ANYTHING TO AVOID A PROPER JOB

Looking over the accounts of the business this week I have concluded that the recession has at last caught up with Acme Labels Inc. We are down on last year and unless matters improve soon we shall be heading for Carey Street. Like all businesses we are subject to the vagaries of new and inconvenient technology and an ever-changing market; more and more people are printing their own labels these days (or making do without) and the High Street DVD rental shops that once formed our core market are now largely a relic of the past.

I am not yet ready to retire - nor can I afford to - so I have been idly flicking through job advertisements only to find myself shuddering at the thought of ever working again for someone other than myself.

I am fortunate in that the labels business is not our only source of income. I still do a little consultancy and writing. So I was really looking for further project and writing opportunities rather than a 9 to 5 job in a company. But what surprised me was the dread I encountered when contemplating the job descriptions that flashed up on the screen.

Fear of imprisonment would not be too strong a phrase to describe this; the fear both of physical incarceration in an office (often a great big office) and mental incarceration of being at someone else's beck and call the whole time.

This was the principal reason that I escaped from the Civil Service in mid career in 1982 - an act which every one of my contemporaries thought to be mad at the very least. Had I stayed I would now be enjoying a most comfortable pension and my salary would have mounted (I assume) rather nicely in the interim as well. I could have been a pillar of the community and, if I had been really effective, perhaps even received a minor honour as well. These things do happen.

But I felt then - and looking at today's job advertisements confirms this - that I was selling my soul. I needed to be free to do my own thing, work in my own way. I wanted to be creative. Consultancy was acceptable because I was largely on my own - I travelled a lot and I met many interesting people all over Europe. I was even, for a time, reasonably well rewarded, though my financial career has always resembled an alpine range in its high peaks and low troughs.

So I was cheered this week at the same time as peering into the next threatening financial abyss to read an account of work undertaken by the Institute of Employment Studies which shows that people who value creativity above wealth are actually happier and therefore better able to survive in these tough economic times without losing their equilibrium.

Many of these people (and I suspect that they include many of my friends on Purple Coo) make their living by mixing a range of free-lance projects and part-time jobs. They may not earn much, their report says, but working in this way does make them happy.

Three quarters, it suggests, are satisfied with their working arrangements as opposed to a national average figure of only 44 per cent.

What!? Less than half of all people working are happy with their lot? That adds up to a vast number of miserable people. And if each is dragging the other down it is no wonder we are a country beset by social problems. We may or we may not be a 'broken society' as David Cameron likes to claim, but we are certainly an unhappy and unfulfilled society if these figures are to be believed.

Certainly when I consider my contemporaries there are very few with whom I would rather change positions. And it would take wild horses to make me leave my comfortable little office (the smallest room in the house, but I like the feeling of snugness with everything to hand and no space for intruders), other than for a brief and occasional trip to London or Brussels for a little bit of work-related excitement.

The one thing that you could say about working in an organisation is that it provides a ready bunch of social acquaintances. In the 1960s and 70s when everyone went to the pub at lunchtime and on a Friday evening, this was all rather fun. But even that pleasure has gone today.

By contrast it is the stay-at-homers who now have all the fun using the time they don't spend commuting for social-networking on the internet, that great water-cooler in the sky.

So rather than being tempted back I shall just keep plodding on, confident in the knowledge that I am happy and that something will turn up. For that is what somethings always do, I tell myself; they turn up. Most people find a way of muddling through if the shoe really pinches. Having lost all his money, Jeffrey Archer sat down and wrote a best-seller. You never know, I may just have to do that. Anything to avoid a 'proper' job.

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE WHITE RABBIT

The other day I chanced on an exceptional seasonal blog written by my dear friend ElizabethM who, in words and pictures, brilliantly described the sheer untainted beauty of the our current landscape-in-winter spectacle.

I commented then that I thought snow had a much greater effect on the world than just its property of making everything bask in a white glow; it's much more than just something that turns hedges into works of art (which Elizabeth had so very beautifully illustrated in her photographs). Rather it's as though we've turned the page of a magic book that takes us through a secret door and into the wonderful world of the White Rabbit.

