2004-06-22 - 9:41 a.m.

The benefits of freelance employment are legion. Flexible hours, the stimulation of changing working environments and types of work. The opportunity to meet a wide range of people. And primarily, the freedom to go and watch a film at 2.20 on a Monday afternoon.

I don't do it often enough. Possibly because I also don't work often enough. When the primary emotion you take away from a torrid weepie or a dazzlingly finessed comedy is neither sadness nor mirth but overarching guilt from having spent the afternoon lounging around a cinema in the first place when you should've been slaving over a hot .doc, you realise that this freelance lark comes bundled with a pesky, uninstallable work ethic, and you're just going to have to earn the right to slack, dammit.

Well, this morning I put in the hours -all right, the plural is debatable - and so by the p.m. I felt I'd earned that right. I hit the multiplex, bought my ticket for The Cooler and thunk the mandatory thought - who the hell apart from me goes to the cinema in the afternoon? During my pre-show wee, I wondered, moreover, whether this would be the day. The day when I acheived cinematic nirvana. I've heard rumours, friends have made claims, but it's never happened to me. Not once. Would this be the day? Would I be the only person in the cinema?

It began promisingly. The adverts were on as I wandered into the auditorium. I rounded the corner. No-one. Just the rolling and flashing and warping light from the projectionist's booth, sending a tunnel of colour out over the ranks of empty blue seats. And me. I took a seat. Too close. I took another. Perfect. Just me. Solitude. A cinematic oneness. Another advert rolled. Then another. I was becoming one with the space. Pure, alone.

And then three blokes wandered in. Balls! And then a woman. Dammit! Then the trailers started. Another man. Ah, gimme a break. And as the film itself began, a couple settled themselves at the front.

Bah! Who are you, you post-lunch escapists? You lonely dreamers? You odd mouth-breather with a Safeway bag which may or may not contain two scotch eggs and a cauliflower? It's not that I'm anti-social, though I am. In some ways the company is reassuring. Other lost souls, briefly visible on the horizon, paddling their rafts into the golden sun. Their presence here is comforting. I'm not the only one here who ought to be working. But. Just once...I'd like to be the only one. To see how that feels. For the whole damn thing to be just...for me.

But it's impossible. Whenever, wherever I go. Others always join me. I mean, if I went to a 3a.m. showing of the Director's Cut of Ted Post's The Baby at the Macchu Pichu Odeon, some fucker would stroll in during the trailers.

What? Oh, yeah, The Cooler was good. Alec Baldwin was king o' dat movie. But you probably knew that already. You were the lanky get with the nachos in row C, weren't you?

Profilage - Previosity - Nextitude