EXCERPTS FROM 'DO MIND IF I DON'T: DIARIES, 1996-2005'
Interview
I have a job interview at a copywriting agency. My housemates are mostly unimpressed, saying it’s dangerously close to the universally distrusted world of advertising.
“It’s just a bunch of overpaid coke addicts stealing ideas from the art world,” says one of them.
“That’s also half the people in the actual art world,” says another.
I feign indignity and tell them that the company is ethically minded and furthermore that they frequently work with clients who produce mail-outs for charities. I have no idea whether or not this is true.
The day of the interview arrives. As I walk into the reception area of the office building, I notice how fashionable it is. It immediately feels like the place is staffed by people who are going to be uncomfortable dealing with me. They probably don’t employ anyone who isn’t good looking enough to at least be considered for catalogue modelling work.
The woman behind the reception desk eyes my dishevelled appearance suspiciously. “Just…take a seat…” she says, looking at me like I’m an unwanted guest at a funeral. OK, so I don’t have irresistibly Nordic cheekbones or salon-grade hair but it’s not like I showed up in a potato sack.
I sit down among six or seven other people, presumably job candidates like me, but with much better suits and personal grooming habits. A palpable sense of tension fills the reception area, but when confronted by an assistant offering me a cosmopolitan choice of coffees, I don’t look befuddled or ask any embarrassing questions. My confident choice of hot beverage calms everyone, and they recognise that I at least have experience of and understand their world.
I’m called into an office and the interview begins. The woman interviewing me has slicked-back hair and power shoulder pads. She is terrifyingly professional. I put my coffee down on her desk and sit back in the chair. My chair is just far enough back from the desk so that it’s now impossible for me to reach my cup without awkwardly getting up out of the chair. I mark the coffee down as a lost cause.
Sitting back, I brace myself for twenty long minutes in the inescapable glare of my own inadequacy. Instead of asking me any searching questions, though, she starts telling me about how she’d been a flight attendant on Concorde for seven years. She talks about this for quite a long time. It’s mildly interesting, I suppose, but after a few minutes, I do start to wonder when we’re going to get to me.
Eventually she changes the subject, though she’s mostly moved onto telling me that I don’t really have the right skills for copywriting. I try to argue that thinking of English words to express an abstract concept was something I could probably make an attempt at given a chance, but I can’t think of any English words in time.
She then starts to probe me about working as a freelance travel writer, something I have wildly embellished on my CV, but which in reality I have very limited experience of. She tells me this was a career which she “was sort of thinking of getting into actually”.
This is an unexpected development. Now it suddenly appears that this woman may have granted me an interview just so that she can ask me about ways to break into travel journalism because she doesn’t want to do this job for the rest of her life and what’s she meant to do by the way, just watch the best years of her life slip by?
This is the opposite of what is supposed to be happening. It’s like she’s stealing a life coaching session or career advice. I have so little professional wisdom to give, and here she is, trying to syphon off my tiny skills pool with her shiny corporate straw.
Added to this, I can’t very well say I don’t know anything about getting into travel journalism because it’s right there on my CV as work experience. On principle, I don’t really want to give her any information which might be in any way helpful. Apart from anything else, I can do without the competition. But then I worry that maybe this is a test of some kind, and since I actually am on the shortlist for the job, if I’m helpful, then I’ll get to work here among the English words and exotic coffees.
I half make a reach for my coffee again before remembering the logistics and abandoning the manoeuvre in its early stages, theatrically crossing my legs instead.
Realising that the whole episode is likely a lost cause, I default to an M.O. which I’m comfortable with: a vague kind of cluelessness that sounds informed on a surface level, but is in fact devoid of substance. I mumble something about there being “very few entry portals”, noting to myself that this is probably the first time I’ve ever used the word ‘portal’ in conversation and that those are the kind of words which I could bring to the table, if only she’d take a chance on me.
She looks increasingly deflated as I deliver the bad news, and politely dismisses me. I almost want to reassure her and tell her not to worry as I’m not very successful at it either, but since she doesn’t even have the courtesy to lie and say they’ll let me know about the position in a few days, I keep quiet. Her loss, I say to myself, although I’m unsure as to what the loss actually is. The thrill of gradually discovering my professional limitations?
On the way out, a job for me having seemingly never even been on the table, I remind myself that the company doesn’t really produce charity mail-outs, and that it is basically the unethical, universally distrusted advertising industry, and that I am a better person for not working there. Of course, I would definitely work there given the chance.
Dancing
I’m at an expensive bar after work in Covent Garden with some people from the office I’m temping at. The cocktails are ridiculously expensive, and they all taste exactly the same, which is to say, like watery fruit juice.
