Proles With Sovereignty Over Their Ears,

Sometimes I have to go where I’m told to. I visited the country of England on Monday, and more specifically, the city of Nottingham, in order to attend a meeting and present some work. Firstly, I did not feel comfortable presenting the work; the findings were a bit old, it had been presented before in skeletal form and I didn’t want to seem like one of lassitude, secondly, I had to go to England – a strange country where life is lived at a stupid pace, it’s fleshed out with noise and weird roundabouts.

The flight from Embra was at 0830hrs which meant that we arrived into East Midlands Airport (a place of absolute idiocy) hours and hours before the meeting in Nottingham. Nottingham is surprisingly large, the street pattern is messy, I guess that many small boroughs probably amalgamated haphazardly. We took a taxi to the city. I keep writing “we” but in reality, I was dozily following, I have become something of an insomniac who listens to the USA presidential race events during the night on Radio 5Live. The taxi driver was typically erratic. We arrived at the meeting venue with around 3 hours to spare. I read for a while before walking down to the lake in the university grounds. I saw some coots and moorhens, I also survived the Canada geese (I did have images in my head of a brutal mauling by geese).

The meeting progressed, I gave my presentation, and there were no hecklers this time. After all the presentations, we had to wait again for over an hour, sometimes outside in the cold, until another taxi took us to the restaurant. I ate some stuff and then waded the brutal streets of Nottingham in search of a taxi to take two of us to the hotel whilst the others went off to some bar. I finally made it to a bed at 2215hrs not that this solved anything. The room was not supplied with tea bags and the bedside lamp on the side of the bed that I wanted to sleep on did not work. Even though I was knackered, I couldn’t sleep again. I saw the clock at 0130hrs. I rolled around, I mulled over almost everything that had been said for weeks. I imagined the football training session I missed whilst I was in England. I doubted the bed, I considered sleeping on the chair or the floor. I decided grudgingly to read myself to sleep, it seems like an obvious thing to do but I did not want to put the light back on.

I charged down for breakfast just after Everybody Loves Raymond, I hastily retreated to my room when the only other member of the consortium present in the breakfast bar was someone who would have made for awkward company. On my return five minutes later, I was relieved to see some other folk were already baring the brunt of that supposed intellectual power. More meetings were held; they were formalities that I witnessed jadedly rather than contributed to. By now I was really exhausted; I had wanted to come home almost as soon as I left Methil. We eventually made it back to the hideous East Midlands Airport where we had to wait for nearly 2 hours. It was quite obvious that the aeroplane was destined for Scotland, the Scottish people are quite distinctive in appearance – it struck me for the first time. Many of them need to lose some weight.

I was glad to make it back to my vehicle and play a CD. The noise we choose to live at is something we take for granted. In the restaurant, it was too loud. In the hotel room, it was too quiet. Without a radio or an ipod, I had no control over sound and that antagonised me. It was a relief to slap on a Classic Cuts compilation CD. I went home to face the barrage of questions and be cranky during a game of five-a-side football.