The 4.30pm London to Berkamhead, Return (Berkamhead 1996: Diary Entry 24th July 1996)

Berkamhead 1996

Diary Entry 24th July 1996

Five days at work have played havoc with my social life. It was so much easier when Amanda, my divorcee friend, worked at Red Brick. It meant I could snatch a quick ‘leg over’ on the utility room floor if the mood should take me. The pull of the bloody biscuit factory snatched that one pleasure away. I’ve spoken to Katie every night this week, but haven’t even felt an urge for a bit of phone sex, let alone anything else. I should drag myself around to see her, but with the manager off again this week, I am so damn tired from holding the fort.

We just can’t seem to get the staff for the house; the low wages and perceived difficulty of working with people with disabilities makes the biscuit factory look like the gateway to the Promised Land. Ok, so it is tiring work and it does take a certain type of person to divide their empathy and attention between eight of the most drooling, perverted and down right annoying morons you are ever likely to meet.

I don’t mean it of course, but that’s what five days non stop can do to a person. Do I do this job for the love of it? I don’t know, but at least I feel more successful than a biscuit factory worker. It has hardly stretched my education though; so much for the value of a degree. Unfortunately somewhere along the line I either missed out on, or more likely, lacked the talent or intelligence, to be drawn into the vacuum that sucks most people my age to the big city. For my own stability I will consider it the big city’s loss.

Work has been a major distraction this week, but very little has happened. Not that anyone is likely to have been reading this, so what does it matter. Strangely I still find opening up to my own diary really difficult. My therapist would put it down to my difficulty accepting the consequence of my own actions, but sometimes I think it just takes me a while to get over the initial excitement of something new and realise my true feelings about it. Just look at all that stuff about Amanda. I thought I was in love with her. I wrote that I was in love with her! Its ridiculous given in reality that all I was having was great sex with a much older woman. Besides, I am and was, in love with Katie very much.