Careering towards a career?

"Job? Did someone say job? Where? Where is it? Get out of my way, it's mine."

It’s the week of the Careers’ Fair. The one by the end of which all finalists dream they will have been handed a job over the table (or stand), based purely on the outstanding quality, originality and (probably feigned) interest of their five minute conversation with the recruiters. Something to the tune of, “Don’t bother applying online, son (daughter doesn’t have quite the same ring to it), we’ll have you right here, right now. In these last five minutes you’ve clearly demonstrated your fantastic organisational skills, ability to work in a team and charm your way through any conversation.”

Backtrack slightly. This may be everyone’s dream, but in terms of the Careers' Fair, is only realistic for those who relish the idea of selling their soul, since they're more or less the only companies there. Souls can bring in good money, I grant you, but Faust’s death knell echoes far too loudly in my ears for such a career to appeal. (The fact that I cannot do Maths, which most of the exhibitors, for want of a better word, require, is beside the point).



"If I look thoughtful and teeming with ideas, someone will snap me up…"

In spite of the perils of soul-trading, the honeypots that are Deloitte, KPMG and BNP Paribas, to name a few, were not wanting for a new intake of worker bees. Unfortunately for the bees, said companies do not, I think, actually hand out jobs over the table for them to get stuck into. This results in a very loud, anxious buzzing emanating from the room. It's as if all the bees in the world have buzzed on over to the same place because that is where the only flowering plant left in existence grows, and they're all just desperate to be the ones to earn their place in the hive by getting a little bit of nectar.

 (Small, largely unconnected aside, triggered by the mention of nectar: The Durham Revue, on the other hand, demonstrated in their Returners' Show last week that they have exactly the right idea about what nectar is: a stream of thought-provoking questions that cause the juices of the brain to flow abundantly with wonder and curiosity, expressed beautifully in song form by Ben Whittle)

The thing about the Careers' Fair is that everyone (myself included) seems to forget that these stands are not in fact the only flowering plants left in the world. Even if the garden of jobs is somewhat barren at the moment after the drought of the last couple of years, there are other jobs; it's just that most of them don't seed themselves on your doorstep.

If you are not one of these worker bees then your dream job will probably fall into one of the following categories regarding application:

a). A military career, which has a rigorous but not quite so cut-throat application system as City jobs.

b). There is a plentiful supply of graduate schemes in your field, advertised and to be applied for online.

c). Nepotism (not a bad thing, as long as it's you getting the job and not someone else).

d). None of the above. You are still panicking.

Mine falls into category d), which means looking for weeks and weeks of work experience. But those weeks are interesting and, dare I say it, exciting. The only downside is that while the soul-sellers are earning themselves a nice pile of cash on an internship to fund their final year, I wince every time I have to top up my Oyster card.

Still, the way I see it is this: 'career' is a terrifying noun. But, it is also a verb, one that implies a certain lack of control, as opposed to direction. As in the internal monologue, 'I am on my horse careering towards a fence and I can't stop. Shit.' Or the newspaper report, 'When the steering and the brakes stopped working his car careered off the road.' Since there's nothing like a bit of adrenalin to liven life up a bit, careering seems to me to be the best way to arrive at a career.

Plus, while careering is an electrifying experience for you, it also provides mountains of material for inducing merriment in the work place du jour. You will be able to tell tales of how you careered towards a fence on a horse (or similar work-related adventure such as bumping into Boris on his bike/Ellie Goulding in a cafe, asking him/her for an interview and getting it published in your local rag). This, naturally, will demonstrate your fantastic organisational skills, ability to think on your feet and charm your way through any conversation, just as in the sugar-coated thoughts of the wannabe City-workers.

Think outside the box, the hive, or what you will and then, as if by magic (but actually by a wonderful adventure of roundabout, up and down careering), you have… a job.

The case for classic recycling

Imagine a world in which there was never again a new novel and no more plays that capture the age in which they were written. Stare helplessly as the sources of lilting poetry from the round earth's imagin'd corners dry up, and the swords of cynical essayists are put up.

