I’m back invigilating exams today. There were meant to be nine of us, but three potatoes didn’t show up so I was leading a team mostly potato free, which actually makes it easier in the long run. The ones who came into work were mostly functional human beings with common sense and huge lives outside the room we are in. “I just have to call the hospital,” says one of them. “Apparently I’ve got lung cancer now.” I react with suppressed shock and she reaches out to touch my arm, comforting me. (!) “Oh don’t worry. I’ve had cancer before.” She shrugs. I don’t know what she’s retired from but she’s brilliant. Many of them are, but I rarely get to work with the good ones as we get made leaders and often have to preside over a room of potatoes, if they show up.
The workforce in this gig is split between actors and people who have retired for various reasons and then current highly academically intelligent students making an extra buck and then cheap people from somewhere who often don’t show… It’s a weird dynamic.
Today one of the Multiple Choice answer sheets got lost at the end of the exam. The one person who had put it somewhere stupid was the only person to leave early. We all had to spend ages digging through things just to correct that person’s mistake. I don’t think they’re paid very well. But … you get your moneys worth, as often as not.
Miserable rainy April. I really want summer now. I’m just done with the cold and the muck. I’m not gonna have much headspace in the next month or so. It’s better than it was, but getting out of bed still involves that temperature plummet and the sooner that stops the happier I’ll be.
For now though, into bed and head down. Early start again tomorrow.
Today I ended up working for my office moving friend, and had a friend round my flat doing things I need to do in my flat for the same rate. Round and round we go. A neutral day, although I’ve ended up with some excellent clothes rails that were being thrown out and might help with the business of storing the huge amounts of costume I’ve got. One of them now belongs to my friend and the rest are in the lockup. I needed her eye to see they were good. All I could see was a big pile of metal. But actually they will be useful, even just for car boot sales, and the season is approaching.
“I start work at 4.30am,” my friend tells me. She’s living in a flat smaller than mine with three male children. “I have to have that time before they wake up.”
My mobile phone has this habit of randomly deciding that the charger wire is wet. It usually happens when it is cold. When it happens I just unplug it and bang the screen and buttons until it stops.
Today, my phone made that noise. I cancelled it immediately and made it go away, but there were other phones in the room doing the same thing. It seems everyone knew about this but me.
The government want to be able to shout at us though our phones. Today was a test, and they likely sent out word through whatever channels they assume we are all following. I just had my phone go crazy suddenly, and I was happy I wasn’t driving. You can be sure that there were some car crashes today, all for what?
Healthcare. Emergency response.
Day nurse has been recalled. Actifed. Night Nurse.
The whole way we look at health and safety is being gradually and stealthily shifted. The deals the Tories made with Trump are still moving. Medicines that don’t fit the US model are being pushed out so they can be replaced by the big US brands. Of course my Barclay namesake is stalling the talks – he wants to tell a story about how our wonderful system is failing. Post Brexit, we are being forced to be a new state, and these cheeseheads in government are too busy looking at their bank balance to look at the future. They won’t divert funds to the NHS. They have been trying to kill it for YEARS. And it clings on, just, because of the incredible humans who have given their lives to it.
But the roads slow down to twenty to make room for the failed electric self driving car idea. And we are all being primed to live in fear. Our phone could go off whenever these short-necked Westminster thieves want it to, warning us about whatever they think is important. Missing girl. Severe weather. Someone protesting. Pickpockets. Can’t embezzle. Murderers.
I’m knackered. My flat is full of cables. All will be well.
