2006-12-13
Thank you for your messages over the last couple of weeks – and yes, I know it takes two to tango. Strangely Jo has made no reference at all to the revelation that I have been writing about us since that night. I’m not going to bring the subject up again but I can’t think why she seems uninterested – only a few months ago she was panicked by the idea that CCTV cameras in the street might pick us up walking together and Dave somehow get to see the images. On that basis how can she be not bothered that there is a written history of us out there? Still it’s good not to have to fend her off on this one, and it will surely come up eventually.Yesterday was, I hope, the final business trip of the year for me. A cold and miserable trip to Oxford University to discuss financial stuff with academics and government advisors. I have been distinctly under the weather for more than a week now and I coughed and sneezed my way through an early flight and a train journey. Hot and a bit feverish, I’m sure no-one wanted me near them, spreading my germs. If I was being sensible I wouldn’t have set off at all but I actually feel quite honoured to be in with these guys debating, and a small part of me is wondering whether I might do well to keep in with them with a view to getting some consultancy work if I ever decide to bail out from my work here.
Standing on Oxford station after I had one of those ‘what might have been’ moments. Around me there was a group of boys who, first of all, I took to be undergraduates on their way home from a term at one of the colleges. But the students will have left last weekend and there was something not quite right about them – they seemed not to know each other as well as they would if they had that common experience. They seemed to be trying too hard to be friendly, a bit gauche.
And then I realised who they were and that I too must have been standing on that station, being the same, exactly thirty years ago. They were schoolboys up for interview for admission next year and the next two weeks will be an anxious time for them wondering if they made enough of an impression to get in to what regards itself as the best University in the world (I’m not saying they’re right or wrong on that).
I remember that I didn’t go through that anxiety: I knew I wouldn’t get in. My problem – it was always this – was that all through my early years at school I was sufficiently bright not to really have to bother trying (sorry if that sounds like a boast – but you’ll see I got my just deserts). It was only in my last year or so at school that things became hard enough for me to need to make an effort – the problem was that I was, by then, so used to not putting in any work that I still didn’t bother, somehow stupidly believing that I could just wing it and get through. I was just plain lazy – didn’t prepare for the Oxford interviews, maybe didn’t know how to, and as a result realised only minutes in that I was being found out in a big way. Looking back, I dare say they thought I’d just put in a fantasy application, whereas I know if I’d thought about what might be needed, or not been so arrogant as to believe I could ‘give a performance’ on the day then I would have been welcomed. And my whole life from then on would have been completely different.
I wouldn’t have gone to Scotland. I wouldn’t have met Lynne (or Jo!), I wouldn’t have the children I have the house, the job. I would have been with someone else, somewhere else doing something else. Maybe something I enjoyed. Or maybe – just maybe - I would have ended up in a similar job, and ended up in the same discussion at Oxford University on the same afternoon
But I haven’t learnt by that mistake. I still ‘wing it’, still drastically under-prepare for meetings and derive huge satisfaction from getting away with it, congratulate myself on pulling things off. Being a lazy bastard really isn’t clever, is it?