Living The Dream

I've often thought of those people, mostly faceless, whom I have a tendency to admire for really odd reasons; people who can sing well without even trying, people who live or work in exciting places, people who produce really nice work, be this showcased through a blog or self-publishing, and more. Then I looked back and realised that, at some point in my life, I was living a dream, yet I did not realise it. I used to live in a flat right behind the London Eye, that tall, semi-circular building known as The White House (very imaginatively named, I must tell you). While my own windows faced the rather little thrilling Waterloo roundabout (or the IMAX cinema, if you're feeling a little more upbeat), the roof terrace overlooked the Thames and, with it, Big Ben, the London Eye itself and, a little more to the right, The National Theatre.

At that time, I was consumed by work. I am not saying this in the sense of 'rushing up the career ladder as quickly as I could'; no, I really do mean consumed in its worst sense. I mean consumed as burnt out by a working treadmill that saw me running and running, even at weekends, never stopping to notice anything. Only once did I go to the roof terrace and sat down, taking in the sounds and the beautiful view. Only once did I actually notice Big Ben chiming. I may have taken a couple of pictures of it, but I cannot be sure. 

It's exactly ten years later, and I am, once again, in this marvellous spot of London, watching the full trees swing in the wind, the tourists stopping by to take pics, the river curling up in thousands of creases. A lot has happened since the summer of 2001, and a lot has not happened, despite the plans (they really are for little schemers) and the striving (don't, ever). 

I've recently started reading the blog of an American artist, this one, who lives in Brooklyn. She often talks of what she does downtown and I always smile as she mentions places that I know so well and that are so dear to me. If truth be told, I swoon a little. Then today, back from the copy room, I caught a glipse of the Thames and, for a change, I stopped. It's a fabulous day in London, with a pale blue sky and clouds scattered across it. As I take it all in, after a period that has been traumatic to say the least, I realised that I am living the dream. For a change, it ain't just somebody else's dream, the dream of someone who may be reading this, swooning like I do over Summer Pierre's site, but my own dream too. This time, I want to stay in the dream, I want to record it all, I want to enjoy it all. This time I am the one actually living it. 

Miserable

Miserable as in miserable weather. One day is serenity, the next day is misery, misery, misery. Like this:


As Phil predicted six more weeks of winter temperatures today (and I being in England predict six more months), I steam-rolled through the very hot deadline for my professor and submitted his application a whole three-and-a-half hours before the deadline. Oh joy, oh genius of efficiency. I heard he has more coming up and will be in touch soon, which left me with a smile on my face, for a combination of reasons, chief amongst them his appreciation of the time I spent on this job and the prospect of more of the same. It will be less stressful too, as I think I have learnt his CV by heart over the past two days.

I went out for a quick coffee and a stick of bread in the afternoon, not a time I am usually setting off, as habit has it that I am out first thing in the morning and back at 2 pm or thereabouts. Today though I had to do it the other way round and was surprised by how incredibly quiet both Starbee and the supermarket were at 3 pm. Maybe I need to re-think my strategy. Maybe I should stay holed up in the morning and then go out in the afternoon. If anything I should be able to avoid the nursery situation at Starbee, particularly bad on Monday mornings between 10 am and midday. Now, if only I managed to write something of note in the morning instead of starting to get going at the magic hour...

All Systems Go

It has been one of those weeks. You start on Monday morning and five minutes later it is 8 pm on Friday evening. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, especially after such a draught in more ways than one, but I don't like it when time flies by so quickly that I don't know what day it is. I don't like it because this week I didn't manage to track anything at all of what I was thinking or doing not just on here but on the red Moleskine that only a handful of weeks back was teasing me, full of promises, opportunities, dreams and as-yet-un-thought ideas.

I flicked through it early and its latest pages are immaculate and very nearly still stuck together, as if I hadn't lived the days at all, but still functioned in expectation. I may have to up the ante next week and write deep into the night if need be, because I do not like this gap, not one bit. Meanwhile, work at the poet's has been steaming ahead. I returned home with an armful (make that two, actually) of poems to transcribe, a file to finish and a database to create. I am not quite done yet and there is the distinct possibility that part of Saturday will be dedicated to this, even though good, cold weather beckons from the Met office's page and a steaming hot Starbee with Rich, which I rarely have the opportunity to share, seems like an attractive enough proposition.

It's always a time of assessment and looking back January, isn't it, but the tax return has nothing to do with it (well, not in my case. I suppose that a payroll/accounting husband does come in handy once a year). It is a time of assessment because the exhilaration of a new year (and new diary) has long worn off and because life isn't half as dull and boring once we are comfortable into our everyday again. I always return to the mundane in January with a sense of sinking dread; two weeks into it and I think that, all in all, life ain't that bad; four weeks into it and I've forgotten to think about it.

This week I've been promoted to the role of co-editor of the selection of poems I've been working on. I was flabbergasted when my guy told me; in fact, I agonised over having given him the completely wrong impression for quite some time. I should have leapt out of my chair, hugged and kissed him, while I just stayed there and nodded in silence, looking less than impressed, I am sure. I rectified it all via email today, when I wrote that 'I shall be delighted to co-edit this book with you and thank you for this exciting opportunity'. It read a bit like a press release, not my style at all, but sometimes, when so many things whirr away in your head and you are working on ten different projects, including cutting out your own inner critic, only a press release will do.

I Found Heaven

I am working in Heaven.

The Challenge For #best09

When some time ago I read that Gwen was starting a Best of 2009 string of prompts for December, I grinned and clapped, thinking how very fabulous, I am gonna do them all. Then the prompts came and the problems started.

There was no Best of 2009 for me; there was just one heck of a supermassive black hole filled with disastrous memories, with internal struggles and ferocious recriminations, with tears and rejections, with wading through black treacle up to my waist. 'There ain't no BEST OF!' the disenchanted me boomed from deep inside, there have just been non-developments, call that best of anything if you can! Rararah-dirahrarah! Self-pity? Anger? Stalling? Sadness? Shock? Yes, all of these and then some, tenfold.