I’ve got lots of things to list and sell on eBay this weekend. I’ve been doing my best, but my friends haven’t been helping me. There’s loads of technology. All the wires have been pulled out and put in bin bags. All the screens and devices are in boxes with no wires. One box contains a dozen Google Nest smoke detectors, likely with another three years on the warranty. New they’d be over a grand worth of kit, but they no longer have the lithium rechargeable batteries. Likely they were taken out too. It leaves me with a conundrum. Second hand on eBay they still command a reasonable price, but I’ll likely have to order the batteries to get a decent price for them. And the batteries aren’t cheap. I’ve been mumbling to myself about it. There’s an incredibly involved home security kit. Motion sensing cameras and bullet cams with a central hub. And NO WIRES. Once again, new it’s about three grand, but I can’t really list it on my eBay until I know it works and I know HOW it works. I have my reputation to uphold on that site. I either fuck the listing by having to say in the description that I don’t know if it works or not and there are no wires, or I find the wires and work out how it works. I’m on the clock with this so it’s not taking the piss. But, kids – if you want to sell your tech, don’t separate all the wires from all the devices.
I’ll need my flat back before long, so I’m not gonna be too thorough with this. I’m already choosing my battles, and the IKEA bulb vases are going to the dump on Sunday evening along with loads of other things that will only sell for a quid and then have to be mailed.
The process of eBay selling is pretty methodical if you want to get more than nothing. First of all, identify the thing. Find other examples that have sold. Work out of there are lots of them going unsold. Determine if there is demand. Think about postage. How will you package it? CAN you package it? Where will you be the day after the listing ends? Can you post it on time? How much does it weigh? What should you charge for postage? Does it need to be collection only? Will you be able to supervise collection?
You know what the thing is now. How do you photograph it well? How do you check for things that might be wrong with it? How do you describe it well and thoroughly so that nobody can catch you out. Buyers have a favourite trick: “You didn’t mention X” If you don’t mention something wrong with it, the buyer holds the power on eBay. Rating is paramount. I’ve given a fair few full refunds through my teeth because I didn’t notice some damage.
Now you need to think of minimum bid. Nowadays, eBay has adverts saying “Buy gold for the price of silver”. With that culture and auction sniping apps, nothing gets bidded on until the last second as the expectation is that you’ll get a bargain. Adverts like that really suck from a seller’s point of view. When I saw that it put me off the site. If I’m selling gold, I want it to go for the price of gold.
Watchers are no indication of value, as most of them just have something like it and are curious to see how it goes. I watch things all the time when I think they are overpriced or I know I’ve got one to sell. The snipers all put in low blows and the thing that you put on for a quid thinking it’ll go for a tenner sells for a quid with twenty four watchers. Maybe 8 snipers put in minimum bid and the first one got it. And then you have to be polite to someone who fucks you around with collection time etc and then tells you that the bulb is broken or whatever and you end up logging in and authorising a one pound refund after losing hours making sure you’re at home for collection. So unless you know exactly how you’re gonna post it and have the packaging already, don’t bother with £1 starting items as you’ll end up working and losing an item for fuck all. I have some packaging boxes at home and if something crap fits in one I’ll list it low as I’ll need to get rid of them. Yeah you’ll get more interest at a low starting price, but these days nobody will bid it up and you’ll end up selling for a quid to one of the AI apps that trawl eBay for random bargains.
But yeah that’s been my day. Thinking again about the second hand market. Dispassionately evaluating someone else’s second hand stuff. Determining whether or not it’s worth buying batteries to sell smoke alarms. I think I will as they go well. The bigger stuff though – that just needs to go go go. TVs without remote or cabling. Ugh.
A rare pleasure to have unexpected London Lou. She usually exists by the seaside and I get to come play with her. The tyranny of the fluffy animal creature.
This evening though “Rumours of Fleetwood Mac” were playing at Cadogan Hall. Her mate has been on the tour bus with them for a year, and wanted us to see what it was like, so we got a pair of guest list freebies.
A packed out hall, usually reserved for Thomas Tallis concerts. We all sat down to watch a gig. I’m not used to that. Too many festivals. I’m used to being able to jiggle around and stick my chin up like your dad. Maybe take a step to the left, step to the right. Do a little shuffle. Check my pockets. Have a sip of beer. Make a comment to the person next to me.
We sat in serried ranks. They came out.
It’s all sanctioned by the band members. A bit of audio plays – a recorded intro by Mick Fleetwood. Last night I said to Tristan: “I just don’t get the whole thing of playing someone else’s songs when you’re a good musician…” “Money,” he replied. “And a guaranteed audience.”
