[Previous chapter] [The MA Course: Summer 2006]
By the time I returned to The UK from The Former Communist Country in July 2005, everything and nothing had changed. I was 22. I was no closer to knowing what I was actually for. I’d missed out on my first voting-age General Election—Blair won again. And I’d also missed out on The Crazy Frog, the release of my oldest brother’s second EP, and my policeman uncle’s untimely death and subsequent funeral. I barely knew him. But knew he was unwell. He'd lived with my father (post-divorce) in The English Cathedral City for a while. He'd been an alcoholic for years by then. I spoke to him briefly about Al Stewart, when my father took me and Girlfriend # 2 (and his Girlfriend # 2) to Bilston to see the great man perform. My uncle lamented that he was not joining us, and told me his favourite Al Stewart song was "Old admirals", whose closing couplets I reproduce here—for you, Prospective Employer:
"Now just like you I've sailed my dreams like ships across the sea;
And some of them they've come on rocks, and some faced mutiny;
And when they're sunken one by one I'll join that company:
Old admirals who feel the wind, and never put to sea."
I moved back in with my mother and her partner in The Rented Terraced House in The English Cathedral City. I didn’t get a Job right away; perhaps I was Exhausted or fearing a bout of Existential Dread—or maybe my mother didn’t explicitly tell me to get one. I knew I wanted to write now. I'd known that anyway; but now I knew I had to find a way to make it my job, and not teaching. But I hadn’t actually written a novel yet. Barely even a short story. Just a few beginnings of novels I’d been starting and stopping for the better part of a decade. And a few narrative poems, set in a made-up village in North Wales. I’d been looking around for Creative Writing courses. I fancied doing the famous one in East Anglia, but I was ineligible for some reason. (Probably my A-levels...) My mother made me aware of The MA Course in Pennycomequick. She’d seen it advertised in The Guardian. A course with creative writing interspersed with feature writing, copywriting, script writing, etc. It sounded like something I could do to find out if I could actually write a novel or not, while maybe learning some Skills that might help me get a Proper Job—or even a Career—in the Real World: which term (“The Real World”) I was increasingly concerned meant The Great Wen. Because most of my old friends had by now gone that way.
But some of my artier Sixth Form College friends had, at least temporarily, gone in precisely the other direction: to Pennycomequick. To a “university college” by the sea. They enthused about the place at a music festival that summer, where I met a young woman who wasn’t called Penny, but who I will call Penny, who said I should definitely move to Pennycomequick because she was living there too, and she could tell after having met me for about sixty seconds, and briefly having shared a spliff with me while not paying much attention at all to The Brian Jonestown Massacre, that I’d really like it.
So being as yet Obedient by Nature—despite being occasionally Unprofessionally dressed—I applied for The MA Course, and for a “Career Development Loan” from The Co-operative Bank, and was soon accepted for both. I made, and paid, a visit that summer to Pennycomequick (the trains in England were bloody expensive compared with those in The Former Communist Country). I had an Interview of sorts. I had to supply some Evidence of Writing of various kinds. Good and Bad, I imagine; but it didn’t matter whether I was Good or Bad: The MA Course cost £8,000, thus I suspect only two things were required of me:
£8,000—or credit to that effect.
A willingness to part with the above.
I already had my Student Loan Debt, and owed my mother a couple of thousand pounds. So what was another eight thousand—or whatever it would be by the time I finished—to add to the slate? Bugger all compared with the millions I’d get for my first novel, I imagined. I already had an idea. It was about this young woman who went to do TEFL in a Former Communist Country, and had a relationship with—look, it was a genuinely good idea. But I still felt I hadn’t done all the necessary research.
The Postgraduate
This wasn’t a Job, Prospective Employer, so I won’t dwell on it. Apart from the aforementioned mini-TEFL Job, I had no regular Paid Employment during The MA Course. I went down to Pennycomequick with my suitcase on wheels, I slept on some friends’ sofa until they found me a flat to rent, and the rent was cheap because it was just one small room in The Terraced House With The Sea View belonging to a university college screen-printing technician: divorced, a social recluse, and an a dvocate of the now-discredited (but even then quite suspect) Eat Right For Your Blood Type fad diet. We’ll call him Winston. He had a cat; but he wouldn’t let her out because he said the other cats bullied her. So the cat was insane, and always trying to shake me down for milk by darting into my room unseen and then kneading my chest with her claws while I was trying to take an afternoon nap.