Yet, late last night I noted that today's prompt was going to be CHALLENGE and some flicker of recognition lit itself somewhere within eyeshot, in that uncanny way that attracts us like the sales at Harrods and repulses us like the stench of vomit. You see, over time I've grown to hate the word challenge. It happened because of my cubicle nation years of leveraging integrated solutions of key enablers that were to be thought of as out of the box whilst the objections were to be raised off-line in a pre-meeting. In those days, everything was called a challenge (except understanding corpo-lingo which, really, was ironic).

There were challenging timescales, challenging budgets, challenging clients, challenging bosses, challenging timezone differences, challenging statements, challenging validities, challenging coffee machines, challenging tokens and challenging parking restrictions. Everything we had to do was labelled a challenge, even when it was self-imposed, such as queuing for the Starbee while balancing a laptop. That's not a challenge, it's over-inflated self-importance. The result yielded a workforce de-sensitised to challenges proper; refer to everything in your life as a challenge and I can assure you that you won't be able to recognise one when it meets you with an axe.

Not only will you be unlikely to recognise it, you will also find yourself incapable to navigate the no man's land without a precious compass you never knew you needed. When I woke up in 2009, free as the proverbial bird, finishing my PhD at last, ready to take flight in any direction I wanted, I soon enough realised that I must have looked (and felt), like hummingbirds immortalised by wildlife photographers: flapping their wings fast and yet forever poised by the same flower. Where do you go when you discover that the crossroad you wanted to reach has no directions? How do you get to there when you don't know where there is or what it looks like?

This was my Best Challenge of 2009, and, in fact, the best challenge I've ever faced. It has left me a little shaken, a lot more weary and worse for wear but has empowered me in ways that I never expected. I went from over-paid corporate git to skint writer in a flash and a hundred doors have now flung themselves open. I've been working on my new pro site for a while, a site that will be complemented by a YouTube channel. I am taking steps to improve my visibility to the world and to blossom into the person I had already become through years of study, research, travel, education and damn hard work. Now I feel on the cusp of something great, less fearful and more excited than I've ever been. But do you know something odd and even a little annoying? I myself was holding the keys to the now open doors, all the time. There were right here, right in my pocket. I guess I never reached deep enough.

The Starbucks Guy

I do not recall when I first noticed him, except I do remember why. He was sitting opposite me, hunched on a book and a notepad, drinking an espresso and toying with a tall latte to-go. What struck me, of course, was neither the espresso, nor the latte, but the intent look with which he was reading and taking notes. In fact, was he taking notes? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps he was getting inspiration from that book or perhaps he was doing what I do, writing quotations so that he could get back to them later. Maybe he was reading the book but writing about something else entirely. Perhaps it was just a to-do list or, worse, a supermarket one and I am just romanticising it all.



But then I resolved it couldn’t be just a list because this guy is coming to Starbee almost daily to write lists while reading a different book each time. I know it’s none of my business but you must understand that when I see someone who gives me an inkling that he could be even vaguely just like me, my antennas start twitching. Who is he? What does he do? What does he like to read? What has he got to write all the time? I am interested. No, I am not interested, I am dying to know.

Notably, I caught his eye too. It could be all down to my staring, of course. As surreptitious as I may think my gaze to be, in truth it poses itself on him and tends to stay there and then moves from book to notepad to espresso to him back to book back to him and so on and so forth. It is thus that our eyes have met on more than a couple of occasions. There I am, thinking that he may be a stifled creative and there he is, probably wondering why the fuck is that woman staring and why is she in here every day, hasn’t she got a job?

Last week I resolved to talk to him. In fact, I even asked for advice from Rick who, as any other straight male out there, just isn’t very good at advice. ‘Talk to him’ was the suggestion, as he obviously doesn’t understand the ins-and-outs of male/female dynamics. I have often stricken passing conversations with women at Starbucks.

Only last week I gushed over somebody’s ‘fab teal coat’ which I squealed in her direction and sure enough I was informed that it was a great buy, and three years old to boot and a pure cashmere one at that and doesn’t it still look great? Doesn’t it just, it was lovely. But now imagine that there is this man sitting next to me, someone I see often for he comes to Starbee for his lunch, often accompanied by an older colleague. Yes, imagine this guy sitting next to me, reading the news on his phone like he was doing today and me edging over to quip: ‘I love your pinstriped suit’. Pwhoooar. Are you smiling at this point? Maybe even laughing? Well, MY POINT EXACTLY. You just don’t strike a convo with members of the opposite sex if you’re a woman. Period.

What am I supposed to do with my guy? Sidle over and whisper: ‘I was just wondering what you’ve been writing for the past four months?’. Now that’s a possibility, even though I concede that I may scare him off and he may never return to Starbee at lunchtime which would then suit everyone involved. But I just don’t think this would be the case because something of note happened last week, when I left Starbee and him in it, went to Waterstone’s for a mindless browse and crossed paths with him as I was leaving. At that point he smiled at me, in that I-am-not-sure-whether-you-noticed-but-I-also-always-see-you-in-Starbucks-and-I-am-not-sure-whether-I-should-have-smiled-at-all-because-I-don’t-really-know-you way.

I left Waterstone’s grinning to myself. This guy also wants to talk to me. So it was that on Monday I plonked myself there early in the morning to work. By the time he arrived, some bastards were sat in the table next to mine and he couldn’t sit anywhere. Waving at him with a grin and pointing at the free chair at my table seemed a little forward considering that we don’t even know each other’s names. Heck, I’ve never even heard his voice. So he left with his to-go and that was that. Yesterday I skipped and today he skipped. And that’s that about The Starbucks Guy for now.