My colleagues are drunk and want to move onto the dance floor. They know better than to ask me, as I feel very uncomfortable dancing and have made this known around the office on more than one occasion. I stand at the bar, telling myself that it’s OK to be here because I’m aware of how terrible it is. A lot of people don’t even know how awful this bar is. At least I know I’m having a bad time.
The DJ is playing the song ‘A Design For Life’ by the band The Manic Street Preachers, and everyone in the dance floor is yelling along to the chorus unironically. “We don't talk about love! We only want to get drunk!” Everyone is smiling as they sing. It’s supposed to be a nihilistic analysis of the constant need to numb yourself against the horrors of modern life, I think, not a euphoric rallying call. The idiots.
Suddenly, I’m approached by a woman. She’s much too good looking to be talking to me under normal circumstances, and I’m vaguely suspicious that one of my colleagues has asked her to chat to me for a dare, but looking around, I can’t see any of them. I try to relax. This could be happening organically, it’s not completely far fetched, I tell myself. After a minute or two of albeit one-sided conversation, in which she mainly yells complaints about her job and her friends at me, she asks me if I want to dance.
“Of course I do! I love dancing!” I say.
She takes my hand and leads me onto the busy dance floor. Almost immediately, a Kylie Minogue song which she really likes starts playing, and she starts dancing. Her movements are much too energetic for what’s essentially a small bar, and she’s crashing around in a kind of obnoxious way, encroaching on other people’s dance space. We’re getting looks.
I start to tense up, but I feel like I should indulge her at least a little bit as we’ve only just met. I’m smiling, projecting with my eyes a real willingness to be around a free spirit, but hopefully with a hint of pleading her to take it down a notch, or at least just enough to avoid any physical confrontations with the other people in the bar.
As the song ends, she starts staggering about theatrically. She lurches to the side of the dance floor, with me trying to hold her up. Suddenly, I’m in sole charge of a semi-conscious stranger. It’s completely terrifying.
I ask her where her friends are and she tells me that they had all left her “ages ago” and that actually she really hates them all and what has she done to deserve this shit anyway when she’s the loyal one who didn’t cheat with Joanne’s boyfriend? I tell her that I don’t really know, but then she starts retching and being sick on herself, and I have to try to keep her from passing out.
People are beginning to stand around, looking at this sorry scene, understandably curious and concerned as to what’s going on. Most of them are glaring at me as if to say, “Why don’t you take better care of your girlfriend?” I feel indignant - it must be very obvious that this girl is much too good looking to be going out with me, but then I worry even more and I hope that this doesn’t further suggest to people that I might have slipped something into her drink because she’s so out of my league.
I’m not sure what my responsibilities are here, and there aren’t any immediately welcoming options. It’s not as if I can ask the DJ to make an announcement about how we don’t really know each other, and it’s almost impossible to convey with my body language to the general public that I’m not really associated with this woman. At the same time, though, I don’t just want to leave her to black out in a public space.
After what seems like about an hour of my holding her up as best I can, and trying to say reassuring things about her friends and life choices, another woman comes to help. She’s one of the bouncers and she’s asking what the problem is, her tone suggesting that I might very much be the problem.
“Look, she’s not with me, I’m just an innocent bystander,” I say. The bouncer looks dubious, but thankfully believes me, and says that she’s in good hands. They both go into the bathroom, and I take the chance to flee the scene and hotfoot it out of the bar, not even stopping to find my colleagues to say goodbye.
I get the night bus home, alone. Two drunk young men behind me are cracking monkey nuts in their mouths and occasionally throwing the shells at the back of my head. I can’t say anything in case they’re looking for a fight, so I pretend to fall asleep and eventually they get off the bus.
Spanish
I’ve had a regular freelancing gig at an office in Shoreditch in east London for a few weeks. I’ve been taking the bus four mornings a week to get there, and grabbing a coffee and some toast from the café that’s right at the bus stop where I get off.
After going there a few times, I had ascertained that the owner is Spanish. One morning, I pay for my coffee and toast and as he hands me my change, against all my better judgement, I decide to impress him.
“Muchas gracias!” I say.
He beams and says, “De nada!”
I leave, thinking what a gracious person I am, talking to him in his native language. I bet hardly anyone else talks to him in Spanish because people are so inconsiderate, I think.
The next morning, he sees me in the queue.
“Buenos dias!” I shout.
He laughs and says something about how nice it is to hear Spanish. I feel even more superior.
