Idiopathy

surpass, and at their shiny core was that day in the office, the beginning of Daniel’s working life, and his only glimpse of his father as a man in his own right.
    This was ’85 – the boom years. Already a little too old by then to be at the bleeding edge of financial gain (Daniel’s father was a strong and loyal worker, but lacked the killer instinct and moral flexibility required to shift what his colleagues referred to as ‘major units’ in the city), Daniel’s father occupied a contented middle-management position in a small sales firm specialising in property deals. It was the beginning of what Daniel would later come to think of as MacGuffin jobs, or jobs in which the supposed thrust of the company or the realm in which they traded had little impact on the work of whole teams of employees who worked at deeper, more hypothetical levels. It was the detachment of work from product, of production from physical activity, and Daniel’s father was the perfect example in that, when asked, he described himself as working in property, and indeed had a job title with the word property in it, but in fact had no recourse whatsoever to go near any property or even any deals relating to property. Daniel’s father worked in an analytical department charged with the task of crunching whatever numbers had been deemed important by the upper echelons. He studied trends, was the upshot, and designed graphs that helped other people understand those trends. As Daniel’s father regularly complained, most people didn’t do numbers, so if you could get the numbers into a picture you were winning. Daniel’s mother described the job as ‘boring’, the implication being that a boring job was perfect for a boring man, and although Daniel’s father clearly saw it differently, he never said as much, choosing instead to shrug his shoulders in an each-to-their-own sort of way and imply, as he would later express it to Daniel when they’d waited over an hour to see a consultant, that boredom was in the brain of the beholder.
    Within a few days of spending the morning at work with his father, Daniel had completely forgotten the subject of that morning’s meeting. What he remembered were the details – the objects that had made the experience real, and the way the whole place felt so much more liberated than he had been led to believe. Up to this point, all he’d seen of his father’s working life was the dapper, buttoned-down man who left promptly each morning carrying a smart black briefcase. It turned out, however, that Daniel’s father dressed for the journey, not for the destination, and the moment he stepped into the wide, open-spaced third-floor office with its high, thick windows and carpeted, double-glazed hush that only served to further offset the beeps and trills of the machines, he stripped off his jacket, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves and made a cup of tea. The briefcase went under his desk, which was infinitely more untidy than Daniel had expected, and was not seen again until Daniel’s father had re-dressed for the drive home. There were personalised mugs and name plates on the desks, and huge, boxy computers with green text on black screens that seemed, at the time, to be a new world of technological advancement, spitting chains of numbers onto reams of punched paper that went on for yards. There was stationery – not just pens and pencils but bottles of Tipp-Ex and Sellotape in special dispensers and electric pencil sharpeners and fat black clips holding stacks of pale green printouts. People had photographs in little stands on their desks. Every desk was an island, unlike at school where you just sat anywhere because everywhere was the same. It was a first-name place. Everyone talked idly not just about work but about anything, about football and the traffic and tax. Daniel’s father was a different man. He was relaxed and respected. People came to him with sheaves of paper and he scribbled on them with a fat blue pen and said things like ‘well done’ or ‘nice job’. In the meeting, there was a flip chart and more pens and a series of graphs that everyone agreed were ‘good but not great’ and which Daniel’s father later confided, while driving home, had been ‘pretty awful’ but apparently everyone was keen to keep a good spin on things. Daniel’s earache faded. They gave him things to do – papers to carry. His father called him his personal assistant and introduced him to