Whey-Faced
These are my sticky notes from Sea State by Tabitha Lasley.
On Striking Oil:
Oil turned the Norwegians shiftless. They took three-day weekends, and ran up personal debt. They scuttled out of the office at four and shipped in Swedes to do their bar work. There was even a new verb, to 'Nav,' or to extract benefits from the state. Their government had bought them the latitude to be lazy. The Norwegian homily always ended with the same words: 'They started that oil fund in the nineties, and they're only just dipping into it now. Consider ourown North Sea story, a sorry tale of Thatcherite profligacy. We didn't save our windfall. We earned it and burned it. On what, no one seems sure. Fifty years since the first well was drilled, and we have nothing to show for our oil. And they say Socialists don't know how to manage money.
On quitting:
When I gave my notice in at work, my editor told me she'd miss me, then had a long conversation with another editor, over the top of my head, about the unlikelihood of attracting a decent replacement, given my simean day rate. Up until that point, I'd thought walking out of a job might be one of those decisions I'd come to regret. After that day, I stopped worrying.
On starting over:
I went to Morrison's on King Street for a knife and chopping board, and had a sudden sense of what I must look like to the other customers. A whey-faced woman in her thirties, spending Saturday night alone, buying kitchen utensils cheap enough to shame a student. A battered wife. An asylum seeker. Witness to some violent crime, relocated by the govermnent, her new address designated by alghorithm.
On divorce:
Married men never leave their wives. And yet, I always knew he would. I had a sense that if I led by example, if I left my job and the city where I lived, if I showed him how easy it was to walk away from things, he would follow. I was shocked and unsurprised at the same time.