From the Old School House

Imagine an old school house. Lofty ceilings, hard surfaces and a fairly large space that would once have been crammed with grimy little critters of all ages; this is south London, after all, a place where smog and smut would have dominated the air, rather than just the brains and mouths of certain locals. There’s another floor above, where yet more urchins would have been packed literally to the rafters. There are windows letting natural light flood in, but they are too high to allow for any view that doesn’t involve pigeons perched on drain pipes. The birds always seem to be mating; I've stared at them a lot. Through the window, open to negate the stifling central heating, wafts the slightly stomach turning smell of a fish and chip shop that hasn’t changed its oil in far too long.

White painted walls, bars on the windows. It was an institution of learning, but it seems to have a much harsher purpose now. The swearing of the children who like to get up to who knows – or really wants to know – what in the alley beside the building adds to the feeling of being in some netherworld, the kind only seen by many in Guy Ritchie films and the estate sections of The Bill. But it’s not a movie set. It’s my office, the place I spend a depressing amount of time.

At one end, by the door that leads through to the stairs and the toilets, sit two people. In theory they sit there, anyway. In reality, they have their desks there as a base for the moments when they’re not on site, somewhere to put their coats while they have meetings, a phone to store their messages, a computer to write instructions for the builders. They’re not there very often. Then there’s a gap, not quite ten metres, but more than five and feeling like the Sahara desert of office space - vast, unfathomable, uncrossable. It’s been filled over the past few months. Detritus from other people’s desks has made its way down here; empty desks are magnets for this kind of thing in an office still adrift with paper and samples of stone, tiles, carpets, tap fittings. There’s even a broken photocopier in there. It’s wasteland, the car wreckers yard of the office.

I sit on the other side of it, a solitary figure with as much space again behind me. All I have to keep me company, most of the time, is my ipod, my computer, a skeletal dodo and a fluffy flamingo pen left behind by the occupant of the next desk when she was made redundant. And the randy pigeons on the rooftops outside. A telephone list with more names crossed out than not is held to the partition behind the computer screen with a piece of yellowing sticky tape. It’s a lonely old existence, some days. On others, there’s so much foot traffic going from the stairs to the kitchen, which opens off a corridor on my side of the room, or to the print area behind me, that I never get a chance to indulge what I’m doing now. You never know who is going to stop for a chat on their way through, surreptitiously checking your screen to see if you’re working on a juicier project than they are. In a world where two thirds of the people you know have been made redundant, you’re always on the look out for the project that looks like its going to last. You don’t want to be the person left clinging to the wreckage when the client gets the jitters about the state of the market and pulls the rug out from under you. Because you won’t have the wreckage for long before it – and your job – is snatched away from you.

L was bitching the other night about not having had a pay rise in the last six months. She wondered why I nearly bit her head off. She’s not familiar with the empty office, the fear, the boredom of not even being able to afford to buy the postage for your Christmas presents, let alone the presents themselves.