met Thurston Moore at a bar in Greenwich village.’
‘Who’s he?’
I started explaining about Sonic Youth, and how important they’d been as a band, (in fact I’d never really been into them but I got exasperated when people didn’t know much Gen X popular culture). I stopped. It was hard trying to impress people with name-dropping if they had no idea who you were on about.
‘I will have to look them up on Spotify,’ Simon said. ‘Maybe I can send you a playlist and you can listen to some of my favourite music?’
I nodded but I’d had enough exposure to millennial music in the office. The speakers constantly played stuff that sounded like you’d heard it before. Where was New Order? The Smiths? The Cure? All the other great bands with ‘The’ in their name? Why did much of it sound like bad 90s dance music? I knew I sounded like my dad now but it really felt like everything was just regurgitated from the previous generation. It was impossible to create something new. But it was also clear that Sonic Youth wouldn’t give me cut through. Thurston Moore was probably claiming his pension by now and eating lettuce sandwiches, avoiding crusty bread so his dentures didn’t drop out, all that stuff. There came a time when you had to hang up those cool shoes and get down with the slanket-posse. I wasn’t quite ready for my stand-up bath but I wasn’t at the cut and thrust either. It was the mid-line. It was the pits.
Too young to surrender to old age and watch Inspector Morse all day long, and too old to be twerking and taking spice. I got back to my desk and re-read the fish finger research project brief that Phoebe had sent over. It would be an important project if it was part of a bigger frozen piece of business.
Everything about it filled me with despondency.
FISH FINGER INNOVATION BRIEF
Fish fingers have been a much-loved family snack for close to three decades but have recently faced challenges because of their lack of healthy cues. We want to reinvigorate fish fingers and position them in the ‘healthy, family, pleasure’ quadrant so that families feel like they’re making a healthy choice. Our ambition is to be the in the TOP THREE food brands in the next two years.
I underlined key phrases and thought about the possible challenges. Fish fingers were fine. Everyone loved them, even if they weren’t entirely fascinating. Generally people loved them because they reminded them of their childhoods. I started jotting some notes. We would need to do some research groups to find out what current consumers of fish fingers thought, and then maybe some with people who didn’t buy them to discover the barriers. I scribbled away some ideas and then added in a couple of ideas from the semiotics team (I still had no clue what they did but Simon had emailed me a few studies they’d undertaken previously on family brands), and in this way the afternoon passed by quickly. In this sense, work was good. It felt meaningless, but it was like doing an arrowword puzzle, and kept you from going senile. I sent the ideas to Phoebe so she could approve before I sent them to the client. When I looked at my phone it was five thirty and I hadn’t got up from my seat for more than two hours. It had been a productive day. I had eaten an overpriced burrito. I’d talked about popular culture with someone younger than me who wore braces and wasn’t a clown.
I managed to log into the nursery portal after three failed attempts. Bella had eaten chicken curry for lunch and made a kite out of an old washing up bottle and some string. There was a photo of her holding it, looking proud. I sent a copy to Pete with a text.
LOOK HOW PROUD SHE IS! X
I was missing these moments because I was trying to come up with a reason as to why people didn’t eat more fish fingers. I felt the head detaching sensation but it went away again. I had to fight to stay afloat. My life was okay. I was okay. The office was okay.
I just needed to finish the baby wipe presentation and things would be okay.
I phoned Kath on the walk back to the train station. I often thought it would be quicker to just create a moving pavement on the walk from Southwark to Waterloo. It was a waste of energy to do the same walk. It made me impatient. There were so many offices here that the moving pavement thing would come. Perhaps we’d sit on the pavement and have our phones attached to our eyeballs so we could really chill. There was a sea of people streaming out of the three glass and concrete towers. Everyone was smiling like it was the summer holidays. And everyone was on their phones, ordering pizzas, scheduling waxes, texting their spouses to say they were off to the pub. This was the best part of the day, the going home part where you shook your blanket off and felt a tiny glimmer of sun on your face. It was possibly worth going to work just so you could get this feeling regularly.
‘How’s things?’ she said. ‘Have you done any ‘blue sky thinking’?’
‘I feel so old,’ I replied, crossing the street and narrowly avoiding a cycle courier who had a boom box attached to the back of his bike.
‘The boy I was talking to today didn’t even know who Sonic Youth were.’
‘Well NEWSFLASH LADY. WE ARE OLD. Do you know that I have a walking stick? My back has seized up and I can’t walk!’
‘How?’
‘I was doing these HIIT sessions online, and I guess I was doing these burpees and going too hard and THWWAAKKK I heard something in my back. I’ve been told I can’t do any exercise for six months. I need to exercise. It’s the only thing that is mine and nothing to do with children and all that shit.’
‘Oh that’s sad. Mind you, any excuse not to exercise,’ I said.
‘But I like to exercise,’ she said.
‘You’ll be doing marathons next.’
‘Not with a sodding walking stick I won’t!’
‘Well you’d be proud of me. I did one good thing. I arranged to have a coffee with a local mum.’
‘A local mum! Wowsers! That’s uncharacteristically social of you.’
When had I got this reputation for being anti-social? Was it still a hangover from having a young child and being too tired to face going out in the evenings?
‘She’s called Bryony and she’s really nice and she’s much younger.’
‘Well that sounds promising,’ Kath said. ‘You need more local friends love. I rarely see you anymore. In fact I don’t think any of the old crowd see one another. We’re all too busy.’
It was true. The only good thing was that Kath and I spoke on the phone. We didn’t just text. It meant something. The people you spoke to versus those you typed to.
I thought back to our school days. They didn’t seem that long ago. We’d spent our time sitting in Kath’s bedroom, talking about boys, listening to music and smoking out the window. We’d started clubbing at fourteen, then everything was a blur of getting off with boys called Danny, Jody and Bobby, and then came university and quite a lot of parties and some drugs, then our thirties and Kath was popping out her children, and I was necking Nurofen Plus, and carrying enormous bags of ideas, before showing them to people who had no interest in them at all. The mudslide into our forties had come next and now we had walking sticks and no one had even heard of Sonic Youth FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.
‘I’ll ring you soon,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about the Instagram. It’s just like that Talkabout phone line we used to use. Remember? It’s like that but with pictures.’
‘But that was moderated by adults wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, you’re right but do you remember those two ugly boys we went to meet in Clapham? One said he looked like Brad Pitt but he was actually very short with acne?’
Kath laughed.