The digital wail of an alarm clock rips into the remnants of the quite wonderful dream I was having about Jet from Gladiators, and I crack an eye open. A silent black nose is inches front mine - now holding it’s breath in the anticipation that I will get up and feed it.
The black nose belongs to Toby, my parents elderly golden retriever.
I stir. Toby explodes into tail wagging and rapid panting. If a dog could be described to cross it’s legs to avoid peeing itself explosively, Toby is demonstrating it spectacularly well. Finding a pair of pants from the 1960s wardrobe in the corner of my room, I stumble out of my room and wander downstairs.
Toby attempts to push his way through the door before I have opened it - wedging his shoulders in a moment of stupidity known only to dogs, before wriggling and skipping into the frosty morning air.
It is a Monday in May, and I am not returning to the family business. I said my goodbyes last week and am looking forward to an unknown future working in an office. Granted, the first few months are going to be on probation, and I’m being paid peanuts, but I’m finally doing what I studied for at college - finally doing what I want to be doing.
I don’t have to get clothes ready. Such was my anticipation, excitement and nervousness on the previous night, I have pre-prepared clothes which are now hung along the stair bannister. I have an hour before the bus passes the end of the road I live on.
My first lunch is something of a personal speciality - cheese and pickle sandwiches. I speciality only in the sense that I tend to make these things due to the easiness and swiftness with which they can be both made and eaten. My Mum complains that I eat too fast, and my future wife will too. Food is fuel, and today I am wrapping it in tin foil before putting it in my brief case.
At 22 years old, the briefcase feels very much like a grown up accessory to be packing with pens, paper and lunch. At the weekend I bought a new diary section for my Filofax. The Filofax was a christmas present some years before, but has never been used in anger. Of course it never will, but on this first morning of a job in the “real world”, it seems like an essential item to have. I don’t know what I might use it for - but it seems important.
While busying myself with breakfast television, coffee, letting the dog back in, finding my keys, getting my shoes on and finding my coat, the clock inexorably ticks towards the moment I need to leave the house. This time isn’t the one that gets me to the bus stop just ahead of the bus. Oh no. This is the time I figured out gave me time enough to walk, and reach the bus stop so far in advance of the bus (to allow for unforseen accidents, complications or happenings) that I may as well have caught the previous one.
Leaving the house, briefcase proudly in hand, I wander up the street past the same houses I have since I was 5 years old. I’m taking things in this morning in a manner I will not do again for 5 years - until I leave home to find my own way in the world. Past the school teacher’s house next door. Past the girl I called my “girlfriend” for a couple of days last summer, and her bitchy little sister’s house. Past the owner of the local toyshop’s old house - noteable in the street for the christmas he put lights up in the tree outside his house, and had them stolen on the very first night. The house is now owned by a young family who are still repairing it after a lightning storm a few weeks ago that took out most of their wiring, and the damn hifi and television in my room. Not happy.
At the turn towards the main road, I pass the elderly Irishman’s house. I’m glad in some ways that he isn’t tending his garden at this time in the morning - which is a surprise as he usually manages to snare anybody and everybody that wanders past. They mistake his friendliness and charm, not realising he is the biggest gossip in the entire street. He knows more about people than they themselves know.
A sudden bout of apprension sets in and I do an understated hail mary - checking my pockets for wallet, keys, and mobile phone. All present and correct.
So. Here I stand at the bus stop. My feet are nearly the same length as the paving slabs. How interesting. Crikey it’s cold. A gaunt RAF officer cycles past on his way to RAF Brize Norton - treading on the peddles like some kind of automaton - staring ahead, hiding behind his moustache. There is a double decker bus in the bus-stop in the center of town in the far distance, but I cannot make out which bus it is. When is it going to pull out?
Funny things go through your head when you’re waiting for a bus - or rather, through my head when I’m waiting for a bus. I’ve been hired into this company on the strength of me knowing Microsoft Access inside out. Of course what my new employers don’t know is that the extent of my real knowledge is a database created for my Dad to hold details of his collection of Chris Rea records. I’m becoming more and more certain that I’ll be found out.