Things never progressed with Penny. We didn’t get on at all. And though I’d see her around, and go to parties at her house because we had friends in common, we’d always end up having blazing rows about nothing. Fortunately there was a whole class-load of fellow aspiring writers on The MA Course for me to befriend. I won’t list them, Prospective Employer, because they weren’t exactly Colleagues. I probably don’t even remember them all; and they probably don’t all remember me. But there were two who lived with me in addition to studying alongside me. Julian had recently navigated a Midlife Crisis by moving his entire family down to Pennycomequick from Up North so he could study for The MA Course alongside the rest of us. Julian would be my housemate alongside my landlord, Winston, for the first few months. I mostly remember him for the awkward evenings we shared watching TV news together. Simon Starling had just won the Turner Prize for “Shedboatshed”. He’d taken a wooden shed, turned it into a boat, sailed it down the Rhine, and then turned it back into a shed. He was on the news saying “I suppose it’s a sort of palindrome”. And Julian said, to the TV, “It’s a shed.” I thought I noted a glimmer of something in Winston’s eye, as though he was tempted to comment, but didn’t think Julian worth intellectually competing with on such a matter. Julian had to drop out of the course in the new year anyway; his wife was threatening divorce, so he moved back Up North with her and the family to try and prevent that from happening. Fair enough.
So then Methusela moved in. Methusela was a skinhead, and often looked at me deadpan without saying anything when we were in the pub. So I’d been worried he’d bully me—but he turned out to be perfectly nice. He was just receding a bit, so he’d decided to cut his hair short. He was also partly deaf, and sometimes unable to follow the conversations in the pub—especially when I was talking, with my Speech Impediment.
My room had a view down the hill over Winston’s garden to the rooftops of lower Pennycomequick, and the harbour beyond, complete with bobbing boats. There was a single bed that I never shared, except with Winston’s cat, and a desk for my PC, at which I’d sit and write—but not smoke; I would have to do that outside. The internet was only available on Winston’s computer in the lounge. He said I could use it whenever I wanted; but I used it once when I came in from the pub, and he was driven half mad the next afternoon when playing online chess—because after ripping out all the wires and trying to slot them all back in, he was still unable to get the sound effects on his chess game to work. (I’d turned the volume knob down on the speaker so as not to wake him up, and forgotten to readjust it after I finished checking my emails.) Having once invoked Winston’s wrath, I never dared to use his computer again, so the internet remained a bus ride—or a three-mile walk—away for the duration of my three seasons in Pennycomequick.
I didn’t have much to do with Winston. I tried to avoid sharing mealtimes with him, because he’d habitually criticize my food; which was usually peanut butter on toast, and which, whatever it was, he said was completely wrong for my blood-type. I invited him to the pub twice, but he wouldn’t come because he said he was too old and didn’t have enough hair. He was evidently Lonely, and hard to get away from if he caught you in a hall or landing. I once answered a knock on my bedroom door to find him standing there brandishing what looked like a snake. “A slow worm actually,” he corrected me. He’d found it while gardening, and was so excited he’d had to show someone. And Methusela was out, so I was the only person he had to show it to.
The Websites
In addition to the first few modules we studied as part of The MA Course—teaching us bits of English grammar and punctuation, which, as an ex-EFL teacher with a first in English from The University in The City of Crushed Dreams, I ought to have known but didn’t—there was a website associated with The MA Course, which we were tasked with running—i.e. commissioning themes for the seasonal “issues” of the website, to encourage people (e.g. our coursemates) to submit Work for consideration for publication. A group of us (including me) volunteered to be editorial “Staff” and would read the Work aloud in a group, usually take the piss out of it—usually, but not always, if it was by someone who wasn’t in the room—and then agree to publish it; because even if we thought the Work was absolute crap (and it sometimes was) we still kind of had to publish it. Because everyone knew who was Staff, and we had to carry on having classes with the rest of them for the duration of The MA Course.