They are excellent musicians, and he’s right. The place was packed. I don’t know how much tickets are, and how the money is cut. There are plenty of people involved in this so they aren’t necessarily printing money, but they are evidently saving a fair amount by not emulating the lifestyle as well as the music. The original band were true rockers, fucking fighting and feuding. The songs run the gamut from ballads to psychedelic strangeness to hard rock. The original band and the tribute were immensely talented. The drum beat on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia” was the result of a botched attempt to imitate what Mick Fleetwood does on Tusk. Over it all the beautiful harmonics of the English and American female vocalists Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. McVie died last year. Nicks is still going, somehow, aged 74. The quantity of narcotics that they must have put away in their heyday boggles belief.
“It’s like Fleetwood Mac without the edge,” says Lou. And yeah – you feel safe. You aren’t expecting one of them to start choking someone or collapse. They play with competence and skill. “They never have an off night,” my friend observes. The original band must have had plenty, I muse. But it’s a good gig. Some of them are really channeling. I find myself imagining the Stevie Nicks (Jess Harwood) singing along to her CD collection growing up, perfecting the distinctive vocal fry. She’s got it down, and the gestural world she’s in feels authentic. It’s a mixture of imitation and channeling. Across the board it is regimented. Tight. Polished.
I wonder if they write their own songs and practice them while they’re on tour or if perfecting the imitation gives them the artistic satisfaction we all crave. It was a good night, and I wasn’t around to see the original band so it’s the best I’ll get. Lovely to have Lou in town too, even if only briefly.
There was a great big American fridge freezer sitting broken in my friend’s office. I use the term broken advisedly as I’ve seen this friend replace a perfectly functional TV through lack of an £8.95 cable. But I understand it to be broken. And it certainly can’t stay there as she’s moving office.
She’s already been scammed over removal. They called up some fellow and didn’t give him context about it being two floors up and huge. It happens. It happened to me with this “cupboard” and I never heard the end of damaging the feet on it moving it on my own. Whoever this guy was, he came into an office with the load of very young humans who work there, he took one look at the fridge and he realised he couldn’t move it on his own. Unlike me, wrestling the cupboard into my car, he then insisted he was paid in full and left without doing anything. I think that’s a dick move , but the young’uns were intimidated by him. £250 he took which is too much for the job anyway. My friend who runs the business wasn’t in the office at the time. Of course she was furious, but now she was also £250 down, so the thing became a mental block. She didn’t want to spend any more money getting the thing out.
I found some guys online who seemed legit. They only wanted £124. It still took her some persuading. It’s a lot of money, but it’s a business… Whoever this guy is, he fixes fridges and charges a bomb to do it. He will take your bad fridge away and charge you to do it too, and then he’ll plunder it for parts or if it’s great he’ll resell it. Smart to get paid both ends.
The lads were excellent. Just two of them. They fought it down the stairs and were connected enough that they only rarely needed me to spot them or hold a door. This is not their first fridge.
Adam and Johnny. Strong work from them both. One very big fridge gone and another problem solved. My friend is running to a very tight deadline and I don’t think she realises quite how tight it is. She’s only got me a little bit in all this. I hope she gets the hard stuff done.
I saw an old friend this evening. I ran into him at the dump. I haven’t spent time with him since 1992.
I was wearing sunglasses and with a full beard at the dump. Somehow he recognised me across the ages. “Al!”
There in the recycling centre. Who would have thought it. A place where old things go to have a new life, and maybe this old friendship will have a new start.
We were at boarding school together. I had been friends with his older brother, so I sought his friendship despite him being a few years below me. I had a racket going on and wasn’t able to sustain it on my own, so we became partners.
Over the week we would assemble a list of weekend booze requirements from all the locked in boys in our house. We would add “Danger money” to the order, making it pretty profitable. Then we would wait for darkness and set out with two military backpacks to one of a number of local off-licences. Different one every time, ideally. We would quickly stock up and fill the packs until we could barely lift them. I was tall and my voice had broken. I usually had some mocked up ID but we quickly learnt the shops to avoid.
