Job Jealousy

Now I am a jobless, I look at people differently. As if they are little units of economic activity. Pretty much everyone I see is earning more than me. This is not tricky as I am currently earning zilch.

I have developed a new game, it’s not very sophisticated but it’s keeping me amused. It goes by the original, but to the point, name of “Guess the Profession”. Based on nothing more than an outfit, haircut, facial expression and a reasonable dose of unfair stereotyping, I am taking a punt on people’s jobs.

By way of example, this evening in Spitalfields I saw:

1. Man, brown hair all mussed up in a kind of Russell Brand run out of Dax wax kind of way, battered brief case, vintage brogues, tight trousers, white shirt and large bunch of flowers. Clearly edits a glossy men’s magazine in Clerkenwell, where they throw around words like “zeitgeist”, “Jefferson Hack” and “post modernity”.


Off to meet my stylist girlfriend at Shoreditch House, where we’ll drink vodka tonics and talk about Hedi Slimane, Vampire Weekend and the ironic super powers of deck shoes.

2. Lady, mid-forties, big hair, bigger shoes, status bag, slightly panicked look in her eyes. Partner in a corporate law firm. Obvs. Walking to a swanky new restaurant in Shoreditch for a client dinner, confused that only one road away from the city, people gather on corner drinking pints of fizzy lager and wearing clothes that look like they were bought at a jumble sale. Have these people not got proper jobs?



I do hope my new Birkin bag doesn’t get swiped by one of these unsavouries.....

3. Leggy blonde with bright red lipstick, lace headband across forehead, vintage playsuit and gladiator sandals. Knocking back pints of cider and delicately smoking Marlboro Lights. Hmmmm....tricky....dressing in the uniform of Shoreditch could indicate a multitude of things. She could be a stylist or a ‘professional blogger’ (that seems to be the profession of many a young trendster) or maybe she spends her days hanging out with skinny wannabe rock stars and creating their album artwork from abandoned syringes and dog shit. But no. I wager that she works in the vintage shop off Brick Lane, whilst trying to kick-start a career in journalism. She has so far had an article accepted for Dazed and Confused and is somewhat nonchalantly chuffed about this.




I think I’m probs looking good enough to be snapped by a trend spotter, sure to see my vintage clad ass in the ‘trendy people’ section of a glossy mag before long. Make it Vogue, please God, make it Vogue....

4. Man, tight white t-shirt with a deep v, exposing toned glimpse of chest. Slim trousers and pointy shoes. Graphic designer, for sure. Works for an uber cool graphic design company in Holborn. Spends his days in front of his shiny apple mac supping super strong espressos, visualising concepts and re-branding brands.



I’ll help you design a super cool blog layout, then we’ll hang out at Milk and Honey drinking mojitos and if you’re really lucky I’ll take you home and show you my ipad....

I am sure I am entirely wrong. Number 1 was probably a plumber, number 2 a shop assistant, number 3 a lawyer and number 4 a hedge fund honey.

I wonder if people look at me and think: ginger hair, short skirt, slightly lost look in the eyes. Definitely a jobless waster.



She gave up lawyering to follow her dream of unemployment, poverty and days spent wondering round East London trying to work out strangers’ professions. Her parents are so proud..... 

Ginger in denial

Summer is here. Happy days. Well it was a happy day. Now the sun is setting on the most glorious April evening, I have discovered my day of heavenly park lounging has given me SUN BURN. It’s April for fuck sake, who gets sunburned in April?

I know who, it’s the ginger in denial. I like to think of myself as relatively olive skinned for a red head. This is because I do not have the porcelain, Lily Cole a-like skin of the classic red head. This makes me complacent in the sun. I look back on holiday tans and think, pah, sun, I have gone brown before, despite your best efforts, I can do it again. I laugh in the face of your rays. UV don’t scare me.

I forget that previous tans have come from carefully monitored sunbathing and full body applications of sun cream, once every 5 minutes. Sometimes helped along with some Dove’s Summer Glow (it’s not cheating when it’s 90% moisturiser, right?).

So, of course, my smug, laissez-faire attitude earns me instant and unattractive blotchy red marks on my shoulder, face and chest. Thank the Lord I wasn’t wearing a string vest.


Sun, why do you refuse to be my friend?