I submitted a poem about a violent tooth fairy, which was stylistically inspired by David Tibet of Current 93—but fell far short in quality. I also wrote a snippet of a fantasy story set in a fairytale castle populated by weird colourful demon creatures. That story was crap too, but the drawings weren’t bad. My best submission was a harrowing and completely made-up childhood narrative called “The Virginity Badger”; being a dark satire of Tooth Fairy / Easter Bunny folklore, culminating in a punchline along the lines of “it’s just your dad dressed up in a suit—like Santa Claus.” I thought it was the best thing I’d ever written, as did my local art-student friend Pierre (who looked French, but wasn’t). I borrowed a banjo from a middle-aged female friend on the course, and—although I obviously couldn’t play it, because it was a musical instrument—I managed to muddle a basic little finger-picked riff, which Pierre then looped on the Apple iMac G4 bought with his Dyslexia Grant. I narrated the story into his microphone in an affected North Welsh accent, and uploaded it to the course website—thus releasing into the world my first and so-far only piece of mixed-media spoken-word performance art. Pierre drew a terrifying humanoid badger on a sheet of A4 paper to be uploaded and scaled down to thumbnail size to accompany the text version of the story. And, because it was going onto The MA Course website, it might have been read by anyone anywhere in the world; but was perhaps even more likely to be read by no one at all.
Fellow website Staff included: Greg, a northerner who looked ten years older than me, but was actually two months younger; Will: a northerner who was ten years older than me, and had that annoying habit that Don III had of finding me inherently amusing for reasons I didn’t fully grasp (probably my Speech Impediment; some people are easily pleased, Prospective Employer); then there was Prince, an argumentative, seemingly drug-addled public-school dropout, about Will’s age (actually, I don’t think Prince was on the board, but he was often in the room); and there was Kumar, a middle-aged guy who I presumed to be a Buddhist, who lived in a shed in somebody’s garden—he’d also gone to public school, and also not got on with it; and finally, Ophelia, the lone female Staffer: a westcountry pool-hustler with a gold tooth. She’d known Prince for years, and was living with Will, with whom she would soon establish a romantic relationship—to my unsurprised annoyance. But the implications of this mid-Course union to the Integrity of The Editorial Team were never much discussed. We just got on with the noble pursuit of publishing Literature.
We were taught how to use the course website, and how to add text and images to it using something called a CMS: a Content Management System. We were also taught to make our own Portfolio websites using Adobe Dreamweaver, to advertise our writing skills—such as they were—to Prospective Employers. And we would all have to contact The MA Course Staff years later to ask to have these websites taken down; because we’d never been shown how to update them or anything. I’ve just accessed a digital capture of my MA Course website on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The homepage reads as follows: “Hey, how’s it going? / Thanks for stopping by / My name’s Alex and this is my website / I am a writer, dreamweaver and visionary [I stole that line from “Garth Marenghi's Darkplace” but the website doesn’t acknowledge this] / I have 10 hobbies / I am outstandingly professional / I specialise in copywriting, branding and PR / I also write experimental and fantasy fiction / But that’s just the beginning / Follow the links to find out more…”
Yes, I know! And there are a lot of links. The “Links” page, for instance, links to 13 other defunct websites belonging to various Colleagues from The MA Course. The “FAQ’s” page (complete with that superfluous apostrophe, which hurts me more than it hurts you, Prospective Employer) includes various questions that nobody ever asked me about my website. Notably “What do you have that other freelance writers don’t have?” To which I have responded “Lots of free time”. The “Portfolio” features a mock-up website I made for my mother’s nonexistent clothing company, complete with pictures of her Unprofessionally dressed son (me) sporting a splendid renaissance doublet. There’s also a link to the (now defunct) website of a support group for sufferers of one of the UK’s commonest skin conditions, for whom I’d done some unpaid copywriting Work for my Portfolio. The “Projects” page lists no fewer than five novels I was writing—only one of which would ever be finished, and none of which would ever be finished by anyone but me. The “Prosaic” page lists five short stories I’d forgotten I wrote, one of which is about a man castrating himself and serving his genitals to friends at a dinner party. “Lyrical” hosts five poems—none of which are good, and one of which is the lyrics to an ill-advised narrative rap song I recorded with my oldest brother in The Great Wen when I was 19. It really is a very comprehensive website, and an invaluable resource for anybody studying the subject of “Alexander Velky in 2006”—even though that wasn’t yet my name in 2006.
