That Monday Morning Feeling

 

A Long Perspective

It was actually a Thursday, a dreary, overcast evening in late May or early June, 1972. The dull weather didn't matter, though, because it was a good evening on the television: Top Cat, Where in the World (a travel quiz which I unaccountably liked), Top of the Pops, The Goodies. The Cricklewood trio’s antics ended at 8.30, leaving a half hour gap before the Nine O'Clock News. This thirty-minute slot was, for just three weeks, occupied by a short documentary looking at the lives of various working people. It wasn't the kind of programme that held much appeal for me, but for some reason I particularly noticed the title: That Monday Morning Feeling. I was just eleven years old and would not enter the world of work for another eleven years... a whole lifetime in the future. Yet that title, and a passing glimpse of the programme set me thinking about how it might feel when I could go to work instead of going to school. I've always liked a well-turned phrase, and 'That Monday Morning Feeling', with its hint of drudgery and dull routine really caught in my mind. Maybe it was the dreary oppressive atmosphere that held sway on that Thursday evening, but somewhere a connection was made.

It was a phrase I could relate to, even as a schoolboy: going back to school on a Monday morning after a weekend spent playing with toys, drawing, watching television was always a comedown. I didn’t hate school as such, it’s just that I could always find other things to do with my time. Going to work, though, that felt different somehow. No longer under any obligations to teachers, homework, exams. I’d always been intrigued by the notion of ‘going to work’, and had often wondered what my dad did all day in his office job at the GEC in Witton, Birmingham. Sometimes he let my brother and myself have used forms, old desk diaries and suchlike to use as drawing paper, but I was always intrigued at the forms themselves, with their columns and boxes to tick.

Going to work had seemed like something exciting and interesting. Now, along came a programme whose title suggested otherwise. For me, television was a parade of fantasy, comedy and adventure, but here was a glimpse of real life, a hint of what the grown-up world of working people was really like. I didn’t sit down and watch any of those three programmes, but the title really set me thinking, and I’ve remembered it all this time.

Fifty-one years later, glancing through the pages of my diary for that year, I was reminded of that Thursday evening so long ago and how it made me stop and think, if only for a moment, about the grown-up world I would one day inhabit. What kind of a place would I find myself working in? As things turned out, I would ultimately spend less than a decade actually 'going out to work'. From 1991 onwards, my workplace became the home. How would I have felt to be confronted then with the knowledge of where my future lay? Back in 1972, the future was still mysterious and intriguing. All manner of possibilities lay in wait: growing up, going to work, marriage, a home, perhaps even children. It didn't seem too much to hope for: I'd been to the weddings of a couple of cousins and guessed something similar must lie somewhere over my own horizon. By the following year, I had even found myself a potential role model in the shape of Likely Lad Bob Ferris. I seriously saw myself married to someone like Thelma and living somewhere like the Elm Lodge Housing Estate... modest ambitions indeed, but it was, after all, the 1970s, and middle class suburbia was my milieu.

Ultimately, none of this happened. But now, as I confront the end of my own working life, it's strange to look back at myself standing on the brink of the grown-up world and wondering what kind of life and career lay ahead of me. Strange and, I have to say, ineffably sad. Stumbling across that memory brought to mind some lines of Philip Larkin... not, as one might expect, his meditations on what he called 'the toad work' but rather, the following observation, set down in his poem 'Reference Back':

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

What I have as it once was... curiosity, hope, a child's naive outlook on a life still to be lived. This is indeed a long perspective, one that, perhaps, it is best not to contemplate for too long. Larkin was actutely aware of time and its effect on people's lives... in another verse he writes of life as 'the unbeatable slow machine that brings what you get'. I know now what the machine brought for me, just as I know for certain that I will never experience 'that Monday morning feeling' again. And somehow, the world seems a sadder place for it.