The next morning, I get off the bus and realise I have pretty much exhausted the entirety of my high school Spanish, and within our relationship, it would be weird to ask him the way to the beach or to randomly tell him that I enjoy walking in the countryside.
He sees me as I walk in.
“Hola!” I say.
He smiles. I feel like I've bought myself one more day.
It soon turns into a living nightmare, one where I feel like I am expected to display my knowledge of a new Spanish phrase every day. I find myself looking Spanish phrases up online and then writing them down, just so I can say them in the cafe. Within a week, I am trapped, each visit giving this guy the impression that I speak Spanish.
I start getting off the bus a stop early and going to the café near that bus stop instead. The servers there are Polish. I don’t know any Polish.
Bagels
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with bagels, largely due to a childhood incident which left me emotionally scarred. I grew up in a small, working-class household in a small, working-class town in the north-west of England in the 1970s and 80s, and as such I had very limited horizons when it came to cuisine.
Even relatively mainstream staples of today, such as Indian and Chinese takeaways, seemed impossibly exotic. Daily meals largely consisted - as they did for most families in that time and place - of meat and two veg, pies, fish fingers, chips, heavily-discounted frozen ready meals which would go against health and safety regulations in the modern age, that kind of thing.
When I was around 13, my secondary school took us on an accompanied field trip to what is affectionately known in our part of the world as That London. I can’t remember what the educational focus of the journey was. At least the year before, when we went to Calais for the day, we’d been able to practise our French. There was a clear objective, even if it was one which most of us avoided, preferring to concentrate on our collective sugar intake and being loudly awake on a coach for the best part of 48 hours.
I think this London jaunt was just to broaden our small, provincial minds. As far as I can remember, even though we were surrounded by the imperial architecture of what was once the epicentre of the world’s greatest empire, we mainly just wandered around in awe at the number and variety of fast food outlets there were.
Our home town in Lancashire had just a single McDonalds and a lone Kentucky Fried Chicken, so this huge city was like a fast food Shangri-La. Just being able to witness the sheer array of options was a dizzying experience.
I vividly remember lunchtime on that trip. We’d been given a small amount of spending money to buy our own meal. This was an exciting responsibility, completely without precedent in its own right, never mind that we were in our nation’s capital, many of us for the first time. This was really living life high on the hog, and no mistake.
We were on the South Bank, close to the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall, and as long as we didn’t stray too far, we were allowed to go and buy sandwiches or whatever we liked at any one of the cafes or any of the stalls along the banks of the River Thames.
I wandered up to one of the food stands, relishing this heady slice of freedom. There were pastries and snacks, and what looked to me like savoury donuts. I mean, they were vaguely circular, made of some form of bread and they had visible fillings. Not knowing any better, I asked for one.
“Could I please get one of those…er…what are they, donuts?” I said in my most casually neutral accent, not wanting to be perceived as some kind of uncultured northern hayseed. I want to project an air of having a very adventurous palate for a 14 year old. Mister, I order esoteric confectionery all the time, don’t even worry about it.
The man at the counter turned to me with a mixture of scorn and disgust on his face. He looked positively askance. “Actually, they’re called bagels,” he said, making a real point to say it loudly enough for everyone in line to hear him. I’ll show this provincial oik, he must have thought. DONUTS. What a fool. What an absolute rube.
I cringed inwardly with embarrassment as the people behind me tried to suppress their collective laughter. I was too flustered to continue the transaction and just mumbled “Never mind, I’m not hungry” and quickly retreated. The only consolation was that none of my classmates had witnessed the humiliation, but I remembered this ill-fated venture many times over the years, cursing my gastronomic faux pas. One day, I would return to That London with a newly-cultivated sophistication, and publicly order lunch with admirable confidence.
Fast forward fifteen years. I’m lucky enough to live near one of the best bagel shops in the city. I go there at least once a week, and I’ve been confidently identifying bagels correctly for well over a decade. Most of my income comes from short-term temping assignments in various offices around London, along with infrequent, badly-paid articles for obscure, low-prestige magazines as I try to forge a career in freelance writing. After paying rent, I have very little disposable income, and bagels are a solid choice for a cheap lunch.
The shop, however, is staffed by dour, unsmiling servers who seem to massively resent the fact that you are even in their place of business, inconsiderately supporting them and their families by giving them your custom. On a good day, I’ll ask for, say, a tuna and sweetcorn bagel, hand over the money, receive said bagel and that’s that. Sure, there’s barely even a flicker of recognition from the staff and it’s a completely joyless affair, but eventually you get used to the system. In some ways, it’s reassuring in its consistency.
