The crushing hangover of 2009
Dan Bourke's spirits have been crushed by guilt, disillusionment, and the merciless injustice of existence. Oh, and his trouser leg is cold...
It’s hard to believe that summer once happened in the city I live in.
Admittedly, there wasn’t much sun or warmth the last time. But you could walk around in one layer of clothes, and swim in the ponds and the sea without too much trouble.
Now, walking to the overheated public pool that’s filled with the urine of schoolchildren, my face is cold-burnt by the snow. And, coming out, my badly dried hair seems to freeze the air’s moisture to my scalp.
The back-to-work-week commuters are so miserable they can’t even muster the energy to push you out of the way when they step up to the carriage.
The tourists getting on the train while you try to get off haven’t got any fight in them either. They give it one half-hearted try then bounce away deflated, like last week’s balloons.
Somehow, the Wharf malls seem confusingly overcrowded and at the same time dead. Any consumption is viewed with suspicion.
How have they got money? Are they spending even more bad credit?
We’ve read about them – they caused this slump. Them and the bankers.
Each coffee now is a guilt purchase.
They’re charging £2.30 for a tall latte – too much but you need the warmth, and the comfort of the hot milk, and the lift in spirits to get you up to your workstation.
Even our office, normally heated to the temperature of a Cairo kitchen, seems chilly.
A square of carpet below my seat is missing, sending the tower’s cold up my trouser.
Will summer ever come again? Did it ever come before?
It’s like the slump. There are, we are assured by everyone, awful times just around the corner.
The papers are running out of people and ways to tell us how bad 2009 is going to be, and how there must be a reckoning for the bad ways of the past.
Which may be true. But it would be a little easier to bear if we’d had riotous good times to deserve all this.
We didn’t though, did we? Did you?
This wasn’t F Scott Fitzgerald’s Paris. We weren’t giddy in the height of hot summer, dancing pirouettes in silks. We were here. At our workstations.
This is a terrible, crushing, whisky hangover, but with nothing on which to blame the cut brain and sick stomach but a couple of lemonades.
It’s not fair. We want our summer back.
Dan Bourke also burbles piffle at blogs.mirror.co.uk/opposite-of-work
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