Time Killing Kid

A friend of mine gave me some cautionary advice a few years ago about “not dipping your pen in the company ink”, by which he meant office affairs are best avoided. Then again, he could be a funny chap at times, so maybe he did mean it literally.

The occasional workplace dalliance I’ve become involved in, or attempted to become involved in, bears this advice out, especially the recent one with R / JC.

The one thing consolation about R was that although I’d been blown out, at least I’d been blown out by someone I work with only on an irregular basis.

On Monday a new recovery worker started.

A female recovery worker.

Who just happens to be my type.

Fuck.

I had the best part of an hour to talk to her on my own on Monday afternoon when we toured the local area to collect antipsychotics.

Frankly, she ticked far too many TKK boxes.

I wouldn’t normally wish this, but I hope and pray she has a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or she’s celibate. Just please don’t let her be single. I’d rather not have unrequited lightning strike twice, but this time around be blown out by someone I work with on a regular basis.

On that note, R / JC wants to go for a drink with me again, and we’ve pencilled in a gig for next month. It took sheer bloody willpower to hold to the decision I made in Wales while on extended annual leave not to socialise with R outside of work.

On Thursday and Friday I have to work with both R and K (the new girl) on shift at the same time. Hopefully they’ll both get married before then (as long as it’s not to each other).

But at least on this occasion my emotional satnav is stirring.

Last night in work (I was on a sleep-in shift) I woke around 2am after a dream I was experiencing finished. In the dream a helicopter had taken off and was flying across a city, when it had suddenly stopped and dropped in a direct vertical plummet until it hit the ground.

I briefly wrestled with the meaning of what my unconscious had cast up, and then it struck me precisely what the helicopter’s fate had been.

It crashed and burned.

Recently I had a medication review at the GP surgery after dropping in my repeat prescription for diazepam. In truth, my sciatica has been fading pretty quickly since it was started. However, I haven’t failed to notice the secondary benefits that come from benzodiazepines.

The doctor who reviewed my medication was not the same one who prescribed it; and it’s always frustrating having to retread your original consultation, especially to someone less sympathetic and generous with their prescription pad.

Despite the fact that the doc grew up in the same part of Wales as my good self, she wanted to keep hold of the diazepam she was slinging, whereas I was adamant that she stick to the original one-month prescription plan and re-up me forthwith.

I left the appointment with my repeat prescription feverishly clutched in my hand. This shit is the bomb!

I have now constructed my own prescribing guide to the current circumstances in my life:

Going out on the lash and feeling like giving the finger to medical advice and drinking while on sedative medication: 6mg

Evening jogging session 2mg

Work football tournament: 8mg

Sleep-in shift with colleague you’ve started to detest and have spread a nickname round the office for (Scrappy Doo): 6mg

Work disciplinary hearing: 6mg

Day shift with co-worker who recently ripped your heart out and tossed it into a bramble bush: 4mg, possibly rising to 6mg if heart flutters start

Insomnia: 2mg

Hairdresser appointment: 2mg

Diazepam: is there nothing it can’t take the edge off?

Apart from withdrawal symptoms.

Well if only it had been the clap, which would have been far less embarrassing than the ‘injury’ I actually sustained over the weekend:

Yep, I managed to bruise the palm of my right hand after clapping too hard while at Old Trafford on Sunday. The only consolation is it deposed my previous most embarrassing injury, where I sustained nerve damage to my fingers through carrying shopping bags (and me being the son of a coal miner n’ all). Evidently, my hands are nowhere near as hard as my heart is reputed to be.

Personally, I blame it all on Sir Bobby Robson. The minute’s applause for the great man started way too early and the emcee had to pretty much abandon his tribute and join in with everyone else. Before then there’d already been sustained applause while Nemanja Vidic and Federico Macheda collected their respective player of the year awards from last season. Then the mighty Reds made their way onto the pitch; Fergie made his showman’s entrance. The match hadn’t even kicked off and my hands were on fire. It started to feel like a banquet in 1930s Russia when Stalin was the guest of honour. Ovations would go on interminably as no one dared to be the first person to be seen to stop clapping in front of Uncle Joe.

