Careering Down the Hill of Life

Does anyone else spend as much time as I do thinking of alternative careers? I sometimes long for the 'job for life' certainty of days gone by. You knew where you were with that: at the same place for the better part of forty years, with the occasional shift up the career ladder onto a marginally higher rung, with a bit of a payrise and then a pension at the end of it.

These days, most people have their first career crisis when they're thirty, as you get disillusioned with that 'career' you've tried so hard to launch (in badly paid media jobs) or the long hours and relentless pressure of being a high-flyer. Loads of people I knew suddenly retrained as teachers; I went freelance (I had no career, and I was in a classic badly paid media job, so what did I really have to lose, other than an office to go to every day?). If you don't do that, then you have a bit of a re-think when you've had kids. Lots of part-timers and four-day-a-weekers, post-babies, I've found.

However, as I have no children, and no plans for any, and I've stayed in largely the same job as I've ever had, I feel at forty it's time for my postponed career crisis. I'm brilliant at procrastination, so it's only right that I've waited for a decade longer than everyone else to think, 'hmm, what on earth can I do with the rest of my working years that will involve very little stress and responsibility, but still pay me enough to keep me in increasingly pricey face creams?' Yes, this is the thought process of the post-Bridget Jones singleton. You don't worry about finding Mr Right any more (even Mr He'd Do For Now eludes you, unless you go trawling the internet dating sites), you just worry about how old people think you are; drowned by a daily tsunami of photos in the media of forty-somethings looking amazing - even whilst on the school run - you know that Looking Younger Than You Are is the only thing worth aiming for.

So far, my alternative career musings have encompassed:
Becoming a florist. I love flowers, and I enjoyed helping out with arranging the flowers for two weddings. Bingo!
Becoming a manicurist - I like doing my nails; doing someone else's for money would be... well, it surely wouldn't be stressful, other than getting high as a kite on fumes every day.
Running a cake shop that also sells books - I like cake, I like books, but which one is better - there's only one way to find out. FIIIIIII... no, have a shop which sells both and see which one makes you more money of course.
Train to be a life coach for morbidly obese people. More and more people are obese. I've managed to lose a bit of weight, and am a de facto expert. Plus, I bloody love The Biggest Loser. Ongoing cash, guaranteed, and hopefully a minor telly career.
Win the Lottery - this isn't a career, as such, it would just be the best way forward.

Of course, I'm going to do none of these things, because I am big on talk and small on action. I need to go on courses (investigation required; time and money dedicated; probably some book learnin' and an exam or some sort of course work/assessment. All seems exhausting). I'd have to think of ways to market myself. It would take energy, and leaps of faith and that kind of thing.

So, for the time being, I shall leave it to James Franco, who seems to be living the life of five people at any one time. Not content with being an excellent actor, he's also busy modelling, directing short films, publishing books of short stories, having obscure art exhibitions in groovy places like Berlin, making records with people AND fitting in a PhD. He's making me feel like a total under-achiever. All that and handsome too. Stop it, Franco, you're giving me a headache and making my career musings feel even more hopelessly puny.

Still, I won £2.50 on the Lottery last week, so I'm sure that soon I'll be giving all this up for a life of unmitigated luxury and will never have to worry about working again.

Girl vs Spider

More evidence that this week is shit - last night I got home and was preparing for bed. I leaned over my dressing table to close the curtains when I was greeted by a terrible sight. There was a MASSIVE spider lurking in the bottom of a vase on the table. Reader, I'm not ashamed to say that I let out an eldritch screech at the sight of it. How had it got there? I'd been congratulating myself only recently on having avoided the perils of 'spider season' (traditionally around September) when armies of arachnids seem to march the land, hell bent on terror. I was thinking that my flat was clearly hermetically sealed, and as it's on a massive road with no trees or bushes for them to hide in, no eight-legged freaks were going to attack me. I was wrong.

'There is the most massive spider I have ever seen in my bedroom. I fucking hate spiders', I texted the MMMC, keen to have some support from a man (this is the problem, when you're a single girl, you have to deal with your own spiders, instead of retreating to the farthest corner until A Man Has Dealt With It). 'That's a sign of good luck' he texted back, unhelpfully. 'No it's not, I replied, 'it's another sign that God hates me'. 'Ha ha, night night' he said. Bastard. Why had he not offered to drive all the way across town at 11.30 at night to rescue me? Oh, that's right, because we're not going out, we're just friends.

