He has got his act together

A day’s holiday yesterday, the last of my annual holiday allocation until Christmas.

I got back to the office this morning to find many decisions deferred until my return (flattering, but I was a little appalled that my team should rely on me so much – as if I knew the answer to their problems!).

Tony Boxall has returned to the office. Previously he had worked on the Sales Desk, then had been promoted, then demoted (attitude problem), then promoted again and sent to our warehouse in Greenford where he was given a technical role looking at the returns from customers (the new Greeford facility is meant to be a subsidiary site, but is actually twice the size of the Headquarters warehouse). Now he has been promoted yet again, and has returned to the general sales office in a supervisory / technical capacity.

Aged in his mid-twenties, Tony Boxall has a slim build, with short brown curly hair and grey-blue eyes. His height is just under six foot, and he has a loose-limbed athletic appearance (a supple way of moving that somehow seems to imply that he has got his act together). He is mostly good natured, except that once or twice a day he gets into an irritable mood and makes sarcastic and hurtful remarks about people.

He is friends with Carl Gedney and Mark Miller, and recently went on holiday with them to the West Indies. Membership of this self-appointed office elite has not been without cost, and as a friend of Carl Gedney he has received the enmity of Sales Director Neil Hancock, finding his work routinely blocked and obstructed. He also embarked on a very public affair with an older woman in Accounts (she was about ten years older, a single mother, not unattractive) and this folded in a messy way, damaging his credibility.

This morning he gave me a submission under the company Suggestions Scheme (another of the many internal staff initiatives that have been allocated to me because no-one else can be bothered with them).

In his car, driving to one of the satellite sites, a CD repeated again and again of the song I Believe My Heart.

This song has reached number two in the charts, and was written by Andrew Lloyd-Webber for his new musical The Woman In White. I didn’t much care for the song when I first heard it – it seemed composed of cheap clichés and featured a light-weight singer from a boyband (Duncan James) and an unknown classical soloist (Keedie Babb, from Torquay).

But the song is actually much more subtle than it first appears, and has a powerful undercurrent of emotion. The accompanying video is misty and byronic (like the dazzling 1988 film Rowing With The The Wind) and features the two singers strolling through a grotto, wandering through a maze, clasping hands under a cedar tree on a wide lawn as petals fall from the sky. Duncan James has a rolling and distinctive walk, as if he is walking in slow motion in wading boots (looks better than it sounds). As for Keedie Babb, I have come to love her charming RADA-enunciation.