Thankfully I was in the, er, hands of a sympathetic companion, who didn’t induce panic in me later by saying “I think it’s spreading! It might be gangrenous!” I, of course, felt completely reassured at this point, and didn’t leave the pub table to wash my hands in the gents in the vain hope it might have been northern grime on my soft southern hands causing the marks, rather than self-inflicted wounds caused by clapping too hard.

Not to say that La Row is completely lacking in her hospitable side, crashing in her front room while I got to kip in her bedroom. And what a bed! The instant I saw it I started having flashbacks to the beds I obviously did not see in late 1970s pornographic movies. For the record, I will say it was the biggest and longest... sleep I’ve ever had, which is more than could be said for Lady Guinness in the morning, woken up far too early for her liking by my repeated enquires of “Are you decent?”. I clearly heard her say “yes” the first time, but was tickled too much to hear her becoming more exasperated in her assertion that she was “decent” to stop continually asking the question.

As for Manchester, it obviously helped being guided round by an experienced local, who on leaving Old Trafford didn’t turn round to me and say “I’m not sure how to get back from here”. It was also pretty cool to sample Manchester nightlife, and not find out that the best place to be getting pissed in Didsbury late on a Saturday night is on a wall outside the Mtwenty (I always have had a taste for the ‘high' life). And it’s nice to get a decent pint in when on a session, and not have someone return with a round of the black stuff and say “actually, the Guinness here isn’t up to much”.

Row, I must return the favour next time you’re in my beloved north Lahnden. We can start at the bar of the motel in Finsbury Park where a few weeks ago two lesbian lovers made a suicide pact and poisoned themselves. The first round of Changs are most definitely on me.

But despite the dodgy beer, bars and bed, I had a bloody good laugh over the weekend, and had to remind myself at one point how only a fortnight ago I’d been totally in the doldrums. So ta very much for being a good friend, m'dear, even if I did have a chorus from a very dodgy late 1980s Texas song going through my head for much of the train journey back as a consequence. I’d give you a standing ovation if it wasn’t for the fact my hands would hurt too much.

Although I wouldn’t have believed it a month ago, there is an upside to sciatica.

To some extent this depends on how sympathetic your GP feels, and how happily they’ll write you a prescription for benzodiazepines.

To say that July was not the greatest month I’ve had is something of… an understatement. Personally, professional, physically, romantically – the gods can fuck with you in so many different ways.

I could list all the various things that happened to me in July. The reason I’m electing not to is it was so bloody painful seeing them all collected together in a single paragraph that I had to delete it straight away.

After initially being prescribed entry-level pharmaceuticals to deal with the sciatica, I returned to the GP after about five days for something with more pep. In my defence, I couldn’t walk for longer than 10 minutes without having to sit down, and I’m absolutely desperate to play some part in our annual football tournament at the end of the month.

Being offered a sicknote and a month’s supply of diazepam was almost too good to be true. Unfortunately, work commitments being as they are I really couldn’t take the former, but I almost managed to forget the sciatica for thirty minutes as I limped off to the pharmacy for the latter.

The reaction from certain colleagues in work today when I accidentally let slip what I was being prescribed was as if I’d won a pharmaceutical lottery.

My favourite response was an envious look and a wistful “you’re so lucky”. I felt less lucky two minutes later when same colleague informed me I had to complete a ten-page risk assessment form about my prescription pills and give my manager an update on my benzo-addled state.

He asked me with a less than professional gleam in his eye how they were making me feel. I was tempted to say: “you know in the disciplinary meeting last week when I didn’t appear to give a shit. That’s kinda how they’re working for me”.

I instead sensibly phrased it thus: “It kind of feels like nothing really matters. Not in an empty way, just that I can't be ruffled right now”.

Him: “Wow. That’s so lucky!”

Truthfully, some of the physio exercises I’ve been doing for the sciatica over the last 72 hours have done more for it than the diazepam, but the secondary benefits of stretching only go so far. I had to swallow a smirk when my doctor agreed to prescribe diazepam because I was more than aware that this was going to be treating more than sciatic nerve pain.

After R’s rejection all sorts of melancholy content had started emerging from my mind, and were finding themselves splurged onto Word documents for future blog posts. Probably the worst example of this was my excavation of a relationship dumping I received in 1999 and comparing it to a sniper’s headshot.

