In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t sound totalitarian or sinister at all. It was an epochal life stage, and a winter that was full of scents and sensations, the way winters are in the summer of one’s years.
How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle?
Part of the process of this new job was an order to attend, along with other similar junior newcomers across the civil service, an induction day at a central London office. This meaningless day has remained with me ever since, jammed into my brain – from which actually important or significant life events have melted like infusoria in the eye.
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