I am still kicking myself over that one occasion weeks ago when we were sitting next to each other and he was reading and writing... but I was so immersed in the crap I was editing that by the time I realised it was him, he was packing his stuff and going. Well, whatever it takes, I am gonna have to do as Rick says and just talk to him. Watch this space.

On Friday

I think that, no matter your work status, no matter the relationship you may have with the office/the school/the shop/your own home, there exists a built-in programme intrinsic to most humans not unlike a sacred fire that goes off like a firework at some point on Friday afternoon. I am off the rat race as I knew it, and yet I am not immune to an explosive desire to fist-pump the air come 3 pm on Fridays, even if my 3 pm on Fridays are no different than the 3 pm on Mondays or on Wednesdays or on any other day.

The daily treat.

This is a curious development for me. When I used to leave the office at 3 pm on Fridays on the way to Euston station or Heathrow, I was too tired for words, too tired even to be happy that another week was in the sack. The weekend itself was a blur of narkiness and recriminations, mostly aimed inward. You just haven't got a clue as to what the dreaded grind can do to you until you are hung out to dry, no matter the weather. No wonder so many colleagues got ill and were off for ages, even in their early twenties. Nothing they can teach you anywhere can prepare you for a working environment that couldn't be further from your wildest nightmares.

The other day news reached me that one of the big dogs at my ex firm has been made redundant. I re-read the email wide-eyed; partners don't get made redundant, especially not when they have spent every day of their working lives ass-kissing the partners two steps above them in the hierarchy, do they? How could this guy have been made redundant when he embodied so well all that was prescriptive about his role? He didn't really speak to people: he always seemed to be reading off a well-rehearsed script, always referring colleagues to policy 1234 or whatever. He was a living Arnold J. Rimmer, quoting Space Core Directive 34124 (34124: No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero gravity) at any given opportunity, except John wasn't funny. In fact, he didn't even seem self-aware.

Gosh, I cannot imagine what life must be like for him right now, getting the boot just before Christmas. I am shuddering. Bloody hell, by the time he gets his head out of his bottom he may even realise that blackberries are also eaten and not just used in the real world. How will he cope without the company-provided wheelie bag for the laptop, without the bodyguard-like headset, without the revolving flashing sign above his head advertising to all and sundry that he was a corporate git whose days were spent blue-sky thinking and leveraging the key enablers that would talk-track the up-sell of the value-tracked restructuring? It doesn't bear thinking about really.

As I was pondering on his sad state of affairs, I resolved never to be an employee again. Yes, yes, I know that I have been talking about work an awful lot on here and about the necessity to have a job, at least for some of us. Yet, I think that I was misplacing my efforts, misconstructing my needs, misunderstanding my mission and an awful lot of other mis-. And it's all crystal clear now: I shall never be an employee again.

Ticking Off

I have a love-hate relationship with lists. Part of me thinks that lists look so pretty, especially if you write them down in a spanking new notebook with a spanking new pink pen. Equally, I think that they can soon become monuments to your own ineptitude and inability to stick to a set of tasks. All in all, I think it is vastly better to get on with your stuff, rather than listing it all out (a bit like that plan thing you know...).

As per usual, there isn’t very much on my list, if not a few, very vague entries which read a bit like new year’s resolutions. Talking of which, only the other day I was reviewing my resolutions for the year 2006. At that point I wrote ‘to swear less’. Whatever possessed me to write down such a thing, I really do not know. Quite frankly, swearwords are to me what dreadlocks are to Bob Marley; a fucking-free life is too grim even to contemplate. I shan’t write that one down again.

So yeah, I was saying that there is nothing on the list, or pretty much nothing, but I should also add that today I ticked something off it, even though it wasn’t written down to begin with (are you following? This is sounding like an absurdist piece of experimental writing. If you don’t get Beckett, stop reading right now). This something is book number two, which I finished late in the afternoon and whose demise to the land of the fully edited I toasted with a bastardised Irish coffee which was really a latte with Bailey’s and Tia Maria. But that’s fine anyway.

Now I am sitting in the bedroom with my mouth watering at the smell wafting from the kitchen: parsnips, potato and carrot crispies crackling away under the grill. It’s time to be over and out.

In The Middle

In the middle of many things today. For a start, in the middle of Autumn, which has truly crash-landed in the back-yard, taken all the leaves off the pear tree (I swear, they were all there only yesterday) and tinged every corner in mellow light. Fabulous.



In the middle of lots of work as you can see. I must have about a ream of paper worth of editing and corrections and more reading. But this too is fabulous, beats any other work I've ever had to do ever.

In the middle of day-dreaming too, like I haven't done in ages.

In the middle of preparing a tasty soup. Parsnips, carrots, potatoes, leeks, red lentils, onions... super-thick and very easy, I really ought to give you the recipe.

In the middle of thinking about Christmas. I am going to do everything silver and white this year, with the tree in the hall instead of the lounge.

In the middle of the crochet blanket. I swear my hook was frigging smoking the other day...

In the middle of writing something completely new. A bit weird after the whole PhD thing, but exciting all the same.

Work With A Capital W

Only yesterday I was thinking that, should no other project fall out of the sky, I’d go back to being even more skint than I already am and, lo and behold, here is the answer to my worries and my little faith, if I can call it such: as I was sitting glassy-eyed and preoccupied, cradling the Starbee I managed to buy with the last £ 2 in my purse, a flurry of emails flash up on screen and a string of attachments reveal plays, pictures, short stories, essays and another book to work on. I am, again, saved.

This time though, we are not just talking about two books to edit; there are plays to formalise in style, essays with references to sort out, images to identify and another book that has been described as ‘the most miserable hellish experience ever’. But, surely, it can’t be worse than what I was doing two weeks ago, right? Apparently, yes, and I should perhaps consider myself flattered by the publisher’s belief that he will not feel so awful at the thought of tackling it again once I have intervened. This guy has some great expectations and I’d be damned if I disappoint him.