Many of you will remember the 1950 film, starring the inimitable Jimmy Stewart, about a mythical white rabbit named Harvey. A six-foot,three-and-one-half-inch tall rabbit, in fact, invisible to everyone except Mr Elwood P. Dowd, a middle-aged, amiable (and somewhat eccentric) individual.

Harvey was a pooka, a benign but mischievous creature from Celtic mythology especially fond of social outcasts (like Elwood).
Elwood has driven his sister and niece (who live with him and crave normality and a place in 'society') to distraction by introducing everyone he meets to his friend, Harvey.

Eventually, the sister tries to have Elwood committed to an institution admitting inadvertently to the attending psychiatrist that, after so many years of putting up with the invisible rabbit, she herself sees Harvey every once in a while. This causes the psychiatrist to let Elwood out and lock the sister up instead. Confusion abounds.

It struck me the other day that the snow and ice now smothering Britain like one of those foaming spray on oven cleaners is itself in the nature of a mythical White Rabbit. It is our own collective Harvey, driving half the population mad while sending the other half into childhood regression and fantasy. Which, in the general scheme of things, is no bad thing.

Most of the time the rabbit - or the snow - isn’t there, but we still talk about it almost daily through the blank days of winter mud and rain. We wish for (or fear) its coming and pretend in mid-December that thick flakes of it are falling or will fall soon. The vitrines of our larger high streets turn this anticipation into an art form with industrial quantities of cotton wool reminding younger members of the population what this much heralded phenomenon is all about.

Depending on whether you have children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren you remember the winters of 1978, 1963 or even 1947. The years of course mean nothing to the young or the growing - ‘I could never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or twelve days and twelve nights when I was six’ - wrote Dylan Thomas - before going on to describe the liberating and educative effects of a gross snowfall on a child’s mind.

But, I wonder really if it is only a child’s mind that our snowy white Harvey actually liberates? At one level most of us are taken in by the sheer beauty of snow: the virginal, untouched, pristine loveliness of acre after acre of smooth and unbroken whiteness. Or by a forest of branches, laden with snow where twigs appear mere shadows sketched by some Heavenly hand to give definition to these ethereal white crystals.

This, though, is just the visible aspect of our pooka, the White Rabbit peeping out from behind the curtain once in a generation. The general and beneficial effects of snow run far deeper.

I notice the quietness immediately. The traffic has gone - or at least so much of it as to make a profound difference to the usual background bustle. People are walking again and as they walk they say ‘hello,’ and wish you well, much as they do on Christmas Day.

You can see children actually playing physically as opposed to hiding in their dangerously virtual worlds. Even the inebriates and binge drinkers seem to sober up. Beer cans and vodka bottles are not discarded into the hedges on a Friday night. Indeed, littering in general seems much reduced.

If you are still at work - or indeed a customer in a shop - there’s a shared complicity at having somehow defied the elements, a frontier spirit that immediately makes people more generous, as if we were all each others uncles and aunts with a family duty to support each other in adversity.

For people are simply nicer when it snows. And more philosophical, reflective. They have seen the White Rabbit and he has changed their perception of the world. Suddenly the hectic bustle of the January return to work, the winter heads-down of dark and busy days as we head towards the sunny uplands of Easter, has eased. With deep slow lying in most places, nothing seems quite so important. Snow metamorphoses into slow.

We think of others and of animals, too. The blackbird eating the berries of the Christmas wreath on the front door, excites sympathy more than anger, and concern for its welfare.

We can afford to be tolerant, self-indulgent; our White Rabbit is handing out excuses for days off and extra hours in a warm bed, while reminding us to provide unfrozen water and plenty of grain for the birds and to take extra care on the ice.

If, like the Eskimos we were permitted 64 words for snow, I’d make sure that the word for a large scale and enduring blanket of whiteness - a six-foot-three-and-one-half-inch rabbit that makes us a calmer and more gentle race - was ‘Harvey’.

THE RATTLE IN THE LETTERBOX

I have just looked out and re-written a couple stories for the BBC’s My Story competition and realised afterwards that they were both about paranormal experiences for which there appeared to no provision in the table of categories.

