Gainful employment

Mark phoned with the doleful news that some people at work (oil industry) have been made redundant and sent home. Not him, so far,  but it has made him horribly aware of his own vulnerability. He has spent all day trying to be very, very efficient and inconspicuous, and privately agonising over every little time in the past when he was ever naughty or impatient or grumpy. He is Mark, so there won’t have been many of these, and he is so mild even when he is burstingly livid that probably nobody would have noticed anyway. I told him that very probably would still love him even if we were poor, but he said rather drily that that wasn’t the point, and in any case that was one assertion he would really much rather not put to the test.

It has made me feel slightly guilty about my own lack of anything that might be seriously considered as gainful occupation: since you can hardly include hanging about on the taxi rank in that category. For quite a while I have been working in a more or less helpful sort of way with a chap who had a legal consultancy, which I liked because I could do it when I felt like and just stay in front of my own computer here: but he has just relocated to Warrington which is not ace for commuting from the Lake District.

Mark is not very encouraging about my employment prospects, but I am quite sure I could have some if only I put my mind to it. I actually applied to the Co-op to be a funeral director last week, which is a career that has always appealed enormously. It was quite hopeful to start with, because they sent me back a psychometric test to see if I might be suitable: however I failed it spectacularly. I am not sure if they felt I was unsuitable for work in general or just work with them in particular: because it can’t be that difficult to deal with dead people: it isn’t as if they are going to get upset or offended or anything. Anyway, that was the end of that as a potential new career, and I am going to have to think of something else.

This is of course the difficulty. I have got so many other urgent things I have got to do in my life it is quite difficult to fit in regular attendance somewhere else, particularly when I am busy. I like driving a taxi because I can just do it whenever I want to. Of course there are some times when it is a good idea to be driving it (Saturday night) and others when it is a bit of a waste of time (Tuesday afternoons) but that aside it really doesn’t matter if I turn up at one o’clock or half-past-three in the afternoon or nine o’ clock in the morning: and once I get there I can pour myself a nice cup of tea and just wait for something to happen. If it is August then lots of things will happen: and if it is February they won’t.

There is a great deal of collective musing on the taxi rank at this time of year about what else we might do to make a sensible living. There was a time just before Christmas when working for the Royal Mail appealed to everybody very much because of the minimal entry qualifications, paid holidays and pension scheme. We all talked about it a lot but of course none of us actually did anything about it, largely because we are all guiltily aware that we are unemployable. Such conversations are popular at moments of downturn in trade, such as the current one which has been brought about by it being February.

I don’t mind this particularly because of the abundance of library books, letters to write and of course having my own blog to keep me occupied, not to mention eating dried pineapple and drinking Earl Grey tea out of my flask, and gazing absently up the lake towards the Langdales. It is a very pleasant way to spend the day, the difficulty being that for at least half of the year it doesn’t earn very much money.

The theory is that we all save up during the summer when things are busy, and then have enough money to see us comfortably through the winter, but like pirates arriving in port with a haul of treasure, none of us ever do. (One of us actually has a provable genetic tendency to this behaviour, his great-great-grandfather was hanged at Whitehaven for piracy) What actually happens is that we all make enough money to pay for a night in the pub, a new tyre and the ingredients for a large fried dinner and then instantly buzz off home, where we stay until poverty forces us out again. This behaviour condemns us to sitting here pointlessly and pennilessly for hours in February when we outnumber the tourists by about three to one. Somebody once did a study of exactly these practices in taxi drivers and confirmed it, there is scientific evidence: we are all stupid.

This, of course, might be why none of us can ever find employment anywhere else. I might just be stuck with this. I had better keep all my fingers crossed for Mark.