Today's awful people

Should know better by now than to start writing at 9:46pm, but do not, apparently.

Today got me well and truly into the condition where I want to have the simple satisfaction of forming some sentences that make sense of the events, and that make sense also from the tangle of half-finished and unvoiced inner descriptions of what has happened and how I have felt about it. (How I have felt about it, or how it's made me feel? This is the kind of question that I worry at endlessly.) Hang on to your hats, because I AM NOT IN BED, but I'm having difficulty keeping my eyes open. However, if I don't do this now the alternative is go to bed and be restless and feel that I've left something important unfinished.

Right, well today a matched pair of offensive episodes intruded upon what should have been a quiet day largely focused on finishing off a work project. First, as I was riding to work this morning I spotted a glove that I had lost on the way home two days earlier. It was sitting on top of a treated pine fence post in a local park. I had the other glove still in my bag so I got it out and put them both on, but the found glove had an unbelievably disgusting, crackly sticky translucent substance inside. Someone - I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture the opinion that it might have been a man - had found it, wanked into it then left it the park, and I think after that it was probably picked up and left on the fence by a different person. So that was revolting and I did indeed throw up, dumped both gloves in the bin and luckily there is a public toilet very close by so I washed my hands with soap and cold water, dried them on my t-shirt and washed them again. When I got to work I really scrubbed them. After work I stopped at Aesop on the way home and bought a tube of hand cream that smells of mandarines and sandalwood and rosemary, it is so delicious that I have rubbed it all the way up my forearms and I have also brushed quite a lot of my current favourite perfume Pomelo across my collarbones. So I smell pretty good now but it wasn't a nice start to the day.

And at work, out of nowhere, a senior manager spoke ridiculously rudely to me in a way that literally took my breath away for a moment, and he did this in front of another colleague - a man who ranks higher than me, who reports to him and with whom I have had a couple of relatively small issues to do with professional courtesy and respect - and two people who they were showing around the back-of-house area where this edifying little scene was played out. I did lose the power of speech for a moment but I got enough of it back in time to call him on his bullshit then and there. I spoke to my own boss about it and I know she discussed it with him, and then later in the day he sent around an email to the whole org which is too boring to go into detail about, but which was plainly the cumbersome backtrack of somebody who doesn't know how to stop digging and start mending.

So, in both instances what I felt I had to do was complete the task of removing the residues, as it were, of what these people had deposited on me, and this was a nuisance and took up a lot of time. But a little strangely it was no worse than that. I didn't even feel the need to break into the emergency Haigh's chocolate heart I carry around in my bag (pictured - it's beginning to get a bit tattered-looking). I didn't feel all that personally involved. And so I thought about these people who'd intruded with their stuff. Why were they so awful? I find many people awful but in many cases this is not barrier to liking and enjoying them or even becoming more deeply attached to them. Morrissey has always understood exactly what this is like, to find people vile but also to be unable to walk away from them, to refuse them what they want, even if what they want is to tell you how unimportant and unnecessary you are.

I have been struggling to stay awake for some time now so I'm going to leave it here - just when I was becoming interested myself. More tomorrow