Every day without work is full of judgement. No money made, nothing proved. Who are these writers who sit and read and write for years without feeling guilty? Who pays the mortgage while they refine their sentences? I miss my mother, though most mornings her old sayings still know where to find me: pull yourself together! Take some responsibility!
No appetite. Can’t concentrate, let alone write. Relentless LinkedIn spam in my inbox. Marketing executive. Content strategist. Brand storyteller. Customer success. Business development. I tailor my CV. I send it to universities, agencies, charities, shops. I apply for a job in the cathedral shop and am turned down. I join the council’s temp-job database. I go into a recruitment office and the man says I’m the third guy today to come in saying the same. He says there’s an admin job available with a business in Hellesdon. Nine to five. But it’s low-level, he says, you’re over-qualified. I could do that, I say, and straight away feel myself squirming out of it.
I’ve avoided working with other people for twenty-five years. The people who sent me work and paid me were names in inboxes. I never spoke to them and don’t know where they are now. It’s my own fault, I think. I was never pro-active. I was behind the curve. I didn’t pivot in time. I didn’t learn new skills, didn’t network. Now they’ve all moved on. It’s a fast-moving world after all, you should have known that from all the business texts you translated and from how quickly the industry was being automated. On the way to the pool near the office buildings I pass corporate people wearing lanyards and wonder how they do it. What are all these jobs and how did they get them? How do they bear the same place and people day after day? When I overhear the men in the locker room talking about their careers and families, I don’t understand what they say, but I admire them.
My thoughts won’t stay in line. No sense of the old life-giving beauty of the world: the great sites and artists, the histories of high thought and culture that used to interest me. That seems gone; perhaps something you can visit as a relief from stress, or in retirement, as you visit a cathedral. I still go to church, but the feeling soon thins out. I do some voluntary work for the Norwich Historic Churches Trust. Archiving documents from churches that have been made redundant. That suits me, a bit, putting irrelevant old documents into a spreadsheet.
Notes from a Room 