Getting old joblessly

It’s a funny thing, your mid late 20s. A strange time for assessing what you have achieved, where you have got to at this the stage in your life where you have (supposedly) never been more beautiful and free and yet where all that comes next is likely to have the taint of age, wrinkles and contemplations of whether it really is ever too soon to start with the Botox.....Seriously, I want me a non-moving forehead and pillow cheeks.

Like Kylie....




Is that eyebrow arched in a coquettish way, love, or did it just get put back on in the wrong place?









Although, take heed, Kyles, how quickly it all gets out of hand......






It’s purty......











Overly-botoxed slebs aside, your mid 20s is really the first time you seriously sit back and take stock of where you have got to, and you really should have got somewhere good. You know, have had a novel published about your precocious sexual exploits, set up your own ethical e-business selling cupcakes made from recycled chewing gum, directed your own feature film on some up-and-coming band writing lyrics in their own blood.....etc. etc. And all by the age of 25.

I am over 25, have done none of these things and appear to be starting my life all over again. This is not good. In columns-of-cool terms, I would be languishing at the bottom with tango tans and Joe McElderry.

Anyways, this weekend, my lovely friends and I - the script writer, the arts officer, the TV lovelies and the jobless waster (that would be me, just to signpost) - were sitting in a Bristol pub, supping the West Country’s finest alco-apples, all figuring out where we come in on the grand “what’s hot and what’s not” column of life.

We’re talking about relationships. Of course, what else? We’re a generation of women who grew up with More’s position of the month, Sex and the City and Bridget Jones, complete with the stigma of cat ownership.



We’re all in relationships (none of us have cats....yet).

Gone for us are the days of waking up in bed with a random, with a pounding head and a mouth like an ashtray, our pants over a lampshade and shame in our bellies. Gone also are the days when twenty eight V&Ts and a bucket of any-thing-but-chardonnay would serve as lubrication for a Saturday night, leading to the unsuitable liaisons and ill-advised table dancing.

But what I didn’t realise was that we had all got THERE. You know home-ownership, marriage, kids type of THERE (.....well I say we have all got there, I discount myself from this, as joblessness tends to mean that mortgages and babies are not top of my current to do list....sorry ma).

Six years ago, the chat would have been about how many unsuitable men we were dating, how wasted we had got the previous weekend and whether skinny jeans would ever catch on. This weekend we all sat there in our spray-on jeans and ironic knits, discussing the minefield of wedding invite lists, musing on the merits of wedding dresses from eBay, and considering how many exciting holidays were left until children came along and condemned us to an annual week in a “child friendly” resort in Lanzarote. Gulp.

It’s not only relationships that mark out the parameters of this new grown-up-ness, it’s also CAREER CONSIDERATIONS. Where am I in my profession? Me: errr, my current profession is being the oldest work experience girl in town. Where am I going? Me: ever so quickly into bankruptcy. When will I be in a safe enough position to get knocked up and still have a decent job when I come back to work? Me: never, never arrrgggh, I’m going to be forced into childlessness through my own self-imposed impecuniosity*.

Surely we are not old enough to have to think about this? Surely.....?

But we are.

How quickly time pilfers our dewy-skinned 20s and lands us almost straight from irresponsible student-hood to fully fledged, crow-footed adulthood. How quickly we are supposed to do something amazing in order to count as being precociously talented. I imagine that, unless I were to take up something obscure like caber throwing (I’m ginger, I could pass as a Scott) or model railway building, I am probably too old to be considered a bright young talent in any endeavour.



How hard can it be?














Not that it’s not exciting times when friends get married, have meteoric rises in their incredible careers and contemplate parenthood. It just feels like this new stage of life has crept up on us and I have woken up at 28, jobless and ill-equipped to cope with the new adult order.

Anyways, all this over-analysing can only lead me to the conclusion that I am having some sort of quarter-life crisis.

As my bank balance will not currently allow me to react to this phase in the classic male mid-life crisis way – buy a Ferrari and hire a bevy of Russian call girls – I shall instead have to distract myself from impending agedness by purchasing a new tyre for my bicycle and treating myself to a large glass of red wine from the pub down the road.

Rock on.

* This is ever such a good word I learnt at law school and like to sporadically throw into conversation to make me appear proper learned, along with such gems as res ipsa loquitor (although don't ask me to explain what it means).

No. 15 (jobless + 57 days)

M is my boyfriend and he is a Creative. Everyone wants to be a flipping creative these days but M actually is one. It’s in his blood. He’s a musician.