I do sometimes forget to bring the correct money with me, and I’ll hand over, say, a not-unreasonable ten pound note for a one-pound bagel. On these regrettable occasions, there’s a haughty snatch of the note, the paper barely out of my wallet. This is followed by the handing back of a vengefully large pile of small change, seemingly made up of the maximum amount of coins needed to make up nine pounds. Is it annoying, bordering on sociopathic? Yes, but I bring it on myself.
There’s a laughably misleading sign on the wall of the shop which reads, “If you can’t see the item you want, just ask us and we’ll make it fresh for you”. I smile every time I see this as I’ve yet to witness anyone negotiate even the early stages of this procedure without being verbally menaced.
This morning, the man in front of me is making a semi-complicated order, consisting of a mix of several different varieties of bagels and fillings. He’s in a hi-visibility jacket, likely taking a lunch order for the builders on a nearby construction site. The servers are standing behind the counter in their time-honoured, stoical fashion; no words exchanged, no pleasantries or small talk. This provokes him.
“You miserable cows!” he shouts, loud enough for the entire shop to hear. “Jesus, what miserable women! Cheer up, why don’t ya?!”
Hoooo boy. This is it, I think. The servers here barely need an excuse to be aggressive, let alone when they’re being subjected to casual misogyny. They can really let rip into this guy. Oh, you’ve got it coming, matey, I think. I prepare myself to witness a degrading public takedown, and excitingly it’s one which doesn’t involve me for a change. This could be perhaps the most mortifying incident involving bagel ordering since that day on the South Bank in 1987.
But then, there’s a twist. The server’s face cracks, and we witness something approaching a giggle, her face visibly brightening. “I’m so sorry,” says the woman. “I’m having a bad day. One of your bagels is free, please have a complimentary bagel, anything you like.” The man asks for and receives a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. A top of the range freebie, dished out willingly and cheerfully. This is a jaw-dropping development.
They laugh about it like they’re all just great friends, his crass insults apparently instantly forgiven. The man leaves the shop, whistling jauntily. This isn’t the system I’m used to. What happened to the reliably dour resistance to any form of customer service? This must be how the East Germans felt when the Berlin Wall came down.
“Next!” the assistant shouts, instantly settling back into her regular demeanour. I’m still in shock, barely able to vocalise my order. “One…tuna…and sweetcorn,” I say quietly, my voice cracking as I anxiously clutch a ten pound note in my clammy fist.
Burger King
Since I mainly work as a temp through an agency, I often have a few days off between gigs. I love to take this time to go to the cinema in the afternoon and see a matinee. I didn’t have time to eat before I left my house today, and so I’m in Burger King in Leicester Square, grabbing a quick Spicy Beanburger. They never have any ready to go immediately, which at least means you know that they haven’t been sat on the rack for four hours. It’s always a bit of a wait, but it’s worth the extra few minutes of my time for the relative freshness, I tell myself.
I place my order at the counter and step aside so that the next person can start theirs. It’s a middle-aged Scottish woman. She’s really strung out and she’s being quite aggressive and loud. She wants a coffee, and she’s asking what the maximum amount of free sugar packets she can have is. The assistant doesn’t understand because the Scottish woman is really drunk or high, and her accent is very broad. Frustratedly, she yells at the young man, saying that she wants eight packets of sugar at the bare minimum.
“I’m an epileptic,” she shouts. “I need at least eight packets for my blood sugar.”
The assistant looks even more confused. I decide to take control of the situation and make everyone’s lives much easier.
“I think she means ‘diabetic’, not ‘epileptic’,” I tell the server cheerily, turning to give them a quick nod and I even end on a flourish, with a cheeky, glancing wink to the woman as well. I’m such a diplomat, I think. I give knowing looks to both people, thinking how much I’m helping out and smoothing things over.
The Scottish woman gets really angry. “What the f*ck do you know, you fucker?” she says. “Why don’t you mind your own f*cking business?”
This was an unforeseen development. “I was just trying to help,” I say.
“Well then, I'll just say this to you,” she says. “F*ck you to hell and back!”
As she says this, a worried-looking manager approaches with a handful of sugar packets and hands them over to the woman. I look away sheepishly. Her coffee is also arriving and I’m just hoping that she can resist the urge which she is no doubt having to throw the scalding contents of her cup into my face. I don’t deserve a disfigured face, I think, not for just trying to help a possibly fake diabetic.
Luckily, she’s somewhat pacified by the huge amounts of free sugar. She wanders away, muttering. “Don’t try and tell ME I’m not epileptic, sunshine,” she says.