Do not go so far as to picture the ever-increasing global population descending into a sort of warped barbarity sprung from cultural thirst. Desperate individuals would not be trading pounds of flesh to get their bloody fingers on one of the last remaining Complete Works. A hundred years down the line, one would not find one's neighbour executing a brutal murder in a quintessential town or village and subsequently setting out clues by which the perpetrator may be discovered, just to give others something akin to the thrill of deciphering the latest murder mystery before the detective himself. There would still be copies of Shakespeare and an incessant supply of Ian Rankin thrillers.

In this parallel world, publishers would continue to publish, booksellers to sell, and the masses to buy and read. It is only the voices that rise up from the ivory white pages in inky authority that would cease to exist. Mr McCall Smith would never pen another 44 Scotland Street story, Mr Dawkins would choke on the chaff that he has yet to share with us, and there would be no post-Iraq/Afghanistan-war elegies to match the nostalgia and deep sadness of the likes of Brideshead Revisited. (This last, I realise, assumes that there will at some point be a time post-Iraq/Afghanistan-war, but never mind). Nothing new would ever be written, in any form.

Now here's the reason for the creation of this hypothetical dystopia. A while ago I came across an article envisaging a world in which there was no new music. Tracks already in existence could be endlessly rerecorded and rereleased; I can hear now a dubstep version of Day Tripper, a violin concerto that sounds distinctly like Insomnia, and a sat-nav-esque selection of voices for each and every pop song (English man/English woman/Irish man/Irish...you get the idea). I saw at once that this would by no means be a tragedy. If all the many dances of the world were brought together in one riotous tangle of limbs, swaying and leaping and jumping, it would be as if four dimensional fireworks were covering the sky, each giving a blazing glory to different aspects of the others. Display over, this glory would then be forever visible, a halo glowing for all time. Likewise, if all the lyrics of the world were married with all the melodies and beats, each would reveal some previously unnoticed diamond on the sole of the other's shoe. A new sort of musical intertextuality would appear. Imagine!

Glancing through from the office into the bookshop where I work, I realised this wouldn't quite work for the world's literature. Poems could perhaps be expanded into novels, and novels condensed into poems or plays. Yet literature has only the medium of language, whereas music boasts words, sound and rhythm. Fleetingly I doubted the worth of all the books around me; there just didn't seem to be enough scope for development. I felt like that narrator - whatshisname? readitatschool? - like him, I would be borne back ceaselessly into the past...

...Nick Carraway. The Great Gatsby. Relief washed over me like a bucket of cold water on a hot day as my thoughts danced through the movements. The Great Gatsby... the photo on my Penguin edition that I love... the man and the woman sitting on a diving board and looking out over the water. I dived into the shop and cooled off after my panic. Of course there would be scope, for I also love the leather-bound special edition copy of Gatsby, there on the shelf. From across the room I heard a copy of Moby Dick, a book I've never been inclined to read, suddenly calling out to me like the sirens to Odysseus, with its rough-cut, rip-look pages.

Visualising my bookshelf at home I saw the elegant edition of Orwell's Critical Essays I'd bought, chiefly because of its cover. It matched his Narrative Essays, so I'd had to have both. I've dipped in and out of them, but I won't pretend I bought them because I just had to read them from cover to cover. My mind's eye is currently oggling the Vintage edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, each page a delicate yet resilient and understated frame exhibiting fourteen lines of the most powerful poetry in existence. And all that space to be scribbled on!

You might call me 'a sucker for marketing' - though I'd rather you phrased it as 'an admirer of beautiful objects' - but that still isn't quite right. A publisher could put the most glorious jacket ever conceived on Martin Amis' London Fields and I wouldn't buy it; I just don't like the book. In an ideal (and probably realistic) world, the above scenario would never arise. But if it did it would by no means be a dystopia. The covers that encase the words we love would multiply, each one a visual representation of an interpretation of the text within giving it a new and lasting light. The written word and the image would grow closer together, intertwine even; a system of classic recycling would take root in society.

I shall never again be ashamed to judge a book, in part at least, by its cover. Obviously I'd rather the twenty-first century had its own Evelyn Waugh, but if that wasn't possible, I could quite happily settle for Brideshead Rejacketed.

Roundabouts and traffic lights

Roundabouts are capitalist and traffic lights are socialist. So said my father on a recent family road trip through France. It wasn't a question, or even a ponderous effusion of a flimsy idea, but a self-assured statement of fact.

