So I’m back in the office – which office? Oh, any, could be MI5 for all I know – after a too, too brief hiatus doing some….ACTING!!!! Hoorah hooray yippeekiyay. It’s amazing the sense of jubilation I got when I left the temp job I was doing that I abandoned for…ACTING!…as if this was a life I could now say ta-tah to and I was off to nail boards into my feet, so determined to tread the boards and stay on them. Of course I didn’t really think a little sniff of a theatre would change my current standing forever more, but such is the devil burning an arse print on your shoulder whilst whispering sweet nothings. Just maybe…?

Anyway, it was a glorious week and, oh, how we laughed and spread out our dusty theatrical wares and wit upon the (actual) dressing room with (actual) posh chairs and (actual) mirrors that lit up. This is terra firma, yes, this feels right, doesn’t it? We’re hooome! It is at moments like that – when a cast takes a collective deep intake of breath so as to remember the sight, the sound, the smell of the stage and all its workings, that I feel an overwhelming sense of love and stinging admiration for everyone clawing on to this profession. Call it a disease, an addiction, an obsession, an affliction; at times like these when you’re putting your make-up on or placing your props, it is simply a quiet, honest, private and unconditional connection (albeit with an untamed beast). And those are the moments I find it overwhelming, and those are the moments I know why I need to carry on going. Not for the applause but for the deep, quiet connection – to something inexplicable.

Just sat on the loo for 12 minutes again, wondering if when I returned to the office they might all be dressed as the cast of Disney’s Dumbo. Just for kicks, or a bonding exercise. The CEO leaping about as Mrs. Jumbo with a pink bonnet on his head, and everyone fashioning trunks from rolled up invoices from PWC. The Finance department tethering themselves to the fans overhead to conjure The Crows, and the HR department jiggling rhythmically as the Pink Elephants and taking turns to stick their head in a cake (nothing changes there then). Quite why my brain has muddled together this effervescent scene is curious but I suppose it is just another way of passing another few godforsaken minutes, desperately holding my imagination intact and trying with all my might not to rip my way through to insanity, the only barrier being as skinny and frail as cling film from Iceland. I play this sequence out in depth, and get quite heady. I wish I had a snack.

When I eventually return, lo and behold they are all still sat in silence and the room continues to feel like Hitler’s funeral. I go back to my desk and sulk. Then a moment later, the CEO bursts out of his private little fucking den with all the glee of finding a singing dodo on his shoulder, and I think maybe this shit could get real and so slowly start rolling up a sheet of A4… Turns out the only reason he felt the need to leap from his throne was to ask one of us sickly secretaries to make him a cup of tea. The mildly eager one of us scraped herself up off her steadily forming roadkill state and schlepped the two metres over to the communal kitchen to do the arduous task. Quite why this fully grown man with a modicum of intelligence and actual hands for hands, not potatoes or anything as cumbersome, couldn’t have made his own cup of tea is beyond me, particularly as he then sits in the eager one’s chair to have a bit of a swivel round regaling the team with some tale about his journey in that is about as melodramatic and hair-raising as a ham sandwich. He manages to spare exactly the same amount of time swivelling like a schoolboy that’s just had his first blow job, that it would have taken him to make his own cup of fucking tea and I feel like I have just boiled to buggery like the poor, enslaved office kettle – the only one here I have sympathy for, apart from my own emaciated brain. The eager one drags herself back over and sort of hovers around not daring to ask if she can please have her chair of the damned back. He takes a sip of tea and comments on it being hot – I feel like I am going to stick my head into the scissors – and then he eventually prizes himself up with a big stretch as if this whole five minute episode has worn him out the most.

Things I’ve Learnt On The Journey So Far:

1. That those exiting Oxford St station at 9am bear the same resemblance as the Chilean miners being freed after the disaster in 2010.

2. That entering Oxford St station at 5pm bears the same resemblance as entering the Gates Of Hell and that is the reason all those Promoters of Religion are handing out their little magazines and smiling hopefully at the stricken throng.

