My father was from a Scottish Presbyterian background. My mother is a Lutheran Swede. The Protestant work ethic is etched on my genes. It started for me at school, when I treated each exam like an Olympic race. It didn’t matter how many As I got or how many times I came first. However hard I worked, I knew that it would never be enough.
Not long after I got that letter from my father, when I was twenty-two, I got a job in the bookshop where I met Patsy. Since then, I have hurled myself into every job I’ve done. Arts administrator and literary critic? There are more books in the world than pebbles on the beach. Journalist? News and current affairs literally never stop. The only way for me to get off the treadmill is to get into other people’s company and out of the house.
My parents believed in public service, not in making money. But they did believe that hard work would be recognized and rewarded, if only with a pat on the back. They didn’t think you could slog your (crisp-fuelled) guts out – in my case through two bouts of cancer – and then find yourself cast out on a whim. When my mother bought me How to Keep Your Head After Losing Your Job, it was partly because she didn’t know what to say. I, by the way, only read a few pages. I’ve lost my taste for self-help books. I used to like the perky tone, but now it just makes me think of people who try to sell you things, people with big white teeth and shiny suits. I’m with Aristotle. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. People who think they know a lot probably don’t have much to teach.
When I lost my job, I didn’t really bother with books. I just emailed everyone I could think of who might be able to help. When Grant Feller was fired by his newspaper, he did the same. ‘My strategy,’ he told me, ‘was to see as many people as I could, and to make sure I had at least one meeting a day, to get me out of the house.’ I wish I could say I followed his next strategy, but I didn’t. ‘I also,’ he said, ‘set my alarm for five thirty, because I couldn’t sleep at night. The best way of sleeping was either to get drunk, which would have been easy, or to be utterly exhausted. That’s the worst time, when you’re lying awake. I’ve stuck with it. It’s part of my day. I swim for half an hour and I go for a run. In fact, I ran so much in those early weeks, I completely fucked my Achilles.’
The only times I’ve set my alarm for 5.30 have been when I’ve had a flight to catch and then I’ve usually felt like cancelling the holiday. Like Grant, I put on my running gear most days. Sometimes, I even go for a run. In my head, I still hate exercise, but when I do it I actually quite like it. And there’s no doubt that it makes you feel better. All the studies say it helps prevent depression, heart disease, cancer, dementia and pretty much every health problem you could think of. It makes you healthier and it cheers you up. If we really wanted to solve the problems in the NHS, we would just make everyone go for a daily walk.
It isn’t, unfortunately, quite so easy to resolve the challenges of an industry in decline. ‘I slowly realized,’ said Grant, ‘that the way back I’d envisaged, into newspapers and websites, was not going to happen, or not in the way I wanted it to, which was with a job, a very good job. So I then drew up a list of about a hundred people, captains of industry and so on, who would be really interesting to meet. I also had lots of friends who were not journalists, who were really helpful. They would know someone who knew someone.’
Grant was canny. ‘The key thing I did,’ he said, ‘was I emailed and in the guide field was “meeting”, because I thought they would think to themselves “have I got a meeting?” So they would open it and then they would see in that first sentence that I had read something they had said or written recently. The other thing was advice. If you say you’re looking for help, that doesn’t work. If you say “I’m in the process of trying to reinvent myself and I’d like some advice” . . . I was surprised at the number of rooms I got into.’
Grant, like me, had meetings with senior journalists and realized that what was on offer was what you could really only call piecework, at a fraction of his former rate. He also started a blog and would often write something targeted at the next person he was about to meet. ‘I’d walk into the room,’ he said, ‘and they’d say, “That was really interesting, that thing you wrote,” and secretly I’d be thinking: yes, well, I wrote it for you.’
I started a blog, too, but when I discovered it was just a way to do what I did before, and not be paid for it, I couldn’t force myself to do more than about one every few months. I still can’t stand writing for free. When people ask me to write something, and then say ‘I’m afraid we can’t afford to pay you’, I feel like asking them if they do the same when they ask their plumber to fix their broken loo.
