From busking to the Premier League
Back in 2002, after several months of struggling with shit jobs, I did what anyone in my place would have done: I spent my rent money on a used tenor saxophone. I was — still am — rather useless at any pecuniary endeavour, but at least back then I could play the sax well-enough to earn a couple of tenners an hour by blowing muzak for gullible tourists. Maybe six years of music conservatory would prove useful in the end, I thought. Maybe this radical gesture would eventually force me out of the cycle of badly-paid jobs. Maybe I needed to wedge myself into a corner, in order to launch myself forward. Needless to say that those six years of music conservatory were useless when London started throwing spanners in the wheels of my get-rich-quick scheme.
First, there were other buskers who had had the same idea as I, much earlier, and I soon discovered that there was a non-spoken agreement in the busking community, that one wouldn’t occupy certain spots, as they already belonged to someone else1. Second, there were several places where one couldn’t play without a licence: cops ushered me away from bridges, some busy central London corners, and one royal park2, to name just three of the many places I was told to leave, often the best places to play for money too. Third, once you found a good-enough spot of your own, there was a limit to the amount of times you could blow “Autumn Leaves” for grinning American tourists3 without going insane. Fourth, the weather in London is absolutely fucking shit and soon the sax started to get rusty, my lips took to bleeding, my fingers developed frostbite, and I died of hypothermia two or three times. Finally, there were (and are) many teenage ruffians in London, and two of them thought it a good idea to try to nick my saxophone while I was practising down Haggerston Park, in Hackney — they managed to snatch it off my hands, the instrument ended up on the floor, and several keys broke. I repaired the sax myself but this unfortunate event put me off busking. So four weeks after my career move I found myself without money and owning a saxophone I didn’t dare play outdoors, and that I couldn’t blow in the shared room I was renting. In the end, I sold the axe for half of what I had paid for it, settled my rent arrears, and told myself to stop resisting the shit jobs, since I was clearly destined for them. I was right, since several years of shit jobs followed. Somehow I managed to get out of them, but it wasn’t thanks to any radical gesture.
Why do I tell you all this? Well, I’ve been thinking about my hapless busking experience for two reasons.
Last week a friend shared a screenshot in a Whatsapp group. It was a social media post in which someone announced they were quitting their day job in order to pursue their dream of becoming a fiction writer — I’m sure you’ve seen posts like this. The poster in question was someone with no publishing history at all, nothing. Still Book Twitter sadists were encouraging this move towards poverty in the replies, when what this person needed was an intervention. I rolled my eyes so hard that I had to take ibuprofen to fight the headache that ensued. Family money might be the best explanation for this strong self-belief. A partner in full-time work might explain it too. But people don’t share this kind of information on their social media profiles — identity is a commodity these days but #NotAllIdentities.
Then, my part-time teaching gig at a London university was reduced from 180 hours a year to 60, because academia is an exploitation racket that no one of sound mind should contemplate as a career. This means I’ll be several thousand pounds a year worse off, during a cost of living crisis, with translation work all but dried up, since clients figured out ChatGPT et al are great at translating garbage. What was my first thought? No, not to buy a saxophone this time, but something equally daft: “Maybe I need to work harder on this Substack and make more money with it. Maybe thirty years of writing will prove useful in the end. Maybe I need to wedge myself into a corner, in order to launch myself forward.” Eventually I saw sense, and I rolled my eyes at myself. And yes, I also got a headache, that I treated with ibuprofen and twenty minutes or so of screaming against a pillow.
But crises are moments of opportunity, and it’d be silly of me not to make use of this particular one in some way. So I’m proud to announce I’m quitting what’s left of my day job, not to write full-time, but to pursue my dream of becoming a Premier League footballer. I’ll turn 47 in January and I’m rather inexperienced at professional football and out of shape, but when you really want something there’s nothing that can stop you. That’s how it works, doesn’t it? Feel free to leave encouraging messages in the comments section, you sadistic maniacs.
Time, too much of it
It’s the first time in many years I’ve got spare time on my hands.
The employment situation described above has contributed to this, obviously; but there’s more. For example, I’ve started cycling to my office this summer, and a forty minutes walk each way has been reduced to a ten minutes ride each way, which gives me an extra hour a day to stare at the walls and the ceiling, if I’m getting my maths right. Then, I’ve decided to give my liver an autumn break after a libationary summer, and god, doesn’t alcohol steal time away from you? Also, as you probably know (because I’ve been telling you every chance I’ve got), I’ve stepped away from social media, and this has freed up a lot of time too. Finally, I’m in-between manuscripts right now4, which means that all my writing happens here on Substack, instead of having to spread it thin over two or three projects.
