My adventures in penury land me with two job applications on my screen, one for MI6, one for Sainsbury’s.
Do I become a spy, or stack shelves in a supermarket? The vacancies are on a recruitment site called Indeed, one after the other: Counter Assistant, Sainsbury’s. Intelligence Officer, London. Just like that. I began googling jobs in a panic because embarrassing things started to happen.
For example, a friend who runs a tack shop gave me a broken bag of feed for the horses, saying, ‘Please, take it, I can’t sell it. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.’ Word has evidently got round that I am succumbing to the pressure of a mortgage and vet bills while persisting with the damn fool idea I have pursued all my life of neither cultivating wealth myself nor marrying into it, instead doing silly things like writing books. What an oversight.
The worst bit is all the suggestions, which invariably begin ‘why don’t you’. This month, friends and relatives have suggested:
‘Why don’t you submit another book proposal? Why don’t you retrain as a teacher? Why don’t you start a daily YouTube broadcast where you do those hilarious impressions of yours? Why don’t you launch a website and get so much traffic that companies like Marks & Spencer pay you to advertise on it?’ And my personal favourite, ‘Why don’t you pick daffodils and sell them in the market?’
The answer to each one is the same, boringly. I can’t afford to spend six months writing another book and not make a penny from the sales (the standard publishing arrangement if you’re not Pippa Middleton); I can’t afford to spend two years working in ‘challenging’ inner-city schools earning a grand a month (my nerves would never stand it, even if my bank balance could); I can’t afford to pay a web engineer to design me some online thingummy so I can tell people jokes for free in the hope that it occurs to Marks & Spencer that the future of its business lies in sponsoring the mental meanderings of a writer in the grip of a midlife crisis; and I can’t afford to pick daffodils from municipal displays on roundabouts and grass verges and end up in prison for thieving.
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