More than one in five people in the UK is out of work at the moment. As lockdowns lifted, many people developed anxiety and depression – most of which can be alleviated by companionship, routine and having your own cash.
What I can’t understand is young, fit people not working. From the age of 13, I stood in a cake shop every Sunday, boxing pâtisserie for affluent customers. The old lady who owned the shop would mutter for us to hurry up as there was a queue. It was a knackering job, being on my feet all day, and the owner didn’t trust her charges to work the till.
So we had to hand the money to her, she would hand us the change, which we would then pass on to the customer. It was a wearying rigmarole, leavened only by the fact that we were allowed to eat the cakes in our lunch hour. A French chef propositioned me, asking if I would like to stay after hours and watch how he made ze pâtisserie. No thanks. However, I stuffed my face with cake and managed to put on two stone within six months. By the time I gave up several years later, I could have rolled home like a giant profiterole.
At least this job was legal, unlike another I was talked into taking. I answered an advert for young ladies to be driven around London selling insurance. The targeted customers were student nurses in blocks of residential accommodation. Unbeknown to 15-year-old me, it was actually illegal for people to enter student accommodation without permission. I should have clicked – why else would the advert have specified young ladies?
The insurance job was only paid by commission, and I was much too honest to sell a single plan: when the nurse at each door would ask whether it was a good deal, I would shake my head in a conspiratorial way. My driver was a decent bloke, but the day I found out that there was no entry to the grounds of these homes to strangers like us, I insisted on getting out of the car immediately and giving up. It was a terrible job and I earned nothing, but I did learn to investigate thoroughly before accepting contracts.
A cushier number was babysitting for members of a Labour council. At night, I visited their homes; but during the day there was a lavish crèche for the children in a building near King’s Cross. Sometimes there would be no toddlers there at all; sometimes there would be one. The other babysitter was a bloke with a serious case of one-upmanship: one day I bought an NME on the way because I had a review in it. He made sure to tell me just how crap the magazine was.
During my year off between school and medical school, I was keen to dedicate all my time to writing for the NME, but an edict from my mother demanded that I get ‘a proper job’, so I applied to work in a playgroup for children between the ages of three and five. This was the polar opposite of the empty Labour councillors’ crèche – it was stuffed with rowdy children and there was only me and an older woman running the place.
A French chef propositioned me, asking if I would like to stay after hours and watch how he made ze pâtisserie
What made it worse was that many of the mothers insisted on staying in the kitchen for a couple of hours while their adored child played. They would chain-smoke, drink coffee and gossip so much that it became more peaceful being with the kids as they hit each other and stole one another’s toys. It was impossible to impose even the most gentle reprimand, because if you so much as said, ‘Stacey, please don’t bite,’ Stacey would give out an almighty wail and her mother’s head would poke out of the kitchen asking what was happening.
Of all these jobs, the only one I truly loved was working at the NME. I was basically being paid for doing what I loved – listening to music, going to gigs, and going to film previews and drinking wine. But I think it did me a lot of good to work at arduous jobs I didn’t enjoy. There is a thrill in earning money for yourself for the first time. Young people who reject the idea of a job they might find dull are missing out.
Work may be tiring, but there are usually other people to talk to, unlike mooching at home, and if you throw yourself into every job with enthusiasm, it all becomes material in your memory banks. The only thing you learn by sitting in your room idly is that your life is boring.
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