There’s also an art gallery containing maps of the places in the various fantasy novels I was writing, mock-ups for book covers, illustrations I drew for the course website, and photographs of three acrylic paintings: one of my mother’s partner (a birthday present for my mother’s partner); one of a young Russian woman I’d befriended on MySpace (sleeve art for a seven inch record that was never produced); and one of Ol’ Dirty Bastard from Wu-Tang Clan (a birthday present for my oldest brother). If for some reason you were to have viewed this website in 2006, Prospective Employer, I doubt you’d have offered me a Job. It’s evident from the website that I can basically write; but so can a lot of people. There’s no particular focus, no real suggestion that I know who my audience is supposed to be, or what I really want to say to them. It certainly showcases my tendency toward Rambling, and my fondness for garish colour schemes. If anything, it would seem to suggest I’m something of a Jack of All Trades, Master of None. If the website was meant to get me a Job, it was not to be successful—although I was very pleased with it at the time.
But the website has helped me write this Curriculum Vitæ, Prospective Employer, for two reasons. The first is the link to a blog—hosted on Google’s “Blogger” platform, and also archived by The Wayback Machine—providing Evidence of my movements over the next few years. The second is the website’s “CV” page, which serves as a rare window into my professional past by virtue of being the oldest CV of mine still in existence. Indeed, it was probably the first CV of any kind that I’d put together as an aspiring Professional Writer. It says “I plan to establish myself as a Freelance copywriter until I find a full-time Job in the same area”—kind of the opposite of how things eventually panned out. It also mentions my Freelance features and news writing for The Music Website my oldest brother worked for. (Mostly undertaken during a brief Internship when I visited him during a holiday from The University; sorry for not mentioning that earlier, Prospective Employer: I'll deal with it in the chapter after next.) The website also says I was “Promotions Editor” for The MA Course website. (I don’t recall exactly what that entailed, but I have found an email I sent to Cosmo from The City of a Hundred Spires at that time, telling him that if he entered our competition he had about a one-in-five chance of winning a laptop.) The CV also lists my secretaryship of The University Green Society, my Academic Qualifications, the latest Work Experience placement I’d undertaken as part of The MA Course, and my Voluntary Role as “Media Officer” for The Cancer Charity’s summer event in the suburbs of Pennycomequick toward the end of The MA Course. Those last two Extracurriculars are Joblike enough to warrant inclusion here.
The Cancer Charity PR: April–June 2006 (spare time)
Pierre approached me at the bar one evening in April when we were drinking in one of the student-friendly pubs near the Pennycomequick docks, and told me there was “a woman with large breasts over there” who wanted to talk to me. She was a bright and enthusiastic local young woman called Chloe, who—it transpired—had recently taken it upon herself to organize an inaugural summer fund-raising event for a well-known Cancer Charity, to take place in a sports field in the suburbs of Pennycomequick that summer. She was looking for a “Media Officer”—basically a PR person—to complete the team of Volunteers she’d thus far assembled. Being Obedient, and having a rather gaunt CV, I agreed to come to the next committee meeting and serve as secretary, taking notes and disseminating them digitally afterwards—just as I’d done so competently as secretary of The University Green Society just two years ago, and just a hundred miles east of Pennycomequick.
The other members of the committee included but were not limited to Chloe herself, chairperson, and the treasurer, who we’ll call Gerald: a retired lawyer from The Great Wen, whose commodious village house we met in, and who was also a chairperson of the committee for the annual village shindig; which committee would meet directly after ours, and which I often found I had to sit through as well in order to get a lift with Chloe back to town. I was the youngest of the group, and Chloe, about four years my senior, was the next. It turned out every one of them had either had cancer and recovered, or had a partner who’d had cancer and recovered, or had had a partner who’d had cancer and died. As someone with no first-hand experience of cancer (though of course I had relatives who’d died of it, and others who’d later die of it) I felt like a bit of a tourist in those meetings. (Being the only non-local probably didn’t help.) Conversations would tilt in dark directions, and end with one of the party saying something softly like “It’s such a bloody horrible disease”. And everyone would nod, except me. So then I nodded too. It reminded me of being young and going to church: everyone seemed to know what to do and say, and what was expected of them, except me. Obviously I didn’t like cancer. But I thought it unhelpful to personify it. I even silently objected—on what I didn’t realize then was more a spiritual than a philosophical level—to the given notion that humans were entitled to expect to be free (or freeable) from the inconvenience of the disease; which had after all only come to loom so large in our collective consciousness because we’d successfully done away with so many of its Competitors over the course of the 20th century. I didn’t say any of this, Prospective Employer; because I knew I’d sound like a dick. I took notes and distributed them after the meetings. I tried to do the Unpaid Job for which I’d Volunteered to the best of my limited Ability. I listened to Chloe complaining about her failing relationship and offered my sympathy; though I could offer little advice, because my paltry two, both brief, romantic relationships—which by then seemed a lifetime ago—had taught me little about such things. I continued to attend these meetings even after Chloe pulled out of the committee because of her personal circumstances—splitting up with her boyfriend, having to move house and find a new Job. Gerald took over as chair. And the event itself drew near.
