Get Out!
There’s a lovely quit in The Furnished Room (1961) by the late London Bohemian Laura del Rivo:
“…your progress here has not altogether given satisfaction–”
Beckett cut in, “Alright. We both know that I’m inefficient, habitually late, and completely uninterested in the work that poverty forces me to do. Having agreed this, let’s end the matter without a long and boring discussion.”
Mr Glegg stared at him, his mouth dead-fish open. Then he banged his fist on the desk. “Get out!”
Beckett went.
Shortly after storming out, our hero notices some glittering shards of glass on the floor near the Tube. He zones out on it for a moment and feels happy.
The only place, I think, to get a copy of The Furnished Room now is the wonderful Five Leaves radical Bookshop in Nottingham. So, you know. Do that.
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Admire the Application
I mentioned this narrow boat couple a little while ago. They escaped expensive London in favour of a life of on the canals.
Since then, I’ve become pleasantly hooked on their videos. A lot of the joy comes from the beautiful b-roll and drone footage of frosty fields and ducks-a-dabbling, but I’m also increasingly impressed at the resilience and practical-mindedness of the couple themselves. The episode where they have to rescue a dropped water cap from the canal could have been banal but is riveting.
Sometimes, with escape-to-the-country-type stories, the joy comes from watching silly urbanites floundering and out of their depth. But that’s not true for this pair. They go about things in a very sensible, practical way; always learning but always putting those lessons to good use. Less exciting that the “retrieval” video linked to above is one where Andrew has to fish a carrier bag out of the engine prop: not exciting viewing but a very good case in point.
What all of this should remind us of, once again, is that escape is possible. If you find ways to apply yourself. Yes, escape can be a game and escape can be fun. Above all, it can be a great romance. But admire the application. Admire the seriousness of mssion.
You could dip into any of their videos at all, but here’s their latest episode, posted just yesterday, about the joys of spring on the canal.
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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 82. Signs of Progress.
Dear diary, not much has changed since my last entry. I’ve been ill for over two months.
Read the rest of this entry »
The End of the Workplace Necktie
From Dickon Edwards’ diary from 2005:
Wednesday 22nd June – a historic date for some. The head of the UK Civil Service announces the wearing of ties as no longer mandatory for male employees. As long as they’re still smart, office boys and men alike can now wear their shirts open-necked as they oil the cogs of government. Must be a relief for those suffering under the current heatwave in offices built before the invention of air conditioning.
It may just be the Civil Service, but I suspect the trickle-down effect for the world of work will be ineluctable. When a similar guideline was made with bowler hats in the past, the trademark headwear of the English businessman soon disappeared from the streets and onto the naughty head of Ms Minnelli in Cabaret.
Fascinating! That was just a few months before my first escape from office work.
When I went back to office work in 2017, I didn’t like the “open collar” lack of formality (so it did indeed trickle down as Dickon expected, though at the time I saw it as Silicon Valley trend-setting). It was as if The Company had sidled up to me, straddled a chair backwards, and said “hi buddy, let’s rap.”
We’re not friends, The Company, and we never will be. Our neckties were there to put distance between us. Well, that’s how I felt until they were taken away.
So I continued to wear a beautiful tie to work most days, despite all of the justified ridicule. It worked too. It said “I am here formally.” It was a Big Fuck Off to the lot of it.
Dickon continues:
I personally welcome this news. Soon, when a man is seen in public wearing a tie, he will no longer be accused of having come straight from work. Tie-wearers will at last be deliberate tie-wearers. All ties will be nice ties, not ugly arrows of drudgery.
Nice.
And a final detail:
This apparently follows an industrial tribunal where a man claimed the forcing of ties upon male workers but not their female colleagues was tantamount to sexual discrimination. He won. The times are indeed a-slightly-changing.
It occurs to me there might be more pinpointable moments like this in the history of work: the day they invented modular office furniture, for example, or the very first building to have air conditioning and flourescent lighting instead of windows. I’ll try not to get carried away.
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The Rule Benders
Why is your boss a narcissist? asks the Guardian.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. But then I’m my own boss. Ahem.
No, really. When I read the news this week that WHSmith are finally ditching their scruffy and expensive high street stores, some old memories of being their teenage employee came to the surface. In particular, I remembered one of the Bosses, Tim, and how awful he was. He’d stride around self-importantly in his dismal black suit, lambasting his “team” of teenage students and retired old ladies. In the staff cloakroom one day, I found his cocaine, which explained at least some of his behaviour.
Once, he had me leafletting uselessly outside the shop because there was an unexplained error on my cash register — a single one in an audit roll of thousands of transactions — which he felt had eroded his trust in me to use such a complicated machine. I never found out what the error was.
I bet the inside of his car was filthy. Footwells filled with McDonalds cartons and scattered change.
Why was he such a narcissist? I asked myself. He was only the Assistant Manager of a WHSmith. What pride does he take in all this? I don’t mean to say one can’t take pride in the seamless running of a bookshop, but he wasn’t the type.
Well, according to the study presented in the Guardian today its because of the bullshit they put in the job ads for managers.
In the study, Gay and his colleagues divided language used in job ads into two categories: phrases that might attract “rule-followers” and phrases that might appeal to “rule-benders”. Postings seeking an applicant who is “grounded and collaborative”, “thinks methodically” and “communicates in a straightforward and accurate manner” went in the “rule-follower” category. Phrases like “ambitious and self-reliant”, “thinks outside the box” and “communicates in a tactical and persuasive manner” were filed under “rule-bender”.
It’s the “rule-bending”-type language that goes into ads for managerial jobs. And it’s narcissists who are most likely to find that sort of language appealing and actually apply for them.
Tim at WHSmith was awful but far worse was his boss Richard — a creeping mustachioed pervert who once said he wished he could do to us what Americans were doing, as it was announced that morning, in Abu Ghraib — and Tim’s equal Olwyn who died. When the news came around, one guy said “well, I wouldn’t have wished that on her.” And then there was Sally who was nice enough, but when I accidentally sold an embargoed copy of Shaggy’s “Angel” on CD, she said that “Shaggy’s people” had been in touch and weren’t happy.
Shaggy’s people indeed. What a bunch of rule-benders.
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Baudelaire
Baudelaire [elevated] idleness to the rank of a working method, of his very own method. We know that in many periods of his life he was not acquainted with, as it were, any worktable. It was by drifting that he fashioned and above all that he incessantly rearranged his verse.
Hooray, Baudelaire!
This comes from a piece of writing by Walter Benjamin, which was only recently translated into English. How can we only now be translating works — even minor ones — of Walter Benjamin? What a world.
Things we don’t know may already be known. In other languages. Apparently the biggest sci-fi franchise of all time isn’t my beloved Star Trek but some German thing. See also Fitzcaraldo Editions and Charco Press who, lately, have been bringing light to my reading not through new commisions but through translation.
Anyway, yes. Baudelaire. The idler’s poet. Benjamin’s piece goes further.
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