He sits for hours with his fancy computer programmes and sliding bits (technical terms) creating catchy tunes and epic songs. I am in awe of his dedication and motivation; he literally has to be dragged away from his desk. We barter. You can work till one in the morning every night, provided you take the weekend off.
I feel like I am in a joint custody arrangement with Logic Pro 9, his music software. Logic Pro 9 gets M in the week; I get M weekends, school holidays and for special occasions.


I, on the other hand, am like the sloth of creativity, the snail of scribes. I am easily distracted. So these are a few things I have been distracting myself with of late:

1. True Blood – series one

As if I even need to explain. It’s vampire soft porn set in the Deep South. Complete with fang banging, humans getting high on vampire blood, slutty Southern boys and Alexander Skarsgaard. Seriously, what is there not to love about this show?

2. The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid

Beautiful, lyrical and tense, this book is the monologue of Changez, a bearded Pakistani who meets an American stranger in a cafe in Lahore to whom Changez tells tales of his fractured relationship with America and the West. Proper good.

3. An Education

Carey Mulligan, how I love thee in this film with your pretty brown eyes, amazing up-do and caustic one liners. Plus, another Skarsgaard (Peter)....hurrah!

4. Millennium Trilogy – Steig Larson

These are the kind of books which you consume. I ripped through the pages of the three hefty tomes as fast as I could, desperate to discover what happened to the implausible and overly sexed characters. Then I finished and felt a bit dirty.

No. 14 (jobless + 52 days)

All you need is love (apparently)

A girl could be forgiven for thinking that the only thing in life she needs to achieve happiness is the love of a good man. Snag yourself a bloke and you’re sorted. Jobs are just to keep you in Louboutin.

I know that this is not a new point, but that makes it no less valid. Read any glossy magazine, watch any shiny American drama trying to win the hearts and minds of young women (with a schmaltzy soundtrack and a lot of tearful doe-eyed female characters – see Grey’s Anatomy) and the clear-as-a-bell message is that happiness is inextricably linked to finding a fella.

Sex and the City is a perfect example of this. Brilliant, glossy, high octane fun and pitched as a programme about female empowerment, with feisty fashionistas lapping up all New York has to offer. All the characters have jobs, too. Hurrah!

Hello ladies, nice pointy shoes

But take a closer look and these jobs are somewhat pushed to the sidelines. Charlotte quits her art gallery job to have kids before she is even pregnant and Samantha gets places professionally by sleeping with her boss, her clients, the sandwich man (or his low carb equivalent) etc. etc.

Then there is Carrie, whose writing career forms the basis of the series, although she seems to write only one column, spends all her money on Manolos and has to be bailed out financially by her boyfriend (not that I am suggesting SATC would have been better if Carrie spent more time putting her money into low interest bonds...but still).

Finally there’s Miranda, the high powered lawyer, possibly the most careerist of them all. But she doesn’t half get punished for it. She gets the ultimate SATC punishment.....the crappy clothes - ranging from unflattering ensembles of shit green or mud brown (which any ginger knows makes you either look like a leprechaun or an autumnal tree) to garish dresses which don’t fit her properly. Then – as if the poor woman needed any more afflictions – they give her a scarily ginger baby.

Ahhghgh, her hair, his hair, that dress...

Maybe there should be more attention placed on happiness through our jobs – especially as you are likely to spend more hours at work than at home and more hours with your boss than your bloke. Sure, they say no one ever dies wishing they’d spent more time in the office but equally, how you feel about your job is vital for your overall happiness.

We could have reality TV programmes dedicated to finding the perfect job. I know we already have the Apprentice but it doesn’t really count because Alan Sugar looks like a small, furry woodland creature and working for him seems about as exciting as watching Time Team dubbed into Latvian. How about Streetmate – but for jobs not dates – Davina McCall could drag a contestant round to jobs in various offices and see which ones he fancies enough to go for an interview with. Streetjob (or some other more approporiate and less "lady of easy virtue" sounding title).

Maybe there should be more pages in the women’s glossies dedicated to career clinics and advice on climbing the career ladder (in more proactive ways than wearing Chloe outfits and bringing your boss skinny soy lattes three times a day). These magazines could include quizzes such as, “how do I know my job’s the one?” – with questions like “does my job fulfil me?”, “do I pretend I have a headache to avoid going in?” and “do I find myself looking at other jobs behind my job’s back?”

Just a thought.

No. 13 (jobless + 45 days)

Love is a losing game

This week, I have mostly been job hunting. Pimping myself out to contacts around London.

Trying to get a job feels a bit like dating.