For Grant, the path to ‘reinvention’ certainly wasn’t instant. ‘I suppose the first three or four months,’ he said, ‘I was earning nothing. The next five or six months I was earning bits and bobs. A few people from outside journalism were giving me gigs. I did some work for an events company. People realize they’re giving you a bit of dignity.’ Grant paused and swallowed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I feel a bit weepy even thinking about this, because that guy who owns that events company did a really good thing.’
I felt like crying, too. I thought of all the people who had been kind to me when I had felt desperate. I thought of the literary editor of the Sunday Times, and the deputy editor of the Sunday Times and the opinion editor of The Guardian and the editorial director of the Sunday Times, and the former poet laureate, who gave me a quote for my website, and the current poet laureate, who also gave me a quote for my website. I thought of the friend who had put me in touch with several headhunters, and the former colleague who put me in touch with an eminent academic. When I had lost a bit of my faith in human nature, it helped me get it back.
Grant has now built up his own very successful consultancy, which provides content marketing, speeches, ‘thought leadership’ and ‘storytelling’ for businesses. It’s all going very well, but that doesn’t mean he has turned into Nelson Mandela. ‘How can I say this without sounding really bitter?’ he said. ‘I always wanted revenge and I still do. The revenge, I suppose, is now being a success, but the feelings of revenge are always there. I am angry at the way people were. You can tell that by the way I remember so vividly what happened. You can’t suddenly paint a smile on. There are some people who go through life and the glass is nearly always full.’ Weirdos, I said, feeling a sudden sense of exhilaration. ‘My glass,’ he said, ‘is in danger of being empty, so I fill it up and it’s also a glass that I want to shatter on someone’s forehead.’
We both cackled wildly. You’ll have to forgive us. Once a hack, always a hack. But Grant certainly doesn’t seem bitter. He’s cheerful and very good company. I hope, at least most of the time, I’m relatively good company, too. Anger, we both agreed, was a fuel in picking ourselves up and driving us on. ‘That’s not the overriding feeling,’ said Grant, ‘but it’s always there. At the moment, it’s going well, but the complacency you have about having a full-time job, I don’t have that, and complacency is not a good thing. That’s why people calcify, because they’ve got a job and they think it’s going to be OK. Millennials don’t think like that. They think: “I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that.” I’m a fortysomething millennial. I’ve learnt something and now I’m going to learn something else.’
We are all living through an employment revolution and many of us are going to be ‘disrupted’ out of our jobs. We missed the industrial revolution, but we’re just in time for what the economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have called ‘the second machine age’. According to an Oxford Martin report, The Future of Employment, about 47 per cent of jobs are at risk from automation. PwC think that about 30 per cent of existing jobs will be lost in the UK by 2030, and about 38 per cent in the US. Whatever the precise figure, it’s likely to be a lot.
Big chunks of the working classes have already been through their revolution, with whole industries wiped out and shipped to the East. Now it’s time for the middle cl
asses to feel the squeeze. We journalists are at the forefront of this wave. Academics, legal writers and financial advisers are likely to be next. If you want to be sure of a job, become a nurse, a care worker, a barista, a construction worker, a computer programmer or a digital marketeer. Forget Martin Amis. Think Steve Jobs.
In this new world, according to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, we will all need to act like immigrants. In this new world, we will all be immigrants. Passion and persistence, he says, which he calls PQ, will trump IQ. What this means, above all else, is that we will need to be flexible. Immigrants have to be flexible. Dreda’s parents – a cleaner and a factory worker – did jobs they might not have expected to do at home. Winston’s parents worked as a cleaner and a postman. Winston has also been very flexible. In the time I have known him, he has worked as a sound engineer, a musician, a barman, a barista, a driver, a gardener and a chef. In Italy, eight years ago, I met Joseph, who came over to Italy as a political refugee from the Ivory Coast. At first, he worked as a street vendor. Then he worked in a factory. Then he worked as a truck driver and saved enough money to buy two flats and some land. After he came to visit me, he fell in love with London and decided to move here. First, he worked as a refuse collector. Then he worked in a care home. Now he’s working as a healthcare assistant and planning to train as a nurse. Now that’s what I call enterprise, and what Thomas Friedman would call PQ.