This unexpected, but prayed for, avalanche of work (paid work, dare I say it) has left me ever so slightly dazed, almost unable to figure out the path ahead. And let’s be clear on this one, I am racking up so many requests and things to be looked into that quite some plotting out will have to be involved. I resist the term plan because, although I am a planner by nature and birth (an anal Virgo), planning doesn’t go hand-in-hand with creative individuals. I am not over-stating when I tell you that 50,000 words of my PhD (that is, three quarters of it) were written off the cuff, not really knowing what I wanted to say, why or indeed how I was going to say it.

The outstanding thing is that three-quarters of this PhD were written in one-tenth of the time since the my registration so... that’s quite telling. By contrast, while working in ‘management’, whatever that is, we spent all of our time planning what we would do and doing very little of what was on the plan. Once I was asked to draft a plan on how to update the revised plan in order to get back in line with the original plan. Do you know how that one ended? With the client getting pissed off and scrapping the project, quelle surprise. That’s why I like to plan the very bare minimum and then I prefer to get on with it.

Much else lies ahead. The course I’ve been taking is spear-heading towards completion, many ideas have originated and two are already hatching as I type. I’ve met a great group of people that are not just friends but actual important resources and that I am sure will help me in the process of formalisation of those ideas I speak of. It all takes time and now I need to re-group, mentally but especially emotionally, and figure out what ground-work is necessary. But I’ll tell you what I really need to come to terms with: being finally able to work by myself and for myself. I’ve wanted this for a very long time and now that it is happening, and now that the work I am doing is intellectually rewarding and is what I always wanted to do, I am so fucking drained I almost do not feel like celebrating. But that has got to change because from now on I am going to be happy.

Supermassive Black Hole

Earlier today I wrote to a friend of mine. Now that all PhD-related technicalities are well and truly over, it's like I have got nothing else to think or talk about. Except, perhaps, the dire job situation. It was easy to scrape by and shut the world out as editing was taking up all of my energies, but now that there is nothing pressing left, it seems only natural that I should be on job search 100% of the time, as opposed to 50% as it was up until recently.

This, however, does not make me feel any better about the task, neither does it indicate in any discernible way that I will be 50% more likely to get a job than, say, winning the lottery, or finding the Holy Grail tomorrow morning on the way to Starbucks. And so I sat down at my desk and let my fingers run freely on the keyboard.

The first thing I wrote to him was: 'I don't suppose you know of a place or way whereby I could *find* £ 600?'. What sort of question is that, I wonder now? Yet, it seemed the only relevant thing to ask as I stared out of the window through the blind, munching on a little cheese and Marmite toastie. And of course, that number staring back, £ 600, fascinated me and worried me in equal measure. Blimey, when I used to work, I paid more than that in tax alone.

Even though I was recently trickling through the last of the writing up process, I could already apply to many relevant academic positions. I say many, but we are really only talking four. Still, it sounds like many to me, as they were as far as Brum and as varied as film studies and English. But I did not hear a thing from those.

Neither did I hear a thing from the countless other applications, CVs and letters that I sent since the beginning of the year, some on a spec basis, many replying to adverts. You'd think I didn't post stuff through a red postbox, but through a shredder, as these days nobody acknowledges anything anymore. Maybe it would be ok if I were a high-school drop-out without plans, goals, qualifications, intelligence or good-looks. Maybe it wouldn't sting this much. But considering that my parents spent in excess of £ 20,000 in further education alone, that I have almost eight years worth of business experience, that I am fluent in three languages and have two degrees and an international work/educational background... well... bemusement, anger and pride are stirring within me every time I click 'send' or kiss another letter good luck.

I have to pay council tax, water and house insurance and have no funds to do it with. Like none whatsoever. It is beyond farcical, beyond depressing, beyond grim. You know those people who say that money cannot buy happiness? Sure, it doesn't buy sincerity, immortality or love either, but what it does buy, water and food, shelter and dignity, that, my friends, is good enough for me.

Experience Matters

My friends and I often talk about jobs, mostly because we currently do not work, either by a trick of fate or by personal choice. One friend in particular gets me to think about the job market by casting a gloomy light on it, not because she is negative, but because her experience, combined with my experience and the experience of many others who only graduated a few years back, are opposites and yet yield the same peculiar result.

When we graduated and started to send out application forms, CVs and spec letters, our efforts often plummeted into the Well of Unanswered Queries, whereby we never really knew whether any of the above ever reached its destination. Many job adverts these days state that 'if you do not hear from us by x date, we wish to thank you for your interest and wish you well in your job search'. Not even the old classic 'thanks, but no thanks' applies any more at present (and by present I do not mean right now, but over the past five to ten years). It is not normal anymore to be polite, not even in that detached HR-way that relegated a printed line to a compliments slip, so consider yourself lucky if you are applying by email, for at least you will get an automatically-generated receipt that will confirm that your efforts have at least reached their destination. It does not mean they will be read but they did go from a to b. Expect no more beyond that.

And so it goes that very many graduates take a very long time to land a first job (if at all, and I am not overstating this claim), so much so that they eventually hit the If Only weeping wall. If only I had done nuclear physics instead of geography. If only I had done history of art instead of history. If only I had done dentistry instead of cardiology. If only I were an accountant instead of a teacher. If only day were night. If only the left were in power. If only the right were in power. If only nobody were. And so on. While all these offer interchangeable sub-options according to mood (if only I were a hippie instead of a yuppie at heart, I would not need to work OR if only dad were a count, I would not want to work), one of them eventually befalls every single graduate in the world: if only I had some experience.

We beat ourselves up because job descriptions (that are not advertising graduate schemes), are all about experience. Six months. Two years. Five years. Three days. One hour. To a fresh graduate, anything feels better than no experience to speak of, even though accruing relevant (by which I mean, not in the students' union pub) work experience while studying full-time is impossible. We continue to navigate the job market with this lack of experience hovering above us like a whiff of plague, embedded on our foreheads like a scarlet letter. Yes, I got excellent grades, we say dismissively, but I bet that if only I had some experience, I would get that job, *insert fit of rage and/or tears here*.