Once the backpacks were full we would trudge out and into the darkness, and the hunt would begin. Some of the teachers were obsessive about trying to catch people breaking the rules. Stuffy busybodies with nothing better to do. We had to predict their movements and get back up the hill without them seeing us. They knew it was going on. Their attitudes ranged wildly from mild amusement to raging apoplexy. As with all minor rule breaks at such institutions, you have to do it well. If you’re cavalier about it you get busted. It’s part of what they teach you…
We never lost an order, thankfully. But we took some extremely convoluted routes, particularly when we sensed that the business proprietor might have called their neighbouring school about these suspicious characters in baseball caps and camo buying up all the booze. One time, someone switched the floodlights on as we were halfway across a dark pitch. We scarpered, and he was probably killing himself laughing as we hid in a bush for an hour and then set off in completely the wrong direction to try another point of ingress. We were careful to the point of paranoia. But I had seen the results of overconfidence in others. It was easy to get caught.
Sitting in the pub with him helped me put a face on that strange institution that I was lucky enough to attend, that I’ve almost deliberately wiped from my fresh memories. It helped me realise it wasn’t so bad there after all. I needed to go away from it awhile. But maybe there are old friendships left to rekindle. I’ve been avoiding a reunion dinner that’s planned in May. Perhaps I’ll go after all…
My friend who I’m helping has been doing very well for herself. She’s running a successful business, employing at least five other people full time and using them. It’s a thriving work environment and right now I’m part of it, blundering through with boxes of rubbish, taking shelves off the walls, packing things.
She’s learnt a lot about business, money, PR. Alongside it she’s raising three boys as a single mum. She makes decisions fast, sticks to her guns and digs her heels in. I absolutely respect her work ethic and ambition and ability. She says “yes” and makes it happen. But there’s a thing I’ve learnt in my haphazard life that she hasn’t had time to learn yet…
She’s all about the marketing of things. She makes things and companies look fantastic. She gets articles written and photographs taken and she is part of the web that helps decide what we almost unthinkingly understand to be “aspirational”. I learnt by association in the early days, and saw first hand the machine that runs beneath the unthinking assumptions we have about competing products. We all have brands that we “like”, and often that unexamined feeling is to do with our consumption of the work that people like her do. Things rarely get into newspaper articles by coincidence. You can make a fantastic product that competes with a lesser product from a rich company – the company that buys the PR and marketing will take your space unless you are insanely fortunate. Take this blog. It’s not very widely circulated. Why? Because I’m not backlinking, I’ve switched off adverts and I’m not doing Search Engine Optimisation. All the things I can do to maximise reach take time and money. I am not writing this for reach though, so I’m not gonna spend money. If one of my blogs was put out there it likely wouldn’t gain traction anyway as I’m not dealing in absolutes, and received wisdom is that you have to be an extremist these days. Maybe that’ll change.
Marketing. You make a thing, you want people to give you a high price for the thing so you make more money. You pay someone to say that your high price is good value. Someone buys the thing brand new, and as soon as they use it they lose loads of ghost-money because a big part of the high price of the new thing is wrapped up in a “new-thing-experience tax” type affair. You pay loads of money to be the first to use the thing. That’s her world. So when she wants something, she doesn’t really hesitate to pay top whack.
Today I helped build a plastic outdoor rattan sofa that she had spent hundreds on. It’ll be lovely in summer, and it fits brilliantly where she wanted it. But if she ever wants to sell it, she’ll never get even half of what she paid, even if she sells it tomorrow. And this is the thing I’ve learnt.
We should stop attaching monetary value to our possessions.
I’ve got this stupid glass thing that my friend gave me. “You’ve still got my £150 glass bottle,” she told me once. I didn’t even want it. But the fact she puts a figure on it makes it awkward having it.
Things are worth what they mean to us.
