LOCKED OUT

I got locked out one recent morning, and kind of locked in too, but we’ll come around to that later. I used to get locked out a lot when I was younger, not because of any stupidity about leaving keys where they shouldn’t or anything like that, but just because I’ve always been the kind of person who gets to places, including work, very, very early.

I mean, I’m not talking about when I was a tiny bod, although I was a “latch-key kid” with my front door on a chain around my neck from being about eight years old, but those slightly more “growed-up” times when you are in the process of becoming a “trusted employee” but haven’t yet actually gained the full modicum of trust required to be given the keys to the kingdom.

Later experience of my incessant punctuality would usually mean that the forces of reason were inevitably bowed to and I tended to be given all the necessary implements required, and, of course, later developments in the world of security access meant that swipe cards and keycodes meant that these things were never as much of an issue as they once were.

But on that recent day, I had a bit of a flashback to my early days at work because, as we were new to the building and the new systems were still waiting to be set up, I arrived to find the shutters all clamped down, all the doors locked, and not a soul to be seen. There was a car, so I assumed that perhaps the vital cog in the wheels of industry had nipped off to the café for a swift cuppa before opening up, so I waited eagerly, but nobody materialised, and my eagerness started to fade relatively quickly as the minutes stretched on and on towards the full hour.

This was all because I had arrived at the shiny new office terribly early and, much like in my early days as a young employed spudlet, found myself once more just hanging around waiting for persons of much higher authority to turn up and let me in so that I could get on with things. I was rather sad about this that day, because it was my very first day of battling the traffic at the particular time of day that I probably will end up travelling the most, and it all went a bit wrong.

Someone, somewhere had cocked up, but instead of being able to make a gentle enquiry when the person with the keys did finally arrive to switch off all the security systems of which I still knew nothing and had no means of tangling with anyway, other, more irate figures had, by that time, also turned up and sat keyless and fuming in their cars, only to broadside the poor chap as he fumbled with the vast amount of keys on his fob leaving me unable to get a moment for a “quiet word”.

I’ve kind of lost track of the number of hours I’ve spent in my life just waiting. Nowadays I can spend chunks of days just sitting in car parks waiting for trains to turn up, but even as a small person I would wait around outside parties I’d been invited too just waiting for someone else to arrive to make sure that I didn’t have to consider risking the social crucification of having turned up on the wrong night.

The rather nice postmaster who also ran the newsagency for which I delivered the morning papers got pretty used to finding me sitting outside on those cold wet mornings, usually parked upon one of those tightly bound bundles of newsprint when he finally surfaced. Quite often it was I who was rattling the door knocker to wake him when hew overslept. I’ve never really been convinced that he was ever really that pleased to see me, but ever since those days I’ve been a terribly early riser and have always, always gone stupidly out of my way to get places far too early, which often results, like today, with yet more aimless waiting around with nothing much to distract me but the contents of my own little head.

I can still remember one long ago night when visiting family in South Wales and I had been left in the company of some distant Aunt or Uncle and hadn’t quite grasped that I was being “looked after”. I blithely returned to the house that we were actually staying in, but everyone had gone out and I sat there, alone in the gathering darkness, hundreds of miles from home and not knowing quite what to do, because I didn’t have the first clue as to where everyone had gone out to. In later years there were the long nights sitting in the car outside other, more adult, parties at which I had become the designated driver for the evening but somehow I had been enjoying the experience so little I had decided that I would prefer to sit in the car and read the newspaper my chips had been wrapped inside for some distraction.

I was always an odd person, I suppose.

So I took my spare near one hour to get nice and chilly in the crisp autumnal air, and spend some time listening to the birds, looking at the autumn leaves, and the canal as its surface rippled in the breeze, and generally enjoying being outside with little to do for once. I did start to feel quite mellow and might actually have been enjoying myself if I hadn’t started to get agitated by the amount of passing time I’d spent there, a growing desire to go for a pee, and the sense that I really did have other things I’d rather be doing.

I can tell you that the disabled parking spot is exactly 19 of my foot lengths long, and fifteen lengths wide, which is the sort of thing I start to do when I’m in those kinds of situations, because, despite being locked out, like everyone else, I’m also locked into my own head and sometimes that can be a very strange place to have to spend your time…