2006-03-06
You’ll remember (or maybe not – who am I kidding?) a while back my colleague Lesley had formed one of her opinions-cum-certainties about another co-worker Charles. And you’ll also remember (let’s keep up the pretence) that he put in a complaint about her harrassing him, which basically consisted of her asking him to stop harassing her? Which he wasn’t, but she got it into her head that he might, potentially, have a big shiny knife and have it in mind to attack her in the dark outside her house? Because, as she said, ‘once you have it in your head that someone is thinking about you that way, you just don’t know what they might do next!’ (Which is really saying if you let your imagination run away with you, it can go just about anywhere.)That all pretty much blew over because she got taken for long-term jury service. She’s been away on a fraud trial for two months now, and frankly it’s been a so-much better atmosphere since she went. But over the weekend one part of her theorising came home to me a bit. The root of Lesley’s problem was that Charles had once made a pass at her when drunk. Now, we really only have her version of what happened, and she is prone to have some flights of fancy, but her basic point was that doing that must have been based on something that he things about when sober, but normally manages to suppress.
I guess it is not inconceivable that Charles does have the odd (and they would need to be) erotic thought about her, but my take on what happened is a little different. I think Charles, being such a repressed and timid creature (there are genuine grounds for believing that his wife hits him) has fantasies, not so much about sexual activity with his co-workers as standing up to, and shocking them. So when drunk this desire to shock and scare them comes out, and what better way (I’m only projecting myself into his drunken mind at the time) than to make a pass at Lesley?
What happened to me on Friday night was of the same sort of enlightenment as Lesley went through – something about someone I thought I knew appeared to become clearer. I work for a company that has its roots in Scotland – hence the not-infrequent trips up there – and not surprisingly we have quite a large Scottish contingent in our office. I was out with a few colleagues on Friday evening, and amongst those were Martin and Andy – both Edinburgh boys. I joined the crowd after they’d been out for a while, since I wasn’t feeling that good still and so was more sober than all of them at the end of the night.
I get on well with Martin - he’s several years younger than me but we share a certain kind of pedantry and interest in obscure facts, and strangely, a birthday. When he got married a little while ago I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get invited on the stag night, but then only about four office mates were. I consider him one of my main friends here.
Friday night I encountered martin and Andy at the bar late on, both with a tumbler of malt in their hand – I joined them. I noticed Andy was wearing a different scarf from his usual Hearts one and without comment reached over and lifted it to look at it. No special reason, just that the Hearts one is a permanent feature. It was a Scottish rugby scarf. Andy and I passed no comment but Martin suddenly growled at me in a strangely aggressive tone: ‘Something wrong with him wearing that?’ I shrugged it off nd the conversation passed on.
I asked Martin about it this morning. He just smiled – ‘You were making some comments about his Scottish scarf, I get that way after a few whiskies’ ‘But I didn’t say anything about it at all!’ ‘Didn’t you – I thought you made some rude remark about it’..
So now I know – deep down in Martin there is a little seed that hates me because I’m English. I thought we got on well – but in fact he’s just suppressing a bigoted irrational dislike.