This temporal surplus might sound ideal, but as someone used to writing in whatever pockets of time I’ve got whilst juggling several balls up in the air, the prospect of not needing to rush feels rather disorienting to me. And by the way, how much time does a person need in order to write? I mean, how much time does one really need? My impression is that the more time I’ve got, the more time I waste. So in the end, if I’ve got only an hour a day to write I’ll use that hour judiciously, while if I’ve got six hours to write I’ll waste five and end up writing for just one. Maybe that’s just me. But do those writers who claim to write for hours on end actually spend their time writing or do they waste it on Twitter or watching kitten videos on YouTube until they realise they’ve squandered a whole day, to end up writing five-hundred rushed words in twenty minutes5? Do people who complain about having no time to write actually have no time to write or do they just lack the desire to face the page?
The longest I write the more I’m driven to believe that when it comes to this practice time means little, that it is mainly about desire. Sure, sometimes you’ll be too tired to desire anything, but time comes second here. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m wrong about many things, the more time I’ve got, the wronger I am, so maybe don’t listen to me.
Communiqués
I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but things have been happening over the past few weeks. You might have missed the news — a terrorist attack against civilians, followed by (state) terrorism and war crimes against other civilians6— but you can’t have missed all the communiqués by actors and celebrities, right?
I’m sure people who got shot by death-cultists in a kibbutz, or who are getting bombed the fuck out of their homes by a revenge-thirsty army in Gaza, really, truly, appreciate the branding exercises inspired by their suffering. If I were to shuffle off this mortal coil after someone puts a bullet in my face or a missile tears me to one thousand pieces, I’d die in peace knowing that some actor or celebrity X, who who became famous in one of the many incarnations of Big Brother, has posted something like this:
We're all living on this beautiful planet together 🌎. It breaks my heart 💔 to see the recent events that have unfolded, causing pain and suffering.
We MUST stand together and condemn these atrocities. Every life is sacred. 😢
#IStandWithX
Celebrities are celebrities and there’s nothing they won’t make about themselves. But there is a bigger problem here: these communiqués don’t stop with celebs or actors in need of attention, since everyone now goes through life as if they were the embassy of some country, compulsively condemning or condoning every single world event, on social media — as if everyone was waiting just for that, instead of being busy drafting their own communiqué. Do these exercises serve any purpose besides branding? Maybe. Perhaps, they are also ways of “doing nothing but making it political,” as my friend and erstwhile editor
would say. And to make matters even worse, these performative gestures are often accompanied by statements to the effect that if someone hasn’t issued their own communiqué about atrocity X, then that can only mean complicity with what’s going on. It’s a strange affair, this fetishism for content production.Like a of people I’ve been shocked by current events in the Middle East. I’ve been refreshing the news pages non-stop, and being a spectator is disempowering; I’ve been reduced to believing what I’m told is going on, and being reduced to faith is also disempowering; I’ve read several thousand opinion pieces, too many of them, the vast majority either redundant or dishonest. But there were two excellent pieces among all this junk, two pieces I don’t regret reading, and that I want to share with you. Both were written by
— they can be read here and here.Perhaps sharing the pieces above with you still amounts to doing nothing, whilst making it political. But I believe that it’s still a step forward from limiting myself to a communiqué in which I tell you what you already know: killing unarmed civilians is wrong — it isn’t liberation politics — and it isn’t self-defence. It’s just murder.
One doesn't want to argue with buskers or anyone who makes a living in the streets. Take my word for this.
This was at Green Park. When I saw the cops arriving I kicked my case shut to hide the money I had made, and when they asked me to stop I told them I was playing for pleasure. One of them replied “This is a Royal Park: any form of pleasure is forbidden here”. He might have been joking but I can’t be sure.
They just love “Autumn Leaves”, don’t they?
A euphemism to say I’ve been avoiding wrapping up several projects because I can’t bear to think of the cycle of submission and rejection once again.
When I started with this money-laundering endeavour called writing, I read somewhere that Hemingway only wrote 500 words a day. I know there are many clichés around Hem, but 500 words a day, every day are 182,500 words a year — which is three novels, or just one if you are Karl Ove Knausgård. I highly recommend you, if you want to write that is, that you prioritise consistency over intensity. That’s £500 pounds. Thanks.
Sure, even terror has a context. But if you are of the “every time I hear the word atrocity I reach for my context” kind, if that’s your first reaction, then your moral compass is absolutely rotten. Whichever side you find yourself in this conflict.
I am looking into milking snake venom as a profession. It’s a real job. It’s pays well. But in the end you are still working for academic institutions or corporations creating anti-venom. Alas, I already have that job.
Great essay.