yesterday evening's event

This bloody “Open Evening” was at the Bede Centre, Durham Road on the outskirts of bloody Sunderland. So I had to get a metro from our place then a bus. When I got on the bus I realised that I’ve got that uncomfortable feeling I get in Sunderland: it’s only down the road – ten minutes on the metro – but they have a different accent to us; and that fucking football team they’ve got…

Then I get to the Bede Centre, which was perhaps once a Victorian school building, big and rambling. I ask the receptionist where the “Recruitment Event” is, and she says that “unfortunately” it’s the queue over there. I join the queue. Way ahead of me, I can glimpse a big hall with hundreds of people filling in forms, or staring into space. I go back to the receptionist and double check. Yes, this is the Protocol Recruitment Open Evening, so I rejoin the bloody queue and it doesn’t move much.

After about twenty minutes a pleasant but gormless young woman in a suit tells my part of the queue that we’ll have to wait at least and hour, and we can fill in the forms and send them in to register, if we want. “I’m already registered,” I tell her. She smiled at me in incomprehension. I went home. It was all like a dream. Or working class history: “Please, miss, just a few hours teaching. The wife’s expecting! I’m desperate! Don’t make me go back to that bloody midden in the desert!”