THE BRIGHTON BUG...

The pre-Christmas, recurring lumbar problem (‘Backache in Brighton’) had compelled me to postpone starting work, but by mid-January I was well enough to take a seat, look at the computer screen, put the head-phones on and start dialling.

How ironic: still in residual discomfort, I was trying to interest businesses in ergonomic chairs. How hypocritical: I’d come to Brighton with Suzi and the name of our game was ‘do everything once.’ Well, maybe not everything but at least make a good stab at repetition-avoidance, and there I was, in an environment where repetition was king.

I could look at my face in the mirror only because I badly needed the money (every man has his price). During our year in the city, from May 2005 to May 2006, I reckon in bar and restaurant tips alone we probably parted with about a month’s rent (I was engaged then in repetition-overload for the sake of the Brighton economy.) By such routes I made myself feel better!

But I wasn’t feeling better at work. After about two weeks, with February beckoning, I began to feel extremely unwell. It wasn’t the back problem. It was energy depletion coupled with insomnia – I’m sanitizing things here, folks. I’d picked up a bug, for sure, but God knows from where. Work? The pub? The dog-track? Someone in the supermarket aisle? The bookies? It was anyone’s guess.

I valiantly continued to make my daily trek to the office. On the third Friday I attended an all-day training course with about a dozen other new recruits. Whizz-kids were brought in from London. They were young and sparkled like the waves on the tantalisingly close Channel. They ‘facilitated’ - I remember the lingo so well -, organised role-play exercises, brain-stormed, enthused and encouraged - and promised a bottle of wine for the day’s best trainee. It was me!

When I got home Suzi was thrilled. Was it because of the sight of moi – or the bottle? The answer might be uncertain but one thing wasn’t: the bug was biting and my week-end was ruined.

Come Monday I rang the HR guy. He’d been great at allowing me to delay starting because of the back-problem. I didn’t want to mess him about again, with the likes of,’I might be in tomorrow…or next week…’. Instead, after explaining the situation, I resigned. He was great, not requesting that I return the wine - that, thanks to Suzi, was an impossibility - and he ended our conversation by saying that if I was ever in Brighton again, there would be a job for me at Regency Square.

I visited the doc., tests were done, but the Brighton bug didn’t show its hand. Gradually I recovered, but it was many weeks before I was my old self.

I sometimes wondered if my action had prompted a policy change in the company, with wine-winning employees being contractually obliged to return to work. Knowing that that was probably not a runner, I pondered instead on whether the company had considered another option: the lucky guy or gal had to drink the wine while on the phone? It’s worth a try. Drink wine - diminish tension - increase conviviality - and sales! That could become the new call-centre mantra.

As February became March and we entered the final phase of our Brighton year, ‘last times’ began to dominate our lives. Leaving the centre and unaware I’d never be back reminds me of some other ‘last times’ of its type: walking down Little Preston Street, being in William Hill’s on Western Road, strolling through St Ann’s Well, having coffee in the sun on the pavement at Caffé Nero in Hove, coming off a train a Brighton railway station, talking to the Big Issue seller who always called me ‘Sean’ - and seeing Christopher Hitchens. In my novel The Man Who Would Do Nothing Twice they’re called ‘Pierres’: ‘last times you don’t know are last times’.

Thanks for your great piece, ‘anubis’. The Q&A session with Christopher Hitchens at the Dome soon said ‘goodbye Tom Paine’, and ‘hello religion.’ Whatever one thinks of ‘Hitch and religion’, sadly, Scotland has a shameful part in fashioning his views on the subject. His father was a Royal Navy officer and for a while the Hitchens clan and the schoolboy Christopher lived a few miles east of here, at the Rosyth naval base. ‘On my first day…I was hit between the eyes by a piece of slate during an exchange of views with the Catholic school across the road, with whom our hardened Protestant were at odds. Innocent of any interest in this quarrel, I nonetheless bear the faint scar of it, above the bridge of my nose, to this day.’ (Hitch-22) So he was marked forever by Scottish sectarianism! No wonder he had a jaundiced take on religion.

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