The Long and the Short and the Tall

My day-to-day life as a Dole Wallah is little changed from the working one. I wake early and eat breakfast at a desk. On the desk is a computer and some writing detritus. No difference there. I read the Guardian Obituaries and news, I then drill down to the arts and maybe some business news.

At some point in the day I will read a couple of blogs; I may even make a comment. No major difference there, on an average working day there was some slack time. Of course there were meltdown-days too, that sometimes stretched into the weekend, meltdown-weeks. But mostly with a little organization I found time for my excursions on the internet.

I take exercise during the day. When working I ran home, through crowded city streets and pollution. The difference now is I avoid the streets and the cars, but otherwise no difference.


I pop four pills in the morning, they keep me alive. This is where my working and my Dole Wallah days diverge. My working life did not involve pill-popping, I was healthy and rarely succumbed to office-worker style ailments like colds and flu.

When I work again, I will have to take the pills at my desk. First thing is out of the question. I need to shave before the pill-popping ceremony. If I don’t, I bleed heavily. My blood is thinned to prevent clotting, so even the slightest cut spurts like a geyser.
As a Dole Wallah I have days with stubble, but at work I never have days with stubble, another divergence.


The Long and the Short and the Tall is a play by Willis Hall; it was directed by Lindsay Anderson at the Royal Court. And made into a film. I mentioned it in my response to some Guardian blog commenter who made a sweeping statement about WWII being just a war against Hitler for Europeans. Too much History Channel maybe? I was trying to make a cultural point about the Pacific conflict, how it seeped into lots of English speaking art. My diversion for the day.


During the boom-time, BCC (Before Credit Crunch). I had one or two diversions a day. But as the sackings accumulated, so did the diversions. By the end I could squeeze my working-week into a day. My internet travels, were a diversion from reality. Rather like a prisoner on death row, I waited for the inevitable. The telephone call.

I even had a sneak preview of what it would be like. The man who sat opposite accidentally put his phone on speaker when his call came. It must have been nerves. I heard the ultimate boss asking him to make his way to a meeting room. Later the man came back for his coat; he left without saying a word.

When the call came, I decided to have my coat and bag brought to me. And whatever was in my desk, I asked them to throw. Most of the important stuff was on my work computer anyway, stored away in text documents. I lost that when I lost my job. The accumulated knowledge of Seven Years, erased.

But like the old men who used to sit in my parents living room, discussing Rommel and Dunkirk. I carry around in my head memories from a time before. Snippets of those text documents; procedures, passwords and the natural ability that helped me along the way. And it’s going to take a lot more than a Format or a Heart Attack, or a Credit Crunch to erase those.