Work

I sat down beside a colleague in reception the other day. He was waiting for someone and I stopped to chat to him before nipping out to get a sandwich.

Him: I’ve only just heard your news.

Me: About my year out of the workforce?

Him: Yes, good for you but why now?

Me [I have to get some kind of pat answer for this]: Well, no one reason in particular, lots of different reasons. [I start to list them]. And finally, I was going to retire at 60 [depressing that I should now have reached the stage of mentioning retirement but so it is] and I thought I could take this year now or later and I thought, I’d rather put in the year at 61 than now.

Him [getting the wrong end of the stick]: Are you really 60?

I have no words lads.

People are more or less back to the office. Not everyone all the time, but almost everyone some of the time. It’s a bit weird after two years largely alone on the fourth floor to now have a full complement of people outside my door.

I wandered out on to the floor and as I did so, the scent of Davidoff Cool Water assailed my nostrils. It brought me back in an instant to the time in the mid-90s that I spent in Bosnia – Davidoff was popular and I had a large bottle at my disposal while I was there. I was doing election monitoring just after the war. I was in Banja Luka which is an old spa town and a very Austro-Hungarian empire town. I didn’t know what to expect really when I was going but I certainly didn’t think that I would regret not bringing my tennis racquet. It turned out that there was a country club type place with, inter alia, tennis courts and all of the international election monitors spent a lot of our free time there. In the days before the internet, our ignorance was legendary and our ability to advance plan much less developed. I just didn’t expect that war torn Bosnia would be a normal place as well, if you see what I mean. I might tell you all I can remember another time but it all flooded vividly back to me as I stood on the floor sniffing.

I turned to my colleague, “Davidoff, Cool Water?” I said. “No Clinique Happy,” said he.

I had a difficult meeting before Easter where my colleagues and I had to hold the line against quite the onslaught from another organisation. One of the people on the other side of the virtual table was a former colleague from a third organisation (stay with me here, Ireland is small). It was all very civil but distinctly trying. I heard my phone bleep in the middle of the meeting but ignored it as I continued to batten down the metaphorical hatches.

When I got off, I checked my message. It was from my former colleague and it said, “You’re like the Spartans at Thermopylae, Anne”. Roll on my sabbatical.