Hmm, so, action was going to have to be taken. There's no way you can sleep in the same room as a spider once you know it's there. It has to be killed (the only good spider is a dead one, in my view). I dashed to the kitchen and grabbed a plate and rubber gloves. I was taking no chances - if it was going to suddenly leap from the vase, it wasn't going to get to touch my arms. No way. I slapped the plate over the top of the vase (visions of the ends of its legs clawing out from underneath it all the while). I picked up the vase (still with the gloves on and clamping the plate to the top of it). I dashed into the kitchen once more. I know the traditional place to rid oneself of spiders is down the plughole in the bathroom, but mine has a nasty habit of getting a bit... furred up. Shall we leave it at that? Yes, let's. So, the kitchen it was. I placed the vase in the sink, I turned on the tap. I removed the plate and aimed the stream of water at the vase. The spider gave every impression of having drowned. I put the plate back on top just to be on the safe side - I have a history of spiders staging Lazarus-like recoveries even when having been hit very hard with a copy of Marie Claire.

I went to bed happy in the knowledge that I had been Very Brave. And also knowing that, much as I derided Gillian McKeith, if I ever had to go on I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here, I would last 28 seconds. The first five seconds would involve me spotting a koala, and going, 'Ahh, look, a koala!' (do koalas live in the jungle? Doesn't matter - pick something cute). The next 23 seconds would involve me shrieking, 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH' as I spotted something without fur and with too many limbs, and demanding to be taken back to the hotel instantly. I am a total girl when it comes to dealing with anything that has more than four legs, and that's fine by me.

Tech-no-no-no-logy

I'm having one of those weeks where it can only be assumed that some deity hates me. I started off by leaving my rucksack on the train on Sunday evening. One of the numerous side effects of constantly packing my things up and traversing the country is that it's made me increasingly forgetful. I never used to leave anything behind; now I find myself regularly getting home to discover that I've left toothbrushes, hairbrushes, half-full pots of really quite pricey conditioner and the like in hotels, at friends' houses or on a train. Sunday was kind of a big one - I had so much stuff with me, that I didn't notice I'd left quite a crucial bit behind. (I'd put it on the shelf above the seats, where I never put anything, so hadn't thought to look up before I got off the train). It was the rucksack that I use for my gym kit, but which I'd re-purposed as a weekend bag, having put my main bag into left luggage, to avoid transporting it from Portobello to Hampstead, then down to Streatham, before going over to Walthamstow and then back to Kings Cross.

Thus the bag contained: trainers, gym kit, wash kit, make-up, PJs, sundry tops and underwear and an electric toothbrush. Quite a lot to have to replace. Thankfully, the train terminated at Edinburgh, so I was able to retrieve the bag the next day (the relief was slightly tempered by the fact that they now charge you a fiver to get your stuff back. Is there anything that remains unmonetised these days?)

So, strike one for positivity - the rest of the week's been a total mess so far. I got soaked on the way into work on Monday (having told everyone all weekend that the weather up here hasn't been as bad as I was expecting, given how shocking it was in December). Umbrellas are a bit pointless here, as the rain is usually combined with a hefty dose of wind, which really sorts the men from the boys, umbrella-wise; you have to rely on a hood instead. I then got to work and booted up the laptop, only to have it die ten minutes later. And by 'die', I don't mean 'freeze for a bit' and then respond to the usual IT Crowd 'turn it off and on again' approach, I mean 'the screen went black and it totally flatlined'. I bashed away at the on/off button to no avail. That's as far as my tech skills take me, really. I logged a call with the engineers and relocated to another part of the office to hijack someone else's computer.

Then our email went down - no communication possible with the outside world. For two days.

The engineer arrived yesterday morning to deal with my laptop. He spent five minutes bashing away at the on/off button. THAT'S WHAT I DID! SERIOUSLY, DO YOU NOT HAVE ANY BETTER SKILLS THAN THAT? I thought he'd be some kind of wizard, or Laptop Whisperer, who'd press a special button and resuscitate it and then I could, y'know, get on with my life. Or get my to do list from my desktop, at any rate. But no, he declared it dead and has taken it off to some kind of Holby City for Toshibas for a man with greater skills and knowledge to pull it apart and hopefully claw back the information from the hard drive.

