Recently I’ve been experiencing some alien encounters. No – not those ones; not ones that wake you up at 3am (why do aliens never visit during daylight hours?) to conduct bizarre experiments involving slurring your speech and messing up your hair. No – the alien encounters I’m referring to are simply everyday things you simply haven’t experienced before. Or ones you have, but in slightly different ways.
Take work, for example. I’ve recently started a job it’s not quite exaggerating to refer to as a “dream career move”. It is, quite literally, amazing. In fact, on a slight tangent, earlier on in the year I was doing an hour-long walk-commute to a job I didn’t like quite so much and en route I would pass one particular block of elegant buildings, musing as I did so over how much easier it would be to work somewhere like that instead. Well, the job I now have is in one of those buildings! (Spookily, the first flat I bought with my husband was also one I used to walk past often, musing over how nice it would be to live there).
But the ‘alien encounters’ I’m referring to in the work context is the fact that nobody, at least not to my knowledge so far, has any flaws. The people I work with are disgustingly healthy; all of them seem to have perfect family lives and are both stunning looking and stunningly educated. It’s great, but what with my habit of eating junk food on a bi-hourly basis, my being separated and not having ever stepped inside a university except to nip to the Ladies' or celebrate others’ academic achievements, there is a slight concern that the reason I’ve been taken on is comparable with the reason Victorian gentry sometimes used to let tramps live in their sheds; to create a nice charitable impression and to give their houseguests a laugh. Any day now I’m expecting someone to walk into my office with a visitor and say something like “This is the uneducated Essex girl we’ve just taken on! Isn’t she funny? She’s got dyed blonde hair and chipped nails and she comes from a broken home and EVERYTHING!”
OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit there – and actually everybody’s lovely. It’s a challenge, though, working somewhere nice; it means there aren’t any problems to sort out, and for someone like me, whose whole raison d’etre at work has been based around frantic firefighting, this is a whole new ballgame. I just hope I prove to be quite effective at generally being and making nice.
One of the advertised perks of the job was the personal allocation of an iPhone, which brings me on to my second alien encounter: technology. What people tend not to realise about my stubborn Luddite-ness is that I’m not looking down on those who are tech-savvy (well OK – I am a bit, but not half as much as it’s often assumed I do) – it’s because I’m self-aware enough to know I could easily become one of those people who whips out their phone the moment they’re asked a question they’re not sure of; who picks a book from their virtual bookshelf to read on the train and then abandons it for another within five seconds of reading it because there are far too many others to choose from; who watches TV shows through tinny headphones with the volume turned up too loud. I could be that person so very easily. And although I’ve downloaded some rather useful apps onto my new phone – which by the way is so anti me that I still don’t trust it – I will always be a Luddite at heart.
Other alien encounters I’ve experienced recently involved my local library, which I visited a few weeks ago to get some books to furnish my new commute. Replacing the library staff were slick check-in/check-out machines which log your every book, together with a shop selling mugs, wrapping paper, book marks and book-holders. As a grubby tour-T-shirted teen approached the counter to ask if they had any more Mr. Tickle bookmarks in stock, I felt a wave of slight depression wash slowly over me. Because Mr. Tickle bookmarks don’t belong in the library, and neither do sheets of wrapping paper covered in Andy Warhol-style paintings of Marmite jars. Aren’t libraries supposed to be dusty old caverns, staffed by people who wear print dresses and blazers with patches on the elbows, who scratch their heads endearingly when you ask them if they’ve got the latest Agatha Christie? I don’t want libraries attracting a “new type of clientele”. And I don’t want to put my books into a machine to check them out (even though it’s quite amusing when you do as the titles display themselves across the screen in big flashy letters; if you’re checking out something with a slightly dodgy title like my sister did when she recently checked out a book called 'Charlie's Big Bottom' - a children's book before you ask - then you’d better make sure no-one’s standing behind you).
So anyway - alien encounters. So far...slightly disorientating and peppered with Mr. Tickle bookmarks.
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