June 26th – too much monkey business, too much monkey business, too much monkey business for me to get involved …

Cleaned myself: 0
Monkey see, monkey do: 0
Tics: we need to talk about Kevin
Believe in God? Left blank on purpose
YTLH: going well

Mother’s husband has either got wind of, or seen, the videos. At breakfast he offered me one of his encouraging observations, as usual delivered through the mechanism of a sort of contrived extreme sarcasm-cum-joke: ‘I’m surprised you didn’t put Esther in your Celebrity Squares,’ he said. Esther is our next-door neighbour, who still looks like David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust. They are sly these types because if challenged, they will immediately cry, ‘I was only trying to help.’

I ignore him because I have received a text from Roger this morning re: the Rugby Sevens Marketing Event, which is to take place a week on Saturday. As far as mother’s husband is concerned the advertising project no longer exists, and will never be referred to again. Same the tournament actually. When last I did, several weeks ago, he’d said, ‘what, you just get dolly birds to lie on cars don’t you?’

Roger’s text tells me that it will be my job to render the site covid-secure and to ensure that the bouncy castle doesn’t float off. He didn’t put it like that, preferring, ‘like we said, you’d better make sure that it’s safe and all that.’ It makes me wonder whether someone at the council has told him that such measures are a condition of their granting permission to go ahead, and he chose not to mention that part to me. Yesterday, I was a bouncy castle monitor, today, I have legal responsibility for all public liability on the site. He doesn’t understand the difference.

It is funny, the public perception of a successful businessman (sic). They’re acknowledged to be a special type of genius, somehow capable of grasping a fundamental aspect of human behaviour that is beyond the rest of us. Yet mostly they are morons like Roger, who either got lucky, or were prepared to do the sort of things that other people were not. Their one skill, it seems to me, is to adopt and fall in line with the policy of business-persons’ omerta – that their past, and how they got to be where they are, is forever kept beneath a shiny veneer of self-confidence, never to be revealed. From now on, all you need to know about them, is that they occupy the social, intellectual, financial and moral position of in-business.

I mean, ‘see that it’s safe and all that?’ Are they the words of a visionary whose constant vista is the big picture; or are they those of lazy bullshitter, who underestimates the real cost of delivering services because desperate people like me are prepared to silently sweep up all the shit they leave in their wake?

Perhaps all us trainee business-folk are forced to endure this process, until the slippery Teflon coating is added to the carapace?