A small celebration is in order this evening as I reach the milestone of thirty years with ostensibly the same employer. While it is fashionable to bemoan pay, conditions and all things down to the colour of the carpet, I have much to be grateful for. I don't know how else I would have survived since 1987. It is to them that I owe where I am now, which might not be anywhere very much but it could have been worse.
I will sound like the wistful John Lennon on In My Life if I set off on a ramble about people and places I've known but a large organisation provides a wide-ranging menu to select your friends from and some are gone but not forgotten while I'm glad to retain those that tolerate the increasingly curmudgeonly aesthete. If I'd have thought thirty years ago that this is where it would lead, I'd have gladly accepted it.
Enough might be enough by now and if there was a viable option to do something else, it would be the top option but I don't really want to write for money and neither do I know anyone who would pay me. I probably have as much chance of earning significant royalties from writing pop songs as the two longest odds horses in the Grand National finishing first and second but we'll see and returning to the best job I ever had, my paper round, would mean negotiating the daily challenge of getting up rather earlier than I can face it. So it looks as if one hangs on in there for as long as possible, turning a deaf ear to the corporate rhetoric and hoping that one's contribution is having a worthwhile effect somewhere.
Meanwhile, I'll raise a tin to the hilarity, the top people, the hilarity and weirdness, the cricket team (and, yes, some of these categories overlap), the unfailing and sufficient monthly wages and the organisation that, somehow well-meaning, brought me here.