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Kneesup’s estate manager, David Spokes, is fifty-five with a medium build.
He enjoys rugby, swimming and family-life. David has what most good men yearn; job-security, a good wife, loving children and a clear conscience.
At work, he receives a constant flow of emails from head office, mostly demanding that new targets are put in place. When they are not met or are proved to be unworkable, the new measures are quietly shelved without explanation. This sort of thing drives David to despair.
As consolation, he reassures himself that the changes will cease in time, otherwise they’d run out of ways to change everything and probably revert back to the policy prior to the first change.
His job is challenging and rewarding, but he is convinced that he’d be far more efficient if he didn’t have to remember which policies were in place and which targets needed meeting during whichever ‘time-frame’ had been implemented for each of the designated ‘concepts’ that had been ‘marked’ for change.
David has to go through the arduous task of asking the staff at the gift shop and tea room to do the silliest things in order to combat new health and safety regulations. Several have left stupefied or been sacked defying whichever new order the Trust is forced to utilise.
For instance, if someone asks for Savlon (a brand of antiseptic cream that every British adult knows is highly effective against minor cuts and scrapes, of which there were a few, mostly from children crossing thorn bushes or falling over) staff are not allowed to give it, even if it’s from their own handbag.
Instead, because of an elaborate dispute with the world’s medical elite, Savlon has been replaced by an antiseptic wet-wipe the name of which no one can remember.
That was precisely the sort of thing that perturbed David.
He’d had Savlon drummed into his head since he was a nipper and it had always done the job for his own children.
Why did they have to change it? Next, he thought, they’d be changing the name ‘God’.
David doesn’t believe in God, as such, although one can see quite clearly that he is comfortable in his own skin.
Half of his workload is a comical juggling act, reading up on essential new guidelines in a cloud of paperwork that flap around his mind’s periphery.
The other half is the rewarding half; the half where he can actually get things done.
With everyone confused as to which of the rules applies in a given week, the unthinkably ludicrous idea of having to waste time listing the week’s changes in a round robin email was put into action a few months ago.
Because of the staff’s generally poor memory, they sometimes find it necessary to ask each other’s advice about something that each and every one of them had done without trouble ever since graduating from diapers. All the changes have messed with their minds, and some had found the situation so laughable that it wasn’t unusual to hear members of staff asking one another, ‘What’s this?’, pointing to a tea-towel.
The response might be, ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should ask Joan to ask Moira to email David to contact head-office and see if they know,’ adding that it might be a cleaning accessory or washing utensil.
On the brighter side, David enjoys a mutually rewarding friendship with Ray and is more than happy to keep him on at the helm, in spite of head-office’s ageist view on the matter, reminding him that most insurance claims from employees arise close to retirement, especially those performing manual duties.
Ray and David often have little chats about quite superficial things, skirting away from anything work-related (targets and changes of policy and the mini-disasters that ensue).
Both of these men are aware that the other is a deeply thoughtful person.
Neither talks of politics, preferring to concentrate on local topics of interest, matters of the garden and their own rather humdrum lives.
Despite Ray being regarded as irreplaceable by the vast majority of permanent staff at Kneesup Hall, pronounced Knee Sup, David is acutely aware that Ray will be extremely hard to replace come the day he is forced into retirement.
Besides their friendship, Ray’s continued employment saves David many headaches.