Astray 4

The last of my steady freelance work fell through on a Tuesday. A short email: changes in the industry, thanks for everything, maybe in future. There wasn’t much to fall through, but the floor still gave way. I got jumpy and filled in an online form for benefits. A week later an appointment letter arrived, summoning me to a back-to-work session at a business hotel near the airport.

A lobby with a scent of air freshener and a coffee machine. Low armchairs, framed pictures of cities at night. I told the receptionist what I was there for. She pointed me to the conference suite.

In the room there were rows of chairs facing a flipchart and a projector screen. A table with jugs of water, cups, plates of biscuits still wrapped in plastic. We sat scattered across the rows. A woman at the front fiddled with the laptop. She wore a lanyard and a card that said Facilitator under her name.

Welcome, she said, when the projector finally worked. Thank you all for coming. Today is about taking ownership of your future. She clicked. A slide appeared: a stock photo of someone in a field, arms spread wide. Underneath: Reframing Redundancy as Opportunity.

We went round and introduced ourselves with our backgrounds. She wrote words on the flipchart. Communications, education, retail, hospitality, care. Then she drew a circle and wrote in the middle: Transferable skills.

Think in terms of your skill set, she said, not job titles. You’re not just a teacher or a carer. You’re adaptable, solution-focused. You have a personal brand.

A wiry man in my row leaned back restlessly in his chair, let out a noise and muttered something. I felt a tug to join in, roll my eyes, but the last thing I wanted was to sneer. I’ve done enough of that for one lifetime.

We were given handouts with boxes to fill in. My key strengths. My unique selling point. My three-month goals. The facilitator walked up and down the rows, bending to look at our papers, nodding. Great, she said. That’s really strong. You’re an asset. The jugs of water sweated on the table. The projector hummed. I watched my hand write phrases from the business texts I’d spent years translating and writing.

At the end she thanked us again and told us to stay positive. This is a journey, she said. You’re here because you have potential. We filed out into the car park without speaking. Lorries rolled past on the ring road. The Holiday Inn behind us might have been anywhere on earth.

*

I cycled to evensong at the Cathedral, taking my time. A few tourists walked around taking pictures. The priests and choir entered the nave. We stood as they filed into their stalls.

O Lord, open thou our lips.

And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.

The words were as familiar as the hotel slogans, but they did something else. They told me I was dust. The choir sang the psalm. The days of man are but as grass. The words sat heavy and right in the air.

We knelt for the prayers. The words asked for mercy for war-torn peoples, for those who labour, for the lonely, the unemployed.

After the grace we went out separately into the cool dusk. The city was the same: crisp packets and cans on the street, migrant Deliveroo drivers on homemade electric bikes. In the bookies’ window a screen rolled through odds for the weekend matches. Two economies, I thought: this one and that slower, stranger one, where even days like this are said to be taken up and worked on in a higher order, out of sight. I felt a draught of joy all the way home.