‘I think,’ said the writer and artist Yana Stajno when I met her in a café near her studio in Wood Green, ‘you have to be practical. Follow your passion,’ she added, ‘but just don’t expect it to pay you.’ Yana came to London in the seventies from South Africa. She was born in Zimbabwe to a French mother and a father who ‘left Poland on the back of a lorry’. He died when she was six. ‘I went to this cocktail party,’ she told me, ‘and marched up to this man and said, “Have you got money in the bank?”’ I can just imagine it. Yana is fearless. She is also irresistible. She has big blue eyes that seem to rule out the word ‘no’. ‘He said yes,’ she said, ‘and I said, “Would you like to meet my mummy?” My mother did marry him. I hated him, though. We never got on, but my mother,’ she said breezily, ‘was fine after that.’
Yana was cheerful. Yana is always cheerful. I met her when my pain condition came back, just after the 7/7 London bombings. It started in my left arm and soon I was gripped with pain from head to toe. I couldn’t type. I could hardly walk. Worst of all, I couldn’t work. I saw pain specialists and rheumatologists and neurologists. One of the oncologists who had treated me for cancer even arranged for me to see the team who worked in palliative care. Nothing worked and then someone said ‘you must see Yana’ and I did.
Yana is an acupuncturist, but that’s a bit like saying Matisse was a painter and decorator. Yana is a healer. I don’t really know how she does it, but she is definitely a healer. She is also a writer and artist, but it’s acupuncture that pays most of her bills.
She came to London with her partner, David. They had met on the steps of Cape Town University, in the middle of a riot. They were both anti-apartheid activists, doing street theatre, which was illegal, and were at constant risk of arrest. It was when they were living in the bush that they realized they would have to leave. ‘An Afrikaner farmer found two children stealing from his little farm shop,’ Yana explained, ‘and locked them in the freezer for the night and killed them. We went to the police, but the police were friends of the farmer and that kind of did it. We thought we were either going to kill the guy or . . .’ and for once the smile disappeared from her face.
She and David lived in a squat in Camden. In South Africa, Yana had worked ‘in restaurants, as a life model, selling things, trading in the market’ and here she got a job as a cleaner. ‘I didn’t actually realize you had to plug in the Hoover,’ she told me. ‘White Africans never used a Hoover! Rugs were beaten, not swept.’ She wrote a play called Salt River, which did very well, but knew that writing wasn’t going to pay her bills. At first she thought about physiotherapy, but then she decided to study acupuncture. ‘It’s very poetic,’ she said, ‘very interesting, and of course you never, ever get to the bottom of it. The points have such lovely names! It’s a continual system of knowledge from three thousand uninterrupted years.’
It works. I have no idea why it works, but for me, with Yana, it does. Yana is an artist, in paint and words, but she is also an artist as a healer. ‘The interesting thing is,’ she said, ‘that if I hadn’t come here I would have been simply a writer and artist. It’s only because I had to do something practical that I used that part of myself. And I’m really glad I did. It’s such rich territory. I love my clients. Do you know? I love them all.’
I honestly think that anyone can love their job. Well, OK, perhaps not an arms dealer, or a pimp, or someone in a call centre who tells you you’ve had a car crash when you haven’t. I believe in work. I think work is how we contribute to the wider world. Work takes us out of ourselves and into other people’s lives.