And he was right. Roundabouts are the epitome of capitalist theory (albeit simplified). When trying to get a leg up into the heady heights of the 'real world', you will put your foot on whoever or whatever is close to you, whether they be a relative stranger in physical proximity or a long-standing family friend. Likewise, as you cruise through town in, let's say, your banged up Renault Clio, you might perchance find yourself tailing a fat cat in his 4x4 as you approach said capitalist junction. Take full advantage of the other roundabout drivers who delay their entry for a split second while they curse the gas-guzzling monster (in the countryside this happens less frequently, 4x4s being a necessary aide to country life in many cases) and mouse-like, slip in behind him. Lorries cars bikes vans stream in from the opposite side: exploit them as they obstruct the traffic immediately to your right. A roundabout is like society - or human nature, more specifically: it's a survival of the fittest, a car-eat-car world.

The traffic light, however, favours the lazy, the bleary-eyed, those whose reactions are as slothful as a sloth hanging heavily from his branch. And as these sloths slope slothfully into the road, the rest of us must sit there in our cars vibrating and pulsating at the violet hour. I have not been driving long in the grand scheme of things - a mere four years - and yet I am certain that as many hours of my life have been frittered away, the seconds and milliseconds drummed out by my fingers on the steering wheel with a patience for their task, born of an impatience of the situation at hand as I sit at yet another red light. Four hours. That's long enough, by my calculation, to make and eat 120 pieces of toast, read a novel from beginning to end, watch two films (plus bonus features) or make love several times.

Such thrills must remain fantasies for those of us faced with the ubiquitous red eyes of Sauron that are traffic lights. We must tap feet, fiddle with gearsticks and fire off expletives at the car in front (who is oblivious to the fact that the light has actually now turned green). I'd like to take a picture of one, upload it onto photoshop and edit it using red-eye. I'd make it sea grey-blue or mossy green with scratchings of brown bark. Then I could gaze lovingly into its persistent eye. I can't deny that I am filled with a glee that surpasses the rewards of roundabouts when Sauron's eye is turned away and I am faced with his green other half. But it is nevertheless a glee full of hatred for something that is nothing other than an enemy, and even if I do defeat him from time to time, I'd rather he wasn't there at all.

The roundabout, though, there's an inspired invention. (I am discounting the mini roundabout, the feeblest of the feeble, as it submits to being driven straight over without raising an eyebrow, thereby failing entirely as a junction and succeeding only in inflating the egos of road users who get a kick from walking all over people). But as I was saying, the roundabout is truly magnificent; the king of the road, crowned in glory. Driving along, you spy a green, flower-topped mound ahead. Aha! Slow up, get in lane, indicate. You look right, your foot hovers, tentative, over accelerator and brake - will there be a gap, won't there? Yes! - no, Disappointment loiters above your passenger seat, ready to sit down and strap in. Yet you don't stop, accelerating at the last minute, and he flies out of the open window with a whining scream lost in the buzz of other engines. Slam your foot down and revel in the roar of the revs as you follow the artful curve. None of those right-angled, stop/start, traffic-light-controlled crossroads. Feel the immeasurable satisfaction as you glide seamlessly from one road to the next.

A roundabout by any other name certainly would not smell as sweet - there would be no initial 'r' to roll and recreate the revs, you would not be able to drive round the curvaceous 'ou' or to exit with the clipped, business-like 'about'. 'Traffic light' says it all, too. 'Tr' is the noise a silent adolescent makes when he is unimpressed and unamused and the hard 'c' rudely forces you to stop abruptly. Having 'light' in there is just plain misleading, light bulbs being synonymous with good ideas.

I'm not a political person. However, I am convinced of three things. One, that roundabouts are indeed capitalist and traffic lights, socialist. Two, that I infinitely prefer the former. Three, that therefore I must be a capitalist, and so in some vague way be a politicised person. Wouldn't it all be so much easier if instead of agonising over the pros and cons of academies, free milk for under-fives and the funding for Trident and choosing the best of a fairly unattractive lot of politicians that way, we just selected our preferred party based on their similarities to road junctions?