Happy Daze - Tuesday

I'm early and the car park is fairly empty. They’ve tried to drive commuters in cars out of town with an expensive park and ride scheme, funded by local taxpayers, but guess what? If people have cars, they want to drive them.

I tried the park and ride once, but apart from being too far out of town I then had to wait fifteen minutes for a bus that didn’t take me to where I wanted to be. It’s not as if you can have a couple of pints after work either, because the bus times are sparser still and you still have to drive home.

Back aching, brief case heavy, I pass the pay and display machine and see the price has gone up again and then see a planning notice. I always read planning notices, there’s a possible lead for future sales with every one. This one isn’t too helpful though, the local authority are giving notice of intentions to close the car park and sell it off, so some pension fund can build student flats. Not even sensibly-priced homes for first time buyers, just a dash for cash with no joined-up thinking. No wonder town centre retail is dying.

‘Hold-up there mate.’ Calls a familiar voice as I head for the park. It’s not a phrase I want to hear. At my age and dealing with annoying people every day, the last thing I need is new friends - or as in this case an old acquaintance thinking he is one. It’s the banker with the dodgy hips.

‘Thought you didn’t hear me for a moment.’ Wheezes the money-lender, as he catches me up with a lop-sided hobble. I pretended not to.

‘Long time no see.’ He says with a yellowy-toothed grin. I know he’s about my vintage and I don’t need any further demoralising reminders of the ageing process. The shaving mirror has that covered.

‘How’s tricks?’ I reply, thinking most of your deceptions have been rumbled Shylock, since the PPI miss-selling fiasco. Not to mention discredited accident sickness and redundancy policies that didn’t pay out - unless you tripped over a Smallpox sufferer and lost your job in the civil service….

‘Crap.’ Says the banker flatly. Terrific. If I wanted manic depressive I could have stayed in my car.

‘Not shifting many mortgages then?’ I ask, wishing the walk across the park away, even if it means opening the office post and finding a solicitor’s letter telling me a buyer has pulled-out and not had the balls to tell me.

‘It’s all about sales and add-on policies.’ Bemoans the banker, with a familiar diatribe. ‘It’s not the same bank I joined from school.’

Too right it isn’t bucko. You’ve shut half your outlets and I can’t find a single teller position open, when I try to pay cheques in at lunch time. Solicitors still send them and will be one of the last professions to embrace on-line banking.

‘And did I tell you my new boss is only just out of university?’ Says the man, puffy face turning florid. He did.

‘And she’s a woman.’ He adds, unnecessarily. The she prefix gave that away.

‘Better get used to that.’ I tell him. 

‘She’ll be pregnant and on maternity before long.’ Says the banker, with a look of distain. So, not his love child then.

‘All they want to do is cut costs, sell over-priced product and flog expensive accounts with monthly charges.’ Continues the banker. He’s struggling to keep up with me and doesn’t seem to have noticed I’ve picked up the pace by fifty percent.

‘I thought you were going to take redundancy and finish early?’ I say, as we swerve an early-morning beggar, with a can of super-strength lager in his hand.

‘Have a nice day anyway, gents.’ Says the rough-looking man, slurred voice heavy with sarcasm. You’ll probably have a better one I think, at least you’ll be pissed by lunchtime.

‘I reckon the whole economy could go belly-up, with all this financial uncertainty and this Brexit shambles.’ Concludes the banker, before adding. ‘Have a good day.’

It’s unlikely.

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Banking On It - Thursday

‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’ I exclaim, brandishing two meaty completion cheques head high. Solicitors are slow to change - slow at everything now I come to think of it - but there’s something reassuringly solid in receiving a fat, touch it, feel it, sniff it commission cheque when a deal has finally ended happily.

‘Err, what are you doing?’ Asks negotiator S warily. I look at her, then realise I have actually, unwittingly, held the largest of the cheques to my nose.

‘The smell of money.’ Chuckles assistant manager T. ‘Gives old-time estate agents a hard on.’

I scowl at T and his head goes down. He’s been on the same HR courses as me and knows when a comment is inappropriate in the work place. Fortunately, I’m tucked well into the desk, so my excitement at receiving the funds is concealed by the aptly named modesty panel.

‘I do all my banking on-line.’ Says trainee F, with that vapid look I just didn’t notice when i interviewed him. I was too impressed by the fact he was one of the few who had bothered to wear a suit and who could actually speak audibly. I blame his mother, both for the tailoring and the wasted money on a private education. You can try to polish a turd, but it’s still crap at the end of the day.

‘I want the pleasure of taking the cash to the bank.’ I tell F.

‘It’s not cash though is it?’ Interjects B from her lettings enclave. ‘I get plenty of low-lifes bouncing cheques on me.’ She also had a Czech bouncing on top of her last year, if rumours about that tenant from Prague were true - but that’s another story.

‘It’s as good as.’ I tell her, my enjoyment slowly being sucked from me, in a way I wouldn’t normally let B do.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever written a cheque.’ Ponders F dreamily.

‘They’ll be consigned to history before long.’ Says T dismissively. ‘Everyone will bank on-line.’

‘No, this is tangible.’ I argue, waving the cheques once more.

