One of the strangest things about not working is experiencing, for the first time, what your local area is like on a weekday afternoon. Weird is the answer in my case.
I have lived in East London for nearly five years and, despite the occasionally over-the-top Shoreditch twatish-ness that has come to define some of my area, I loves it. I really do. I love it for its bars and restaurants tucked away off streets with amusing sobriquets such as “Murder Mile” and I love it for the Sunday Brick Lane markets, where vendors set up stalls at the side of the road selling used toothbrushes, single shoes and a multitude of rusty springs.
When I was working as a City lawyer, I felt that living in Bethnal Green was the equivalent to ordering salad with chips, the two concepts together (one bad, one good) cancel each other out. Obviously.
Yet Bethnal Green is all manner of strange when you are out and about during working hours. By way of example, on my way up West early one afternoon to meet a man about a dog, I strolled merrily past the soul music singing tube worker at Bethnal Green station and skipped down the escalator deep in thought about something or other. Maybe about the faux fur coat I have been lusting after to keep out the bone-chilling cold or maybe I was pondering the West Lothian question or reflecting on the possibility of a hung Parliament following this year’s general elections (sometimes I attempt to be high brow, even if just in my head).
Anyways, I didn’t realise that my pace of descent was faster than that of the chap in front of me until I had nearly collided with him. The man turned around and leered at me with a face which resembled that of a shabby-suited, scabrous, semi-toothless 50 year old Pete Docherty.... after a rough night.
I let out an involuntary yelp of fright and he lifted up one scraggy sleeve and lamped me one across the side of my face.
Cripes. Escalator assault by geriatric East End celebrity-a-like tramp. Awesome.
But it’s not just random incidents of assault that make me feel weird about being home in the day. It’s also the little things that I never knew about. The fact that every day at about 2 pm the kids from the local school all troop down my street, muddy legged and scraggy haired, presumably after some collective sporting endeavour. Or the dude with the fluorescent jacket who cleans around the bottom of the trees in our street (only the trees, nothing else) and the little boy across the road who walks his huge staffies every morning at 11 am with his mum and makes me feel old as I catch myself wondering whether he ought not to be in school.
It’s funny, having the time to watch the world around you go about its business; doing jobs it hates but earning money nonetheless, getting beaten up by the bigger boys in school football matches, having a routine and being part of something.
When I was an office monkey, I thought there was nothing more pointless I could be doing. So it’s strange when I realise that being jobless sometimes feels a lot like being irrelevant.
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