Infidelity for Beginners

You may find yourself
in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, “Well, how
did I get here?”
 
– ‘Once
in a Lifetime’, Talking Heads

“… so you see we’re having to check
overheads in every department. Advertising and Editorial are undergoing exactly
the same reviews so don’t feel you’re being penalised or being picked on
because it’s a company-wide review. It’s just the state of the current economic
climate I’m afraid. It’s changing week by week so we’ve got to pre-empt and
adapt if we want to continue to survive when so many titles are going to the
wall.”

Christ I wanted a fag.

Some people can do that to you; make you want a fag. It
doesn’t even matter if you’ve never even smoked before. Five minutes of
listening to them waffle on and you’re ready to start.

I wanted a fag. I wanted a big, fat, juicy fag.

I wanted to light one end, suck hard on the other and then
blow a enormous cloud of hot blue smoke right into Norman’s face (and possibly
follow it up with a blur of whirling fists).

Check overheads? Current climate? Pre-empt and adapt? All he
needed was to call it a challenge and he would’ve had Bingo.

“… and of course nothing like this is ever easy, but I know
you’ll give it your best shot and see this as a challenge…” There you go a full
house and he’d only been speaking for three minutes. Not too shabby by anyone’s
standards.

Out of sheer desperation my eyes drifted around his desk and
latched onto the oh so familiar photograph of Norman’s never-changing wife.
Like Norman’s namesake from
Cheers
no
one had ever seen his wife, word around the office was that she didn’t actually
exist, the picture had simply come with the frame. I could quite believe it and
even made a point of looking out for her whenever I passed Prontaprint or
Snappy Snaps.

“… and this goes right across the board, be merciless, be
tough, be decisive…”

Back to the fags. Like I said, I would’ve loved one but I
couldn’t. And not just because we weren’t allowed to smoke at work any more or
because Norman would’ve frowned upon it or because the shop across the road
didn’t sell them but because I’d given up six months ago; six months, several
days and a few minutes in fact. Fantastic. How great was that? I’d smoked for
fourteen glorious years and had enjoyed a modest but regular ten-a-day habit
but suddenly all that was behind me. I was a non-smoker once more.

A clean living, non-polluting, fresh air breathing,
grown-up, healthy non-smoker. And I would’ve happily killed every other
non-smoker in Britain and climbed across their clean, healthy, cancer-free
bodies just to have had one last drag. One tiny, measly, nicotine-packed,
deadly, yet delicious drag. God, I would’ve loved that.

But I couldn’t. Because I was a non-smoker again. And
non-smokers weren’t allowed to smoke. And that was all there was to it.

Somebody had once told me that it got easier with time and
like an idiot I had believed them, but it didn’t. Or at least, it hadn’t. I
still wanted one in the morning after my first cup of tea. I wanted one in the
car on my way to work. I wanted one during my lunch break and then again at
about four. I wanted one at about six on my way home from work. And I wanted a
couple in the evening when I sat in my comfortable armchair after dinner and
watched a load of rubbish on the telly.

I wanted a cigarette all of these times, every day and more,
but most of all I wanted one right now.

“… because that’s what being a team player is all about. Are
you a team player Andrew? Andrew?”

And perhaps a massive belt of scotch too.

That was something else I was having to cut back on.
Alcohol.

I guess it’s the same for everyone in their thirties. You
cut back and quit, reduce and rethink. I’d spent most of my twenties eating,
drinking and smoking whatever had tasted nice to eat, drink and smoke and told
myself I’d sort it all out when I got to my thirties. Except who knew how
quickly they’d come around?

Don’t get me wrong, I’d never been an enormous booze-crazy
pill-head like some blokes like to boast they were, but then again by that same
token I hadn’t exactly been good to myself. I’d enjoyed fry-ups for lunch,
chips for dinner, beer in the evenings and fags in-between and had basked in
the knowledge that I knew something every jogger in the park didn’t –
that they were idiots.

I’d been the fittest I was ever going to be in my life and
I’d taken it all for granted.

But then I guess most people do when they’re young.

Most of us look after our cars better than we do our bodies.
My friend Tom bought a new car recently and wouldn’t smoke or even pick-up smelly
food in it. It was okay for him to constantly stink of fags and battered
sausages himself, but he didn’t want the same fate to befall his beloved
Volkswagen. Every Sunday he’d be out in the street with the turtle wax
buffeting it up to a fine shine and he even missed a medical one time in favour
of getting a knocking checked out underneath his bonnet. It’s something he
still brags about today, but I wonder how much he’ll be bragging when that
knocking moves to his chest.

Like I say, when you’re in your twenties you don’t really
worry about these things because time’s on your side. Heart attack territory is
still way off in the distance and the effects of a night’s heavy drinking can
easily be put right by another night’s heavy drinking. It’s all a bit of a
laugh.

And then one day you wake up, slide your feet into a
slightly worn pair of carpet slippers and find a load of birthday cards on the
door mat downstairs.

Your hangover lasts a little longer into the weekend, your
dinner wipes you out, every ache is terminal cancer and you’re absolutely
knackered all of the time.

You’re thirty.

Or more likely thirty-five.

See, unhealthy living is a heavy old juggernaut to arrest
and it ploughs on well into your thirties before you’re finally able to get it
under control. And what fun it is when you do. I had been on ten fags a day,
but now I was on five portions of fruit, two litres of water, thirty minutes of
exercise, eight hours of sleep and a couple of minutes of flossing. If that
wasn’t enough to make a man want to get out of bed in the mornings I didn’t
know what was.

