Rats and worms with cameras (a day in the life of OB)

 8.10 I've never woken up this late before. It took two goes to get fully awake, the first time round I slipped and was sucked back into the kind of sinister, fitful, paranoic half-sleep I seem to exist on lately. The second time I managed to drag myself upright, remembering that I had taken one of those tranquillisers at around 3 o'clock last night, and that it had done anything but tranquillise me. I wasn't late for work, just didn't have much time for the usual leisurely early-morning session of reading the newsgroups and mailing lists that normally precedes the hurried shower/scramble to find clean clothes. I had time for a quick scan of my mailbox and a shower, then realised I had no clean shirts left except "winter" ones. Being British, even after all these years in Spain I still find the concept of having "summer clothes" and "winter clothes" bizarre and mildly funny. Nevertheless, I have it on good authority that going to work in long sleeves in this weather is seen here as not only eccentric, but a possible symptom of Alzheimer's or worse.

8.50 I leave for work, late as usual. On the corner of my street, check to see if C is approaching. Sometimes we coincide: I on my way to work, she on her way to her Course in Careers Advising (she is unemployed but hoping to find a job helping people to find a job). She is nowhere to be seen. Probably a good thing as she has strong opinions about people who wear winter shirts in summer. Yesterday, though, we did coincide. I didn't have much to say as we walked the few hundred yards before our paths diverged;
but before waving goodbye, I took the opportunity to give her one of my lingering bearhugs on the corner of the main avenue, in full view of a bloke who looked like a plumber and several middle-aged women at a bus stop. I should perhaps explain that for me, a bearhug is when you hug someone as a lonely child would a teddy-bear. I specialise in those, when allowed. This week I have been, surprisingly, allowed. I say surprisingly because last week C told me she didn't want a relationship. She wanted us to Just Be
Friends. But on Sunday it turned out that the concept of "just friends" included having sex, which was a surprise to me. Rashly, I decided that this was exactly what I wanted: no commitment, no obligation to see her when I'd rather be alone, but conversation and sex whenever both felt like it, which to judge by previous experience might be assumed to be quite frequently. So this week, I had lapsed back into smiling and feeling good and giving her bearhugs.

Yesterday, as she walked away, I wished I had a camera. I wanted to capture the moment. That long, swinging, black skirt, the blue T-shirt, the sheer prettiness of her in the street. I wanted to shout to the world: I owned that once! Even if only for a few months...

9.07 Arrive at work. It is already annoyingly hot. I climb the metal spiral staircase to the programmers' floor and stand by the air-conditioner with arms outstretched like a cormorant trying to coax the blast of cold air into my armpits. After that, it's business as usual. Not much to recount there. I have a pile of "partes de servicio" (worksheets?) with descriptions of changes, corrections, improvements to be made to the Shibboleth, the great and holy business program that currently forms the only objective justification for my existence. Yesterday I replaced a Data Bound Grid with a Flex Grid and found it worked much faster for searches. Today I had, among a dozen other things, to add several filter criteria to a series of printouts and replace the CC field in a series of SQL stored procedures with IsNull(CC, ''). Yes, my job is as interesting as that. Occasionally I get up and stagger to a nearby open-plan area where you are allowed to gulp down a
few puffs of a cigarette while making coffee in a little plastic cup. Another interesting distraction is answering the phone and informing whoever it is that whoever they want to speak to is not there. A lot of the time I
am alone: the others get to go out and see clients. I don't because I don't have a car. So I just codify and drink coffee. End of job description. 

Oh, I forgot: the radio. It is on all day. Always the same songs, current pop hits, most of which I like. But it is very quiet, very low in the mix. When the news is on, every half hour, I usually can't make out what is said beyond a few words here and there. The only one I have decided I don't like is one by what's her name, I don't really know her name, one of those posturing bints with perfect bodies and Hispanic names of nearly voting age that make me frightened to turn on the TV to MTV in case I see one and my eyes get stuck and I suffer. Anyway this one features a few notes from the famous Satie Gymnopédie, endlessly repeated as backing to a bobbing, tuneless whine, which is to my mind sacrilege and annoys me intensely whenever I hear it. I mean you get used to contemporary pop ripping everything and everyone off right left and centre but some stealing is beyond the pale. But then David Byrne ("Road to Nowhere") comes on and cheers me up. Yes, that's how boring my day is.

1.30 I knock off and head for home. Occasionally I don't. Occasionally I am wickedly adventurous and stay in town for my two-hour lunch break, usually in order to have a haircut or because I have remembered in time that there is no food in the fridge. But today I go home, have a plate of unadorned pasta and search around for a more suitable shirt to wear in the afternoon. Eventually I find one that still has long sleeves but seems to be made of thinner material. I also log on briefly and reply to an email from one of the two long-distance friends I currently write to.

3.35 I am back at work. It is ridiculously hot. I linger by the noisy air conditioner trying to get the air to blow into the various crevices in my more suitable shirt. The sweat has stuck most of the shirt to my skin. I try
to detach it gingerly. When I get to the PC I have to position some paper under my mouse arm, else the sweat turns the desktop into a skating-rink.

