At dinner, the talk turned to post-awayday golf. Plans are in place for a quick round tomorrow after the final session – and it’s clear that I am not part of them. As relieved as I am not to be invited along, it’s a sure sign that my corporate star, which had once shone so briefly, is now beginning to fade and die. Already I can feel my outer layers burning up, as I begin the process of collapse. One day I may be no more than a very dense white dwarf.

Wednesday February 21st

I found myself running out of the room at the end of the awayday as if it were the end of a school year. If I’d had a satchel on me, it would have been thrown up into the air with joy. At least I’d managed to let off a stink bomb in the meeting room; well, at least that’s how it seemed my presentation yesterday had been received.

I watched them all move noisily away to the golf course, like a herd of corporate hippopotami. Next week, when everyone’s back in the office, the awayday will be advertised to have been a big success: there will be tales of the day’s swaggering stroke-play, the eagles and albatrosses, and near holes-in-one. Unmentioned will be the wild swings out of the rough and kicked-up sand from the bunkers.

Awaiting me is a meandering train journey home. Ordinarily, this would be prime poem-writing territory, but I have another, more pressing commitment. It’s book group tomorrow evening and Voltaire’s Candide is calling me, in the way that only a late-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment satire can (i.e., faintly and with little hope of being heard).

It is mildly embarrassing to think that this will be the first time in three years that I’ll have finished the book ahead of the meeting.

Thursday February 22nd

John Travoltaire

Well, you can tell by the way I break the rules,

I’m a reason man: no time for fools.

Progress checked, our freedom scorned,

We’ve been kicked around since we were born.

But it will be all right, it’s not too late

For separation of Church and State.

We can try to understand

With science to lend a helping hand.

Dictionaries and dancing, poems, plays and prancing,

I’m spreadin’ the light, spreadin’ the light.

Despots are a-quakin’ and institutions shakin’,

And I’m spreadin’ the light, spreadin’ the light.

Ah, ha, ha, ha, spreadin’ the light, spreadin’ the light.

Ah, ha, ha, ha, spreadin’ the light.

Lining up at the bus stop, with The Best of Disco shimmying and bumping in my earholes, I was struck by the sudden thought that if John Travoltaire did not exist, it would be necessary for The Bee Gees to invent him.