‘Analogue man in a digital world.’ Retorts T pithily. It’s not an original line, but he deploys it well.

‘Don’t know why they can’t open a few more counters.’ Says the woman behind me in the long queue at the bank, later.

She’s talking to me, despite my body language screaming, leave me alone everyone. I glance at the array of tellers’ positions, most with their irritating little pull-down blinds deployed. I nod in agreement.

‘All too busy flogging policies nobody wants or needs, or out repossessing some poor businessman’s home.’ Sneers the woman, with the sort of venom that can only collect from being bitten personally.

I nod again, in what I judge to be a tacit agreement without the need for further discourse. It’s pleasing to note that bankers are below estate agents and jostling with politicians on the public hate list - it won’t last. To be on the safe side I clutch my company paying in book closer, I don’t want her to see who I work for, she might have had a pleasant moving experience but the odds are against it.

‘Sorry for the wait.’ Says the banker from behind her glass protection, when the cretin ahead of me - who seemed to be paying in the clattery contents of several stolen charity tins - has gone.

She doesn’t look sorry, she certainly doesn’t sound sorry, but that might be because I can’t hear her properly - despite the sound loop sticker that maintains her insincere corporate mutterings are allegedly audible to the deaf and the desperate.

I watch as the woman robotically stamps the counterfoils and processes the cheques. Eye contact lady, I think angrily, at least try to engage. But the armour-plated glass acts as a personality barrier as well as a physical one. Perhaps branch banking is as doomed as my staff maintain, I think dejectedly, as I trudge to the door only to walk in to the hobbling banker coming in. Damn he’ll want to talk reciprocal business.

‘How are things?’ He asks briskly.

Changeable.

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Eat To The Beat - Thursday

I spot him heading my way through a throng of lunchtime escapees. The sort of office workers who are either in the private sector, like me, and are taking five minutes to grab a sandwich to eat at their desk in between calls, or are working for the public sector and engaged in exercising their body, mind and rights by taking their full sixty minutes entitlement - no matter how may times the phone rings unanswered in their absence.

I consider dodging to the other side of the pavement, as I reach the pedestrianised area with slightly fewer empty shop units, not so many charity outlets and a healthier footfall, but I’m almost as lame as him now. Instead I paste on the increasingly hard to muster, glad to see you face. He looks genuinely pleased to meet me again – unless…

‘How’s tricks?’ Begins the hobbling banker breezily, as if greeting some sort of worn-out hooker whose overdraft facility he’s thinking of extending. The analogy has some merit, I think, as we both labour to a halt causing two jogging-bottomed, large-arsed young mothers, with more tattoos than what’s left of the Royal Navy can muster, to swerve their pushchairs past us without cracking into our ankles. The pair are engaged in some sort of harsh-vowelled rant about not getting their money on time and I wonder if they’ll be in shortly to ask B, our loose lettings lush, if she rents to DSS tenants – or if she’s coming out on the pull later? I realise, my autopilot has taken over and I’ve answered with a default platitude along the lines of: ‘Not too bad. You?’

The banker frowns and I notice, with a little churlish pleasure that he’s greyer and thinner on top than me now.

‘Seriously?’ he quizzes, shaking his head a bit like Bomber our destructive local surveyor when he down-values another home and destroys a much-needed sale with the words: ‘Price seems a bit full. Got any comparables?’

I admit, a bit sheepishly, that I haven’t thought the answer through and I’ve had better weeks, better months, better years and probably better career opportunities.

‘Thank God,’ he says brightening. ‘I thought it was just me.’

‘Thing is. I feel like a bloody dinosaur.’ Continues the shot-to-pieces in the hip and hair department moneylender, as I find myself perching on a pigeon-shit-stained bench half listening to his depressing monologue and half hearing the increasingly plaintive cries from the Big Issue seller everyone with a job, or not retired, is studiously avoiding.

‘Your business has changed a lot.’ I concede, trying to look at my watch without him spotting the movement. All the low-calorie meal deals with any non-horsemeat filling will be gone at this rate and I vaguely imagine I can hear phones ringing in my office, unless it’s that ear infection back again.

‘Tell me about it.’ Answers the man morosely, as I think ring the Samaritans pal. They volunteer for this sort of thing and don’t have to sit on a chilly bench a wino slept on a few hours earlier, feigning an interest rate I can’t sustain. The tarnished and gum-splattered pavement at my feet looks suspiciously like night-time emissions have been vented, making me wonder if I’ll have any, shoes of at the door before you come in to our house, oddballs later today. But then again, maybe they aren’t so weird?

‘The world is run by bloody bean counters.’ Rails the banker, seemingly without irony. Should I ask him about my endowment mortgage? Probably not. I’ve already seen one grown man cry today and there’s still that repossession to attend later.

‘Do you know, I’m one of the oldest in my branch now.’ Continues the man semi-rhetorically. ‘I have to report to some snot-nosed kid who talks in marketing sound-bites and questions my sales figures every Thursday.’

‘Not good.’ I concede, wondering if I can stomach another reduced-fat cheese and pickle, with those taste-free baked crisps and a bottle of flavoured water resembling piss?

‘Burger and chips?’ Asks assistant manager T, as I return.

‘Comfort food.’ I tell him - feeling a bit sick.

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