Fast-forward by ten years or even twenty, like my friend I spoke of in opening, and you are flying very high on the wings of certitude. You're certain that your efforts are going to pay off. You're certain that you can go for a higher-paid, bigger, better, closer job. You're certain that you're the best manager the world has ever seen. You're certain that Excel will not screw you around any longer... except you're old. Not old for real, else you would be retired somewhere and would not be seeking a new occupation, but just old enough to be discarded in favour of someone else. You're not mathematically old, you're just... old hat.

Why giving a job to you, with twenty years' experience, when we could give it to an intern that will cost one forth instead, no matter how little she knows? But wait a minute, doesn't this potential intern need some experience, the one we spoke of above? In fact, isn't she kicking herself right this minute for having got a degree and now finding herself in the Real World with a piece of paper not even good enough for polishing windows but no work experience to speak of? Hey, so which is which? Is experience good or bad?

I don't have the answer my friends. All I know is that the more I speak to people and the more the job market, in any industry, acquires the aura of a guarded secret held by a sect that lives in some rocky mountains in some country I couldn't pick out of a map if my life depended on that pin. I do not know how people change jobs, let alone careers, and I consider myself, all things considered, super-lucky, for at least I know what I am seeking, a position as lecturer as opposed to anything else. Because quite frankly, job descriptions such as 'creative consultant' or 'director of first impressions' or 'engineering account administrator' or 'strategic client financial control analyst supervisor' mean jack shit, with or without experience.

Smelling The Roses

One day last summer, as I was trailing a very cute bookshop in Bramhall, a man approached me, saying that he thought he recognised me from the office where he used to work, wasn’t I the girl in the hot pink coat? I was and so he continued to tell me that he had been made redundant a few weeks before, after twenty-four years with the company.

All that struck me at the time was the queer combination of redundancy and twenty-four years. I just didn’t think that long-standing employees (and this one was a high-flying senior manager) would get axed when the going gets a little tough. The best I could manage was what I am sure looked like a mildly perplexed look and a ‘wow’ uttered as my eyebrows eventually rose all the way up to my hairline.

Redundancy announcements are one of those cases whereby you don’t quite know how to react, a bit like the sudden-death news of someone you vaguely knew. What do you do, do you look heart-broken, mock-concerned for those who are left behind or just say ‘sorry, didn’t know him’ and move to the next group of people? Redundancy is very much like that, with the person at the receiving end left hovering above the working colleagues as the infected outsider we don’t know whether to pity or congratulate.

And so I grasped for that age-old cliché, that horrible and pointless, ‘what will you do now?’, as if a job were the be-all and end-all of a person’s ability to actually live. ‘I got a good pay off, so I am taking six or maybe nine months off to stop and smell the roses’. We parted soon after and, believe you me, I have often thought of that man since then and I have kicked myself on many occasions, wondering why on earth I didn’t give him my card so that we could hook up if we needed to. Blimey, with twenty-four years experience he probably has a zillion contacts.



Instead I left the bookshop looking at my shoes and kicking the air, wondering why we don’t smell the roses a little more often. Shouldn’t we smell the roses also when we work, also in the various winters of our lives, when we feel like there is nothing worth stopping for? I spent the last few weeks glued to my PhD, my mind constantly reeling with ideas about Coleridge, Shelley, Frankenstein, Wordsworth in an irrational cauldron stirred up by the vampire, and so I forgot that I crossed a momentous day, May 30. On this day last year, I left what was to turn out as my last work assignment at a client, to then spend the summer working from home, producing minor documents of very minute importance until I left for good. Thinking back on it, I am scoffing at having felt sad on that day as there really was nothing to feel sad about.

When I turned the page in my pin-up calendar a couple of weeks ago, I realised that, in a way, I have not been in a work-situation for one year. I know that my friends say that’s not true, but you know what I mean, doing a PhD is not the same as going to an office or a shop every day of the week always at the same time. Thank God it ain’t. And do you know something perplexing? I’ve never been this relieved. Isn’t that weird that lack of funds could possibly go together with feeling relieved? Isn’t that the other way round? Well, that’s the point exactly. I finally had the opportunity to stop and smell the proverbial roses and it was only without the jet-setting job that I did so. I stopped being tired, run-down and narky all the time, I stopped living so that I could work.

And more interestingly than all of this pseudo-philosophising are numbers which, as is often the case, speak for themselves. In eight months, from Sept last year to May this year, I wrote over two-thirds of my PhD, way over 50,000 words. So maybe my next project should be a postgraduate guide ‘A Part-Time PhD Is Really Only Ten Months Long’. Of course this happened because I stopped and smelt. Not that my roses above smell of anything other than grass and mud but... you should smell that too sometimes...

If Only!

I am three days into my jury duty and all is well. All is well because I have mainly sat around reading and writing (and who would have thought I would have ended up writing so much about Frankenstein?) and because I have been on a case and there may be more to come tomorrow.

I am not too shocked by the daily get up-get ready-and-go routine, as I have realised that, after all, that’s what I normally do, even if just to get myself out of the house and to Starbucks to work. Yet, I know that deep inside I already cannot wait for it to be over. I want to catch up with Louise and Merv and with Britt and baby and with Dee and Mac and being unable to glance at the clock wondering whether Marks may still have some of the baguettes that Rick likes and no big deal if they don’t, I’ll go tomorrow, isn’t that great.

I knew that I would have craved unconditional freedom five minutes after it was taken from me which is really making me think about the whole job situation. As I won’t be able not to work for ever (sob), I hope that my eventual university job will be as exciting as the PhD has been because, right now, I’d be quite happy to play Socrates forever, sitting under a fig tree, reading books and philosophising about life and death. But then, who wouldn’t like that?

