Working days left: 2. I think it’s finally beginning to sink in. It’s now more than an abstract notion: I am embarking on my biggest adventure, possibly ever, and certainly since coming down from Scotland in the summer of ’87. When I left school, I knew I was going to university; when I graduated, I already had a job lined up. Now…all I know is it’s an era drawing to a close. But as it does, another opens, one of uncertainty, yet also of huge potential. Next Wednesday morning, I am going to wake up, and it’ll be more than “not going to work”, it’s “have no work to go to”. I’ll be unemployed, and feeling like a long-term prisoner who has finally got parole, and must make his own way in life once more. There’s a brave, new world out there, and it’s a little scary.

It’s incredible to think it’s twelve-and-a-half years since April Fools’ Day 1988, when a raw, naive innocent (that’s me, in case you were wondering) first crossed the doorstep of James Capel, as HSBC was then known…and crashed their live dealing system on his first day. I like to think I have maintained this standard of professionalism and integrity ever since. It can’t have been too bad, however, since a year later, they poached me from the software house, and the rest is – or rather, is about to be – history.

I’ve spent a fascinating couple of days emptying my desk drawers, filling two sports-bags with the stuff I want to take home, and several bins with the junk. The vultures are gathering over the remnants, with the destination of my glow-in-the-dark scorpion paperweight and Buffy lollipop tin likely to be the subject of severe debate. The contents act as a time capsule, reflecting both internal and external history. Thus, there are master copies of the early issues of TC; a dozen posters from the team outing to see Barb Wire (the cinema were glad to get rid of them – anybody want one?); a fragment of the Berlin Wall; chocolate handcuffs; the FHM 100 Sexiest Women supplement for 1996 (Gillian Anderson was #1); all my turn sheets for the Movie Mogul play-by-mail game, and so on. Material relating to actual work was in the minority – for I’ve learned over the years that “documentation” = “evidence”, and is thus incompatible with my personal ethos of plausible deniability.

The weird thing is, I’m leaving a job which is perfectly adequately-paid, and in which I am not unhappy. I’m working for a good manager, who believes in letting us get on with our jobs; my co-workers are a generally amiable bunch of social deviants; and after more than a decade, you acquire a certain security of tenure because you’ve outlasted everyone who knows what your job actually entails. But the siren call of America, a new life and a new home, is just too powerful to resist, and so I find myself with a mere fourteen working hours left in this country. I have now received the Termination Letter (capitals used out of fear), which warns me of the direst consequences (it stops short of sending me to sleep with the fishes, but only just) should I reveal any commercial knowledge to the competition. Fortunately, any knowledge I possess is of the entirely uncommercial kind: our team won the departmental pub quiz on Wednesday, thanks largely to our nailing of the ‘Myths and Legends’ section – I knew watching Xena would come in handy someday.

And that’s it. On Tuesday, at around 5pm, pause for a moment, and think of me, as I pick up the last of my possessions, put on my coat – and run screaming from the building. Here we go, indeed…

Spectacular Bodies
The Hayward Gallery
19 October 2000 – 14 January 2001

Art and science are usually regarded as being separate, and often contradictory disciplines, emotion and logic in opposition without much apparent common ground. But such ground certainly exists, and the Spectacular Bodies exhibition covers some of it, with particular regard to human anatomy.

The element of it which has received most publicity are the wax models used to teach anatomy, back in the days before every medical student got their own corpse to cut up. Then, the only available bodies were those of condemned criminals, making dissections a rarity, and something of a theatrical event as a result. In lieu of real flesh, elaborately detailed facsimiles were constructed out of coloured wax and other materials, and these form the centerpiece here.

Looking at them, a whole range of emotions ran across my mind. They seemed unerringly lifelike, the wax glistening moistly, but there is also something deeply disturbing about seeing human bodies cut up and displayed like slabs of meat in a butcher’s shop. Others seemed like alien flowers, petals opening to reveal strange organs of unknown purpose – for how many of us know what a pancreas looks like, anyway? Yet the more moderately discreet were barely distinguishable from regular statues. Take someone’s skin off, pose them appropriately, and they don’t look all that much different from a body-builder or well-toned athlete, though it was clear where Clive Barker got many of his ideas for Hellraiser!

Even now, the form is carried on, albeit less for instructional purposes, and merely for the artistic content. Shown on the right, is John Isaacs’ A Necessary Change of Heart, which sat in the corner of the gallery, as if its subject had fallen from some great celestial slaughterhouse. While almost all the rest of the exhibits were behind glass, this one was out in the open (albeit with a museum guard hovering nearby), adding to its queasy appeal. If Isaacs ever wants a career in the movie industry, I’m sure he has a great future ahead of him, making highly-convincing special effects.

