Psycho Commissioning Editor

 

 

 

I’m wasted again in a pub the wrong side of the M25, called something ridiculous like the Cock Tavern or maybe it was the Cock and Hen, but I hadn’t looked properly. The beer is flat, and after a half of a pint I move onto Belvederes and have to keep going outside for cigarettes into the bitter Lancastrian cold. The barman doesn’t know what Belvederes are and it takes me a long time to explain how to make one.

 

It’s so windy my Zippo is going out and I meet a woman called Elsie, who has a windproof lighter; she’s the wrong side of the M25 and the wrong side of forty, but she warms to me and I’m taking her number and saying that I’ll call her after dinner, which I eat in a bad, overpriced Italian place that’s not too far from my hotel, washed down with some Rioja that I can’t remember much about.

 

I’m academic calling, and I can’t get over the cling-filmed academics that serve to ruin what’s already a jagged hangover into a blitz of a migraine. I take four aspirin and a try a coffee from a dispenser that stutters into life only after three rounds of the correct change. It bleeps at me as if I am the one making a mockery of common sense. I take a sip; it tastes entirely of itself, there’s no resemblance to coffee at all.

 

Later on that night, after I’ve slept with Elsie or maybe it was Betsey but I wrote it down wrong, I move into a strange zone where the syllabus that my textbooks have to map onto is becoming murky, as if there’s some force stirring a still but shallow pond with a stick. I awake in a dry and hot room, the air con stuttering, my mouth tasting of pesto and a dubious brand of olive oil. Betsey is gone.

The next day I have more appointments at a more northern town, so I have to get up early and manage to drink a coffee at the buffet breakfast, which as far I can see consists of industrial quantities of scrambled egg, some sour tomatoes and a few blackened and charred sausages. I pass, because even the muesli looks meaty and fatty in this context, and the thought of any kind of food is making me think of Betsey and what we did last night. I swiftly want to move on to talking about textbooks.

On the train to the next place I fire up the Blackberry, which cheerily delivers me what might as well be hate mail, endless screeds of people asking for things and wanting things to be done that they aren’t quite savvy enough to piece together. I rummage in my pockets as the train reaches its destination and extract the makings, rolling a thin but well-formed cigarette. My hands smell of fried breakfast still and it proves impossible to completely eradicate Betsey either.

The day passes in a stupor of bad coffee and stilted conversation, one person after another falling over themselves to give me nothing to go on and advance their RAE ratings at all costs. At one point my finger runs over the blade I keep in my pocket and I unsheathe it, letting it cut my index fingertip purposefully, so that I don’t laugh or cry or make any movement untoward. I leave promptly at lunch and catch the train down, back to London, awaiting six hours of commuting and then a Tube journey that will further make me want to extract teeth from passers by.

I come back to the office the next day to dull acceptance, tepid greetings and a miraculously full inbox, in defiance of my tired and greasy Blackberry that probably broke when I did what I did that night with it. After I lodge at IT repair request, I sit down, sigh, and then get up, if only wander to the kitchen to make a coffee, stirring in some whiskey from the hip-flask I keep behind the rotund Marketing Assistant’s rarely touched Weetabix.