Next

When I left with a redundancy letter; that was supposed to be the end of me and my former employer. But it’s over a year now, and I’m still processing that event. The nightmares are infrequent, but when they happen I am left unsettled and out of sorts.

Last night my dream amalgamated a couple of my jobs. It mashed in Lord of the Rings, my daughters bedtime book. A couple of naked actresses (Uma Thurman and Elisabeth Moss who plays Peggy Olson in Mad Men) covered in mud; ala the Slits album Cut.

In the dreams version of my life; I’m still at the old firm, working part-time. A blend of yesterday and today as I happen to be looking for part-time positions. It’s coming up to Christmas, and the works party is happening that evening.


Reality was different; I got through Christmas 2008 without a party. Except I found a way of getting horrifically drunk. 10 on a scale of 1 to 10; narrowly behind waking up in a police cell. The pressure cooker of eighteen months of sackings had finally started to whistle. In February 2009 it exploded, and so did my heart.

Two characters appeared in my dream, like implants from a melodrama. There was a Cassius; lean and hungry, slippery and backstabbing. I suppose he must have existed at my previous firm, but not quite in that form. Then there was the benevolent boss. A weak figure who liked me, but was under the spell of Cassius.

A third person, the whisperer, was a real colleague. But I’ve not heard anything from him since I was frogmarched from the building.

The dream segues into nightmare and the whisperer lets me know two people are being canned today. He also makes a point of mentioning one of them is me. The other unfortunate, a woman, is already being hung-drawn-and-quartered by the boss and his sidekick.

But in this scenario there is hope, if only I can influence the benevolent one, persuade him, with a tableau of my past glories.


Reality is something different. There was no old or new school, no continuum. I existed in the day, and whatever happened before counted for naught. The only hope I had was that I would never be next.

The telephone call and a matter-of-fact conversation were not recreated in some Technicolor moment. Instead my new reality took me to a housing development. Quaint Hobbit-hole like housing. But inside they were shoddily built, exposed electrical wiring and poor plasterwork.

In the morning I thought of all the housing left to rot by the Credit Crunch. The Sub Prime loans, long defaulted on. The shockingly awful record of this Government and the Last when it came to house building. But that’s reality, in my altered-state, something different was happening.

There was a muddy excursion, where famous actresses appeared naked, their modesty preserved with mud. And then I was back in the grey generic office.

I plead for my life, the way David Niven does in A Matter of Life and Death. There were examples of my work, laid out before the benevolent boss. My past glories, looking very small under the microscope.

But all I could hear was a hiss of Cassius, speaking in the benevolent boss’s ear. As he turned the pages of a decades work, all I could hear was NEXT, NEXT, NEXT.