Tuesday 27 September 2016

Pseud

I didn't much like yesterday. It was one of those days when a lot of things came crashing down and I was left wondering where I was going to start the rebuilding process. Nothing major. I'm just a bit fed up and in need of a job! It was one of those days when I kept having to remind myself that I chose this lifestyle. And then I kept having to remind myself not to make knee-jerk phone calls railing at people for not getting back to me when promised so that I can move other projects forwards. Of course, the truth is that everyone is simply getting on with their own lives and no one owes anybody anything, although I so often find myself just wanting to shake people and ask what on earth they actually do for most of their days.

I had a very interesting conversation about laziness with someone on Sunday; about how so many people in so many jobs feel aggressively entitled to do so little. I've come across many lazy people in my career. I worked for a company once which had a policy of filling their offices with pretty women because they thought it would be nice for clients to enter a building where there was lots of hot totty to look at. I genuinely wish I were joking. Of course, we spent most of our time trying to find things for these women to do, but none of them seemed that bothered about learning new skills and seemed only to want to do what they were ultimately being paid to do, namely to waft around the place looking pretty. One of them used to get very excited about booking restaurants for lunches during days of filming, and would often come up to me, whilst I was shooting, to tell me that she was very bored but how much she was looking forward to lunch. Another used to regularly go outside for rather lengthy fag breaks and later admitted that there was a tanning shop opposite which did a line in 5-minute booster tanning sessions... She'd say she was having a fag, pop over there and have a quick tan before exercising her right to then have a cigarette. If I wrote any of this in a play, people would accuse me of being a misogynist. Of course, I'm not saying that all the women who worked in the office with me were lazy. Not by a long shot. One in particular was always the first into the office and the last to leave, and spent her days with her head buried in a computer. It just so happened that all of the lazy people in that office were women. And, of course, it's difficult for a male boss to tell a staff member that he or she is lazy without being accused of bullying. We live in strange, somewhat precious times.

I met Josh for a cup of tea yesterday, which was a welcome distraction from moping. We met at the Soho Theatre Cafe, which seemed to be full of pseuds pretending to be creatives. I love the word pseud. It's a brilliantly pretentious word to describe brilliantly pretentious people. We walked across Soho and met Nathan in the churchyard behind St Giles' in the Fields, in the foothills of Centre Point. It's a lovely, very quiet, somewhat windswept place, which the tourists don't visit. A perfect place to sit and eat sandwiches...


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