We are so tired

Day before the BBC presentation . Work from 0720-2200. Dinner. Drinks and a run through of what 'the new structure' might mean for us. I feel better as The Better Half doesn't want the job I thought she was about to be offered - we'll just have to see what happens if and when it is actually passed her way. Presentation tomorrow means up in under six hours' time. Knackered and away to furtive sleepland. My workload is also reaching breaking point. On we go, on we go.

Developments

So my job's changing, and I'm going to become some sort of roving reporter-type who sources case studies and generally creates things that sell bog-cleaning services to blue-chip companies. This is all fine, because it is allied with a move to home-based working from the South West. This would enable us to buy a house somewhere really nice, with hardly any crackheads and the sea.

The same proposed restructure that has created this climate of possibility is also semi-likely to be one where the Better Half, who has consistently outperformed me at work for the past two years - that I am sat here blogging while I wait do her to finish work should be all the evidence you need of that - is offered our boss' job when he goes on sabbatical. 

How do I feel about this? Odd. Not good. Proud of her, but jealous and inadequate too. Superseded.

The Cloaked Man

The flat-faced man by the fire

The dirty girl's hands in her sleeves

A sailor, a traveller, a seller of crosses 

A bitch and a crooner, three stockbrokers, thieves.

All drink and carousing, their hearts and desires

All richly unwinding, all glinting in smiles

The warm light of laughter, the thrum and the roar

The wind wheedling under the thousand-year door 

 A pistol wrapped tightly lurks under a cloak, festooning a man in the corner whose smoke

Stubs needles to his knuckles and guttering, broke

The spell in his minds eye, no longer.

Disturbance, a slip-shift, a cantilever snakes

Through the mood of the place as the patrons, half-baked 

Sense motive or meaning which prior unseen, wheens the 

Tone of their evening and their slow crunches home

Remembered in instant, quick muzzle flash frame

The gun rears up, hurls the end in a flame

At the man with the flat face

Who falls in his hearth-place

And cradled by dirty girls' hands 

Slips away from the sailors, the brokers, the thieves

And on to the lands where nobody breathes

The cloaked man smokes on, and leaves