5.45 I have a 5-minute coffee break and chat with Custo, the young programmeress who is working on the Help file in another room. She is planning to study maths in a private school. I ask for details, wistfully
trying to convince myself that I might have the energy to study maths myself at some point in the foreseeable future.

7.00 I knock off work. There was a brief spell, months ago, when C would sometimes be waiting for me in the street outside. I glance out of the window before leaving the building, purely out of habit, but have learned not to expect that any more. After all, we are not actually having a "relationship" now.

7.35 I am home again, proudly sporting a carrier bag containing a canary-coloured shirt with short sleeves. This was C's idea: take advantage of the Sales. The shirt cost two and a half bar meals, or twelve
beers. Not bad. I look forward to showing C my new shirt. I plan a meal out with her in a bar this evening, as we used to do, after she has finished torturing herself at the gym.

7.50 Having checked the mailbox, I put on a load of laundry (all the other short sleeved shirts), wash the dishes from yesterday, dust the computer table ("dust" is perhaps an inaccurate description for the process of trying to get cat hairs to stick to a piece of wet paper towel). I discover the exit pipe from the washing machine is broken and water is gushing out all over the terrace outside. I wonder vaguely how to fix a broken exit pipe. But the water is welcome - the terrace needed a wash anyway. Then I decide to search for the address and/or phone number of S., the woman whose hospitality and charitable tendencies I am vaguely hoping to take advantage of in my forthcoming (Aug) visit to Segovia. In the process of sorting
through the various drawers I use for stacking "papers", I find hundreds of unopened letters from the bank, dozens of letters saying that the royalties from my book have not amounted to a figure of $50 in the time specified, which is why no cheque has been sent, several operating manuals for electrical or electronic equipment, some birthday cards, a twenty-five pound gift voucher for Marks and Spencer someone gave me as a present years ago, and some photos of R, an ex. I reminisce about R and decide to stick on a tape of Lisa Stansfield, the singer whom R used in her first attempt to seduce me, maybe ten years ago (she was a student of mine, and insisted on playing the song "we've got to Live Together" in my class, on
the grounds that the lyrics might form an interesting object of study. I didn't get the hint, until several months later when she explained to me what her intentions had been. By then we were Living Together). I become
nostalgic, but push the nostalgia to one side and insist on telling myself how nice it will be to inform the obsessive-compulsive C about my paper-sorting exploits, proudly showing her the several supermarket bags full of unopened bank letters and suchlike, all ready to be carted to the dustbin. That's my plan: to impress her so much (with my tidiness, my Reduced Smoking Habit, my determined effort to achieve certain longstanding ambitions) that eventually she will change her mind and decide she does want
a Relationship after all. By then, presumably I will want one too. For now, I want to eat out with her in a bar and to be seen with her and envied and to tell her about my boring day and ask her about her interesting one and to hug her and touch her hair and then come back home and have sex. I want her to be interested in my sorting of papers and throwing away of bank letters. I can think of no-one else who would be interested in this, but she might. 

9.50 Fed up with her not arriving, I have already phoned her parents a couple of times to find out where she is. Now the phone rings. She tells me brightly and breezily about how tired she felt today. I say "what are we?". She replies that we are not a couple. She says she was worried this week as I seemed so happy all of a sudden, and suspected I had got the wrong end of the stick. She wants us to just be friends. I want to say "with or without sex?" but feel that would seem a little too direct. She tells me I am "very valid". I don't want to be very valid! I threaten to go and live in Segovia (this is what I think swung it for me last week). She seems relatively unconcerned. Eventually I get from her that she has decided more sex would not be a good idea as it would be "cruel to me". I am not sure if it would be cruel to me or not. I can see her point of view, but there is another way of looking at it. It would be cruel if I was not going to live in Segovia. But I am hoping to do just that. And even if I fail, being the victim of "cruelty" is better (surely?) than being just nothing. I listen to her sweet, beautifully modulated voice, the calmness of it, the gymnastic healthiness of it, the remoteness of it. I compare that with the image in my mind, of [I have removed a few phrases here out of a reluctant sense of discretion. Rest assured they were extremely poetic].

10.10 I put down the phone. Suddenly I feel much aloner than before. I am frightened of the parts of me that are not speaking up. They are still taking it all in. I don't know where I will be tomorrow. I feel rejected not
once but twice. But I don't really know how to feel about it. I am not programmed to respond in any special way. I just feel lonely, a bit sad and a bit frightened.

I forgot to mention - the title. On the phone, C told me that there is a dustmen's strike in Segovia right now (one of those news items I couldn't catch on the radio). She said "there are rats and worms walking the streets of Segovia like tourists". I loved this image. Rats as tourists. I want to be there! I am planning to write a film set in Segovia in medieval times: the rats would be IDEAL. Maybe I could persuade the dustmen to go on strike again a week before we start shooting. Rats and Worms walking the streets
like tourists! I want to BE THERE.