the peripheral whiff of something that I think I might have thought
Perhaps, I hope, it was just the general thinklag of being back at work. It’s just that I found myself sitting at work today completely bloody freaking out; sat hunched in front of a computer, unable to do anything useful at all, even though something needed to be done.
The Government had brought out a thing, and I had to write a blog reacting to that thing. And I just couldn’t.
The thing was the thing. I was me. The thing and me were not interfacing.
The thing was fine. A decent enough thing. I mean, just a Government document thing, you know? 150 pages of highfalutin words and then some stuff they say they’re going to do. Yadda yadda. All launched with fanfare by Her Upstairs, Mrs May; that’s rare for a green thing.
Everyone was Excited. A squillion envirowonks — my peoples — competed with each other on Twitter for who could say the sharpest thing about a document none of them could possibly have read yet. If you were an envirowonk that thinks it doesn’t do to be too mean to the Government, you thought it was great. More bolshy envirowonks — my real peoples — said what we always say, which was: nice curtains, Mrs May, shame about the furniture.
We always say the same thing. And we say it to each other, and so it must be right, mustn’t it.
And we all went on telly (I didn’t go on telly) and we all sat down quietly to read every page (I didn’t read every page) and we all wrote blogs (I just rocked quietly in my chair and did not write a blog, not for a long time). And then tomorrow or the next day there’ll be another Big Document of some description, and we’ll do it all again, and
AND FOR GOD’S SAKE I THOUGHT
I MEAN
what the hell does it matter what I say about all this
I don’t even know what I think about all this
how can I know what I think about this, it’s a plan for sorting out the whole fucking environment, and the environment is fucking massive
and it doesn’t have all the things in it, but of course it doesn’t, the ‘environment’ is anything you want it to be, so obviously if you want to slag it off you can slag it off
even though we can’t possibly know what we think about it
can we?
AND I THOUGHT
aaaaaargh omg omg.
How many times have I done this? Sat in front of a computer screen with a flashing cursor and a press officer looking at me with friendly menace and a ‘time is money, sparklehorse’ look on their face, and they just want me to write something quick and on-message, y’know, but the problem is that I don’t really know what I think about any of it; I have the things I think I think about the world, and they might be right but they might just as easily be wrong, and how the hell does anyone have the sheer fucking upbringing to just say what they think about something without perpetually worrying about the fact that none of us, surely, have a fucking clue what we’re doing, really, do we?
I went out and got chips, and helped a little bit with the office lunchtime go at the crossword puzzle. This calmed me down a bit. I sat down and 700 words just kind of dolloped out — words to be on message, and I suppose read OK, and probably capture some faint essence of an angle you could probably take, and have the peripheral whiff of something that I think I might have thought if my brain was straight today.
It’s a lonely business, sometimes, this.
