Back from Blighty

That’s me back from a break at home with the family in Blighty.

Before I went, a row had broken out regarding Shelley, who had made a friendship with a local man, and brought him back one night to The Complex, as most people call it; (I prefer to humanise it slightly as “The Bungalows”). The guys on the gate wouldn’t allow him in, and she was upset and humiliated.

This apparently little incident is actually indicative of a huge difference between our respective cultures. We post millennial north Europeans regard the private behaviour of a forty-something woman as her own business. Whether she wanted to play tiddly-winks with this guy, or have hot steamy jungle sex is really a matter for her. Whereas the locals would consider the very notion of a woman that age even going out to work in itself as disreputable. And a MAN, a local, in her home. Alone. At night! They were quite probably utterly banjaxed by the whole business.

This blew up just before my holiday. I gather it has ramifications, but not what they are yet. Mr Fix-it is at the centre of it, apparently, being the supervisor of the guys on the gate.

Incidentally, LM pointed out when we were watching the Chelsea match on telly the other night that he’s a dead ringer for Avram Grant.

I got back to find that almost all of the silver barked Egyptian palms had fallen over. I’ve also given up entirely on any notions of gardening in this soil which is I fear not just sterile but probably poisoned, perhaps taken from an industrial site. Perhaps the landlord was wearing a flashing neon hat when he bought the soil and the trees – they clearly saw him coming, anyhow.
DoS is back, and it’s fairly obvious that all is not well in the SMT. The Leadership and Management manager had gone back to Blighty whilst I was away, some story of a family illness. This morning, HD told us formally that his colleague had resigned. He also managed to tell us that he hadn’t resigned for the stated reasons, but that “I’m not telling you guys” the real reasons. He became even more discrete when he told us that DoS wasn’t aware of the problems that LMM’s departure would cause.

I immediately felt, and still feel now twelve hours later, that this is the end of the road for HD too. When you those below you in the food chain that they are not permitted to know things, and slag off those above you, and lose the only person on the same rung as you (they were boozing buddies too), well then, you’re isolated, to say the least. Mind you, he seems to have a strange sort of cheerful indifference to daily courtesies, and must have enormous powers of survival to have got where he is without any personal qualities whatsoever. So I couldn’t write him off just yet.

KST, in China, has now resigned. A pity, he’s cheerful soul who lightened the air.