Less interesting were the more regular works of art, although they did show how many artists have taken a specific interest in anatomy: Stubbs (when he wasn’t drawing horses), Rembrandt, Durer, Turner and Da Vinci among them. Some of the last-named’s notebook pages were on display – borrowed from the Queen – and, as an aside, it was interesting to see them written in “reverse”, from right to left. There were also some “installations” from modern artists, which were without exception, crap: what exactly is a video of open-heart surgery playing above a neatly-made bed supposed to signify? I did have to laugh at the jar of bulls’ testicles which had a mouth projected onto it, if only for the look on people’s faces when they read the label, and realised exactly what they’d been staring at for the past few minutes.

Fortunately, the non-art exhibits had a fascinating range, from medieval textbooks which sought to explain how the four humours affected personality, through to a jar containing a pickled foetus, with beads on its wrist for no readily apparent reason – eat your heart out, Damien Hirst. Ironically, there were also masks cast from the faces of Burke and Hare, the notorious “resurrectionists” from Edinburgh, whose trade was in supplementing the officially-available corpses, with ones they ended up creating themselves. What goes around, comes around, and they now find themselves the objects of public attention.

Another important area covered by the exhibition, was the way scientists have attempted to link mood and character to physical attributes. The ‘science’ of reading faces, physiognomics, has been around at least since the time of Da Vinci, and was strongly supported by the likes of Francis Galton – who also was one of the discoverers of fingerprinting. Phrenology, the reading of the bumps on the head as an indicator of mental disturbance or criminal tendencies, lead to the gathering of enormous amounts of data, though it seems that their interpretation tended strongly to pander to the preconceptions and prejudices of the time.

There is a lot to see in this exhibition – perhaps too much – and by the end, I was feeling distinctly body-weary. There’s no doubt that we are all examples of remarkable natural engineering, but as with cars and computers, my interest in the internal workings is limited, when things are otherwise going well. However, the images of the anatomical models will stay with me for a long time, and the names of Pinson, Zumbo, Susini and Towne undeniably deserve a higher place in art history than they have received. Definitely, their wax works…

Working days to go: 7. Shopping days to Christmas: oh, I dunno, must be round about fifty. But I mention it, because I saw my first specifically-Christmas advert on TV yesterday, even though there are still more than two months to go. And it was for freakin’ dog -food: Cesar, the dog-food for dogs that aren’t really dogs at all, but medium-sized rats. You can, it seems, get a special Christmas flavour of it, so that little Snookums doesn’t feel all left out when you’re tucking into your turkey. In terms of nutritional content, it’s probably right up there with a Big Mac, and quite possibly tastes not too bad either – I can imagine it, spread on crackers and accompanied by some good port. Yum. But it’s the surreal concept of a dog celebrating Christmas, and somehow appreciating your efforts, that amuses me. I suppose I should be annoyed by the concept, but I can’t be bothered; anyone who possesses one of those miniature flea-collars on legs, deserves to be ripped off. So good luck to Cesar – and if you run out of cheese footballs or twiglets on Boxing Day, you know what to do. It’s quite likely your elderly relatives will be just as happy, and it does wonders for their coats…

I bought a musical birthday card earlier in the week – I’m a firm believer in the gift that keeps on giving, even if it’s only tinnitus. But how do you write the damn thing? Every time I cracked it open more than half an inch, a ferocious rendition of… well, I’m not quite sure what it was, but it was bloody loud. It didn’t seem that bad in the shop, but in the office, it sounded like The Who had been turning their amplifiers up to eleven once again. So what do you do? Slam it open, scrawl “Hpy Brtdy J” on it really quickly? Or do you adopt the cautions, bomb-disposal approach, cracking it open slowly, until the last possible moment before all hell breaks loose? I went for the latter, though, being left-handed, I was still forced to wedge my hand in next to the spine to try and write anything. Combined with my nightmarish writing at the best of times, it’ll be a major miracle if the recipient can work out who it was that sent it.

In a little over an hour’s time, an era will come to an end; a solitary trumpet will sound The Last Post, as I switch my pager off, and go off duty for the final time. Yes, after somewhere round about nine years or so, I am coming to the end of my time as an out-of-hours support person, liable to be woken up at any time of the day or night for the most fatuous, trivial or pointless queries and errors. Except that at 3 o’clock in the morning, there is no such thing as a trivial query. When that beeping starts, getting progressively louder as you try desperately to convince yourself that it’s someone else’s… albeit someone else in your bed…someone else on call…it’s one of the most hideous sounds known to man. If Pavlov caused dogs to salivate by ringing a bell (or waving tins of Cesar under their noses), it’s likely that for the next decade or so, you’ll be able to get me to twitch severely, by creeping up behind me and going “Beep-beep-beep-BEEEP!”