An archived blog-post from my defunct blog dated August 3, 2006, records that I spent some time that week trying “to get stories about [The Cancer Charity] into local papers”. But it does not record success in this endeavour. I was a terrible PR person, Prospective Employer. I’d learnt on my course how to write a press release technically well; but I’d no knack for extracting a newsworthy angle—I think my brain just doesn’t work in the same way as other people’s, Prospective Employer: the things I find interesting aren’t the things they find interesting. My finger’s always off the pulse; my heart beats with no discernible rhythm. It’s something I live with. It hasn’t killed me yet. But one day it might.
When the day came, it rained, inevitably. People turned up to walk round the sports field in the suburbs of Pennycomequick for hours on end, like they’d all agreed to. I took five pounds to donate to The Cancer Charity, because that was all I could afford. I never had Money in those days, and didn’t even have a Job. (The MA Course was technically Full-Time, and I was trying to write The Novel out-of-hours.) Chloe turned up on the day, as she’d tearfully promised us all she would. She still seemed really down, and I felt sorry for her. Where was that bright and enthusiastic young woman I’d met in the student-friendly pub near the Pennycomequick docks back in April? Yes, her breasts were still large. But I didn’t mention that, Prospective Employer, because it wasn’t relevant. Besides, she probably already knew.
We all agreed the event was a great Success. I watched a young girl read a prepared statement in an unwavering voice to a TV camera from the local news about how she was living proof that cancer could be beaten, and that donations to The Cancer Charity would help other young girls like her to be given a second chance at Life. And I thought about all the other young girls who’d got cancer and died—like everybody eventually died—and I thought about the rubbish Job I’d done of raising awareness of the event in advance of that day, and the paltry five pounds I'd donated. And I watched that bronze-pyjama-wearing, walrus-moustache guy—the one who always sang rollicking folk songs like “Rocky Road…” and “Finnegan’s Wake” at open-mics in the Pennycomequick pubs—performing a set of acoustic covers of popular songs to a scattered crowd of increasingly damp cancer-sufferers and cancer-sufferers’ kin. And his rendition of “White Flag” by Dido—a song to which I’d previously been indifferent—unexpectedly moved me. So when a committee Colleague asked me if I could phone the local radio station for a shoutout, even though I had a mortal fear of speaking on phones, Prospective Employer, I made the call—instead of just walking off with my phone to my ear, pretending to make it—and we got a shout-out ten minutes later.
And we all agreed the event was a great success.
Other extracurriculars
I spent a week in The City by the Bridge doing Unpaid Labour for The Branding Agency. I wrote some radio ad scripts, worked on a brand naming Project for a new cherry liqueur, and edited some copy for some booklets being produced by the bank I was with, and with whom I was to spend a significant proportion of my free time that year exchanging argumentative letters about their exorbitant overdraft fees, and the fact that they’d cancelled my student overdraft even though I was still a student and couldn’t afford to suddenly pay it off. I slept that week in a Youth Hostel across from an old American businessman who snored loudly all night. I ate as cheaply as I could, and only went out once, when I met an old university friend—Virgil, now working for the council—for a drink. I learnt nothing in that “Job”; at least nothing I hadn’t already learnt on The MA Course. At the end of my five days’ Unpaid Labour my Agency Bossman offered me a sentence by way of feedback: “Basically, you could do a job like this tomorrow”. But he offered me no Job, and didn’t even give me twenty quid like The Photography Shop Bossman. And it would be ten years before anyone Paid me to do a Job like that; it would not, in fact, be tomorrow.
