Back to the Same Old Same Old

Ah, work. Can't live with it, can't eat without it. My wee holiday is over (there's a post brewing that'll tell you all about it, as if you're interested, but it's taking me a while to finish it, as it involves posting pictures and whatnot. Thankfully no Venn diagrams as yet, though), and so I've been back at work for the past few days. And contemplating the arduous prospect of a twelve-hour shift tomorrow. That's a pretty large slice of no fun. Phillip Larkin had it pegged when he wrote "Why must this toad 'work' squat upon my life?" I'm seriously thinking about taking up bank robbery. Think about it - it might be a risky business, but the hours are good and you get to be your own boss. Even when the authorities do catch up with you, they'll just force you to take early retirement. And stick you in an early retirement home, which just happens to have bars on the windows.

On the plus side, though, I've kicked my running up a notch since I got back. Probably because I felt a bit guilty about neglecting it for a week. Fourteen and a half miles on Sunday night, and the same on Monday night. Rubbish times, but there was a pretty strong headwind a-blowin' - so much so that at times I felt like a crap mime as I ran into it. The river was running high as well, so there was no sign of my two heron standpipe sentinels (which I may explain sometime in some future post), but seeing the water seething and roiling, whipped up into a dark, frothy frenzy by the wind almost made up for it.

I also found this little snippet the other day. I had a cataclysmic computer failure some six months ago, and lost a hell of a lot of stuff as a result - not just stuff that I'd done, but also music that I'd downloaded which I've been unable to find again - anyway, I'd thought that this too had been lost in the Great Crash of 2003 (as I think of it), but it turns out that I had a paper copy of it kicking about. Anyways - I would have been paid $25 for this (plus my weight in coffee), and it would have appeared on the labels of coffee cans throughout the US thanks to www.storyhouse.com if my computer hadn't have been feeling a bit peaky at the time.


The Zoo

The entire incident was hushed up - even now when I go back the keepers pretend not to recognise me; although, tellingly, none of them ever look me in the eye. I don't go back often. And when I do, I watch the visitors more than the animals. I always make sure I'm parked close by, and sometimes I even keep my engine running.

It all happened the day after the great storm.The whole zoo had been hit pretty hard, but the monkey enclosure had suffered the worst damage. We were sent in to clean things up. The monkeys made more noise than usual that day - I'd never seen them so rattled.

I wasn't the one who made the actual discovery, but I was one of the first on the scene. It was in the far corner of the enclosure, where the visitors can't see and where the keepers hardly ever go. While chasing a wind-blown plastic bag, one of my co-workers had stumbled and fallen. When she looked to see what had tripped her, she noticed a loose strip of turf laid over a hole in the ground. Puzzled, she'd peeled back the turf, and, as she did so, the monkeys all fell curiously silent. I'd seen her fall and rushed to help her, so I was there when she made her disturbing find.

Inside the hole were six long overcoats - one only half-finished - made from old crisp packets and scraps of newspaper roughly stitched together with dried grass. Six baseball caps, crudely fashioned from used fast-food containers, and six small bags filled with an assortment of small change and shiny bottle tops. And, perhaps most ominously of all, at the very back of that shallow hole we also found an old disposable razor.

I quit my job the very next day.