Two and a half books of this writing. I don’t know whether to call it “work” or not, as in “a body of work”.
Work, when used to describe the sort that we are supposed to go to every day, is an emotive, loaded word. A lunatic on a men’s social website has been questioning people about whether they work. An episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, The Poetry Society, features a group of beatnik poets who live on a canal barge, and in the basement under the pet shop in East Cheam. Sid James, usually the anti-establishment rebel, asks “Don’t they do any work?” in a slight disapproving tone, reflecting a collective societal view of 1950s post-war “rebuilding” Britain, that all (male) people of working age should be working. Whether it was in an office, a shop, or a manual worker in a grey or brown boiler suit style uniform, possibly pushing a trolley along the street, the visible evidence of work allowed for social approval, a status of belonging, of contributing, of being part of society, not completely remote from the hero status applied to those serving in the armed forces during wartime, and still fresh in the collective memory. The alternative, being out of work, meant worthlessness, loss of identity. Labour exchange shame. It is no different now in some people’s minds. Right now there is, at the next table, a loud common man name-dropping his way through the music business, who earlier was talking about people on furlough “taking the easy option”, before returning to boasting about who he’s worked with, how much his house is worth. He’d fit in well on Birds Of A Feather.
I watched Shaun Of The Dead last evening. Simon Pegg often wrote and played characters who did low end retail jobs, but seemed to be able to afford living in North London, having a social life, not having to have competitive tory style aspirations for advancement. It seems like a lost age now. Loud common man is now clapping his hands to punctuate sentences. Wanker.
I don’t know where I stand with work. The present lack of it is contributing to my precipitous depression and other health disappointments. I want to be back, but I dread the thought of spending every day there pretending to be content. I equally fear the prospect of having to find something new to engage in. If I knew it was an interim state it would be bearable. If I have to exist on national assistance and tinned soup I’ll put up with that. I won’t co-operate, or show enthusiasm, or do anything I don’t want to do. I don’t want to do any of it. I don’t want to engage with people at all at the moment. I can’t even find happiness in my actual work, writing, film and image work. I keep pushing at it though. That’s all I can do. I can’t stop.
I’ve walked onwards now, through Bloomsbury. It’s like a village, maybe a slightly fake village. Past the shop where Black Books was set. Into Foyles, a young man in a striped tee shirt. I could work there. I should find out about it. My eyeslight is getting worse. My joints are aching. Maybe I now need to be open about aging. I can’t do 10 hour days in warehouses. I’m not even going to try. Why should I? No one would be impressed. I’d be physically and mentally destroyed by it, maybe ridiculed along the way. My mind is going, through lack of exercise. My memory has gaps, it doesn’t fit together well any more. Most of it is still there, it just works in an unordered, uncontrolled way. I don’t mind that. We can’t know everything, I don’t want to. Bob Dylan was very like that before his motorbike accident. He opened his mouth and random intertwined words came out, seemingly only loosely under his control. The cynical music journalists loved it.
There’s something on the news about children being back at school, in some sort of overcomplicated way. It looks encouraging though, they seem happy. Children probably don’t worry too much about the state of disjointedness the world is in, they’re innocent, they don’t know anything different. I’ve previously thought about teaching as a career. Perhaps I will do again. You have to pay for training, and support yourself for a year, then get paid less than a west end theatre box office assistant. Short days though.
Apparently Amazon is creating 5000 new jobs, or is it 500, or 50,000? Whichever it is, it sounds depressing, and not something to be celebrated or applauded. I’m picturing a dystopian future where never ending convoys of Amazon vans drive out of gigantic grey windowless aluminium sheds, along roads to identical houses, dropping off cardboard boxes. Another procession of vehicles then set off in the opposite direction to collect the used cardboard, take it somewhere, then the whole process starts again. Footage of these autonomous traffic flows could fit well in one of Patrick Keiller’s “London” films.
I’m in Soho now, at a chain bar, an Orwellian place full of fake people. Quite noisy, shouting, shrieking, common cockneys on ‘phones. Camp Old Compton Street fashion disciples. They seem impervious to everything. A group of young men with long thin leather bags, maybe containing wind instruments, snooker cues, or guns. Young, geeky, bespectacled, making efforts to be friends, they could be first year university students. Are students actually physically at university now?
I can’t tell if it’s raining outside, there is a general gloominess in this space, a large cavern with small street entrances at opposite ends. It used to be a sweaty dive for beat combos to perform before Soho became corporate. There are some of the old traditional street corner pubs left, I should seek them out. Soho is at its best when damp, dirty and grimy. It is a village consisting of parallel streets lined with Victorian brick built houses, a village with few trees, apart from the square, and lots of debauched raucousness. A tourist attraction that people used to be bashfully ashamed to seek out. I’ve worked on its outskirts over the years, I like it. I would have led a more sheltered life had I stuck to retail work in the suburbs. I’d better make sure I don’t fall back into that. That would be a waste of a life.
Andrew Stevenson 