Time wasting

November 2002

The next day I got an email saying:

‘Sunday is such a boring day, always the same, dim sum with mother, then watch tv. I wish you could be here with me, then I would be happy. Now that I have you, it seems like being apart is just time wasting. I miss you so much already’

And each night when we spoke the question about my return date come up again and she would ask ‘any news yet honey?’

I talked to her about a problem contract that I had to deal with back in the UK. I said that our business was losing money and that I was under a lot of pressure to help sort things out. And in some ways this story was true, our business could not meet its targets without the most creative accounting since books began.

But she had expectations, she thought I was moving to Hong Kong to take up a position there. She thought we had a future. She didn’t know that my job and life were firmly based in the UK. She didn’t know anything about me. She didn’t know that it was me that was wasting her time.

And all the time I continued to feed those expectations with talk of my return.

She was patient, always very patient, saying ‘don’t push your boss, work is very important for a man’.

And as I read these emails and listened to her kind words, I began to realise that I wanted to see her too. Surely I could make it happen.