cowboys in cuba - chris and cosey

back to the grind. at work, they chatter in short staccato bursts about where they shopped, what nearly didn't fit in the boot. when they ask me, out of politeness, what i did, i make up some nonsense about an imaginary western.

i twist together strands from an old john wayne picture and something even older in black and white. something where a train gets robbed. i add in the end of a german film about terrorists and they all nod as if they wish they'd seen it too.

a boss moves vaguely in our direction and all conversation dies. the crowd turns back into whirling particles that shoot away from each other as if doing something.

i lift a folder from my desk and walk almost purposefully towards the grey-with-scratches filing cabinets. out of the corner of my eye, i see that the manager has stopped by the desk of one of his cronies. i watch them pretending not to talk about golf.

lunchtime comes and goes. i spend mine looking around the market. a stall by the name of Mistress Honey Bunny has rails and rails of the sort of thing i should be buying, but nothing jumps out at me.

the problem is, this new club that's opening a week on saturday. various people have said they're going so i might as well. i looked at their website and their fetlife group, but it gave me no idea of the specifics of their dress code.

i pause by another stall, more to kill time than for anything else and scan the dvds there. sadly, as i'd expected, it's all brain-dead hollywood nonsense from the last couple of years. remakes of oriental movies that i quite liked. i see ben stiller's name a lot as my eyes rove.

i tend to store up info on a lot more films than i actually sit through. when i was at college, when i was, in fact, a film buff, i noticed that people switch off when you start talking about music or films that they're unfamiliar with. i do it myself, during lectures on boy-bands or blockbusters. or tv quiz shows.

sometimes, encouraging people to pidgeon-hole you and write you off is the closest most of us get to a cloak of invisibility.