I love coffee. It makes me happy to have a really good cup of coffee. In Harris + Hoole the other day, I was served by a guy with tattoos and a big bushy beard. Almost everyone serving coffee these days seems to have tattoos and a big bushy beard, but what marked this guy out was his smile. He was so cheerful and friendly that I asked him if he liked his job. ‘Yes,’ he said, but he didn’t need to. You could see that it made him happy to add so much pleasure to someone else’s day.
In a few years, perhaps we’ll never meet a real person in a real shop. Supermarkets are already trying to train us all to use scanners, those horrible machines that won’t let you buy a bottle of wine even when you’re over fifty. I like a human to scan my Marlborough Sauvignon and Kettle Chips. I like it when they smile at me and ask me how I am. Sometimes it’s the only conversation I have all day. A few years ago, some people made a big fuss about a government-sponsored scheme to support people into work that, they said, included ‘slave labour’ at supermarkets. They seemed to think that working in a supermarket was something that should make you feel ashamed. They could not be more wrong.
Winston changes jobs quite a lot, because he gets bored and likes to try new things. Joseph loves his work as a healthcare assistant. He can see it has a big effect on people’s lives. Claire, who was made redundant from her marketing job by her horrible employers, now works with adults with learning disabilities and loves her job so much that she literally radiates joy.
The people I know who don’t love their jobs are the people whose bosses talk about things like ‘synergies’, ‘innovation’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’. If you want people to hate their job, just blast them with jargon, give them hundreds of boxes to tick and watch them every damn minute of the day. Bob’s your uncle, or your Big Brother. George Orwell didn’t need to know about the studies that link autonomy with productivity. ‘Nothing was your own’, he said in 1984, ‘except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.’
It makes me angry when people sneer at other people’s jobs. Most people in the world have to take what they can get. In a big city, in the Western world, you have more choice, but you are still living in a city, not in Nirvana. And it isn’t just immigrants who are grateful to get any job at all.
My sister managed, through years of struggle, and while on antipsychotic medication that made her speech slurred and her mind dull, and through taking, and retaking, exams she kept failing while her siblings got straight As, to scrape four O levels and two CSEs.
She managed, after a couple of years at a secretarial college, to learn to type. She managed to get a job, in the typing pool of an insurance company, where she was, according to the reference they gave her, ‘a conscientious and loyal employee’. Caroline was certainly conscientious. She was more proud of that job than anything she had ever done. The only problem was that she was extremely slow.
After three years, she got the sack. It took eighteen months, and dozens of application forms, to get another job. This time, i
t was as a sales assistant in a shoe shop. ‘The manageress has been very kind to me,’ she wrote in a letter to my brother, who was then in America. ‘She is very nice, but she told me on Friday that I was too slow. The people in the shop are very nice and I enjoy dealing with the public and am good at it. It is just that I don’t think I am very good at the job. I am on a six-week trial. If I don’t pass it, I mustn’t worry too much.’
She did not pass it. A year later, she got a two-month stint of work experience as a sales assistant at M&S. The work experience was part of a scheme to help disabled people into work. But not, unfortunately, to keep them. My mother begged the store to keep her on. They refused.
It took six years for my sister to get another job. This time, it was as a part-time cleaner in a canteen. She worked hard, and she loved it. After a year, they asked her to resign.
I have never met anyone who tried harder to get a job. I have never met anyone who wanted a job more. But employers – even nice, well-meaning employers in a world less cut-throat and slower than ours now – didn’t, and don’t, just want people who try. They want people who can do the job, and do it well.
In the end, we all decided that it was probably better for my sister to give up the struggle to get jobs that nobody seemed to want her to keep. She was happier without the stress of constantly trying, and constantly being told that she had failed. She lived modestly, and was grateful for her benefits. But she still wished she could work. My sister knew instinctively what the studies have shown: that people who work are happier and healthier than people who don’t.
When she died, and we went to register her death, there was a box marked ‘occupation’. It was eighteen years since she had worked in an office. My father paused, and then put ‘typist’.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 24
