Day 304: Inchoate

Greetings! I write to you from my brand new (refurbished) Asus Chromebook Flip, which device is perched snugly on my lap, which lap and connected buttocks are in turn roosted insouciantly upon the soft and inviting sofa in my living room.

I’m downstairs, is what I’m saying. I’m writing this from downstairs.

Not exactly straining at the boundaries of the potential for portability there, but it makes a change from sitting in my room. And it’s a shorter trip to the kettle, for Earl Grey related endeavours, so that’s another bonus.

Indeed. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll even venture as far as the kitchen to do my writing. Only a lazy arm’s extension for the tea bags then.

No. Further afield. I shall be on the road with Stevie tomorrow, doing man things such as: discussing the relative merits of duct-tape, guesstimating how many two-be-fours our appointed job will require, shouting at Radio 2 presenters while undertaking on the M1, and eating forlorn pizzas in Holiday Inn restaurants just inside the London Orbital.

So that’ll be nice. Mmm. Do I have anything else to say? The light was good this morning. It was a good light. The day, with a new menu launch, absolute bare bones staffing, and all the usual Monday woes, promised quotidian strife and despair, but for that three minute stretch from the bus stop to the doors of the pub, I was in heaven. The sun was low, piercing the morning mist and caressing the city’s brick with a gentle hand of gold. Further off, a celestial javelin of shattering white reflected from the canyons of glass, brought arms of hurrying humans up to shield groggy eyes, as the obliterating beam burned away the mind’s inchoate architectures and left the soul unshielded and new. Outside the little florist’s on Surrey Street pink and red flowers stood; snipped from their roots they pulsed with the last gasp bursts of their living joy. A delivery driver in ankle-length shorts whistled as he walked. The air was a vibrant haze. Cars shone in grace. Our mother star sang out across the firmament, and the vast Earthbound fold danced to the beat of another day.

Then I got to work and found the compliance diary needed filling out with interminable bureaucratic checks for the upcoming month, and a dark cloud passed across my vision for the rest of the shift. But I had those three minutes. Those three minutes were mine.

Mm. Just read all that back before posting, and I have one thing I’d like to amend. Steve does not undertake. He will definitely say, “Bobby, I do not undertake!” if he reads this post. And he’s right. That was poetic license on my part, conjuring archetype when Steve is nothing if not iconoclastic.

He does eat forlorn pizzas though. I’ve got him bang to rights there.