Most girls in their twenties and thirties will be all too familiar with the(occasionally) excruciating dating scene.

It’s not even the truly heinous dates which get you down....y’know, the ones where your date tells inappropriate jokes about disabled people, offensive to the extent you have to turn and walk out of the pub (seriously, this happened to me) or the one where your date tells you, on the FIRST date, that he is actually already seeing someone (again, true fact). These at least provide you witty anecdotes with which to regale your friends, or material for your book on the 50 worst dates.

Nope, it’s the “no-spark” dates that get you down, the dates with perfectly attractive, funny and clever boys, with whom there is just no spark, no matter how much you try to conjure one up through copious amounts of liquor. The “no-spark” dates get you thinking: if you can’t connect with the good ones, who are so few and far between anyway, what chance is there of ever finding love, the tiniest needle in the haystack of hormones that is our metropolis?

“No-spark” dates go like this. You meet a guy in a bar, online, at an after-work drinks party, down an alley...wherever...and you decide you like each other enough for a date. He seems nice and he looks good in stripes (we East London girls love a bit of Gallic charm) and you are, well, borderline OK even if you say so yourself. Magic.


Only it’s not magic. It’s fun and all; you share some shandies, move on to vodka tonics and end with a shot of sambuca. You talk about your childhood: his parents divorced, yours moved around but otherwise normal, happy backgrounds. He’s hoping his rock band takes off, you’re hoping there’ll be another series of Flight of the Concords (ah Brett, we miss you, and your wolf-embossed leisure wear).

There’s no electricity but you’re having a nice time. Average nice, alcohol fuelled, average nice. Your hand slips into his on the way out of the pub. You share a beer-breathed kiss on the street. Probably with tongues. Your heart’s not in it, but it seems only polite, on both your parts.

When you get home (alone), you sit on the sofa. Your housemates are all asleep and it’s too late to dissect the somewhat lacklustre date. You feel a bit empty. You know he won’t call. This doesn’t bother you because you like him; you don’t. This bothers you because it’s still rejection.

Well, that is what job hunting is like.

I’ve met wonderful, amazing people for coffees over which they impart advice, but I leave feeling more confused and further away from the JOB than before. Not because they haven’t been helpful, they all have been, but because getting a JOB just feels so far from my grasp. Every job seems to call for a special set of skills, which I don’t have, some special spark which I can’t bring.

Applying for jobs online, has forced me to attempt to write witty and concise covering letters –like writing my own dating profile - citing all the ways in which I am fabulous and should be offered a job for which I am not really qualified.

I went to a job interview recently, where I was quizzed for an hour before they escorted me to the lifts with a pitying look in their eyes. Not sure I even like them, but that’s not the point, because they still haven’t phoned.

No. 12 (Jobless + 40 days)

Don't worry be happy

There was a book reviewer at my kitchen table today. He appeared to be the remnant of a particularly heavy night my flat mate had been on the night before. I made him tea and plied him with questions, probably none too welcome questions given his expression which appeared to scream: “shut up, you irritatingly annoying early morning talker. I have drunk my body rate in literary Courvoisier and I feel like a small rodent-like mammal is currently decomposing in my mouth.”

Probably to stop my questions, he asked me what I did. I gave the big sigh I have become accustomed to emitting when faced with this question: “weeelllll, I used to be a lawyer but I gave it all up to sew sequins and dustbin lids onto the clothes of Cheryl Cole”. He didn’t laugh. I later discovered he had left sleeping tablets on the sitting room table, so I shall attribute his impassive expression to the drugs and not to any deficiency in my witty one-liners.

I told him the truth. I am figuring it out but in the meantime I am working at a charity. For free. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realised that I sounded like one of those people who weave their socks out of macro-biotic yogurt and sport a mono-brow.

He turned his bleary eyes to me and asked “Is that because all the people who work for charity look very smug and happy?”

Yes, yes it is.

He makes a good point though; henceforth maybe I should only target jobs where the workers look very smug and happy. This may leave me with limited options, I can think of jobs in which people look smug (bankers, hedge fund managers, BBC Breakfast presenters and new-media dahlings in fluorescent trainers and trilbies)....

smug banker dude

.....or happy (archaeologists always seem quite happy, as do biochemists and the guy who works at Bethnal green tube station and sings soul classics).

happy archaeologist ladies

But rarely are people both at the same time. I have decided this is my aim: happiness with a large spoonful of smug on the side.