Years of experience have, however, skilled me in the art of being able to get up, connect to the work computers, analyse the problem, fix it – or, perhaps more likely, foist it off onto someone else – and disconnect, all without hitting genuine consciousness at any point. This is a useful trick, one which actually has its uses in day-to-day life as well, especially when hungover. But while I will miss the pager’s four convenient alarms (I have taken it on holiday with me, purely for this reason, and even once left it behind in a hotel room in Florida, much to my consternation!), I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see it go. From now on, any sleepless nights will be entirely ones of my own making, and that’s how it should be.

I have a certain warmth of feeling for the Millennium Dome: anything which causes Tony Blair so much embarrassment and grief can’t be all bad. But, having said that, I probably wouldn’t have bothered going if it hadn’t been at the suggestion of my parents who were visiting London, on their way to holiday somewhere less wet. Which could pretty much mean anywhere on the planet, outside than the South-East of England over the past couple of weeks. Indeed, my touristing tolerance had already been hammered by a ‘Ghost Walk’ round the Tower of London that would have benefited from scuba equipment, and a failed, but equally moist, attempt to see some 5th of November fireworks. At least the Dome was inside…

And make no mistake, there is an extraordinary amount of stuff to see there: after a full day, some eight hours of gawping, we still hadn’t seen six of the fifteen zones, nor any of the stuff outside the central arena, save for the Blackadder Back and Forth show. which is shown in a nearby pavillion. However, while the sheer scale of the edifice, and its contents, cannot be denied, the quality of the exhibits leave a good bit to be desired in that, while the day passed by with surprising swiftness, there is very little in there that I have the slightest interest in seeing again. Case in point: the Play Zone contained a number of futuristic activities and leisure pursuits…none of which kept my interest for more than a few moments. If this is truly what we have to look forward to, I foresee hard drugs becoming the pastime of choice.

Similarly, the main Millennium Show had a good fifteen minutes of material in it – so it’s a shame it lasted three-quarters of an hour. Some of the aerial ballet was genuinely breath-taking, but there were so many dead spots that the overall effect was of a school Christmas pantomime, directed by a severely over-ambitious drama teacher. The Peter Gabriel soundtrack was kinda cool though. It all has something to do with a conflict between Earth People and Sky People, but even after reading the programme notes, I’m not entirely sure why one side appeared to be clad in matching pyjamas, who the good guys were, and what the overall message was.

Probably something about living in peace, harmony and balance with nature, for there was also an underlying preachiness about many of the exhibits which could become immensely irritating. The very first zone was Money, and consisted largely of the City of London telling us not to spend too much or too little, because it would cause financial chaos. Excuse me, whose money is it again? Oh, yes, mine… Worst of all was Living Island, which took ecological sensitivity to neo-Fascist levels: no matter what the activity, it was Bad For The Environment And Should Stop Immediately. I did like the display of flotsam (or is it jetsam? Never can remember…) picked up off the beaches of Britain. Egyptian packaging, Norwegian beer-cans – the world has truly become a global village. Albeit not quite in the way intended by the Home Planet zone, an extraordinarily sappy tour of Earth, hosted by two aliens (“No, we can’t stay – but they can!”) which says that we are the most amazing thing on it, and thus presumably implies it’s okay for us to rape the rest of the planet. Cool.

I liked Travel, which traced the progress of transportation from our own two legs through space travel, and beyond on into the future. It managed both to be informative, and provide an emotional content which was all too often missing. On the other hand, the Body zone was a severe disappointment. A pumping heart and a brain telling Tommy Cooper jokes was about the limit of it, as well as an exhibit designed to identify you by the patterns of veins in your hand, which didn’t work. This was a definite problem; I suspect the lack of money, and the approaching end of its life, means that as things break down, they weren’t getting repaired, and so a significant percentage of things were out of order for one reason or another. Sometimes, I accept, it wasn’t the Dome’s fault — the previous day, someone had used a bulldozer and tried to steal the 350 million pound diamond exhibit, so that was shut. Instead, we took a photo of ourselves, standing next to the closure sign, looking mournful.

Oddly, the lack of attendance worked in the Dome’s favour: the first estimates required a daily attendance of 35,000, but I suspect that if such a volume was ever reached, the facilities would be creaking at the seams, and you would certainly lose the airy sense of space which was one of the most memorable features. You could wander into any zone almost at will, without queueing; we didn’t bother with the couple of exhibits that did have a line, partly because I suspect they wouldn’t have been worth the wait. Food and drink were equally easily accessible, in a broad range of forms, though irritatingly, you weren’t allowed to take these into the zones: we were barred from the BT-sponsored Talk zone, for unlawful possession of candy floss. It’s good to talk, providing you don’t eat at the same time.