Somewhat New Tidings

Soon I will be busy with jury duty. I have thought about this for a while, not because it makes me feel excited or self-important, but because I will need to be in a work-like environment at a set time for a set number of days. No big deal in the real world but in my world office work does not exist any longer. In fact, it has not existed since June last year and for one that was full-on employed since the very early post-uni day, you will agree that it was a bit of a sudden shift of perspective.

That's it, perspective; that's exactly what I gained in the past year or so, regardless of the economic constraints that this change of career (underway, I hope) have meant, a welcomed perspective that has morphed me from corporate number to free agent. I was discussing this with a friend of mine yesterday and we brought up 'certain people' who state to be craving 'somewhere to go' in the morning. I have put the two objects there between inverted commas as if these 'certain people' were dirty people in some ways, but that is precisely the way my friend and I see it. We have both embraced our own home-bound freelancing with such élan and gusto, that whoever cannot see the advantages of this lifestyle is, oh my, practically an idiot in our eyes.

Deep down, I do not really feel that judgmental. If you like to get in the car in the morning to get someplace where you can be bossed around by someone (or where you can boss around someone), and enjoy it, good for you, it doesn't affect me. But having spent such a long time in the company of over-tired, over-narky colleagues, I suspect that at least some of those 'certain people' proclaim to be craving a routine out of a built-in social gene that displays a propensity for apparent over-working. I remember seeing lots and lots of people wasting time on Facebook and Instant Messenger all day long only to get their asses into gear at 4 pm, ending up staying until way past my bedtime. That's masochistic if you ask me. I like to leave the office when I can still manage a little more than just a face-down collapse into bed still wearing my coat and shoes.

At some point I did not even want to concede that there are people out there whose only interest is their work. I am not against this in principle but when faced with that stone-cold hard reality, I felt a little stung, as if my faith in the creative capability of the human brain were somehow compromised. Take my ex colleague Claudia, about my age, working at all hours, early morning (and I mean 4 am, not 8 am), late evenings (and I mean 11 pm, not 7 pm), weekends and holidays. One day she came up to my desk asking for advice regarding 'a nice place where to take my parents for lunch on Sunday and somewhere with something to do'. I reeled out a few suggestions, country pubs, little restaurants, small cafés, you know the drill. Satisfied with a few names, she pressed on regarding the 'something to do' part.

I didn't know Claudia very well, although I had been to her house and was more than a little flabbergasted by the lack of décor. Not that I expected a World of Interiors spread from entrance hall onwards, but the scarcity of decorative items of any sort and the distinctive lack of books gave me reasons to pause and silently wonder whether, deep down, she really was an illiterate man wearing a skirt. So I faltered and eventually suggested that Tatton Park would perhaps make a nice Sunday excursion. With a mansion, large tended gardens, many acres where to go walking, animals of all sorts to admire, a couple of shops, a place where to have a cuppa and even an antiques fair coming up on that very weekend, it seemed to me like she would have been able to find some activity of interest within the beautiful grounds. As she left my desk, faint bells were ringing at the back of my mind; I should have really figured out that someone who had lived in the area for years and had never bothered going to Tatton Park may not be a Tatton Park Person after all. Or an Any Park Person really.

We caught up at Starbucks on Monday morning and even before I could ask her a thing, she told me how boring her weekend was and how crap, yes crap I am telling you, the whole Tatton Park thing was. You see Claudia is one of those people who crave to be in an office every day and who need to have someplace to go after 8 am. Her interests outside work amounted to pretty much nothing; she was not interested in gardens or walking, not interested in animals or children, in cooking, reading, writing, painting, drawing, plumbing, cars, postage stamps, art galleries or museums. Once she asked me what on earth I was going to do in New York for a full two weeks. With hindsight, I would say it made sense her spending every God-given hour under the sun and the moon at the office, for she did not exist outside of it.

The Apprentice Can't Be Terminated

A couple of days ago, while flicking through Ravelry’s message boards, I came across a discussion thread about The Apprentice. I don’t have a TV, so I don’t watch The Apprentice. It would be fair to add that, even if I did have a TV, I wouldn’t watch The Apprentice. Or Big Brother. Or Celebrity Big Brother or Dancing with The Stars or any other pseudo-reality show. In fact, I like to think that Big Brother and its ilk are shows only good for uneducated, pig-faced, dim-witted morons who write ‘should of said’ instead of ‘should have said’.

So I read the thread about The Apprentice with second-hand interest which I can muster very well early in the morning when I try to procrastinate two more minutes, just two more, please, clinging to crap, any crap, no matter what crap. The gist of the thread was that this year’s contestants are a bunch of obnoxious idiots only chosen for their egos and not their business capabilities. And there followed comments laced up with quotes from the night before, and so stomach-churning were they, that I’d rather not copy them on here.

Actually, the contestants on The Apprentice are by no means isolated incidents. An isolated incident is a bolt of lightening hitting a person. Neither are they freak occurrences that don’t happen in real life (that’s Pretty Woman or Maid in Manhattan). My real life was infested with such gits to the brim of a hat placed on the head of a ten-foot tall Hulk. Maybe even above that.

There were many managers that never ever said hi or bye; it was uncool to be polite, even at its most basic. There was the one that could not conduct a meeting without swearing every two words, his forehead always pulsating with rage, spraying everyone within spit-each. I’ve never seen anyone whose saliva could travel that far that fast before or since. I always expected him to explode into fucks even when he was laughing, even when he was staring at his computer, at his Facebook page, screen sprayed with a congealed subtle mist, brow as corrugated as the sea in high winds.



There was the other colleague who would always, every single time, cut through what you were saying, just to show her ability to (supposedly) foreshadow your own views. She thought of herself as a mind-reader while she really was no more than a permanently hormonal over-made-up fool who looked like a bulldog with fake lashes chewing on a past-its-sell-by-date wasp. Then there was the guy that would never ever crack a smile, not even a fake one, not even the grimace that people sometimes pull at themselves, when they have realised that they have closed the doc without saving it.