I completed no great works of Literature that year, Prospective Employer, and although I did bits and bobs of Unpaid writing Work here and there, I was not yet A Professional Writer. Still just an Aspiring Writer. Course submissions notwithstanding, what I actually mostly wrote at that time was vacuous blog-bilge and song lyrics. Song lyrics for the two very different “bands” I was briefly in.
Band # 1 was a conceptual folk group I’d invented called The Goatherders. The other two members were graphic-design students Craig and Kev, whose sofa I’d briefly lived on at the start of term. We had a MySpace page to which we first uploaded the entirety of our recorded output (one original song and half a cover) and next invited all the attractive girls we could find on the website within the 18–25 age range to befriend us. I was the song-writer: a tough gig, because I couldn’t write songs or play any instruments. But I did own a ukulele (bought on a day-trip from The University with Indiana, years ago) and I was able to play four chords on that. I’d written the lyrics for a song called “Mexico” several years ago at university, and Gilbert had instantly found the right four-chord riff to carry his rudimentary improvised melody. It was G, C, F, and… hang on, I’m going to find the ukulele.
These were the lyrics:
“I’d like to go to Mexico,
I’ve heard it’s very nice.
I’d like to go to Mexico,
I’d like to go there twice.”
(The fourth chord was A-minor.) So Gilbert wrote that song, but I’d written the lyrics, which as you can see were equally important. The Goatherders’ songs were supposed to be about goat-herding; but the lyrics I’d written about goat-herding were much longer and bleaker, and didn’t have any accompanying music. Besides, Craig and Kev weren’t interested in those. They liked Mexico, which I played to them on the ukulele, and then sang—because I couldn’t do both at once; just each in isolation, badly. So on the recorded version of Mexico, which I still have on a hard-drive in my shed, I was playing ukulele while Craig and Kev sang, backed up by Will and Ophelia, and maybe one or two other coursemates. Craig or Kev then overlaid another two takes of singing (this time including me) to improve the listening experience. We all agreed it was a great song. Craig and Kev and I worked on a follow-up called “Morocco” for which Kev improvized a moody organ bit, and I attempted some lyrics. But we somehow couldn’t quite arrive at a song-structure. Kev then made up his own song in private, called “Bolivia”, which I provided unsolicited copy-editing toward, for fear of being omitted from the credits entirely. It was a good song and he taught me to play it on his ukulele. (We all had ukuleles.) Craig was a decent drummer, but we didn’t want any drums because we were a folk group, so Craig mostly played guitar. We never recorded “Bolivia”; which is a great shame, because it would have made a perfect double-A side single with “Mexico”. (And I already had the sleeve art, featuring the Russian woman from Myspace.) Our second and final recorded song was an ill-conceived keyboard-and-ukulele cover of one of my oldest brother’s rap songs. We never played live, because that would have been awful, and creative indifferences finally brought about The Goatherders’ end—not with a bang, Prospective Employer, but a whimper.
Band #2 was a different concept entirely; because concepts were one thing I could do. It was really more of a band-name than a band. The name was Paedos in Speedos. I know. I’m not proud of it, Prospective Employer, but hear me out. The concept was to satirize what I considered to be the inherently sexually predatory, often paedophilic, character of popular music—via the medium of popular music itself. Pierre thought this was a fantastic idea, and—notwithstanding the fine art degree he was busy finishing—he immediately set about putting some songs together on his dyslexia-grant Apple iMac G4, inspired by my concept. I wrote some lyrics that were supposed to be funny; but I was concerned they might be misinterpreted if people didn’t “get” the satirical element. Pierre tried putting one or two of the least unpleasant to music, with limited success; and came up with some of his own ideas too, which were less horrible and thus more conducive to being adapted to upbeat melodies. I played no instrument in Band #2—because all of the music was made by, or at least on, Pierre’s computer. And the only one of our songs I remember actually singing on was a cover version of Razorlight’s “In the Morning”, which we’d chosen because the lyrics already sounded like Paedos in Speedos lyrics. That the object of our satire had so soon overtaken our attempts to satirize it was an early warning sign that Paedos in Speedos would never be a Proper Job, I feared. Pierre eventually wrote one really good, and really short, pop-song without any input whatsoever from me. He had it played on BBC radio once by Tom Robinson—but only after renaming our band “Pydos in Spydos”, which Tom Robinson still hadn’t quite sounded comfortable reading out on air. Noting the reticence of the Industry to deal with a band with such a controversial name, Pierre changed our band-name again—this time to Woman Eyes, a pun that took me a fortnight to notice. But by this time we were living in different places. I’d only come up with the band-name in the first place to pass the time in the pub. And now our band no longer actually had that name, I finally realized I wasn’t in the band at all. Which I must say, Prospective Employer, was something of a relief to me; because I reckon it’s hard to hold down a full-time Job and make a success of your band.