Self-indulgent wallowing aside, it was not helping, in the same way building R up into the “Jewish Cleopatra” for the past three months was far from helpful. Thanks to my own purple prose and mythologizing I’d given her superhuman powers of rejection by the time I finally got her out for a drink. I regretted the day I’d ever started committing my thoughts of her to blog, not because there was the inevitable risk I’d have to describe a public rejection, but she’d become a fantasy figure and almost better than reality.

I’m hoping more alternative treatments (the start of the football season and an extended holiday) will wean me off the benzos in the medium term, although for the time being I’m going to keep dropping the repeat prescriptions into the surgery and carry on feeling “lucky”.

I remember working in the same department as a consultant clinical psychologist who specialised in cognitive therapy for psychosis. I always thought he had a particularly cool job and an introduction that must have gone down a storm at parties (“I’m K. I work in psychosis”).

Fairly frequently, I have to dabble with psychosis, but the more day-to-day psychological-type work I’m caught up in involves sensitively responding to emotive situations, but also accepting how subjectively life is experienced.

Even a generous amount of left-field life events isn’t preparation enough for some of the situations that occur. In the past year I’ve seen the dawning realisation on someone’s face that they’re about to be sectioned (and am probably going to see that same expression on the same person’s face in a few weeks); the thousand-yard stare of another being tormented by critical auditory hallucinations; or just having to adjust to how simple daily activities can be a major challenge to someone with major mental health needs. The following video is a pretty good simulation of how someone’s reality can be distorted by psychotic experiences:

Unlike in general conversation, the question “How are you feeling?” is nearly always of particular relevance where I work. It becomes second nature to delve into areas of someone’s life that would normally be considered off limits. I often forget this when chatting with people outside of the job and have to remind myself that the “special permission” (as one psychologist described it to me) to go into those areas no longer applies.

As workers within the project we’re encouraged to keep access to our own personal lives strictly compartmentalised (“professional boundaries”) when working with service users. This can often seem very one-sided when you’re expecting an individual to disclose extremely sensitive personal information while being off limits yourself.

At the weekend I had to sit through an emotional interlocution of my own with R and face up to last week’s events. We’d had about 25 minutes of having to work together as if nothing had happened last Thursday, but after we’d found a quiet spot in one of the upstairs kitchens I decided to break cover.

I think it’s fair to say, much like on the night in question, she didn’t exactly let me down gently. Her recall of a sequence of events that were misty in my own mind was unsparing, and I accepted as true her account of actions that I couldn’t quite remember myself. After a while, I didn’t so much wave a white flag as climb out of my trench and walk slowly towards the crossfire. I figured that if I’m expecting my key clients to be open about difficult circumstances in their lives I had to take the same journey:

Me: Wasn’t it obvious I was attracted to you?

Her: On reflection there were a couple of occasions which now seem obvious. (Slightly chastising) But what made you think I was attracted to you?

At this point I had a particularly bittersweet Wilco track floating through my head, and pretty much sighed out the title as my response:

Me: Wishful thinking...

Maybe I should have included it with the MP3s I gave her...

So why didn’t I see it coming? How did I allow my emotional satnav to send me into a ditch?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

At least a small part of my mind had some inkling where this was going to lead to.

Recently I had been using the phrase ‘carrying a torch’ to describe my predicament, without being fully aware of its precise definition.

Looking it up, the most frequently listed description is “to secretly love someone who does not love you”. Now I certainly didn’t / don’t love R, and it probably is just a silly phase I’m going through, but my understanding of the phrase was that you covertly liked someone and they were simply unaware of it, not that the feeling continued in the face of rejection.

It’s never pretty, rejection, and at some stage almost everyone will experience its sting. In the past month I’ve been rejected and accepted by the same person in the same evening (try and work out which emotion you’re going home with that evening), and the acceptance certainly didn’t balance out the earlier rejection.

From my own experience, some rejections have been pretty obvious and almost wilful on my part. However, the ones that sneak up and mug you are another story. I still remember vividly being dumped by an ex in 1999 and a vertigo-esque feeling gripping my body. You try desperately hard to control your facial expressions at those moments, but it’s a losing battle. The worst is the walk of shame away from it all. Walking down the street last night on my own was pretty demoralising, especially so as my sciatica decided to reawaken from its alcohol-induced slumber and slice through my hamstrings.