I go back to waiting for my veggie burger. Everyone waiting in the line is glaring at me and tutting.
Interview
I have a job interview at a copywriting agency. My housemates are mostly unimpressed, saying it’s dangerously close to the universally distrusted world of advertising.
“It’s just a bunch of overpaid coke addicts stealing ideas from the art world,” says one of them.
“That’s also half the people in the actual art world,” says another.
I feign indignity and tell them that the company is ethically minded and furthermore that they frequently work with clients who produce mail-outs for charities. I have no idea whether or not this is true.
The day of the interview arrives. As I walk into the reception area of the office building, I notice how fashionable it is. It immediately feels like the place is staffed by people who are going to be uncomfortable dealing with me. They probably don’t employ anyone who isn’t good looking enough to at least be considered for catalogue modelling work.
The woman behind the reception desk eyes my dishevelled appearance suspiciously. “Just…take a seat…” she says, looking at me like I’m an unwanted guest at a funeral. OK, so I don’t have irresistibly Nordic cheekbones or salon-grade hair but it’s not like I showed up in a potato sack.
I sit down among six or seven other people, presumably job candidates like me, but with much better suits and personal grooming habits. A palpable sense of tension fills the reception area, but when confronted by an assistant offering me a cosmopolitan choice of coffees, I don’t look befuddled or ask any embarrassing questions. My confident choice of hot beverage calms everyone, and they recognise that I at least have experience of and understand their world.
I’m called into an office and the interview begins. The woman interviewing me has slicked-back hair and power shoulder pads. She is terrifyingly professional. I put my coffee down on her desk and sit back in the chair. My chair is just far enough back from the desk so that it’s now impossible for me to reach my cup without awkwardly getting up out of the chair. I mark the coffee down as a lost cause.
Sitting back, I brace myself for twenty long minutes in the inescapable glare of my own inadequacy. Instead of asking me any searching questions, though, she starts telling me about how she’d been a flight attendant on Concorde for seven years. She talks about this for quite a long time. It’s mildly interesting, I suppose, but after a few minutes, I do start to wonder when we’re going to get to me.
Eventually she changes the subject, though she’s mostly moved onto telling me that I don’t really have the right skills for copywriting. I try to argue that thinking of English words to express an abstract concept was something I could probably make an attempt at given a chance, but I can’t think of any English words in time.
She then starts to probe me about working as a freelance travel writer, something I have wildly embellished on my CV, but which in reality I have very limited experience of. She tells me this was a career which she “was sort of thinking of getting into actually”.
This is an unexpected development. Now it suddenly appears that this woman may have granted me an interview just so that she can ask me about ways to break into travel journalism because she doesn’t want to do this job for the rest of her life and what’s she meant to do by the way, just watch the best years of her life slip by?
This is the opposite of what is supposed to be happening. It’s like she’s stealing a life coaching session or career advice. I have so little professional wisdom to give, and here she is, trying to syphon off my tiny skills pool with her shiny corporate straw.
Added to this, I can’t very well say I don’t know anything about getting into travel journalism because it’s right there on my CV as work experience. On principle, I don’t really want to give her any information which might be in any way helpful. Apart from anything else, I can do without the competition. But then I worry that maybe this is a test of some kind, and since I actually am on the shortlist for the job, if I’m helpful, then I’ll get to work here among the English words and exotic coffees.
I half make a reach for my coffee again before remembering the logistics and abandoning the manoeuvre in its early stages, theatrically crossing my legs instead.
Realising that the whole episode is likely a lost cause, I default to an M.O. which I’m comfortable with: a vague kind of cluelessness that sounds informed on a surface level, but is in fact devoid of substance. I mumble something about there being “very few entry portals”, noting to myself that this is probably the first time I’ve ever used the word ‘portal’ in conversation and that those are the kind of words which I could bring to the table, if only she’d take a chance on me.
She looks increasingly deflated as I deliver the bad news, and politely dismisses me. I almost want to reassure her and tell her not to worry as I’m not very successful at it either, but since she doesn’t even have the courtesy to lie and say they’ll let me know about the position in a few days, I keep quiet. Her loss, I say to myself, although I’m unsure as to what the loss actually is. The thrill of gradually discovering my professional limitations?
On the way out, a job for me having seemingly never even been on the table, I remind myself that the company doesn’t really produce charity mail-outs, and that it is basically the unethical, universally distrusted advertising industry, and that I am a better person for not working there. Of course, I would definitely work there given the chance.
Dancing
I’m at an expensive bar after work in Covent Garden with some people from the office I’m temping at. The cocktails are ridiculously expensive, and they all taste exactly the same, which is to say, like watery fruit juice.