3. That the real reason women wear comfy trainers with their business suit for the commute is so that they can make a quick getaway should they make the clean decision to pummel fellow passengers with their lunch box in order to have enough space to breathe out of their own nostrils.

4. That it is a very affecting experience sitting next to someone on the bus who decides to open up their tupperware containing salt fish stew, and then eating it with their hands.

5. That one is never too seasoned a traveller to not have to hold onto a handrail, and therefore avoid being launched at the bloke in front, hands clawing for help, and unknowingly/knowingly cupping said bloke’s balls as the nearest sturdy aide.

6. That one will never walk down the stairs of the bus gracefully. Ever. Instead, one must prepare oneself to look like a gorilla being steadied from a moving speed boat into a circle of snappy crocodiles.

7. That one’s basic sense of smell will heighten due to locking heads with fellow civilians, and therefore render one an expert in hair products/perfume/fabric conditioner/if they recently had sex/if they drink coffee/if they own a dog/if they like to shower regularly/if they don’t

8. That upon discovering the tube will be three or more minutes away, one will react in the same manner as discovering one’s house has burnt to the ground.

9. That wearing fur on the bus or tube is never a good idea and will just make one feel conspicuous, like one has escaped from the zoo and any moment the keeper will appear with a net.

10. That no matter how clean/polished/glamorous/geared up/tanked up/fresh/lively/happy one feels when one sets off at the start of the ride, at the end one will always feel mucky/violated/jaded/repulsive/perverted/knackered/suspicious/sober/depressed/ready for bed.

Just sat on the loo for ten minutes eating walnuts. Ran the tap a bit to obliterate the sound of crunching. Thankful to Mr. Corporate God for creating individual cubicles with sinks so these moments of respite are private – cell-like but still, we must count our blessings in these long, drawn out days where one feels like the innards of Robocop – not the good bits, not the fun, cool, action stuff but the mechanics that make his elbows move. Basic, essential and boring.

When I first started my stint in this office, I felt like I warded against being sucked in by this vacuum of worn out walls, heavy and regular with their grey disposition – grey stairs, grey chairs, grey cupboards, grey floors – why grey, by the way? Who decided that? Why not a kaleidoscope of colour, bursting with beauty, vibrant – to make it more interesting, yes, but also to keep us ALIVE, rather than slipping into death unawares. Sometimes I think I’ll hear the odd, sudden thud, of office workers slumping onto their keyboards – Death By Dullness.

Yes, I thought I warded against all that, with my gauche lipstick and dangly earrings sashaying their way along the brown carpeted corridors like an African mother pacing the earth with buckets hung on her shoulders taking nutrients back to her tribal brood. Oh little me, oblivious to the function of the binder, oblivious to how the Chairman takes his tea, oblivious to where the paper clips are kept. And now I know it all and have gone from a modicum of zany to full-throttle zapped. And I can’t be bothered to wear earrings and it’s too tedious to bother with lipstick the colour of a bruise. And whether I was aware or not, my last several outfits have been 50 Shades of Grey. Apt in many ways – colour, mental state and how dreary and sexless office life is – just like that godforsaken book.

Still, it’s my last day here today, so come Monday I will be back to being a hand-to-mouth-Moaning-Minnie-actress-writer-wannabe-type drooling about all the things I want to do, panicking and perspiring and desperate to get back to the office so I can afford to spend all my wages drinking in the pub and checking my phone to see if The Call has finally come through.

Yesterday I made chickpea cookies the consistency of cow pat so my dalliance with veganism is over.

I recently heard a successful author describe writing as an “evil task”, and it made me think, and sigh with relief, that it wasn’t just me. For somebody who wants to write, there is something supremely satisfying – unrivalled, even – about penning a line you’re proud of, but volunteering to actually get down to it is about as likely as skipping all the way to get your cervix scraped.

