Back when I was at uni, when now-respectable professors happily got their kit off for photos, which is a story that needn’t bother you now, I did Sociology. Or as Paul McCartney nearly put it, Sociology did me. One of the pitifully few things I remember about any of it was the concept of time being introduced to work with the introduction of factories, whistles, time-sheets and clocking-on. Before that in summer there were long day-works and in the absence of artificial light in winter, short ones.
Tomorrow is going to be a long one, not just because it’s summer, although the weather says otherwise here. More because I’ve got to get s train ticket with a code and codes, in my experience, don’t always work. If that sounds like me just being old, I bought one of the first airline ticketless tickets, back in 2003. It didn’t eork. Nobody knew what to do with the bit of paper with the code on it at Heathrow, the printer there wasn’t working, the last plane I’d tried to catch there someone had tried to blow up and I’d spent £2,500 on Business Class tickets. Chiefly because someone else was paying. The ticket still didn’t work though.
Tomorrow I could go and get my tickets after I’ve gone to the post office and the opticians and just casually stroll up, tap my code receipt in and like a normal person, go to London. But what if it doesn’t work? If I go now and it doesn’t work at least I get a whole evening to panic about it. Because tomorrow is a bit important. I’ve got a job interview tomorrow lunchtime for something I’d like to do. After that, almost unplanned, or certainly not planned when I bought my ticket, I’m pitching Janni Schenck, the screenplay what I wrote, at Raindance. In front of money people. In front of producers. In front of people who could say “we’re going with this. Here’s some money to not sell it to anyone else while we sort out some stuff about it.”
I haven’t thought about what accent they’d use, yet. Might not happen. But it could. If my ticket works, obviously. If I can decide what to wear. And I can find somewhere to park. All kinds of things.
