I wore a tie to work yesterday.
By which I mean that, having sat at my desk since six in the morning learning about smallpox, I suddenly found I needed the structure that only a collar and tie can confer on the day. These have been tough days for all of us, and the relentless misty blending of different parts of the day into each other, with no punctuation marks, no coffee breaks, no nothing, had just got to me, and I wanted to look and feel smart.
I went back upstairs, found my one ironed shirt, applied cufflinks to the sleeve and then put on a patterned tie that was sober enough to indicate a man of seriousness, but just about edgy enough to suggest hidden depths. My family were confused but, then, they often are.
I had last worn a tie to the final interview for a senior charity job about two years ago. It was between me and a miserable looking man with long lank hair, dirty glasses and a nervous twitch, and we stared at each other across the waiting room, wanting at once to come across as assertively confident, but also to recognise a fellow human in torment. The residual Etonian in me assured me that the role would be mine. A day later, I got a call to say that the miserable bloke had got the job. The residual child in me wanted to sit down and cry.
It was at that exact moment that I decided that, when I eventually grew up, I was going to be a writer. I had made a presentation to the interview panel that was the very best that I could do; I had given them a revolutionary new idea which, mysteriously, was so good that I see that Mr. Misery has been inspired to run it at the moment. And I had failed. So often in life, I have got away with doing something substandard, and it working, that I found I couldn’t live with having done something really good, and nonetheless failed.
Within a month, my (lovely) literary agent had found an (equally lovely) publisher for my rather strange idea for a book about two middle-aged men learning how to bee-keep, a book that somehow convinced the Daily Telegraph that Duncan and I were having a gay relationship in the full sight of our understanding wives, and the Daily Express that I was suffering from PTSD from something that they were desperate for me to agree had happened to me whilst I was in the army. (If we are in the mood for name dropping, and we clearly are, the Daily Mail photographer scooped the jackpot by arriving in the house and immediately saying to Caroline: ‘nip upstairs like an angel, love, and shove some lippy on for me’. She adored that.)
We worked together on that, then on Shearwater, and we have just agreed a contract for the next two books. If I could go back to that waiting room and have been able to look into the future and seen me writing that sentence, seen me writing down those twenty precious words, I would have got up there and then, made my apologies, and driven home, probably having let Mr. Misery’s tyres down on my way to the car.
The tie cheered me up in a way that, frankly, amazed me, and I have had sort of decided to wear one every Monday until Boris releases me from my cage, or the 45th President of the United States is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours, whichever comes sooner.
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