There was the pouting asshole that always used to say ‘shut up please, I’ve got something to say’ to introduce his brain farts (fart being the operative word here). There was the manager that got a call because his son had been taken to hospital and barked down the line that the nanny is with him, so what’s the big deal, I am in a meeting for Christ’s sake, I said only in emergencies, you hear!

The list goes on and on, all thinking themselves as exceptional individuals who consistently deliver on time and to spec, who never ever over-promise and under-deliver, who can paint the room with all of their blue-sky thinking without even needing a brush, future-retroactivating the socialocomotion of the mission critical whose synergistic actionable paradigm shift required their input.



Let me drill that into you: the bunch of morons on The Apprentice are not few and far between, caricatures of a business world that does not really exist. They are real, they are a representation of what happens in boardrooms everywhere and they are not going to go away. They are like Terminators, both as inherently stupid (My database does not encompass the dynamics of human pair bonding) and as consistently blinkered (He'll find her! That’s what he does! That’s all he does! You can’t stop him!). These gits will never stop and I’ve got proof.

A couple of years ago, three youngsters joined my then team on a summer placement. Up until then, I was pretty much unaware that students do that; I had recently been a student myself and if there was one thought never to have crossed my mind it was this: ‘I’ll go on a placement with some multi-million dollar consulting firm working eighteen-hour days seven days a week for five hundred quit and a branded pen for the entire duration of my holiday. Yay!’.

Turns out I am in the minority because I later learnt that there is an increasingly high demand for these summer placements, from undergraduates as relevant to the consulting arena as microbiologists or theologists.
On that morning, they gave a brief eye-watering presentation on who they were and why they were with us, some shining above others as little prissy over-achievers of the 'I learnt three languages and lived in seven countries before I could piss' sort.

People that use blackberries as opposed to eating them, people who switch on the sat-nav to go to the toilet and who use weekend as a verb, as in 'I weekend in the country'. I felt both sad and bitter and I cannot even tell whether I felt more sad for them or myself, knowing that, eventually, these will be the New Breed of Corporate Gits I may find on my path, no matter where I am or what I do. A handful seemed like Perfect Consulting Assholes material and I am sure they'll go very far carried by the unclippable wings of self-importance. Because that’s what they do and we can’t stop them.

Re-Wiring

When I moved to this house six years ago, I was pleased to hear that the previous owner had just completed a massive re-wiring exercise. Not that I know very much about houses, electricity or anything even remotely related to both of these, but even in my infinite ignorance, I figured out that re-wiring was a big undertaking, no matter how small the house. As of late, I found myself thinking about re-wiring, even though it came to mind for a completely different reason.

I know that there are people who have worked for thirty years straight and for whom eight years is little more than a speck of paint on a wall, but for me, eight years are in fact my whole working life. Before then it was the uni and before then it was school, all the way back until I was six. I suppose it’s therefore pretty accurate to say that, for the past fifteen years, I got up in the mornings and got ready for work.

Now that work as such does not exist outside of these few walls, I still get up in the morning and I feel a subconscious pull towards the rushing to the bathroom and the rushing to do my hair and my face and the rushing out of the door, even though I’ve got nowhere (indeed no reason), to rush anywhere. I’ve even started to entertain the very foolish idea of getting up at the crack of dawn so that I could be the first person through the coffee shop doors when it opens, sat in a corner with a steaming cuppa and a fresh newspaper.

But what for? What do I even feel this need to get up, get ready and go, when I always found the whole ritual so violent that I often ended up grinding my teeth through the blaring alarm clock? I need a good re-wiring, that’s what Paul was telling me only the other day, when I spoke of my great ability to fret about frittering time and about trying to find a structured purpose to each and every hour of the day, as if I were in the military.

Because re-wiring is a big job, I do not think that even these past three months have come near to even remotely showing me the way. In fact, it’s a bit of a miracle I’ve even realised I need re-wiring, let alone started it. To think that only a year ago I used to whizz past my favourite Starbucks at eight in the morning, wistfully sighing to myself and wishing for a life of leisure unencumbered by meetings and the tyranny of the clock! And now that I have it, it’s like I don’t know what to do with it!

Mac, who supervises my PhD, says that we are fixated with working many hours a day, all day, all day into the evening, even at weekend when, really, four steady hours a day, five days a week, are more than enough to allow us to do everything we need and want to do, research-wise. He thinks that I will, eventually, learn to let go of this MUST DO feeling and that I will be able to enjoy the days as they break down into pleasurable activities, as opposed to huge blocks of boredom, which is what characterised my working life until very recently. And so the journey begins... Tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of my life.

Walking On Air

Only a handful of weeks ago I talked about my career counsellor and his grand ideas of a retail or marketing or PR job for me. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to go with the flow, to follow his advice at least insofar as considering the options available to me. Of course I said at the time that none of the above would find itself on my path (or in my way), and this morning I concluded my sessions to a figurative round of applause, showing the guy my fresh business cards marketing my writing and translating venture and promising that I will stay in touch.

And so I felt delivered of a great weight, of this faking that I may have been interested in an office job that I knew, deep down, I already despised. I have often thought that my new beginnings never take place in the spring, when nature wakes up to live another year, but in autumn, when the same collects itself, draws balances and takes a figurative rest. Well, all hail to the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness; it seems to be working for me.

None For Recruitment

A friend of mine is looking for a job and is currently mingling with one of the world’s worst working races: The Recruitment Consultant. It’s a funny thing about The Recruitment Consultant (who, for brevity, I will now call in a flash of French flair Le Récro, or perhaps, l'idiot): they are as disliked as estate agents and lawyers and yet, nobody is vocal about this dislike. Why is it that there are jokes about estate agents and lawyers and none about recruitment consultants? What is it that shelters them from the irate brunt of all of those people they screw around for weeks via a multitude of means only to leave them hurt and dejected by the sidelines? Why aren’t we all up in arms about their general lack of professionalism?