My colleagues are drunk and want to move onto the dance floor. They know better than to ask me, as I feel very uncomfortable dancing and have made this known around the office on more than one occasion. I stand at the bar, telling myself that it’s OK to be here because I’m aware of how terrible it is. A lot of people don’t even know how awful this bar is. At least I know I’m having a bad time.
The DJ is playing the song ‘A Design For Life’ by the band The Manic Street Preachers, and everyone in the dance floor is yelling along to the chorus unironically. “We don't talk about love! We only want to get drunk!” Everyone is smiling as they sing. It’s supposed to be a nihilistic analysis of the constant need to numb yourself against the horrors of modern life, I think, not a euphoric rallying call. The idiots.
Suddenly, I’m approached by a woman. She’s much too good looking to be talking to me under normal circumstances, and I’m vaguely suspicious that one of my colleagues has asked her to chat to me for a dare, but looking around, I can’t see any of them. I try to relax. This could be happening organically, it’s not completely far fetched, I tell myself. After a minute or two of albeit one-sided conversation, in which she mainly yells complaints about her job and her friends at me, she asks me if I want to dance.
“Of course I do! I love dancing!” I say.
She takes my hand and leads me onto the busy dance floor. Almost immediately, a Kylie Minogue song which she really likes starts playing, and she starts dancing. Her movements are much too energetic for what’s essentially a small bar, and she’s crashing around in a kind of obnoxious way, encroaching on other people’s dance space. We’re getting looks.
I start to tense up, but I feel like I should indulge her at least a little bit as we’ve only just met. I’m smiling, projecting with my eyes a real willingness to be around a free spirit, but hopefully with a hint of pleading her to take it down a notch, or at least just enough to avoid any physical confrontations with the other people in the bar.
As the song ends, she starts staggering about theatrically. She lurches to the side of the dance floor, with me trying to hold her up. Suddenly, I’m in sole charge of a semi-conscious stranger. It’s completely terrifying.
I ask her where her friends are and she tells me that they had all left her “ages ago” and that actually she really hates them all and what has she done to deserve this shit anyway when she’s the loyal one who didn’t cheat with Joanne’s boyfriend? I tell her that I don’t really know, but then she starts retching and being sick on herself, and I have to try to keep her from passing out.
People are beginning to stand around, looking at this sorry scene, understandably curious and concerned as to what’s going on. Most of them are glaring at me as if to say, “Why don’t you take better care of your girlfriend?” I feel indignant - it must be very obvious that this girl is much too good looking to be going out with me, but then I worry even more and I hope that this doesn’t further suggest to people that I might have slipped something into her drink because she’s so out of my league.
I’m not sure what my responsibilities are here, and there aren’t any immediately welcoming options. It’s not as if I can ask the DJ to make an announcement about how we don’t really know each other, and it’s almost impossible to convey with my body language to the general public that I’m not really associated with this woman. At the same time, though, I don’t just want to leave her to black out in a public space.
After what seems like about an hour of my holding her up as best I can, and trying to say reassuring things about her friends and life choices, another woman comes to help. She’s one of the bouncers and she’s asking what the problem is, her tone suggesting that I might very much be the problem.
“Look, she’s not with me, I’m just an innocent bystander,” I say. The bouncer looks dubious, but thankfully believes me, and says that she’s in good hands. They both go into the bathroom, and I take the chance to flee the scene and hotfoot it out of the bar, not even stopping to find my colleagues to say goodbye.
I get the night bus home, alone. Two drunk young men behind me are cracking monkey nuts in their mouths and occasionally throwing the shells at the back of my head. I can’t say anything in case they’re looking for a fight, so I pretend to fall asleep and eventually they get off the bus.
Spanish
I’ve had a regular freelancing gig at an office in Shoreditch in east London for a few weeks. I’ve been taking the bus four mornings a week to get there, and grabbing a coffee and some toast from the café that’s right at the bus stop where I get off.
After going there a few times, I had ascertained that the owner is Spanish. One morning, I pay for my coffee and toast and as he hands me my change, against all my better judgement, I decide to impress him.
“Muchas gracias!” I say.
He beams and says, “De nada!”
I leave, thinking what a gracious person I am, talking to him in his native language. I bet hardly anyone else talks to him in Spanish because people are so inconsiderate, I think.
The next morning, he sees me in the queue.
“Buenos dias!” I shout.
He laughs and says something about how nice it is to hear Spanish. I feel even more superior.
The next morning, I get off the bus and realise I have pretty much exhausted the entirety of my high school Spanish, and within our relationship, it would be weird to ask him the way to the beach or to randomly tell him that I enjoy walking in the countryside.
