One morning during a short break in Tenerife, I decided to drive up the road on the south side of Mount Tiede. It's one of those narrow, windy, steep roads, the sort with no safety rails, tight corners and steep drops. For a while I was okay, stopping a couple of times to look at the view. I was even enjoying the challenge of all those twists and turns. Then, quite suddenly, I lost my nerve. Two-thirds of the way up. I couldn't go on. I wanted to get out of the car and walk away or have someone else drive. Except of course, I couldn't. I had to go on driving up to the top and go back down again, even though I could feel the fear in my stomach and saw horrible accidents at every corner. My body carried on where my soul and mind had given up, and I have no idea how I made it up the last third of that mountain road.
That's what it was like when I spent most of 2006 looking for a job, being told that I gave good interview and was going about my search in the right way, not to be worried, something will come along... After a while, my hope ran out, leaving an outward physical reflex of confidence, and habits picked up from years of job-hunting. My body carried on when my soul had long since given up.
When in February 2007, I joined The Bank, I was in a bigger psychological mess than I knew. I was scared, vulnerable, weak and utterly bereft of self-confidence. I was surviving on habit. Of course, the bully who ran the section I joined saw it and laid right in. He did it to everyone in the team, and they were more robust younger men. We took it for eighteen more months until he moved on. His replacement was another weakling who basically marched to the first guy's orders.
I stopped going to the local gym at the same time, as I had been getting bored, tired and lacking all enthusiasm for exercise. What I didn't know was that my blood sugar would shortly go from 4-5 micro units per millivolume, which is fine, to around 8-9 mmol/L, which while not life-threatening, caused me to get blotchy, itchy legs, a string of nasal infections (which are taken seriously by medics, and for which I became really well-known at the Soho Walk-In Centre) over a two-year period, and I swear my brain didn't function quite right. The fact that my slot in the office was gloomy, the boss was an insecure bully, and I couldn't see that my job would last past the next three months, did not help. Plus adapting to the weird world of retail banking takes much more time than you would think. I weighed 103 kgs, too much of it was fat, and I snored badly. My girlfriend had stopped sleeping over because I was snoring, and I went for an operation to treat that. Amongst other things, they scar your upper palate so it toughens: it's not life-threatening, but it is painful for a couple of weeks. It didn't make enough of a difference for the girlfriend.
In autumn of 2008 I broke up the only long-term relationship I've ever had: ten years or so. We had reached that point where we were functioning better apart than we were when we were together. We were snapping at each other and not having any fun. The last holiday we had taken, to Sicily, was a mitigated disappointment: September is always glorious in Sicily except when it isn't, and that was when we went. We had simply been through too many bad times together. we weren't fun anymore, and we were dragging each other down.
At the start of 2009 The Bank merged with the Very Broke Bank That Used To Be A Building Society Before The Other Scottish Bank Bought It. The Bank spent more than six months re-organising itself, starting from the top down, and it was no fun spending six months thinking that I was going to get the chop: I took no holidays, to build up the size of the redundancy payment. I didn't get the chop but I did get put into a lower-graded job, with three years to get myself rehabilitated before they cut my salary and conditions back to match the grade. For about eighteen months there was a general state of unhappiness, upset, disillusion, change, settling-in and experimentation as the new management found its way around. Nobody can remember doing anything much significant in that time - except that's when I did something in three months that apparently would have taken the lesser mortals of Accenture £1m and 3,000 man-hours to do. And I kept up with my e-mails while doing it. I was going to Chester every week, and one of those weeks spent a day in hospital with a grossly infected eye and face.
Outside work I went on a carb-free, chocolate-free, reduced-sugar diet that lost me 15kgs (down to 88 kgs) in about four months. At 88kgs sometime in the summer, I was experiencing serious constipation, so I ate more bulky food and my weight settled around 91kgs. The nasal infections stopped. My head cleared up. My mood improved. But not before I was put on an "improvement plan" at work at the start of the year, and then re-organised into a lower-grade job in summer as a result of The Merger. (Not quite as bad as it sounds: at The Bank anyone to whom that happens keeps their existing pay and conditions for about three years, giving them ample chance to get their grade back.) All my Bro's went off in different directions across the organisation, and I had a new manager. Which was actually the best thing that happened to me, even if it took a while before I could recover enough to be an asset to him.
2010. Not a day went by that I didn't think of my down-graded status. I did my job. The entire company was in turmoil, new recruits were joining every month, and very few people really knew their way around. I just did shit I thought needed doing, and that turned out to be exactly what my new manager wanted his people to do. So I started to work my way back again. I was helpful to the new guys, and that's not as common as one might think, and I got my grade back in the autumn. But by the autumn, my weight was back up to 95 kilos and I was feeling the strain of trying to control my eating. Remember, I don't drink and I don't smoke, and the only thing between me and raw emotion is chocolate, milk shakes and custard doughnuts. So I enrolled at The Third Space, and over the next few months lost a lot of unsightliness around the waistline.
2011 was the year I got the infection on my skull I thought might be cancer. It was the year I turned into a guru at work, and got a half-decent bonus. In the gym, I made it to passing the US Army standards for guys of fifty. This completed my journey from unemployed in 2006 to well-regarded at work, better paid than ninety percent of British taxpayers, and with as secure a job as any wage slave is ever going to have. I should have been on top of the world, but instead I could barely breathe: just before Christmas 2011, one evening I started on my two-mile treadmill run, and collapsed breathless after 500 metres. It was also the last year I took any "proper holidays". I went to the Algarve, Pembroke, and Biarritz via days in Paris either side. I brought a heatwave with me to all of them. And I was… not lonely, but exhausted from having to keep myself busy and occupied for the sixteen hours a day I'm usually awake. I talked to no-one who wasn't staff, except in the Algarve where I spent a couple of hours talking with a German girl who painted churches and who was driving round Europe with her dog and sleeping in the car. The people who ran the restaurant at that beach thought we were so cute. I was damn nearly in tears one of those lunchtimes on the Algarve. Dinner at Chez Phillipe in Biarritz was amazing. Then The Bank moved us from Covent Garden to Bishopsgate. We still don't like it. 2011 was The Year of Spinning, Running, Yoga and Pilates.
2012. The year I was coughing for months and my legs packed up. Don't let's talk about 2012. I don't want a repeat. I got a lot of massage and osteopathy. Almost as much as I did on my damn arms at the start of 2013.
I didn't mention the building work I had done on the house in 2007, where I had to fire one set of builders and find someone else to finish the job. The place now looks finished - except for the cupboard under the stairs, and I really should replace the kitchen. I've had three cars in that period: a Ka that got written off when a drunk shunted me in Twickenham, a Clio that got flooded by the river at Richmond because I didn't know it was a super-tide Sunday, and the Punto I have now. All of them second-hand and all paid for cash.
(Edited 27/1/2023 from two posts)
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