I have been Goldilocks-ing my way round the office (today's computer: seemingly built in the late 1970s; I'm under instructions from its nervous owner not to turn it fully off, as it takes three days to start up. Yeah, tell me about it). I have no idea when a replacement might come from the engineers, or how long they'll keep mine in quarantine. Add this to panicky ad deadlines, endless meetings, having to forward everything to a colleague because I can't print anything out and having a nervous ten minutes yesterday morning when it looked like the Gas Board had already taken me to court, found me wanting, and were now going to break down my door in order to check my gas meter. I was most of the way through a panicky phone call to try to avert this (tears weren't beyond the realms of possibility) when I realised that actually, the mail had been mis-directed, and it wasn't me they were after at all, it was someone two doors down.

I need a weekend to recover from all this, and it's only Wednesday.

Time to Stop Browsing and Make a Purchase

Hmm, I'm back in cattle class on the return train journey, and just discovered another reason for spanking the company credit card and upgrading to first class. Since the last time I travelled as a pleb, East Coast have seen fit to 'monetise' their Wi-Fi. If you're in first, you can have as much Wi-Fi as your business travelling heart desires. But here in the cramped land of the free-coffee-free, you can have a tantalising 15 minutes to browse for nowt, and then you have to 'upgrade' and pay for it! WTF? You can't do that! Offer a 'service' (albeit largely theoretical, given the amount of time it's generally available on a four and a half hour journey) and then take it away again.

I fear East Coast trains are taking business tips from Ryan Air. And that's never a good thing.

Teenage Kicks

Why is it. That the default setting. For novels that are written by young men. Who want to appear modern. And 'edgy'. Is to write in these really short sentences. That make everything sound. Like bad spoken word pieces. Delivered by young men in skinny jeans. With too much hair. Who should - by rights - be being bullied. Instead of everyone thinking they're cool.

Because they take drugs.

And write in sentences that make them sound really bored. Or, at best, mildly autistic.

I'm reading one at the moment; I have to meet the author, which I am dreading, as he is actually a teenager. Worse than that, he's already published four books! Not books you or I would've heard of, naturally (they were probably all published via Twitter, in between taking drugs and playing Call of Duty 4 or something), but yes, apparently he's a bona fide novelist. His book is a lot like Skins - it has a variety of drugs (ketamine, mephedrone - yeah, I just checked the spelling of that, that's how in touch I am with youth culture - pills [unspecified, but unlikely to be Anadin]), quite bleak sex and a protagonist who bestrides the likeable/hateable divide like a skinny jean-wearing colossus.

It is of course making me feel at least 104 years old. My teen years were so sedate I lived in fear of my mum taking me to the doctor for tests to see when my hormones were going to kick in. I liked books. I didn't like the taste of alcohol, so I didn't drink (till I was in my early 20s, actually). Having been to an all-girls' school run by crazy nuns, boys were a foreign country that I didn't have a passport to. I couldn't see the point of smoking (I was never going to look cool, so it would've just been a waste of money and a pair of unsullied lungs). My formative years had been scarred by a collection of government warning films (now being expertly exhumed by Charlie Brooker in How TV Ruined Your Life) covering a dizzying array of past-times and their ghoulish outcomes, so I was never going to experiment with drugs. Why would I, when picking up a sparkler could result in nearly losing a hand, and my desire to go swimming in an abandoned quarry had been thwarted by the looming presence of Death - actual Death, with a hooded dressing gown, and a scythe and everything - not to mention the ever-present threat of harmless-looking men in cars offering to 'show me some puppies'.

Man alive, it's a miracle any of the 70s children a/ got out alive and b/ have gone on to have children of their own.

So, despite the fact that this book has been presented to me as a chance to 'relive my teenage years', I'm sticking with the author's view that his book is aimed at people who are 'between 16 and 22' - they're nothing if not madly ageist, 18 year-olds - and I shall just nod and smile, and pretend to understand when he tells me how to market his book via crowd-sourcing or cloud gathering or something. And wonder if the current Government's approach to warning youngsters of the dangers of modern living via just printing the names of STDs on the pants of sexy girls who are going to carry on having sex regardless is a bit, well, tame. They should at least be being told not to have sex whilst touching a pylon and flying a kite. I blame Nick Clegg. Fucking liberals, they take the danger out of everything.