He sees me as I walk in.
“Hola!” I say.
He smiles. I feel like I've bought myself one more day.
It soon turns into a living nightmare, one where I feel like I am expected to display my knowledge of a new Spanish phrase every day. I find myself looking Spanish phrases up online and then writing them down, just so I can say them in the cafe. Within a week, I am trapped, each visit giving this guy the impression that I speak Spanish.
I start getting off the bus a stop early and going to the café near that bus stop instead. The servers there are Polish. I don’t know any Polish.
Bagels
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with bagels, largely due to a childhood incident which left me emotionally scarred. I grew up in a small, working-class household in a small, working-class town in the north-west of England in the 1970s and 80s, and as such I had very limited horizons when it came to cuisine.
Even relatively mainstream staples of today, such as Indian and Chinese takeaways, seemed impossibly exotic. Daily meals largely consisted - as they did for most families in that time and place - of meat and two veg, pies, fish fingers, chips, heavily-discounted frozen ready meals which would go against health and safety regulations in the modern age, that kind of thing.
When I was around 13, my secondary school took us on an accompanied field trip to what is affectionately known in our part of the world as That London. I can’t remember what the educational focus of the journey was. At least the year before, when we went to Calais for the day, we’d been able to practise our French. There was a clear objective, even if it was one which most of us avoided, preferring to concentrate on our collective sugar intake and being loudly awake on a coach for the best part of 48 hours.
I think this London jaunt was just to broaden our small, provincial minds. As far as I can remember, even though we were surrounded by the imperial architecture of what was once the epicentre of the world’s greatest empire, we mainly just wandered around in awe at the number and variety of fast food outlets there were.
Our home town in Lancashire had just a single McDonalds and a lone Kentucky Fried Chicken, so this huge city was like a fast food Shangri-La. Just being able to witness the sheer array of options was a dizzying experience.
I vividly remember lunchtime on that trip. We’d been given a small amount of spending money to buy our own meal. This was an exciting responsibility, completely without precedent in its own right, never mind that we were in our nation’s capital, many of us for the first time. This was really living life high on the hog, and no mistake.
We were on the South Bank, close to the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall, and as long as we didn’t stray too far, we were allowed to go and buy sandwiches or whatever we liked at any one of the cafes or any of the stalls along the banks of the River Thames.
I wandered up to one of the food stands, relishing this heady slice of freedom. There were pastries and snacks, and what looked to me like savoury donuts. I mean, they were vaguely circular, made of some form of bread and they had visible fillings. Not knowing any better, I asked for one.
“Could I please get one of those…er…what are they, donuts?” I said in my most casually neutral accent, not wanting to be perceived as some kind of uncultured northern hayseed. I want to project an air of having a very adventurous palate for a 14 year old. Mister, I order esoteric confectionery all the time, don’t even worry about it.
The man at the counter turned to me with a mixture of scorn and disgust on his face. He looked positively askance. “Actually, they’re called bagels,” he said, making a real point to say it loudly enough for everyone in line to hear him. I’ll show this provincial oik, he must have thought. DONUTS. What a fool. What an absolute rube.
I cringed inwardly with embarrassment as the people behind me tried to suppress their collective laughter. I was too flustered to continue the transaction and just mumbled “Never mind, I’m not hungry” and quickly retreated. The only consolation was that none of my classmates had witnessed the humiliation, but I remembered this ill-fated venture many times over the years, cursing my gastronomic faux pas. One day, I would return to That London with a newly-cultivated sophistication, and publicly order lunch with admirable confidence.
Fast forward fifteen years. I’m lucky enough to live near one of the best bagel shops in the city. I go there at least once a week, and I’ve been confidently identifying bagels correctly for well over a decade. Most of my income comes from short-term temping assignments in various offices around London, along with infrequent, badly-paid articles for obscure, low-prestige magazines as I try to forge a career in freelance writing. After paying rent, I have very little disposable income, and bagels are a solid choice for a cheap lunch.
The shop, however, is staffed by dour, unsmiling servers who seem to massively resent the fact that you are even in their place of business, inconsiderately supporting them and their families by giving them your custom. On a good day, I’ll ask for, say, a tuna and sweetcorn bagel, hand over the money, receive said bagel and that’s that. Sure, there’s barely even a flicker of recognition from the staff and it’s a completely joyless affair, but eventually you get used to the system. In some ways, it’s reassuring in its consistency.