As anyone blessed with more than a trace of empathy in their character who has been in the only slightly less depressing position of rejecting someone knows, there aren’t any comforting words to say at that point. You don’t want to hear anything about “putting all your eggs in one basket” (even if it is true), and you certainly don’t want to be asked “are you going to get angry with me?” I’m certainly not going to do the latter, I thought at the time, but I will be kicking a lot of lampposts on the way home and tossing my cigarette lighter onto someone’s roof.

Making a play for someone I work with was always going to be a high risk manoeuvre. As R only does weekend shifts we don’t actually work together that frequently, but it’s deeply unfortunate that we have to do a shift together this weekend. I get the impression I'll still be feeling quite raw when we meet.

Right now I feel stunned, in much the same way I did for 80 minutes of this year’s Champions League final. After seeing United rip into Barcelona for the first ten minutes it was devastating to see Eto’o suddenly score in Barca’s first attack, and then spend the rest of the match thinking ‘this really wasn’t how I was expecting the evening to turn out’. The walk back to the tube station from the pub at the end of the evening was like seeing that Eto’o goal going in again, and again, and again.

To try and shake off the blues I am going to cook one of my speciality chili recipes this evening, which I’ve christened voodoo chili, in honour of R’s juke box faux pas from last night. As we were making our selections she decided on a Hendrix number, pronouncing the Chile from Voodoo Chile in the same way the country Chile is pronounced. I was in such full-on gentleman mode at that point I resisted the opportunity to take the piss, although I no longer feel bound by such decorum a day later.

PS

I registered at a GP practice this morning in order to get my sciatica pharmaceutically treated. While there, I had the obligatory healthcare screen for new patients by the nurse. Towards the end of our consultation she asked if I needed any condoms...

I just smirked and said probably not for the foreseeable future.

“I thought that this was just going to be a friendly drink.”

Hmm. There was a point in the evening where I was going to mention that, as we've now recruited a full staff team, come September / October, JC won’t be allocated any more shifts at work.

Suddenly, it seems like a blessing (once we’ve got this weekend’s shift together out of the way)...

A certain someone has asked me to put together a CD for her, so this weekend I’m having my High Fidelity moment and rummaging through the ol’ collection to put together something worthy of entry in my top 5 compilations for grrls I’m very, very interested in.

Few things are bigger deal breakers than a potential beau’s taste (or lack of it) in music. I remember going back for “coffee” with someone and browsing the CDs at her flat, shuddering as I realised I was on the verge of shagging someone with Craig David, George Michael and Robbie Williams albums in their collection (Bramble’s saving grace was that at least she had a Calexico CD in the hovel she resided at).

There wasn’t going to be any future in stepping out with someone whose record collection was worse than my mother’s. My mum has gone through some bizarre phases in her music taste, from Cliff Richard to Mel C (“the only one out of the Spice Girls who can really sing!”), to Will Young and, ahem, 5ive (just don’t ask...). And now she likes Amy Winehouse...

I’m not sure if I’ve ever gone out with someone whose musical taste I’ve felt entirely comfortable with. We all have our guilty pleasures but... Charlotte Church? Mott the Hoople? Smashing Pumpkins. No, no and NO!

Of course, this CD is in many ways more for me than her - all she’s going to do is listen to it. I’m the one agonising over how I should start things off (high-tempo opener or a faded-up slow burner?), whether any songs smack of tokenistic inclusion (can’t let it be too many white boys playing guitars and singing harmonies, right?) or wondering how much my taste has actually broadened since back in the day the sixteen-year-old TKK was head to toe in denim and ducking bottles of piss at the Donnington Monsters of Rock festival.

There’s also the risk of putting songs on there which might have some real personal significance and then having them summarily dismissed (I’d think I’d sooner hear “I tend to think of you as a friend...” than having my favourite tunes pissed on).

As I also really like this person, I’m screening the lyrics of the tracks in case it comes across as some big exercise in subliminality (the last thing I’d want to do with someone I really like is give her the impression I really like her, right?). So songs mentioning love n’ stuff are out. Songs about suicide, death, eating disorders and life in prison are in.

Hmm. Maybe I should just play it safe and save exposing my soul for another day.