Demanding an Upgrade

I found out recently that I'm allowed to travel first class on the train for work, provided, of course that I book it far enough in advance. So that it costs about the same as a week's rent each way, rather than the equivalent of the GDP of Chad each way. Thus I find myself, for only the second time, traversing the country in first class on a Tuesday evening. Tuesday! A school night! This feels in some way wrong; as if one should only go first class on a Friday evening, like a proper commuter, travelling home to one's family. Kicking off one's shoes because of the extra leg room and luxuriating in the fact that the working week is done and, dammit, Greg, you have earned this.

So, what does the extra billionty pounds buy you, on the East Coast line? Well, for a start, it buys you two different coloured seats to gaze at. Yes, that's right, when most of them are empty because of the prohibitive cost, why should you have to look at plain old navy blue all the time? You want more! You want a choice of colours at which to stare! So you also have buff-coloured seats. I am currently the sole occupier of a quad of buff-coloured seats, and a table. This is exciting, although I have to say that I'm wondering if the single seat, rows of which are placed by the window opposite, with a table that, because of the sheer quantity of room, wouldn't be nudging into your beer gut if you had one, might not be even more exciting. They just look a bit more, you know, exclusive. There is no danger that your feet would touch anyone else's (as mine had to, the very first time I travelled first class, two weeks ago. My horror was compounded when, on my return journey, a man who seemed to be suffering from advanced TB - coughing, spluttering, a face that looked as though it were about to fall off entirely - sat opposite me. From Newcastle to Edinburgh. Which takes hours).

Not content with providing a choice of colours for its seats (seats which apparently recline - I've failed so far to achieve this, despite some ardent button-pressing), first class also rewards you with antimacassars (sp? I've never had one before) embroidered with 'first class' so that you have a constant reminder that you're Better Than the Other Passengers. And you have a clean, cotton surface on which to rest your upper class noggin.

The tables are furnished with proper china mugs and actual metal spoons. Crikey! It's like the Ritz on here. This is so that you can be offered free tea and coffee approximately 30 times between Edinburgh and Kings Cross, from a trolley. You are also offered complementary biscuits or fruit cake (there is a man two seats up from me who had two pieces of fruit cake by the time we'd made it to Darlington). Passing up free cake takes reserves of self-control only usually attained by Shaolin monks. However, I'd already got myself a large coffee and a muffin from Caffe Nero before I'd embarked. Because a/ the fundamental rule of train travel is that, no matter what time you're getting on the train, you have to get a cup of coffee and a muffin and b/ even though you're in first class, and the coffee is not of the granules-with-hot-water-shoved-on-it variety, it is still resolutely revolting. I don't know what they do to it, but it is like coffee as imagined by Oliver Twist. Thin, grey and somehow managing to taste vaguely of Horlicks. Perhaps they still use the hateful UHT milk in it, instead of proper milk. As with many modern luxuries, East Coast's plentiful free coffee promises so much (free coffee! In a china mug! Delivered right to you, as you sit there, doing nothing, with all that leg room!) and delivers so little.

The other thing that's vaguely disappointing is that the Wi-Fi in first class isn't substantially better than it is in normal class. For the extra money, I demand an unwavering connection of a strength that would make Atlas jealous. But no, it still took me 20 minutes to order some toiletries from Boots online, because the connection kept crashing. This is the problem when you've paid extra for something (even when it's not even coming out of your own pocket) - you feel entitled to hunt for things to find fault with. 'The big table and the leg room and the free 'coffee' aren't enough', you say to yourself. 'I want some free wine, and some snacks, like you get on a plane. And maybe one of those horrible foil-topped meals! And maybe... some socks. And a toothbrush.' Because the money you're paying is twice what it would cost you to fly, so why shouldn't you be treated like an in-flight personage?

It's possibly a good thing that I'm never going to earn enough to afford a trip on the Orient Express - I'd probably be demanding sheets spun from Cheryl Cole's hair and a dedicated Persian cat for me to stroke between the hours of 10am and 2pm after the first six hours on board. Who knows what Elton John-style levels of excess I could notch up by the time we reached our final destination?