Interesting times

Life might be about to get really exciting.

Mark’s company has announced that they are going to make some more people redundant. They have managed to amass almost enough volunteers for unemployment: but, they have warned grimly: they need one more.

One man will have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of his boiler suit and company issue baseball cap, and hurled pitilessly out of  the huge double doors and flung into the outer darkness beyond.

The axe is going to fall on Thursday and it is to be hoped that no compressors or steam generators or sandblasters or other items of similar importance need building in the meantime, because of course nobody is going to to do anything at all other than loiter around hopping anxiously from one steel toe capped boot to the other until their fate has been decided. The merry mood has been further enhanced by the opinions of those who have already fallen to the axe, explained in indelible marker pen on the wash bay walls in heartfelt detail.

Mark is as sanguine as he always is, and has put in some exploratory applications elsewhere, just in case, and as is always the way with these things, once we started to think about doing something different the idea grew on us and got more and more exciting.

By Easter he might be in Italy or Saudi or Brazil or Singapore or even living at home and working from somewhere local like Sellafield or the wind farm out in the Irish sea. I have reserved judgement on this last option as I have grown quite used to living with the dog, whose needs in the laundry and catering departments are not at all demanding, and who can be chucked out on to the landing when he snores.

Mark was quite upbeat about the idea, and kindly suggested by way of compensation that if he lived at home again he could finish tiling the kitchen. This sounded all very well, but of course the reason that  I don’t mind the neglected and incomplete state of the walls is because whilst he is away I never need to bother to use the kitchen. At the moment nothing more creative than coffee emerges from it, and even that comes in the same mug which I wash occasionally when it starts to be upsetting or when I am expecting visitors. Tuna fish can be eaten with a fork directly from the tin, cheese can become mellow and malodorous on the table and then eaten in dripping lumps for breakfast, garlic can be eaten all the time with everything, and if I start getting scurvy there is always the remains of Elspeth’s very nice damson gin.

But these are interesting times, with endless possibilities, and I am secretly rather pleased at the prospect of a new adventure. He couldn’t come home every weekend if he were in Abu Dhabi.

I would have to go out and visit him…