Nowhere was the Dome’s spectacular failure as a commercial attraction more evident than in the gift shop. With almost two months to go, they had already embarked on an Everything Must Go! clearance sale, which had some spectacular reductions. Shirts which had been twenty quid at the start of the year, were now 4.99 and you got two for the price of one. If you could get to the shop without having to pay for admission to the whole facility, that would be your entire Christmas shopping sorted. However, such is the low status of the Dome, that you might as well go round with “I AM A PLONKER” on your chest, and none of the designs appealed, even at that low, low price. However, I do wonder if some of the limited edition stuff – first day covers and the like – might be worth picking up, on the grounds that no-one will bother, and so they might well end up being worth more than you’d expect…

So, what to do with the Dome when it reaches the end of its useful lifespan in seven weeks. Tony Blair won’t let it stand as a memorial to the total incompetence of Cool Britannia, though it is entirely fitting – being an impressive shell whose actual contests, once you get inside, leave a lot to be desired. Maybe we can do as was done with London Bridge, and sell it off to the Americans, perhaps for use as a shopping mall – it’d help if we could stick a flag on it, and convince them it was actually Buckingham Palace. But I think we should engage in a grand but empty gesture to match the entire concept. According to one of the tumblers (now reduced to 4.99), it would take Niagara Falls ten minutes to fill up the Dome: I think it would be an interesting and worthwhile exercise to ship the entire unit across to upstate New York, turn it over and prove the validity or otherwise of that statistic…

Working days to go: 12. The good thing about giving three months’ notice, is that few jobs short of brain surgery actually take that long to hand over to your successor – in my case, a couple of weeks was sufficient to do all the handovers to my pseudo-replacement. I say “pseudo”, since who can possibly hope to replace me? I mean, he’s a nice guy, but hey, he just doesn’t have my devastating good looks, personal charm and work ethic… Besides, he’s a Liverpool fan – although that brilliant goal against England last Saturday elevates Hamann to divine status as an honorary Scotsman [a big “Hi!” to Mal at this point would seem in order…]

Er, I digress. The main point is that work-wise, I’m doing nothing much beyond staring blankly at my screen and occasionally typing in stuff. [We’ll take the sarcastic comments of “And how precisely is that different from normal?” as read, thank you] And it’s intensely liberating not to give a damn. I have to say, I thoroughly recommend resigning – I think the past two months have been among the most enjoyable of my working life. Or rather giving-the-impression-of-working life, since as the days have ticked by, even that illusion has gradually faded. These days, I hardly even bother looking over my shoulder if I’m engaging in not strictly work activities; after all, in the phrase which has become my mantra, “What are they going to do – fire me?” Down the pub for three hours? “What are they going to do – fire me?” Refuse to work overtime? “What are they going to do – fire me?” Printing out dubious, TC-shaped items? “What are they going to do – fire me?”

Bliss. The single biggest threat which hangs over the head of all us wage slaves has been removed from me at a stroke. Even the ultimate sanction, “you’ll never work in this town again”, is of absolutely no use, since I have absolutely no intention of ever working in this town again. The thought strikes me that I could entirely re-invent myself, fabricate an entire new identity as I head off into the New World. I could be a priest; a member of the Witness Protection Program; a dispossesed aristocrat. But truth is, I actually quite like the identity I have, thank you very much: a sardonic media-junkie who believes the recent shut-down of his web site was due to the Babylonian Brotherhood, an ancient conspiracy of shape-shifting reptiloids…or perhaps not. Yes, that’ll do, I think.

However, I note that this resignation thing does appear to be infectious: house-mate Abigail has also handed in her resignation (and was last seen clutching a celebratory bottle of champagne!). Hers was similarly enforced by a move, though in this case, it was the job moving away from her which was the main trigger for the decision, after her company moved out to Orpington. Where that is precisely, I’m not sure, but it does not make for an easy commute from Tulse Hill — not least because you are going against the flow, so so speak. However, she is actually looking for another job, unlike myself, who is looking more for…well, a lottery win would make things simple. Still, all we have to do now is convince Steve to follow suit, and all the residents of TC Towers will be wandering around with relaxed, beatific grins on their under-employed faces…

If I do get employed in the States, I think I may hand in my resignation on the day I arrive. Do you think they’d mind me giving them five years notice? And to everyone else… Quit your jobs! Slack off! Buck the system! At least, I think that’s what my notes here say…