Job

I haven't had a proper job since sometime in the eighties. Can't remember when exactly, but I think the Falklands War was on at the time, and Terry Wogan was singing the Floral Dance on the jukebox in the pub where I used to drink and smoke. My mind wanders, so these two events might have been miles apart. I think Mark Knopfler with Dire Straits were doing Romeo and Juliet at the time too.

So, have a Google, and you'll know the three different times that my memory is recalling.

Anyway, it was the fat end of thirty years ago.

Since then, fortune has variously smiled on me and now and again pissed in my kettle. I am lucky in that, although I managed to fail two out of three A levels with flying colours (the useful two, sadly, but I did very well in music, which is not what I do for a living), I have always had an eye for an opportunity. I have never had a plan. Never had an interview. Never actually gone for a job, they tend to find me. So, lucky.

I have managed to invent a few things, been bought and sold, been paid many hundreds of thousands of pounds and been owed about the same, debt gone bad, whoops. So I am mostly skint, though mostly have a few bob in the back pocket. I have no long term prospects, rather like the Labour Party, although while I can still breathe I will hopefully find someone who wants what I have to offer. Unlike the Labour Party, who are shafted up the wrong 'un with a splintered axehandle, regardless of what the Sun says.

I am tremendously loyal, in that I have never, ever left a job, or a client. That's my CV.

But in all the things I've done, I have produced what someone wanted, either in order to sell it to someone, to save money in producing it or to produce more of it.

That's what a job is. Where someone wants something you have in the way of time, energy, skill, and will make something of it to benefit himself. It might be money, and at the end of the chain it has to be money. Nothing comes of nothing.

I have many friends and most of them, sadly, work for the state in one way or other. That means that they have gold-plated pensions and pretty secure employment prospects as long as New Labour stay in.

But, apart from the teachers, they don't actually do anything. They achieve nothing. They make nothing. The could go on permanent holiday and nobody would notice.

And then for every few of them, there's a hierarchy of others, who manage them. And then there is H fucking R, which used to be called personnel, and still should be, and God knows they get a bloody fortune. And then on top of that there are junior ministers and then ministers.

And that isn't what a job is. It is just what unemployment isn't.

End of.

Am I wrong?