A few years later (March 2008 to be exact) Pierre persuaded his friend, an up-and-coming art director, to shoot a music video for our radio hit; which Pierre insisted I should be in too, because I was, in fact, half of the band—at least as far as he was concerned. So I Obediently turned up to Pierre’s friend’s house in The Posh Suburb of The Great Wen in my fake fur coat and had a weird fur helmet (probably not fake) made by another friend of Pierre’s put over my face—so I could have been pretty much anyone, even though I was me. I was subsequently filmed dancing a bit, then having a load of glitter blown into my face and several litres of cream poured into my eyes. I learnt, Prospective Employer, that having cream poured into your eyes doesn’t hurt, but it is annoying. My fake fur coat was covered in cream and irreparably ruined, and I had glitter in my stools for a week. But I deserved it. Because in some way, the whole thing had been my Idea, and therefore my Fault.
Grade
MA Professional Writing: Distinction
The Novelist: Summer–Autumn 2006 (full-time)
I finished The MA Course and went back to live with my mother and her partner in The Rented Cottage in The Countryside of the Hog County. I didn’t go to pick up my result in person, therefore it was a good one. I ended up with decent final marks both for The Copywriting Portfolio I’d submitted, and for the first three chapters of The Novel I’d by then written almost half of. I don’t remember who among my coursemates an d Graduating noncourse mates got what grades, and I’d already reached the conclusion that our MA marks wouldn’t really matter much. What might matter more was the roughly £25,000 worth of Debt I was now in; I’d received a letter from The Co-operative Bank to tell me that now I’d done The MA Course it was time to pay off the eight grand I’d borrowed, which was now twelve grand—or would be by the time I’d finished paying it off.
So I did what anyone in my situation would do; I applied to have the loan-repayment commencement date deferred on the grounds that I was Unemployed. I signed on at the Jobcentre Plus in The Cathedral City. And I set about completing The Novel. After a month or two of applying for Jobs and not getting them, I’d almost finished The Novel, and my mother was almost fed up with me being in the house. She’d only recently got rid of my younger brother, who’d chosen his university for its convenient proximity to a girlfriend he would soon break up with, and had subsequently found that he knew more about the subject (of graphic design) than many of the people who were supposed to be teaching it to him. He and his new girlfriend eventually decided to move to Pennycomequick and start their university lives afresh. But no sooner were they out the door to Pennycomequick, than I’d come back from it . Actually I probably came back just before they left. Either way, the phrase “boomerang generation” was not in popular use then; but we’d all experienced it—and none of us quite so much as my mother. She had a conversation with my oldest brother, who was living in a tiny flat of his own in The Great Wen at that time, and persuaded him to let me come and stay at his place while I looked for a Job.
I was far enough along with The Novel by now not to interpret this as an abuse of my Human Rights. I could get a Job, finish The Novel in the evenings, get The Novel published, and then that would become my Career. Of course I didn’t really believe this, Prospective Employer; but I did sometimes dare to hope it because it helped me allay the Existential Dread. I’d got some great comments from both of the course tutors who marked my three-chapter submission. (Even though one of them had previously expressed concerns about The Novel’s semi-comedic tone.) I was given to understand that if I made it to the end of the story while maintaining the same quality of output, there was no reason whatsoever that an agent wouldn’t take a fancy to it, and a publisher wouldn’t buy it off me and pay me to write the second and third instalment in the trilogy. (Neither of which I’d actually got a plot for; but those would come later, I supposed.)
That November I made a makeshift bindle by tying my chequered bandana around the end of the old-ladies’ walking stick that I’d bought to go with my fake fur coat while living in Pennycomequick and dressing like a shit rapper, and I mounted it on my shoulder like so many catless Dick Whittingtons before, pound signs in my eyes, and headed with my suitcase on wheels for the train station with a one-way ticket to The Great Wen.
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