I’ve got a cheap plastic voodoo Madonna that means more to me than a whole collection of Lladro China ones and beautiful blown glass ones. If I had to buy all my stuff back from someone I’d spend more on that plastic one than any of the ones by reputable makers. She’s Our Lady Untier of Knots.
I’m trying to help a few people untie knots and get rid of things that are clinging to them. The spanner in the works is ALWAYS their sense of value. Price can’t be predicted unless we have an Etsy shop and enough space to store the thing for years. But I can’t move your stuff on if you are convinced it’s worth three times what people will pay for it.
This is a rustic pig bench. It’s nice.
Lots Road wouldn’t take it because of condition. I’m gonna sell it for her on eBay I think. To get the best price I could choose a high value and then sit with it forever until someone pays. But there aren’t enough hours in the day and there’s nowhere to put it in the meantime. And I don’t want to disappoint her with a low price. You see the conundrum?
“You’re here at the wrong time. You’ll have to leave.” I’ve booked in to the dump on the wrong day. “My car is full. I’ll need it empty tomorrow morning and you aren’t crowded. Surely I can just empty it?” “You haven’t got a slot booked. The council could ban you.” “I don’t want to be banned. This place is going to be important in the next few months.” “Well you’ll have to drive straight through and come back at your allocated time.”
I ignore him. Dump man. I reverse into a bay and start the process of separating rubbish and putting it all in the right skip. It’s a meditation. They now take rigid plastic. Hopefully I won’t get banned by the council. It felt like the guy was on a power trip.
Most of the people who work in the dump seem to be alright. They are very mobile, winging through the bays silently correcting categorisation mistakes. Invisible in hi-vis, they help make sense of the filth. The digger operators are extremely skilled. They pick out mattresses like toys in a claw game, and they crush up the wood and cardboard to make room for more, always with an enviable precision considering the size of their machines.
I’m on a decent hourly rate from my friend and it is striking to me how I’m happy to work at that rate. I think I’ll need to pay some friends a similar rate to help me box up my flat. The thing that we have that she doesn’t have is the benefit of lack of attachment. “Those plastic coathangers will definitely be wanted by a charity shop.” Reader, I chucked them into rigid plastics.
There’s much still to do, and now it’s a working office with quite a few young men and women in there beavering away on spreadsheets, so it feels weird dismantling desks. Still, we are getting through it and running up against all the old familiar blockages. The one that I’m over now but I see in others all the time is the notion that items are worth much more than they are. “The pram goes to Christie’s.” It’s a nice pram. I’ve seen them sold for £300 on eBay. But I’ve also seen them go for just £50. If she’s expecting a couple of grand we will have to go round a few times before she accepts that it can’t command that at a last minute sale.
Still. I am doing what I can. It’s what I should be doing in my flat. I’m calling it prep…
A long long time ago, one of my day jobs involved being a temp in a PR agency. It was only for a short time. The office was mostly staffed by young women fresh from university, and my jobs ranged from franking millions of envelopes to calling up papers asking for back issues to fixing the loo roll holder to organising the basement storage cupboard. Nobody knew my education level or cared. I certainly wasn’t bothered being dogsbody. I’m very happy to be bottom of the hierarchy.
I’m still friendly with the owner. I was never gonna make full time staff as I didn’t want to because acting yaddayadda, so the work dropped off as temps are often just a way of trying out potential new full timers. But I’ve been going back there occasionally lately to help out. She’s downsizing.
This huge office full of history is going into a much smaller office next door. This involves a lot of heavy lifting. Today we packed papers for shredding, I deconstructed a few big desks, and we took a load of crap out of the basement storage. Over the years she has gathered many free samples from clients, and she’s not allowed to sell them as they are for testing only. These things date back to the late nineties now. Whatever you can think of. Tech. Art. Homeware. Furniture. Baby stuff.
I’m on hand for the man stuff. I was breaking up chipboard desks so they fitted in Bergman, and then I booked a slot for Wandsworth dump.