I do sometimes forget to bring the correct money with me, and I’ll hand over, say, a not-unreasonable ten pound note for a one-pound bagel. On these regrettable occasions, there’s a haughty snatch of the note, the paper barely out of my wallet. This is followed by the handing back of a vengefully large pile of small change, seemingly made up of the maximum amount of coins needed to make up nine pounds. Is it annoying, bordering on sociopathic? Yes, but I bring it on myself.
There’s a laughably misleading sign on the wall of the shop which reads, “If you can’t see the item you want, just ask us and we’ll make it fresh for you”. I smile every time I see this as I’ve yet to witness anyone negotiate even the early stages of this procedure without being verbally menaced.
This morning, the man in front of me is making a semi-complicated order, consisting of a mix of several different varieties of bagels and fillings. He’s in a hi-visibility jacket, likely taking a lunch order for the builders on a nearby construction site. The servers are standing behind the counter in their time-honoured, stoical fashion; no words exchanged, no pleasantries or small talk. This provokes him.
“You miserable cows!” he shouts, loud enough for the entire shop to hear. “Jesus, what miserable women! Cheer up, why don’t ya?!”
Hoooo boy. This is it, I think. The servers here barely need an excuse to be aggressive, let alone when they’re being subjected to casual misogyny. They can really let rip into this guy. Oh, you’ve got it coming, matey, I think. I prepare myself to witness a degrading public takedown, and excitingly it’s one which doesn’t involve me for a change. This could be perhaps the most mortifying incident involving bagel ordering since that day on the South Bank in 1987.
But then, there’s a twist. The server’s face cracks, and we witness something approaching a giggle, her face visibly brightening. “I’m so sorry,” says the woman. “I’m having a bad day. One of your bagels is free, please have a complimentary bagel, anything you like.” The man asks for and receives a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. A top of the range freebie, dished out willingly and cheerfully. This is a jaw-dropping development.
They laugh about it like they’re all just great friends, his crass insults apparently instantly forgiven. The man leaves the shop, whistling jauntily. This isn’t the system I’m used to. What happened to the reliably dour resistance to any form of customer service? This must be how the East Germans felt when the Berlin Wall came down.
“Next!” the assistant shouts, instantly settling back into her regular demeanour. I’m still in shock, barely able to vocalise my order. “One…tuna…and sweetcorn,” I say quietly, my voice cracking as I anxiously clutch a ten pound note in my clammy fist.
Burger King
Since I mainly work as a temp through an agency, I often have a few days off between gigs. I love to take this time to go to the cinema in the afternoon and see a matinee. I didn’t have time to eat before I left my house today, and so I’m in Burger King in Leicester Square, grabbing a quick Spicy Beanburger. They never have any ready to go immediately, which at least means you know that they haven’t been sat on the rack for four hours. It’s always a bit of a wait, but it’s worth the extra few minutes of my time for the relative freshness, I tell myself.
I place my order at the counter and step aside so that the next person can start theirs. It’s a middle-aged Scottish woman. She’s really strung out and she’s being quite aggressive and loud. She wants a coffee, and she’s asking what the maximum amount of free sugar packets she can have is. The assistant doesn’t understand because the Scottish woman is really drunk or high, and her accent is very broad. Frustratedly, she yells at the young man, saying that she wants eight packets of sugar at the bare minimum.
“I’m an epileptic,” she shouts. “I need at least eight packets for my blood sugar.”
The assistant looks even more confused. I decide to take control of the situation and make everyone’s lives much easier.
“I think she means ‘diabetic’, not ‘epileptic’,” I tell the server cheerily, turning to give them a quick nod and I even end on a flourish, with a cheeky, glancing wink to the woman as well. I’m such a diplomat, I think. I give knowing looks to both people, thinking how much I’m helping out and smoothing things over.
The Scottish woman gets really angry. “What the f*ck do you know, you fucker?” she says. “Why don’t you mind your own f*cking business?”
This was an unforeseen development. “I was just trying to help,” I say.
“Well then, I'll just say this to you,” she says. “F*ck you to hell and back!”
As she says this, a worried-looking manager approaches with a handful of sugar packets and hands them over to the woman. I look away sheepishly. Her coffee is also arriving and I’m just hoping that she can resist the urge which she is no doubt having to throw the scalding contents of her cup into my face. I don’t deserve a disfigured face, I think, not for just trying to help a possibly fake diabetic.
Luckily, she’s somewhat pacified by the huge amounts of free sugar. She wanders away, muttering. “Don’t try and tell ME I’m not epileptic, sunshine,” she says.
I go back to waiting for my veggie burger. Everyone waiting in the line is glaring at me and tutting.