Two things irritate me above all else every time I think of Le Récro: the first one is Love Bombing and the second is CVs.

When you’re new and turn up at your first meeting in a set of newly polished shoes and perfect briefcase, Le Récro won’t even let you sit down without gushing about details. It could be what you’re wearing or what you said over the phone prior to the meeting or what you sent via email with your old CV. Whatever it is, the Love Bombing begins immediately because, even though they do not love any candidate, not really, you are the equivalent of a walking stack of cash to any of them.

And so it begins, call upon call, job profile upon job profile, email upon email, you delude yourself that this person has your best interests at heart and that, in no time at all, you will be in a new job thanks to your supah dupah fantastic Récro. The reality is that you will be dropped like a sack of bricks as necessity commands and you will never hear from that adoring fan of yours ever again. This is exponentially more likely to take place if your CV was found by Le Récro while crawling the net, as opposed to you yourself approaching the agency directly. You'd be surprised (only if you never dealt with them of course), but it does work like this. You may be registered with twenty of these leeches at any given time and you will suddenly wonder one day, two months down your new working line, hey, what happened to him? Wasn't he supposed to call back on Friday...like... ten weeks ago?

The CV Problem is one that affects millions of individuals the world over. There is no standard in CV writing, put that in your head and live happily ever after. Ever leafed through the hundreds of CV writing books that litter your nearest bookshop? If you have, you will have noted that there are numerous permutations of what an acceptable CV looks like, all valid, all fine specimens of how to get a job. What these books, and Le Récro with them, do not tell you, is that they objectify the market through a subjective view of it. This means that each one of these people who recommend CV writing in a certain way, base their recommendation on a set of rules that are non-existent. Other than ‘check your grammar, check your spelling, don’t print on pink paper, don’t scent it’, we should all be aware that Le Récro is going to suggest what he thinks is right which is not at all the market standard. This is because there is no market standard, no CV that will make every single employer, or even the majority of employers out there, fist-pump the air in delight when they read it. There really isn't. It's a written document and like all written documents it is predominantly judged on an entirely subjective basis.

Today I heard from a friend whose Récro suggested to remove the ‘28 years of experience’ line from her CV, on the (ridiculously flimsy) basis that her age, or a hint of an age, should not be revealed in it. Except the diploma acquired in 1978 alone would be enough of a hint to anyone who isn’t an illiterate, mathematically challenged moron, that the candidate at hand isn’t twenty. My career counsellor, who used to be a recruitment consultant many years ago, agrees that the vast majority of them are just bums on seats and do not even have an inkling of what life-changing head hunting is all about. Usually, leafing through Reed’s pages is enough to single out job positions advertised by recruitment consultants, not because they start with the ubiquitous ‘My client...’ but because the adverts are riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical inaccuracies, with apostrophes scattered over the page like random soft sheep upon a grassy knoll and with the lack of them hanging over the writing like a bad smell. Don't believe me? So there, copied and pasted two minutes ago:

"A hugely challenging oportunity has arisen to work for one of the countrys leading financial services' providers. We are looking to recruit a focused and highly driven Operations Manager to manage an established contac centre during an exciting period of growths. Managing the contac centre operations your role will to be manage all levels of staff to ensure an effective delivery of the strtegeic objective. You will be ensurring the delivery of business' KPIs and be responsible for managing and developing the internal and external customer relationships. You will be commercially astute with a keen eye for figures and have full budget responsibility for your area."

I am told that there are good Récros out there but they are a bit like mythical figures, a bit like Santa, whom we see here there and everywhere all year round, even though we know perfectly well that those we meet are all impostors and that the real Santa is somewhere at the North Pole. I heard good things of the book How To Handle Your Recruitment Consultant even though I have no direct experience of it and no wish whatsoever to read it. All I would suggest is to handle them with a carrot and a sackful of sticks if you must, otherwise, not at all.

... Into Square Holes

Many years spent as a prisoner of corporate thinking and faking brought me to despise networking. Not just the act of networking, not just networking per se, but even the term, net-working, working the net. It always reminded me of disgusting spiders scuttling across their own nets, ready to eat stuck victims alive. As it turns out, I am not too far from reality, for networking in my own life always meant observing from the sidelines as weasels would make friends over supper only to plant knifes into their respective backs as the occasion called for.

Mind you, it was natural, expected, even normal if you will. I understood early on that that was the essence of networking; getting to meet people in order to use them and discard them like unsavoury chewed gums. And so I did not network, I limited myself to making friends. The people I could not stand never became friends, the ones that were scattered along my path like rare precious stones were quickly saved up and safely stored. This networking business however seems unavoidable and has returned to bite my vast bottom in more ways than one. My career advisor mentions it ceaselessly, I talk about it with a few trusted friends and I am worried that I too will have to turn myself into a hairy, fat spider with eight eyes who works the net.

Take this afternoon for example, when a perfectly acceptable talk at the Knutsford Literary Festival was again foiled by networking. I went to listen to Poppy Adams of The Behaviour of Moths fame. She said that once she finished the novel she started submitting it to agents but very quickly realised that there was no luck to be had. So she began working her network and asked all of her contacts whether any of them worked in publishing or knew an agent or publisher or knew someone who knew... etc... etc... You get the drill. Fast forward to the present day and Poppy has a very interesting book out for readers' consumption. What would have happened to her novel had she not worked the net? Would have agents continued to reject her? Paul, who once suggested me to generate some scandal around my life in order to get an agent, says yes, without a doubt.

I returned home to a rejection letter to my spec query. This agent calls my work a novel, except I explicitly describe it as a lifestyle narrative non-fiction offering which, for the uninitiated among yourselves, does not mean novel. I filed the letter away with the rest of them, pursing my lips and thinking, for a change. But do contacts that work in publishing grow on trees? I am gonna have to find out.