“I love the dump,” says one enthusiastic millennial as I am javelinning metal desk legs from my car into the metal-bin. I kind of get her enthusiasm. The sun is out and it is busy at the pit. It’s almost like a social occasion, and curiosity is at high pitch. “What wonders are being hurled away,” we all think, looking at each other’s stuff. A man arrives with a rusty bike and three people ask to look at it before it is finally consigned to the bike-resyk.
Wood in the wood. Metal in the metal. Small electronics in the small electronics. Cardboard in the cardboard. On show at the back they have compacted cubes, enough to help you believe that perhaps the work you are doing to separate it all will lead to something positive. It’s hard to trust recycling. The majority of people are thoughtless about it and chuck food packets in with the cardboard and so on, or just whatever in the wherever. At the dump you are being monitored so maybe you are a touch more careful. It’s not perfect there. “I’ve got four glass table tops. Is there any way they can be recycled?” “No, just throw them into rubbish. We can only do bottles and jars.” But it’s trying. It’s a place where you can believe that things don’t just end when their usefulness to you finishes.
I bought new boots a couple of days ago. I could have perhaps stretched my old ones out longer. A good cobbler could resole them and shore them up, but in this disposable world it just seemed easier to renew them entirely. Maybe it was justifiable with the boots, but we are mostly killing the world with our cultural habit of replacing perfectly good things when they aren’t quite working. I’ve fixed ovens and washing machines and cars with internet tutorials. Often the thing that’s gone wrong is easy to solve and working around it does no harm at all and doubles the life of the appliance. Let’s all try and ignore the external pressure to buy new shit all the time and lean into the interesting learning experience of diagnosing and fixing things. It’s fun finding out how things work.
I’m still off the coffee, and really noticing the extent to which I have been using the caffeine hit to propel me through the day. I’m not so muzzy when I wake up. For a long time, whether or not it was the case, I was persuading myself that I wasn’t much good in the morning until I’d had my coffee. Not a helpful narrative for the mornings where I couldn’t get it. We tell each other stories about ourselves all the time, and sometimes we fight tooth and nail to defend the version of ourself that we’ve made up. I’m fine without coffee in the morning. Maybe a little less wired. Maybe a little more forgetful. But with a bit more time I’ll be able to shape out when it’s a useful stimulus to me. For now I’ll save myself a fortune on the kneejerk “buy a hot drink” impulse. Sometimes three or even four a day at about three quid each. Too much money over time. It’s a huge racket, coffee. Big money beans.
I was woken up by a playful cat. She is usually mildly vexed when I show up at Lou’s and put my feet in the bit of bed that is definitely hers. This morning she shouted at me a little bit and then put her tail in my mouth. I’ll be looking after her for a couple of prolonged periods soon and feeding her medicine so it’s good that she’s getting more physically comfortable around me. She’s very nice to me at the moment though. Lou’s arms are a maze of bite marks.
We went to Stanmer. It’s easy and pleasant. Some Spring flowers but no bluebells yet, and I didn’t dare wear my new boots for a long muddy walk so it was back in the slipperboots and rolling along like a pirate. I bought some juice with the money that I’d normally have blown on coffee. They’ve got a great little juicy place that I first found back in October 2020. Simon is no longer there though. When I asked someone where he was they looked uncomfortable. “He… no he doesn’t work here anymore.” Poor Juicy Simon.
I love these little windows of countryside with Lou. It’s getting easier to do – to buzz up and down to Brighton. I might be getting used to the train before long too. Lou booked her theory test and is going to get on the road. When she gets her wheels it’ll be like Tristan in the micra all over again – I’ll be moonlighting as a driving instructor, remembering my dad’s valuable lessons, and then hours and hours on the back driveway at Eyreton practicing my hill starts. If there’s a car in Brighton already it’ll be too costly to bring down Bergie. They really sting you for parking all week down there. I’ve had more tickets in Brighton this year than in London for the last decade.
But I’m back in the smoke, winding down. Party boats on the Thames. Traffic and wind. Warm bed..mmmm
AlBarclay 