If you work for the same company for long enough, you eventually amass more holiday days than you can possibly use. Add to that a busy year - billable for most of it - and you find yourself in my situation - taking staycation after staycation in a spiral of “use it or lose it” days off.
Of course we all know that a “day off” isn’t really a “day off” - it’s just serving a different master - be that your family, your other half, or your own conscience.
So far today I’ve had a shower, got dressed, tidied the lounge, filled the dishwasher and put it on, cleaned the hallway floor, filled the washing machine and put it on, emptied the bins… the list goes on. If I had written it all as a to-do list, my day might rival the faux inspirational bullet journal pictures that used to infest social media - works of art filled with yoga, coffee mornings, mindfulness, and whatever else.
I’ve escaped the treadmill for an hour. You find me sitting in the corner of the “new” pub in town - the one that serves free coffee refills and cheap cooked breakfasts. An hour to feed my face, and sit quietly with the laptop - writing these words.
Along the way I bumped into a neighbour with her puppy - a wonderful golden labrador called “Ron”. He seems to be going through something of a transformation - from a razor toothed finger munching machine to a well behaved menace that returns on command as long as there might be an edible reward involved. I’m not sure if he remembered me, or if he greets all apparent newcomers with an aeroplane propeller tail, and springs for legs.
When I leave here I have a parcel to collect for my other half - I’m using it as added validation for the coffee and breakfast.
It’s interesting - during the first weeks the new pub was here, it was filled first with families at the weekend, then retired people during week, and now seems to have levelled out somewhat - with a rag-tag collection of professional people having meetings, students nursing free coffee refills, and those similar to myself - escaping their homes for an hour.
A girl is sitting just across the way - accompanied by a coffee and her laptop - apparently writing a blog post. Who knew? I’ve recently suspected I might be the last unicorn - the last of the “almost daily” journals on the internet. Perhaps not.
I really don’t like that “blogs” became marketing tools - or rather, that one use-case overtook all others and ruined the original idea. I suppose the “social internet” is much the same - the first wave in any new platform tends to be the explorers - the journallers - the diarists - recording and sharing moments from their lives. Once any platform garners a large enough audience the attention seekers arrive - spouting nonsense from imaginary soap-boxes. Legends in their own lunchtime. Along with the nonsense faucets, the “poor me” crowd descend - sucking attention by advertising their plight. Finally the masters of the machinery impose algorithms to encircle everybody with suggested content and concordant feedback — dividing and inciting in the pursuit of traffic, and scraping our predispositions in order to inject marketing drivel into the discourse.
Anyway.
Enough of that.
I kind of went off on one there, didn’t I. An ex co-worker once described my occasional descents into hyperbole as “foaming invective”. He wasn’t wrong.
I have a parcel to pick up - and a bookshop to avoid.