Cry Me A River

There is water sluicing through the roof as I type. It is dripping in a slow but methodical fashion from a rather discouraging gash in my ceiling which has opened up in the last few days and now seems to be steadily widening.

At first I attempted to control the leak by placing a rubbish bin under it. But the drip slyly changes direction approximately once every two minutes, evading capture. After half an hour of scuttling back and forth, bin in hand, eyeing the ceiling with a crazily fixed intensity in order to plot and thwart its leaking arc, I abandoned my Sisyphyean efforts.

The sound of the water hitting my carpet, in huge, despondent plops, is not a joyful one. It is a bit as if the flat itself is weeping. And who can blame it? I would also have a serious case of the cries if my ladybits were being excavated to house a soon-to-open late-night shisha bar, as is the unfortunate case on the ground floor below, but that’s a story for another night.

I’m not asking for your pity: I’m saving those supplications for my elderly Chinese landlady. (Although the last time she was called to the party, to rescue us from an overflowing toilet, she opined that it would do us good to pick up the basics of plumbing as necessary preparation for “housewife job”, so I am not holding out a great deal of hope. No doubt she will see this as a golden opportunity for me to learn the ropes of a bit of light structural engineering.)

I merely wish to make the observation that my life is not one of undiluted glamour.

This fairly obvious point struck me with thunderous intensity as I was trudging home from the cinema tonight, shortly after another Damascus-style revelation. The first was that the taxi-driver who ferried me home late last Wednesday night overcharged me by something in the region of 200%. But then I recalled the possibility that he may have levied what one might delicately term a “vomit surcharge”, and so I shall charitably call us even.

But the second epiphany – that my life is not one in which, say, Anna Wintour might find herself comfortably at home – was rendered starker by tonight’s cinematic offering, which in a heroic act of steely will I maintained wakefulness throughout. The film in question was An Education, which tells the story of a young girl’s battle to choose between the hedonistic abandonment of a love affair with a glamorous older man, and the possibility of winning a place at Oxford if she just buckles down and gets to grips with her pesky Latin conjugation. I believe this is the point at which a more considerate blogger would insert some sort of flashing spoiler alert, since I can inform you that she chooses the man, loses everything, and then gets it all back. On Her Own Terms.

Bravo and jolly well done to her! I was, of course, rooting for the pedagogic path throughout. I nodded furiously when her various ever-so-slightly-lesbianic teacher/mentors extolled the peerless virtues of higher education. I punched my little fist in the air when the protagonist dutifully spelled out her hard-earned conclusion, that “there’s no shortcut to the life I want”. It was all I could do not to leap to my feet and deliver a standing ovation during the concluding scenes of her cycling amidst the dreaming spires with implausibly shiny hair and a pleasingly weighty book-bag. As the credits rolled, I was filled with contentment for a narrative satisfyingly resolved in everyone’s best interests, with Hedonistic Evil firmly subjugated to Educational Good’s superior might, and everything just peachy with the world.

It was only as the lights went on and I began to deposit the punters’ discarded ice-cream pots and smuggled-in sticky beer cans in a black rubbish sack that it slowly began to dawn on me that something might not be quite right. This feeling of stirring unease stayed with me as I locked up the toilets, exchanged farewells with my co-usher, an Eritrean refugee, and signed out my time-sheet to register a solid 5 hours’ toil remunerated on the minimum-wage pay-scale.

Only in the course of my walk home did these sentiments cohere into something approaching crystallisation. And when they did, boy, was I pissed.

“I’ve been duped!” I cried out to no-one in particular, or I would have, if I were a character in a 50’s caper-movie.

I was seized by an urgent desire to run back to the cinema, clutching a megaphone, and re-broadcast the film with an accompanying soundtrack of my screeching “Don’t do it! Choose the rich dude! The only life that your Oxford education provides a shortcut to is one that involves a roof with a hole in it!”

But I didn’t, of course, because access to the projection-room is far beyond my professional remit. Also, the abundance of late-night shisha bars gracing Kilburn’s High Road do not offer megaphone rentals as part of their utility package, although I have reason to believe that they are open to discussions about contract-killings, so it seems an arbitrary point at which to draw your service boundaries.

Instead I came home to assess the spread of my bedroom’s new lake, and started googling ‘dry-stone-walling for beginners’.

After all, they do say that knowledge is power.