24 September 2015
I attend my day job for the last time before officially retiring. The official retirement will differ from the past six months only in that I no longer turn up at the office once a week to contribute nothing, but instead contribute nothing from the comfort of my own home. To mark the occasion, my colleagues take me for lunch and shower me with gifts. There are balloons and flowers and speeches, and it is all very emotional. They have put together an album of memories and thoughts about how bizarre it has been to work with me over the years. They manage to make it sound like a privilege. I clear out the clutter from my desk. Among the fifteen years’ worth of staples, treasury tags, correction pens, Post-It® notes, paper clips and biscuit crumbs, I find photos charting fifteen years’ worth of my family growing up. During this time, I have remained strategically behind the camera lens, so as not to chart the visual impact on a mother of a family growing up around her. It is a strange feeling, to have been somewhere so long that they remember you having a baby, and now you struggle to remember the baby’s name, and anyway it is not a baby any more but apparently needs a lift to university. In my defence, one of the babies has since changed both its name and its gender, making it doubly difficult for me to keep track of my offspring. Wearied by all the tidying-up, to which I am unaccustomed, I open a second can of Red Bull®. These days, it seems, I lurch between two extremes. The first is hyper-alert and anxious. The second is asleep. There is no middle ground. It is sometimes tricky to decide which of the two works best in a meeting, which then makes it tricky to decide whether to break open the third can of Red Bull or not. Mostly, I decide that sleep is the better option. They can always wake me up if something important needs discussing. Or better still, after they have finished discussing it.
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