Why? Is it because you’re scared of actually just being a bit shit? And if so, what a net full of nimwits. It’s like someone you love saying, “Come here, lie down, you don’t have to do any graft, just lie back and I’ll blow your mind” – sexually speaking, not I’ll-blow-your-brains-out-with-my-AK-47 – and you replying, “Fuck that, I’ve got a Rampant Rabbit in the back with new batteries and I have very sturdy wrists”, or looking disdainfully when Mary Berry says, “Here, eat this three tiered cake, it’s scrumptious and calorie-free”. Why would we retreat from such joy? Sadism is the only answer.

Someone else said that creativity is like a shooting star, a fleeting, passing thing, and you have to therefore recognise, grab and ride that wave when it comes to you, because it’s just passing through. Well, maybe that is so. And maybe that’s ok. But always this feeling of failing. “Oh ball sacs, I haven’t written again today. Well I’m obviously not dedicated enough and I’ll never make it a career. Where’s my self-flagellating stick I fashioned from a chair leg and old forks whilst procrastinating last Thursday…?”

Off to do a spot of hoovering.

Had an argument with Benedict Cumbersome today. It wasn’t that fair an argument really, because he was immortalised on a poster and I was held captive on the Victoria line but that didn’t stop me going all gung-ho. Fortunately I didn’t vocalise my wrath per se, so no one managed to stir from their morning umming-and-aahing about whether or not to throw themselves in front of the next train. BC just looked at me, in that way he has, all sort of superior and yes-I-look-like-an-alien-and-yes-I’ll-give-you-an-orgasm-that’ll-blow-your-toes-to-Timbuktu intensity.

I said, BC, I’m having none of it. Don’t try to smarm your way out of this, sunshine. You’ve just gone and made it, haven’t you? And now life’s all la-di-da, with Weinstein on speed dial and martinis at the Marmont. You no longer have to stand here getting a sweaty lesson in anatomy half a mile underground because you’re so close to the forty year old accountant in front of you that you’ve managed to massage his small intestine, while the physiotherapist to the right of you has just punctured your left lung with their elbow as you try with all your might not to engage in a snog-a-thon with the granny to the right with raisins in her teeth. Not to mention the fact that a banker’s briefcase has been wedged up your vagina ever since Stockwell, and it’s ever so slightly turning you on, and is that wrong, even here amid this savage Hogarth tableau known as public transport? But even that wouldn’t bother you, would it BC, because you don’t have a vagina and even if you did it would be nowhere near here, getting flayed by office chattels? Or maybe you do? Maybe you do have a vagina, or happy to tuck at least, and maybe that’s why you’re doing so well – you’re flexible, and you can fashion a fanny for Hollywood’s highest bidder?

BC doesn’t really have anything to say to this and so we just have a bit of a stare off. He looks mostly superior, surprise surprise, and I just look on, mostly vexed. I wonder what he’s doing right now…purring over a new script, perhaps, or his bank account… Poor BC, just having to sit and take it as my brain swirls with scorn. I like you, BC, I like you a lot. You’re a v v good actor. I’ve even seen your willy on stage as Frankenstein’s monster – all of you, not just your willy, though that could be an interesting take? – and I must applaud you as it was a very worthy production and a very worthy willy. But now I’m thinking about your willy, BC, and this banker’s briefcase is still wedged up my vagina… Suffice to say all is forgiven and I’m sorry for being so mean.

All my love,

The (v) Flustered Feminist
x

NB, (“very”) not (“vegan”). Don’t put that beside my name now like a restaurant menu that’s had its balls removed

Gloriously fed up today. After spending the weekend in Dorset rambling wildly up grassy mains screaming “I can see the SEA!” like someone who’s on day release, dislocating my jaw in order to enjoy a wedge of sponge cake the size of a family home and deciding with conviction it’s necessary to stop at every pub to rest your wind-swept knees, no wonder it took me within the region of 1.17 minutes of being on the tube at 8am to resume my usual London P.O.V. of wanting to scalp everyone in sight and dance around the various bouffants with the confidence and complacency of a seasoned cannibal.

Houmous? Hummus? Houmus? Homouse? Hoemus? Whoremouse? Hemmarse? Arsemouse? Horsemuss? Humscrumptious? Whosemouse? Snoozmus? Schmoozhouse? Humanahumanahumanamus? Scaramoose?