Last days are strange

I find myself on a bus at two in the morning. The top half is filled with students chanting and clapping. A saxophone plays. The people who got on the bus with me had glanced upwards but stuck to the main floor. I went upstairs. Stomps, shouts, tamborine. Mardi Gras come to London…

Ending a job on a Monday is strange. It’s the start to the week. It’s busy. Never more so then where I’ve been for the past 6 months. Meeting day. A day for nothing but preparing for the week ahead.

All the normal leaving things happen. One last lunch with too little people. One last meeting. One last coffee. One last awkward goodbye with a card, a few words and shuffling feet.

Computer is wiped clean of files and favourites and handed in. A chat on the sofa. I can’t give trade secrets. Or say I still work there. I think in case I forgot and I said I did the next day at the conference I was speaking at. I think I get that. The not working there part.

I get one last ride with Claire, the woman who, in half a year, taught me the importance of process and how to look at all situations from different angles. I didn’t necessarily always follow this guidence but now it’s in my brain.Or at least in the left hand side of it.

Dropped off at Westfield. It’s all glass and confusion. Browse Apple store and pick up the new mac. Heavy. A man nods at me. Still the same weight he says. I nod back. Put it down. Browse shops. Try on clothes I’d never buy. Eat veggies and rice in under ten minutes. Run to the tube. Play Angry Birds until Oxford Circus.

I meet Sophie. We are seeing a live BBC radio show. First one I’ve been to. There is a metal baking pan in my bag. Something I left at work that now had to come home. I’m afraid I won’t be let in. Only crazy people carry around baking pans.

They let me in.

Tonight it’s Tim Key, Mark Watson, and…some other guy. We drink wine. They make us laugh. I see they only go through half of their material. Jill Abram, a poet I know, is working in the booth and says hi. We talk about what I’m doing next. I can’t say.

Find out via Twitter that my friend Nick is doing the Arabic World Service broadcast and he is in the same BBC building as me. He signs us in and we rotate through an impossibly slow revolving door to join him for coffee.

Drink it black. One sugar. Nick and I talk about possible futures. His seem heroic. Enlightened. I consider mine. Am I making the right choices?

He runs off to press buttons to project news into places I’ve never been. I slowly rotate out into the night.

"In the Mood" is in my head. I sing through all the parts. You can do that at one am.

Walk from bus stop to bus stop and back again. The 88 arrives. I hear the stomps and whoops and hollers. I have to see what the commotion is. Go upstairs. It’s heaving. A sat down parade careening through London.

Trafalger square. The motley crew sing their way off. “We Got the Funk.” Stomp. Stomp. “We Got the Funk.” The doors close. Their singing becomes distant. Like the muffled sound of too loud earphones a few seats down.

They wave from the street.

I wave back.