost in the woods looking for everyone in a particular WhatsApp group, and even then, I wouldn’t have dreamed of ringing them all on it.

HICCUPS AND OAT MILK

I’ve had the terrible hiccups, so instead of pushing a trolley round Sainsbury’s, I’m slowly digesting a hot oat milk at the in-store Starbucks.

I don’t get the hiccups very often, but for the last ten minutes my body has been involuntarily spasming and now I feel like my stomach is trying to turn itself inside out with each jolt of the diaphragm,

I don’t think Sammy minds. This was her idea. Though who knows what the trolley will be full of when she comes to find me in a minute. And if she runs into any fellow teachers, or parents of children who can’t quite believe that their teacher exists outside of the school, then she’ll be a little longer still. Honestly, sometimes it’s like being married to a local celebrity. I just stand in the background in much the same way personal protection officers would.

The milk is helping. It’s not really milk though is it? Oats aren’t mammals. I don’t actually know how oat milk is made and I don’t have signal for Google.

She’s back. Now all we have to do is pay, which is my job. Do they still say a shock is best for hiccups?

VIEW FROM THE OLIVE BRANCH

It’s really raining. One hour until my train, so I’ve decided to dive into the Olive Branch cafe opposite Oxford Railway station. It’s warmer, quieter, and the tea is nicer. Plus I’ve found a way to charge up my phone for the journey home.

It’s a good moment to reflect on the last couple of days in this city.  And the Sales Kick Off at the Leonardo. 

I think, on balance, I should not have come. I definitely thought it last night when I realised that the rest of the team had gone to dinner without me. 

I was one minute late getting to the lobby, so I waited.

After a while I started to realise that the chances of 11 people and 3 separate taxis being simultaneously more than 10 minutes late was so low that it couldn’t have happened, and that there had been only one other explanation.

It turns out that they all thought I was in the other taxi. Not a nice feeling though, being left behind. For a while I thought I would quite happily have just stayed at the hotel after all. It wouldn’t have done though. I ordered a cab and eventually went to meet them all at Gusto.

I just don’t think I belong in that crowd. But then… which crowd do I belong to? Sometimes I just don’t know. There was little I could contribute this week too. Much wasn’t relevant, or if it was, tough to absorb. It didn’t help that last night was so boiling hot, I failed to sleep before the hour ticked beyond a 2. When I opened my eyes, alive to the darkness and fully awake, I noticed it was just gone 4am. Now that I’m slumping into my tea at the Olive Branch, I can see how startling that maths looks.

Meanwhile, needing to be there meant that I couldn’t be at home for Sammy, and she really needed me. Just as our pizzas came out at Gusto, she rang, and in a way that I knew was sort of urgent. The quiet, late, antisocial extra at the table had to disappear and find a quiet corner. I was anxious. It didn’t make anything easier.

 

The cafe is filling up now. It will soon be time for me to splash through the glinting puddles, clutching my hood over my head and my sopping bag over my shoulders. I think my tea’s gone cold too.

I actually can’t wait to get home.