I’m not the first guy to moan about these things and I don’t
suppose I’ll be the last.

I just wanted a fag that was all.

“… so it’s over to you. Make this your number one priority.
Go away and take a good hard look at your figures. Get them down on paper and
dissect them until you’re down to the bare bones then rebuild them from
scratch. I’ll want to see justification for the absolutes and alternative
solutions for all your other outgoings. Remember, lean and efficient. Make
those your watch words and you’ll have a very happy publisher on your hands
indeed,” Norman said, then sat back, folded his arms and took a great big dump
in his pants. At least, that’s what it looked like he did from where I was
sitting. He was smiling to himself about something and as I’d heard nothing in
the last seven minutes that could’ve possibly caused him to smile, by the
process of elimination it had to be the only explanation. Alas I didn’t have
time to ponder this further as he seemed to be waiting for some sort of a
response from me.

Now, given the choice, I would’ve loved to have seen him
prostrate on the floor, with his hands over his ears, wailing like a little
girl and utterly broken as a man, but unfortunately my publisher’s happiness
and the easiness of my working days were index-linked. So I pretended I liked
the sound of everything he’d just said and promised prompt action on any number
of fronts. This made Norman smile even harder so I made my excuses and got back
to my desk before we started ripping the shirts from each other’s backs.

“Lean and efficient,” he’d said, although as everyone knew
this just meant cost cutting. Why then hadn’t Norman just said “cost cutting”
and saved all the yadda-yadda-yadda?

Simple, Norman liked Norman. He liked his meetings, he liked
sounding important at them. He liked wearing a tie and having to put on
cufflinks in morning. He liked big words. He liked new words. He liked having a
company car. And he liked having the biggest office in the building.

Most of all though, he liked having a staff to share his big
new words with.

Don’t get me wrong Norman wasn’t a bad man by any stretch of
the imagination. He’d never been horrible to me or to anyone else for that
matter. He always remembered everyone’s birthday and never seemed too upset
when nobody remembered his. He bought flowers for all the secretaries at
Christmas and this year even caught everyone on the hop when he left early on
the Friday before the Bank Holiday and said we could all go home too. At least
ten of us overtook him on the stairs on the way out.

He did all of these things and more, and yet still it wasn’t
enough because nobody really liked him.

I couldn’t tell you why. I couldn’t even tell you why I
didn’t like him. I just didn’t. Perhaps it was because he was in charge and got
paid more than me and he’d never once apologised for it. Or perhaps it was
because he liked to stick his nose into places he didn’t need to stick his nose
into and this would always stir up the waters. Either way, he was a fairly
uninspiring cricket of a man with files for friends and too much time on his
hands. Somebody should’ve probably taken him out to lunch and talked to him for
as long as they could’ve on as many subjects as they could’ve just to prove to
him there was more to life than work, but that would’ve meant spending a whole
lunchtime with Norman and who could be arsed with that?

Not me.

So I didn’t.

And neither did anyone else either.

About the only time I ever really spoke with Norman was when
he’d either wander by my cubicle or call me into his office to share a few
thoughts on improving the way we did things around here. Naturally, these
thoughts would almost always ruin what was left of my day and make getting out
of bed the following morning even harder to bear, but this never seemed to faze
Norman. He just kept them coming.

His latest idea was a complete break down of my annual
budget and a whole justification for each and every individual expense. Where
were we getting our pictures from? Could we get them anywhere cheaper? Would it
cost less in the short/long term to hire photographers/become photographers
ourselves? If not, then okay, but at least we’d looked into these things.

Naturally he wanted all of this in a full glossy
presentational report, with coloured pie charts, 3-D graphics, pull-out
statistics and cover-mounted free stickers, but just pulling out the costings
and compiling the figures for the last year would take a whole day or two.
Arguing the case for each and suggesting possible cheaper alternatives would
really put the tin hat on it.

What an utter ball ache.

I hadn’t even got back to my desk and already I could feel
my shoulders sagging with despair as my self-respect packed its bags to leave
for the rest of the week. That chap took more time off than the rest of my
staff put together.

I slumped into my chair and wondered if I should start right
away, but decided I couldn’t face it. There was no sense going at it
half-cocked, not when I was in this frame of mind, so I file Norman’s report in
the “crap I’ll confront later when I can face it” corner of my brain and spent
the next few minutes picking my teeth instead.

Luckily, there was no rush.

Oh it might’ve seemed like Norman was in a hurry to get
things moving but you should never go by other people’s time scales. People
always ask for everything to be done right away but that’s just their way of
ensuring they get done eventually. Ask any bin man when he’d like your rubbish
out front and you wouldn’t be able to get to the shops and back for wheelie
bins on the pavement all year round.

So when Norman said, “Make this your number one priority,”
you have to bear in mind the times we live in and the changing use of language.
There’s a lot more interpretation these days than there was a century ago. We
can’t take everything as literal.

For example the following is a
short list of my priorities:

Stay alive

Gather food

Maintain a shelter

Look after my wife

Look after my health

Check Lottery numbers
every Saturday and Wednesday

As important as it was, I couldn’t
see myself downgrading any of those priorities in favour of compiling a report
on the annual costings of a rather poorly performing caravan magazine. Yes,
that’s what I do for a living. I’m the editor of
Caravan Enthusiast
, a spectacularly unpopular monthly magazine that
covered every conceivable mind-numbing aspect of a dying pursuit. And it
couldn’t die fast enough as far as I was concerned. I hated them. It’s funny, I
never used to before I worked on the magazine but then I guess ten years of
writing reports on awnings can do that to a man.