Canary Wharf. Financial buildings towering skywards in monumental cock-offs - Jenga in steel and glass. Such an odd place. The dated show-offy gloss - champagne & oyster bars, Rolexes, red braces (still). And a very cold wind blowing off the Thames, howling through the empty plazas. No feeling of soul or warmth. Can anyone love this place? I can't imagine it. But then I only get a visitor's glimpse. A bank of granite-faced receptionists with immaculate talons and air-hostess hair. Sculptural flowers (penile, waxy) intimidate deliberately. Then up thirty-six floors in a sickening matter of seconds. ADMIRE our boardroom table. It is BIG and SHINY and EXPENSIVE. QUAKE at its might. (I want to launch myself at it - on my stomach, and see how far I could travel. Like curling. With a couple of people brushing frantically in front of me. I don't, but one day I might. When I burn my bridges (yet again) and have to find a new start.)
Things looks up immensely when I go for a coffee in Pret a Manger, and a woman called Agnes gives me a clementine. Free of charge. She balances it carefully on the lid of my coffee, where it sits and glows orange. It pleases me disproportionately. Then I notice the whole place is studded with clementines. Everyone is getting one. But I seem to be the only person to eat mine. Lots are discarded, left on tables amid sandwich wrappers. How can people not want a free clementine? If not now, then in the pocket for later? Perhaps finance types can't have clementines. Perhaps zest will smear onto balance sheets. Juice will make ink run. Or they just simply don't understand or trust something that is given freely.
My last job of 2011. As I go home, the cold that I have been holding at bay finally wins out - eyeballs aching and feeling large as space hoppers. Throat lumpy and raw. And I'm tired. But that's fine, because I have time to lie on the sofa and watch black and white films. And drink hot lemon. And eat clementines. Because I have a pocketful.
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