The bus is coming.
I try to make myself look important and hold an arm out to signal to the driver that I want to get on. A wave of self consciousness absorbs me - quite irrationally seeing as it’s so damn early, and I’m one of perhaps four passengers on the entire bus. I pay for my return ticket, and shuffle off down the bus - sitting a little way behind those that will soon become my regular travelling companions.
A grey haired neat looking gentleman in perhaps his early 50s is doing the crossword. He sits opposite a slightly older lady with butterfly shaped glasses and a long, smart coat. She seems very tidy. I wonder if he is a policeman… there’s something just a little too orderly - too sensible - about him.
We make our way past Brize Norton, through Curbridge, and eventually into Witney - “Blanket Town” in the language of citizen band radio that so captured the heart of my Aunty Barbara back in the day. I remember reading her book all about the mysterious world - “Big Tex’s Big Book of CB Radio”. Apparently it was cool to have a made-up name for yourself - a “handle”, and to talk to people about needing a “number one”, and cranking each other. It sounded painful and I never really understood it at all.
Witney itself was familiar to me. Just a couple of years previously I had attended the grandly titled “West Oxfordshire College”. All students and lecturers referred to it as “Tech” - referring it’s original far more sensible title - “Witney Technical College”. While at college the various pubs, bars and clubs of the town had remained mostly mysterious - I had never been one of the fashionistas, and had little or no social skills to speak of.
Stepping from the bus I murmur thanks to the driver, and set out on foot across the remaining ten minutes walk to the office. My route takes me across the church green, past Harry Enfield’s house, the Henry Box school, and down the side of the impressive and really rather large St Marys church. Behind the church, the path opens out onto parkland, and the “Leas” - a parkland used by the fairground each year to host “Witney Feast”.
Childhood memories of Witney Feast abound. Begun in the middle ages as a hog roast run by the nobility for the peasants, it had now become an invasion of hydraulics, lights, bumper cars, candyfloss and variously inbred fairground families. The yearly arrival of the noise, lights, excitement and wonder experienced as a child were probably approached with a certain amount of dread by parents across the area.
Today found the parkland mercifully empty of caravans and heavy machinery.
A few minutes further on, and I found myself climbing the stairs to main reception.
I meakly sidestep into a smart, busy office populated with people wearing office clothes - something of a novelty after so long spent as either a student, or on the shop floor of a workingquarry. A smiling lady in her mid 40s with perfect hair shakes my hand, and beckons me into an office to wait. While I say “office”, it’s actually a conservatory that’s been built inside the office.
I sit and watch the various unknown people silently wandering back and forth beyond the glass - using the copiers, typing things into their computers, leaning back with telephones clasped to the side of their head.
Finally I recognise the chap I met for an informal chat last week walking up through the middle of the office in my direction. The managing director. He’s being interrupted every few steps by questions from his staff.
The door swings open.
“Good morning! Good to see you - if you come with me I’ll show you your desk - your computer arrived yesterday. I’ll leave you alone to get yourself sorted out, and then have a get together mid-morning to go meet people, and find out what we can get started on”
We wander down past the various desks, and I am conscious of being watched. I shake hands, greet politely, and am told a succession of names that I will instantly forget.
In the far corner of the office stands an empty desk, surrounded by software boxes and new hardware. I slide my briefcase down the side of the desk, and don’t know how to reply to the older gentleman sitting opposite - Mr Leons - who breaks the ice with the remark “Don’t you listen to what any of these lot say about you young John - you look like a fine young man to me”. He then bursts into song about a boy standing on an aircraft carrier deck with sticks of explosive in his pockets.
Laughing politely, I busy myself with sorting out the new toys surrounding me. Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Microsoft Access 2. I press the power button on the beige box on top of the desk.
Bloody hell fire.
It’s a 90Mhz Pentium, with 16Mb of RAM. The fastest computer I or anybody in the company has ever seen - and it’s mine. Holy crap - look how fast it is… look how fast it booted up!
Please god, don’t let me fuck this up.