Three Days to Go

What can I say about this morning? I dunno. It has been over cast and dull these last few mornings, not that I am complaining. The universe gives us sparkling days and we complain it is too hot, so who am I to denigrate a gentle morning of soft grey.

I followed a slow driver, a charcoal BMW 330d, all the way down Victoria Street to Burnley. He drove like he had all the time in the world. Idiot. It was one of those drivers that just wouldn’t get out of my way. I wanted to stab him. It was as though he were out for a Sunday drive. It was like he was following me from the front position. It had one of those short, claaaasy number plates. C63 Y, or something like it.

There was a very beefy boy jogger in running shorts at the lights waiting to cross near Burnley. He had great thighs and a pair of those very short cut running shorts, where I could see the red sack of his jocks holding his balls. I could see the hairs on his muscular thighs. I could see his fingers adjusting the bits that itched. He had blonde hair and a sleeveless football/hoodie jumper on, with muscular arms and broad shoulders. He was panting, as though he had been running, which he had. He moved from foot to foot, rather than jogged on the spot. What a sexy boy, bulging out the front of his little shorts, his red jocks hanging out the right hand leg sack-like each time his right thigh moved backwards as he moved from one foot to the other.

He was every mother’s perfect nineteen year old son. To be jogging at 8am means you must be keen, or energetic. I pictured him lying in bed, before he set off, busting a nut all over his sheets.

It was a somewhat grey morning, he brightened it up. Now, if only, this idiot BMW would get out of my way.

C63 Y even turned up the last side street I turn up for work. As if purposely to annoy me. The driver had tuned into my biorhythms deliberately as if to exact revenge for all my impatience at other drivers for the entire time I had been coming this way to work. It did a very slow park about halfway down the street. Grrr! Blinker on. Come to an effective full stop, for no apparent reason. Blinker, blinker, blinker… nothing. Then it lurched forward and took a sweeping right hand turn not into the nearest driveway, but a drive way three along. Of course, just to be annoying.

Sam calls me a whinny pants. He tells me that the world doesn’t revolve around Christian Fletcher, that, in fact, I am a part of the wider world community. I usually bristle at such suggestions, saying that it is only the slow and the stupid that I loath, everybody else I am happy to be called the same species.

I laughed at myself and Sam’s words, as the charcoal BMW with the pretentious number plates did an impossibly slow sweeping arch into the drive way of choice, which just happened to be the furthest driveway from where the two of us now sat eagerly waiting for the manoeuvre to be completed. Well, I was eager, I guess I shouldn’t speak for the other idiot.

I released my white knuckles from the steering wheel and I relaxed my neck and back and breathed out back into my car seat, laughing at my own hysteria. I looked at the warehouses lining the street next to us and immediately started redesigning them into modern warehouse living.

Three days to go.

We went to the (the pub) for lunch. I’m thinking it was my farewell lunch, but it was, actually, a meeting with the two now ex staff members who have left to have children, Nell and Liz.

Christine drove. We parked out the back on the ground floor of the high rise car park.

Most of us ate half palmas, as is usually what we eat when we go to (the pub). It is, actually, the reason why we go there. You know, good tucker.

Christine drives a four wheel drive, a Holden, so it is a tighter fit being a bigger car. When we came out, the car parked on the driver’s side of the car was parked very close to the side of Christine’s car.

Cathy got in the back commenting on the car being parked so close that it made it difficult for her to get into Christine’s car. Now, I don’t know if I messed anything, but then Cathy proceeded to denigrate Asian drivers. As far as knew, the car was simply parked there and no driver was in sight. The only acknowledgment of a driver would have to have been an assumption. She said that Asian drivers were the worst on the road and that they had to be avoided.

It is not the first time she has been racist. She has made other derogatory statements aimed at Asians, barely concealed with humour.

I hate this passive racism, unthinking racism, clichéd racism. It is a sign of low intelligence, I can only conclude. I am complicit because I didn’t say anything, I realise that, but how do you have that conversation at work? In a temporary role?

It is decades out of date, if not longer. Even though I am making excuses, at least my mother’s generation had the second world war to hang their racism off. People today do not have even that slim excuse.

I said nothing. What is it they say, bad things happen when good people remain quiet.

Is that it?