It’s always nice to have smoke blown up your arse. Well… Perhaps not literally, as the nearly drowned might have discovered courtesy of the tobacco lobby in the late 1700’s. There was a moment where we had public kits like defibrillators to blow hot tobacco smoke up people’s bumholes to wake them up. There they were with this new thing they were bringing over and trying to get people hooked on. They had friends in high places. These things got produced and disseminated. Things never change. The eighteenth century equivalent of Michelle Mone toddled of with loads of money, a few people who were nearly drowned had some smoke blown up their arsehole with a tube. None of them survived. The world moved on, but didn’t. It never does. “Greed is good,” said Gordon Gecko in the eighties. It has barely changed in my lifetime. I guess the idealists are less likely to join the conversation as they are all too busy trying to live. So the power still is held by the ones who started with stuff.
I stuck with this workshop dayjob through thick and thin. There was a long period where they paid us in pocket lint, and we ended up sharing a room in a Travelodge with a stranger. “Which of us goes in the single,” might be the first conversation you have with someone. Jide and I met over that conversation. Later on we did a play together at Oval House.
The hardest bit was when we used to get sent out for not enough money to extremely difficult schools with big groups to deliver a workshop that was let down so much by the materials that it didn’t really matter what the leader brought to it, you knew you were gonna lose the room the moment you played the video that formed the whole premise of the day. I would sometimes win it back with honest discussions about the video and the people that made it, and tie it all into why I’m in the school. “You might not think there’s work for you with this company, but you’ve all just fed back about the video we just watched. That actor got paid for THAT. Somebody wrote it. Somebody directed it. If they all got paid for that, who knows what you could get paid for by these guys, but first let’s look at the problem they were trying to set up in the video for us to solve. What do these made-up posh children NEED?”
Still it was hard work and I stuck with it. It has started to bear fruit now. The rate has finally become competitive with my other jobs so I’m much less likely to bin it for something. And the content is being processed through someone who knows how it runs. I’m much less likely to have to deliver twenty consecutive slides with essays written on them to a room full of pissed off urban youth who are skipping PE to be with me.
So yeah, it was nice to have some smoke blown up my arse. Normally we do this in isolation, but we had someone else in the room today who understands the work and who robustly reassured me that it’s something I’m good at. Of course it is. But it’s always nice to be told.
I still got nervous before… It isn’t free yet. I had one of those nights where you get an early bed but then you wake up at 2am and there’s no way sleep will come back. I lay prone for four hours, a different side every twenty minutes, on the edge of dream but never quite ducking under. Then I just threw it in, made instant coffee and looked at the slide deck.
AlBarclay 