Yesterday, well the day before by the time you read this, I bunked off. (I’m not sure if “bunking off” is a Britishism but, just in case it is, it translates as playing truant/hooky/ skiving/throwing a sickie.) The more I think about it – bunking off – the more it sounds like a poor euphemism for sex (as I’m told “the shift” is in Ireland 😂) but there was none of that, although that seems like a missed opportunity with hindsight.
It went something like this: I had swottily arranged all my work so I could take Tuesday out to go to a meeting in St Andrews in Fife, about an hour from where I live in Edinburgh. The location was incidental, chosen for convenience; being halfway between our respective homes and at the same time where both of our partners happen to go for work/study. When I woke up on Tuesday morning looking forward to a laptop-free day but one I could still pass off as work without, you know, actually doing any, I discovered that the person I was meeting was sick. The meeting was off. And so was my excuse not to work.
Because, yes, even after five years entirely self-employed which, I am told, is meant to give you license to take time off to suit you rather than being tied to the strictures of the 9-5 (oh, how we freelancers laughed as we pounded away on our laptops late into the night on a bank holiday) I still need an excuse, or better still permission to take what I still think of as “a work day” off.
Is it just me or does this feel like one step forwards two steps back in my personal evolution from good girl to badly behaved woman? Or at least mildly naughty. Just when I think I’m nailing it, I stumble across another personal roadblock with foundations so deep I am forced to take a detour.
It will surprise you not even slightly that as a teenager I was never to be found having a sneaky cig or snog or scrap around the back of the bike sheds during double maths. (Yes, all those were things if you went to a British state school in the 1970s/80s). Playing truant just isn’t in my DNA. Either that or I was socialised out of it depending on your nature/nurture position. (I’m pretty sure my dad cut class more often than not, just as I’m 100% convinced my mum didn’t, so take your pick.)
Fear of getting caught. Fear of getting into trouble. Just plain fear of anything and everything. All stopped me bunking off school and even sixth form college. At university, the odd hangover may have got between me and the lecture theatre, but the good girl (or Straight As Sam to steal a phrase from Molly Roden Winter and her inner good girl, Straight As Molly) still ensured I felt like someone was going to find me out and… do what precisely?
The closest I ever came to it was sneaking out through the broken back fence every other Thursday lunchtime to buy Smash Hits magazine from the local newsagent and then head to my mate’s house round the corner to ostentatiously not eat our lunch and pore over the Thompson Twins’ latest lyrics. (Consider this insanity a historical note, younger readers!)
I only once threw a sickie from work, very, very early on in my career, before I had a job I really cared about. Even then, far from enjoying the stolen hours of freedom, I spent the day racked with guilt, convinced I was just minutes away from getting busted. (I’ve no idea how, it’s not like I was moonlighting on reality TV. Straight As Sam doesn’t bother herself with minutae.) The kernel of it lies in the fact that as a child and young (and middling) adult, I was only ever able to flick life the Vs when I reached a point of truly not caring. Those moments were rare and potentially explosive. Otherwise, true to good girl form, mostly I have spent my life caring far too much about things that didn’t care about me back.
So, here I was, on Tuesday, a recovering good girl with a latent fear/resentment of authority (the two often seem to go hand in hand, no?) AND I am not good with last minute changes of plan. I had planned to have the day off. (I mean go to a meeting.) I had worked around it. I had been looking forward to it. And here it was, cancelled. Any halfway sensible person would have considered it a day regained, punched the air and used the gifted hours to get ahead with work or do some long-sidelined chores or watch the tennis or fret about the election (Don’t forget to vote Brits!) or try to understand the thought processes of the US Supreme Court or *whisper it* gone ahead with the day trip anyway. And relished the fact that they could do it without putting on any makeup because they no longer had to make a good impression.
Wait. What?
Truly, these are the kind of time- and energy-sapping machinations that tumble around my head day in, day out. That inner good girl, she knows I might have won the occasional battle, but we haven’t even got started on the war.
I jest. Ish. But seriously, how much of our energy do we waste on fear, without even knowing, precisely, what we’re afraid of? What could we be doing with it if we weren’t frittering it away?
At some point in our young lives, lines are drawn and we are told not to step outside them. Or else.
Or else what?
We will disappoint.
We will get in trouble.
We may even be punished.
But that’s all. It is very rarely a matter of life or death. At worst it might cost you a week’s pocket money.
It can take a lifetime to unlearn that.
Over the weekend I watched a small girl, 4 or 5 at most, showing her dad how to stay inside the lines on the pavement. “What will happen if I don’t?” he asked pretending, unconvincingly, to try and fail once again. Hopping expertly from square to square, she gave him a VERY SERIOUS LOOK. And then she pounced. “Roarrrrrrrr,” she said.
Bears. It seems they are alive and well and living in Edinburgh. Just waiting for someone to step outside the lines.
Listen, I know how nuts this probably sounds. Here I am, at 57 and 363 days old, (yes, Cancerian. There’s probably something in that, not that I believe etc etc, but that’s one for another time) genuinely feeling the guilt at taking a “work day” off. But reader I did it. Not without guilt, but I did it. And nobody died. And nobody told me off.
I sat in a cafe listening to a (very) random soundtrack of 80s, 90s and noughties music and read a book that wasn’t for work (the astonishing All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker, out 16 July, highly, HIGHLY recommend –
you will LOVE it), I ate cheese toasties and didn’t drop crumbs in my keyboard because my keyboard was 50-odd miles away, and then we wandered along a windswept beach, watching the gulls wheel on the air currents and luxuriated in a Mr Whippy 99 at a surf cafe set back in the dunes. Later, we got the train home where I lay on the sofa and watched tennis, before changing channels and shouting at the football (soccer). On a “work day”.Not exactly wild, but baby steps.
Did I feel guilty? Oh my God, yes. But not constantly. Did I occasionally self-flagellate. Maybe once. Or twice. And only when I stopped appreciating the sand and the surf and the seagulls and the storm clouds (and the ice cream) and allowed my thoughts to drift inwards, where they were immediately hijacked by all the shoulds that were just waiting to leap out at me waving their to-do list. But, with a little effort, I can now push them back. Or at least sneak past.
As the train slid back across the Forth that evening, above the ferries and the tugs and the container barges and the tenders returning tourists to a cruise ship docked in the firth, I realised what had happened.
Absolutely nothing.
I had not only stepped on my personal lines, I had, in the teeniest weeniest of ways, stepped outside them. And, so far, I’m still waiting for the ROARRRRRR.
• What would you do if your inner good girl let you?
My brother retired this week. Now 71 he had worked since he was 18, rising from the factory floor to the position of plant superintendent. The company was good to him, paid vacations, medical insurance and enough money to have a comfortable life.
He was terrified of the freedom.
"What do I do now?" he asked, 'Anything you wish', I replied. He didn't set the alarm clock on Sunday night. Monday he made breakfast and read the morning paper, setting it down to call me during the second cup of coffee.
"I'm going fishing" he said "and then I'm going to learn to yodel"
I went freelance mainly so that I could take days off on a whim! Yesterday morning I looked at the laptop and said (loud to myself) "NO" and drove to Siccar Point (east of Edinburgh) for my regular pilgrimage to see the Hutton Unconformity (I am a geologist), breath some sea air and take a walk along the coast. Stopped at a cafe for some tea and cake on the way back to town. Zero guilt...I have worked hard for decades while bringing up two kids. I am Italian, though, which helps: I was not brought up with a Calvinist ethos that assumes that if you are not working, toiling or suffering you are very probably up to no good!