1960

I'm in the back row of a training class. Five rows of seven people are ahead of me; thirty five computer screens all showing the same thing; thirty five people sitting up and listening. Powerpoint. Death by Powerpoint. The delivery of the presenter is mannered, over-stressed and - above all else - slow. My involvement feels like it is next to nil. It's two o'clock; lunch was an hour and half ago and it's starting to hit me. My eyes are heavy, my arms are like lead and I feel like I have to sleep for a week. My vision is blurred and I know my eyelids are only half open. I know it all, but I have to pass this course. I simply have to. We have an assessment on Friday and it's only Tuesday. Give it until tomorrow - I'll be wide awake tomorrow, just as long as I resist the temptation to down another bottle of wine in my identikit room in the identikit residence not fifty yards from here. I wish I could get out and do something else, but I'm too tired. Always too tired. The hire car will sit in the car park all week, never turning a wheel because I have no motivation to drive out of here and down a faceless dual carriageway that runs without feature for forty miles in either direction.

The droning voice of the lecturer is never ending; same pitch, same intonation, same weak jokes and the same mugging, corporate giggling. Company pens, block writing sheets, computer screens, mouse pads, clip folders, laminated handouts, corporate cups, presentation prints, overhead video projectors, class suggestions, audience participation, hard-wearing carpets, featureless biscuits, whiteboards, blackboards, smartboards and dead boreds, subdued lighting, jars of mints, vertical blinds, bottles of lukewarm water, stifling talk, stifling thinking, stifling air, stifling pace, brain-crippling feebleness, morbid isolation and that mind-fading heat that comes with closed windows, heavy lunches, merciless boredom and the paranoia that says no one else in the room is feeling as fed up with everything as you are.

I hear the words 'watch this space', 'paradigm', 'I'll get back to you on that' and 'solution' far too often. I escape from this dreary and dull world by imagining grotesque situations; people around me being hauled up and spun around the air impaled on spikes until they disintegrate; sexually humiliating situations for everyone; turning invisible and walking up to the unsuspecting instructor just to hear the sort of scream he will come out with when I kick him with great force in the groin; flipping the room on its side and dropping people by a noose in the room from one end to the other to see if it beheads them; situations where the instructor goes mad, barks like a dog, kicks three people unconscious and then squats on the desk to defecate, regaining his sanity as he does so and realising what he has done and is doing; or him breaking out in angry madness and shouting racial abuse at the non-caucasians in the audience that he normally is so careful to protect from any hint of offence. I drift from one angry and violent situation to the next until they all appear to be one and the same.

Between the slats of the vertical blinds I can see the outside world, and cars and trees and people and shops and buses and fun and football and sunshine and wine and beer and friends and parties and laughter and love.

I have to get out of this life. I really have to get out of this life.