Now I am not normally someone that has much to do with the paranormal. I can’t make tables levitate (as, allegedly, could my great aunt); nor, so far as I know, do I have a ‘follower’ like my daughter who found herself shackled to a ghostly presence while doing charity work in Africa. She even sought help from someone who dealt in these sort of occult matters who diagnosed a young family member who couldn’t ‘rest’ properly.

And, yes, it was true. A Roman Catholic illegitimacy in a distant part of the family and an unbaptised child who had died and been refused burial on consecrated ground. No wonder the child felt aggrieved, it wasn’t her fault after all. But this was an untold and hushed up story, which my daughter knew nothing about.

Nor again do I have the ability to sense ‘presences,’ which my old father used to do regularly, especially when egged on by his third wife, Ella, who could practically relate the history of a building from sensing the cosmic vibrations coming through the walls and ceiling.

In fact you could say they made a rather spooky pair. She died shortly after him and at short notice. Her death, and the way in which she announced it in a telephone call to me quite out of the blue one morning in a voice still strong, bright and optimistic: ‘I’m sorry to be troubling you at work but I just thought I ought to tell you that I probably won’t be here much beyond next week,’ seemed to parallel exactly that of Laura in Saki’s eponymous story:

“I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

“But today is Saturday; this is serious!” gasps her friend Amanda.

“I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” Laura replies.

Laura tells her friend that she can be optimistic because she is not actually going to die, just presumably leave off being Laura; and this is indeed what happens, Laura resurfaces as a succession of verminous beasts that play havoc in the poultry pens of family members she had detested in this life.

In Ella’s case the optimism came from the prospect of being released from her current state of inconvenient separation from my father and so she embraced her ending with almost indecent haste.

The funeral took place in a little village church in Gloucestershire for reasons that I never fully understood, their religious persuasions being questionable to say the least. The Vicar was a jolly fellow, well briefed on their psychic history, and so was not in the least fazed when during his eulogy the heavy oak door of the church creaked open and no-one, visible at least to the rational eye, came in.

Someone shut the door and sat down. The vicar resumed and the door creaked opened again. That this was my father descended to collect Ella and to have a spot of mischievous fun seemed obvious to anyone that knew them. Again the door was closed and this time, bolted. Ghosts are so bad about shutting doors after them.

But this Christmas-tide I did experience a psychic phenomenon of my own and I suppose it was that that pushed me into submitting my paranormal tales to the BBC. (If ever they are published I shall no doubt not hesitate to tell you about them. If they are not published then I may recycle them and inflict them upon you anyway).

Our last Newfoundland dog, Sampson, died in the house where we live now about ten years ago. He used to lie beside the front door, curled up on the wide doormat and when he got up he stood so tall that his big head would rattle the interior flap of the letter box.

We still hear the letter box rattling from time to time. Usually just a single rattle - the flap lifting and falling shut. You'd swear the post had arrived but when you run to look - nothing. And it isn't the wind or a door being opened; we’ve checked that. It doesn’t happen very often and we think nothing of it.

But early the other morning about 5 am, in fact, I was going downstairs to the kitchen. I had reached the bottom of the stairs when the letterbox gave a tremendous and multiple rattle - flap, flap, flap - as though a postman with a parcel had found the doorbell inoperative and wanted to attract our attention. Exactly, in fact as though I had disturbed the sleeping dog and he had jumped up smartly and so rattled the flap.

But of course there was nothing or no-one there and the air was otherwise quite still. I suppose I felt slightly scared. What might be coming next? This is after all the season of clanking chains.

Nothing further happened. Friends said it must have been the presence of the dog. But why at that time? Why such insistence? Was this an omen?

We found then that we had to cancel a proposed trip to France for New Year. Was it this? And then a blogging friend, someone who had, last year, been due to visit us, died tragically and unexpectedly in hospital, just when we had had all expected an excellent recovery. Was it that?
Or is it something yet to come?

Or is it absolutely not an omen at all - just a random event, signifying nothing?

In the words of Thomas Crown watching the supposed fake Rembrandt burning on the fire: “we shall never know, shall we?” But of one thing I am quite sure, this was a real event even if one without an obvious cause.

Another case of there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.