*downloads the torrent for Mel C’s Northern Star album from the Pirate Bay and readies a blank CD-R *

So, to cut a potentially long(ish) story short, I asked her out for the drink, and she said yes.

Thanks to all the words of advice, encouragement and piss taking since my last post. I would like to make it clear to y’all that I do have some previous experience in this area, and have been asking women out for drinks since I was at least 31.

Yesterday was my seventh consecutive day in work (hooray for shift work!), and one I took rather leisurely (a rare luxury in an understaffed psychiatric project).

I pretty much spent the last hour of my shift playing pool with JC and, admittedly, was not trying particularly hard to win. When someone you’re carrying a torch for beams that much every time they pot a ball, you find yourself deliberately missing a few shots and even losing the odd game.

My blissful hour was only interrupted once by a hilarious intervention from SGH, who walked into the room, saw us playing and said:

“Alright TKK. Alright sweetheart. [to JC] I’m only calling you sweetheart because I can’t remember your name. I’m not bent. I’m not gay. I can remember men’s names, just not women’s. They’ve always been jealous of me, ever since I was a young woman...”

Eventually, I ran out the winner in our games, and being a gentleman I shook her hand. However, when I attempted to release her hand, she held mine tighter, and so I held onto hers, resulting in us holding hands for an inordinately long time. I don’t know whether it qualified as a ‘moment’, but it certainly felt that what started as a handshake finished as something else. She then decided she wanted another game, although we only got halfway through as one of my key clients needed something from JC and my shift had now finished.

Our rota for July is due out next week. *crosses fingers*

Punctuality is not my forte.

I was a pretty punctual person until my early 20s, although by that point, after living in London for a few years, I decided to wave the white flag and join the fashionably late brigade. Anyone who's ever stepped into the London Underground Bermuda Triangle and been reported missing by the friends will know the frustration at seeing your life ebb away while stuck in a stranger's armpit on a Central Line carriage.

However, today I knew I had to be on time, as this was going to the first of only two opportunities I had this month to catch the Jewish Cleopatra.

Or so I thought.

So I pack my overnight bag (I'm doing a sleep-in shift at work tonight - joy!) early. I got in the shower, early. I shave early, etc. Basically, I was Mr Early today.

I left my flat (early). Stepping out onto the street from TK Towers a No.29 bus passed me.

It was too early.

Despite being too cool to run for buses, I managed to make the bus as the driver decided to nip into a shop to get a drink.

So I arrive at work.

Early.

I drop my bag upstairs, stroll down to the staff office and walk in through the door.

Early.

Five minutes early. Result! Not too suspicious...

Except...

She's not there.

I feign innocence and ask the other staff in the office who else did the sleep in shift, knowing full well I'd pined at the rota for many an afternoon since the new shifts were announced, and how few she'd been given. Thankfully, she hadn't gone (early), so I go upstairs to unpack some of my stuff.

And then she walks into the upstairs office, looking like Horses-era Patti Smith mixed with Cleopatra.

Be still my beating heart.

I knew it was going to be a brief chat, as when you finish a sleep-in shift you really want to leave the place sharpish, but I also knew I really wanted to ask her for a drink and I only had two chances to do that this month.

But... it just really wasn't the time. As much as I want to ask her out, I want it to look vaguely natural when I do get round to it. So I let it go and said at the end of our chat: "see you soon. Whenever that's going to be".

She replied: "I'm sure it won't be that long, TK".

I checked the rota downstairs when I got in, expecting the July rotas to be out today, as promised, which of course meant they were delayed until next week. While I sort of expected that, I didn't expect the extra bank shift booked in towards the end of the week, overlapping rather nicely with one of mine.

Which just happened to be filled by the person I broke the tardy habits of a lifetime for today.

It seems my lobbying at the team meeting on Tuesday had had an immediate impact.

The rest of the day went by in something of a haze. Having to work a nine-hour shift with a co-worker you really don't get on with is pretty tough, especially when you've seen someone you swoon over leave the building.

Later in the evening as I played pool with one of the residents, True by Spandau Ballet came on the radio. For the next three and a half minutes I was in another world, dreaming of thrills in my head and pills on my tongue, forever being punctual and True!

This finding deeper meaning in classic 80s pop songs can only mean one thing...

She's going to politely turn down my offer of a drink (whenever I get round to making it).