Dour Saturday

It’s Saturday night and these are the outpourings of a disaffected mind.

I’m sitting here trying to fill in a job application form that would take me back into Further Education where I would be teaching English Literature at GCSE and A Level. You might wonder why a man in my station would choose this path but it’s something I’ve always considered taking up at some point in my life. It’s not as high as my qualifications would allow me to teach but it’s better than Channel 4 and is a unique opening for a man of my peculiar character. It would also be good money and security for when Alastair Darling’s financial crisis hits the hardest.
Yet as I sit here and write, I’ve got the TV tuned to Channel Five. I’m watching ‘Britain’s Most Haunted’ hosted by Paul Ross. And therein lies the reality of my life. Here is my problem writ large.

The Channel Five studio is filled with a sample of the Great British Public, eager to hear of haunted houses and the afterlife. For whatever reason, the GBP buy into the scam. A ‘superfan’ is interviewed. She’s bought all the videos and DVDs, hundreds of T shirts. She’s invested money into this show whose message seems to be that life is only made bearable by the promise that death is just another state of being. I respond with my usual outburst of swollen invective that human longing makes fools of us all. We dream for the impossible, believe in the ludicrous, and invest in the ridiculous.

Nothing gets me more agitated than seeing desperate people having their fears exploited. It feels like we’re back with Chaucer’s Pardoner and I want to cry something obscene about his relics. I was in a bookshop yesterday that was advertising a weekly séance with a nationally known psychic. ‘More popular than the book club’, I was told. ‘Less homework and a bigger payoff.’

I can’t be like that but it’s the reason why I’m such a bloody awful position.
I’ve never been good at making compromises. I fail to adapt to situations in which, to use the term I hear so often, ‘I need to bullshit’. Even if it means money in my pocket, I fail to jump through those hoops. It doesn’t make me belligerent in a bad way. I’m easy to get on with in everyday life. I am what you see. There’s very little facade, not too many pretensions; just a sometimes gruff, often serious, but usually likable chap who is likely to make you laugh. But in terms of work, I’m unemployable. I have so many transferable skills that I don’t know what I’m cut out to do anymore. I have no career, just an excess of ability. I have passion but no professionalism. The nation is constipated by professionalism.

Let me give you the example that’s making it hard for me to fill in this job application.

There are two students sitting down to take a GCSE in English Literature. One student is one of those intelligent, sensitive types that have always traditionally excelled at the subject. He has a genuine understanding for poetry, has an ear for the language and can analyse poetry on the go, tying meaning with lexical choices. The other student struggles. He doesn’t enjoy literature but there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I’ll be honest as say that he goes into the exam with barely an original idea in his head. Both students answer the same question about a range of poems by some modern darling of the examining board. The student with a good grasp of poetry writes intelligently on three poems he has obviously read, internalised, and thought about. His answers are original and stunningly good. The second student, the one who despises poetry but has memorised the right things to say, answers on four poems. His answers are rehearsed and staggeringly unoriginal.

No here are the rules. Here is the crux.

Student 1 can never get over a grade C. To get higher, he needed to have answered on four poems. No matter how intelligently he wrote about three or the reasons for limiting himself to that selection, the examiners wanted an answer based on four.
Student 2 answered on four poems. He gets higher than a C because he fulfilled the examination criteria. Accordingly to the results, he’s better at English than Student 1.

Life moves on. The results stand. The injustice is served.

Now, how do I write a covering letter, knowing this? How do I explain why I want the job but also why I don’t want to be accessory to the crimes committed in the name of education? It’s why I’ll probably fail to get the post. I’d speak up when I think something is wrong. Do I want an income so badly that I’d be happy to break the spirits of independent young minds? Could I programme them for the end of year exam? I’d work my hardest to see them succeed, encourage them to achieve something meaningful in life, to make the most of their gifts. Yet the sad reality is that students are probably better off without my advice. They wouldn’t fulfil the criteria.

And let’s face it: who even gives a damn about literature these days? I have learned the hard way that ambition leads to disappointment. The world teaches us that the path of least resistance is the way to go. And we’ve got ghosts to chase instead.

The Straight Edge

As usual, an email from Elberry found me elbow deep in the compost heap of my own scribblings. I don’t know what I was doing there. It’s such a festering mound of old prose, unpolished stories, and novels that have far to go before they can even be considered ‘half-finished’. You see, I’m troubled, dear Madeleyites. I’ve been troubled for the last few days. It all goes back to my hosting this year’s Galaxy Book Awards.

I managed to get through the show with the minimum of trouble. Bill Oddie was sitting backstage with a dart gun filled with mild tranquilizers. His job was to watch a heart-rate monitor and fire a dart into my buttocks whenever it became apparent that I was getting too excited. It worked well until I watched Russell Brand receive his award for best biography. I was suddenly filled me with such rage that the darts didn’t work. Oddie missed with one which lodged itself into Jordan's forehead. The poor girl was struck dumb. It was left to Dame P.D. James to leap up on stage and pin me down during Russell’s acceptance speech.

Now I’ve had time to calm down, I’m left to reflect on what has been a week filled with unique events.

First there was kindness when help came from a totally unexpected quarter. A complete stranger contacted me and helped me with my search to find an agent.

Then there was helpfulness. The agent rang me and talked to me for 25 minutes during which they gave me some very helpful advice.

Then there was frustration. Back up in Manchester, I was mildly scolded by a producer on ‘Eye of the Storm 2’. If I didn’t need the work, ‘Eye of the Storm 2’ would be looking for another presenter.

Finally, there’s vacillation. I’m considering returning to education. The last week's sequence of events has convinced me that I need to have some direction in my life. There has to be something more than 'Eye of the Storm 2'. And writing blogs is fine but they are hardly the stuff of novels. The agent told me as much, advising me that there’s no book to be made from this blog. It means that I have to rub out 190,000 words from my list of publishable material and to write something big and new.

Which leads me to my hesitation... The local University runs a creative writing course. I’m tempted to apply for it. How I’d pay for it, I have no idea. Whether they’d accept me is open to question. And how this would help me, I’m really not sure. But as I told Stephen Fry when he rang me on Sunday morning, since he's been in America, I’ve been missing that spiritual straight edge to run my pen along.