A filter exists, between my mind and my typing, protecting the tender inner parts of my psyche from the harsh eye of those who know me. Today it’s on holiday.
This story begins the sleepless night I received my exam results after my second year at University. I’d failed and in doing so, had almost totally wrecked my chances of ever having a career as a lawyer. I remember feeling resentful at the atmosphere of observation at home, the inability to leave your front door without being harassed, questioned. I called the school’s ‘Pastoral Care and Welfare (et cetera)’ tutor, Paul Hubert, tears streaming down my eyes and barely holding the feral noises in my mouth. I asked for advice. ‘Call back during my office hours’, he said and he hung up.
I replaced the receiver, I didn’t call back. I obviously wasn’t worth his time.
When my third year results were released, I remember pacing around and wishing that Hubert was there. He was the pin that tied together my pain and when, despite all of my hard work, my effort, it hadn’t paid off. I was mere inches away, I wanted to burn and I wanted him to burn with me. I was psychotic, and I remember standing on the grass outside his office, wondering if the impulse would take me and chastising myself as a wimp for not doing so.
Inside my head, there is often a fight between the angry and immature me and the weedy, terrified one. I wonder if angry was let out, he would make a monster or if it would be years of repressed energy, deforming me into some cocksure winner of the world. I don’t know what he is or what he represents, but he’s staying locked down in the bottom there.
o0o
At the end of my final LPC exam, I walked aimlessly around London. I found myself wandering around like a loon, the question of what to do now repeating in my head. I didn’t have anything. The wind out of my sails, no feeling of motion, just a hollowness where I should have felt.
I have never been one to dramatise anything, when I was at High School there was enough drama to power the BBC for years.
I wandered up and down Victoria bridge. There are little balconies with benches recessed which allow passers by of a bygone era to sit and reflect upon the day. I climbed over and dangled over the edge. I had been (and still am, to be honest) rejected or ignored by every firm I had sent an application to, and for the first time I was aware of the impending impotence. I would have spent five years, thirty thousand pounds and wasted my adult life not finding a job. I was a dead end, a footnote that life’s winners can compare themselves to, someone who fell by the wayside. In my head I was contemplating the best method of suicide and the correct method to achieve it. I worked it through in the methodical, committed fashion in my own mind that I do everything. This is no idle threat to my psyche. I don’t say this to glamourise it, attention seek or crave statements from my friends. I was low, and I want you to know how low I was. I was alone and in pain. The pain wouldn’t go away.
Of everyone I have been fortunate to know, students I have studied with, valued friends, most of them are off onto careers, further study, travel… something. What did I have? A worthless degree from a University I loathed and had treated me with a contemptuous indifference, no career prospects and the thought that I would live out my days working in a factory in Lowestoft for the rest of my miserable life. The propeller blades on the Thames clipper couldn’t have looked more inviting.
o0o
This afternoon I raced home from work, sweat beading from every part of me, my hair matted and unkempt. I poured myself a glass of whiskey and sat in silence with the envelope of results in my hands, on my lap. I was still. As long as the envelope remained closed, there was hope, however slight, that I could move on. When it was open, it felt feted that it would be the end of me and that the pain would be silent no more. All I had ever wanted was to fit, to do well by others and to stand on my own two. Nothing in my life was even close to that ideal. I offered no prayer, I merely wanted to never leave the stasis.
My right hand pawed at the seal, the left held it steady. I closed my eyes and the right hand tore forward, drawing the seal back and shocking the paper into it’s hand. It didn’t belong to me anymore.
I opened my eyes, and in the centre of the page, separated on all sides by a generous, wide, clear margin, was the word
COMMENDATION
and my body went cold, then warm, sparks and shocks. I giggled. I cried. I giggled some more and cried a little. I downed the fluid in one go and felt nothing but the hysteria of triumph. The first time in years, I had made it. I’d not passed, I’d not scraped it, I’d done it properly .
Overleaf, the sheaf of paper offered more marks, a breakdown of the results, information on graduating and a mention of…
the LPC can be converted (upgraded, what have you) into an LLM with the submission of a 20,000 word dissertation. It’ll cost, but it’ll be cheaper than re-doing a whole year in education, and an LLM is now respected and often is seen by employers as positive. It could potentially wash away my shitty degree, and with it I could again begin to hope that my life could still have some meaning. I don’t doubt that something shall come and ruin me, something shall snipe, pick, I shall feel yet another thousand betrayals as I am rejected for more jobs, but for today, and today only, I shall allow myself to bathe in triumph.
As a child, when I wrote a story in which the main character emerges, battered and bruised from his torment and stands free, hopeful of a better life, I always ended with a line stolen from Douglas Naylor. For today, at least, I can begin to hope.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the grass began to sway.
I had reached 2nd stage for a training contract in January this month but today received an email telling me I’d not made it to the 3rd. Which is a shame because that was the last application I had on the fire. It looks like I shall be repaying my student debt at Birds Eye.
I have suffered through a month of sobriety, 18 hour days at the library and no fruit or fresh vegetables. I am suffering burnout - not because this is a gargantuan effort, I’m aware Lawyers have to do thrice as hard work. I am suffering burnout because at least the Lawyers in question get paid to do this.
I have had an exam every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday for February. This Tuesday I finish.
Kate Bush thought it a wise idea to use Pi as the lyrics to a song.
As the battery warning symbol began to flicker on my mouse, I clicked the email notifier and waited for gMail to load. I looked at the time – 10:55.
‘Shit’, I said.
As I went down the titles, one read ‘Human Resources’. They don’t send emails out for nothing. My heart leapt into my mouth.
‘Dear Mr Cooper, Thank you for your application for a trainee place to commence in September 2009.
We received our highest ever number of applications and I regret that your application has not been successful and we will not be calling on your for interview..’
I ambled toward the shower, every step a condemned man.
Read:
#1 - Belle Du Jour, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl by ‘Belle Du Jour’.
Reading:
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Zodiac by Robert Graysmith
Up Next:
The Naked Jape by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greaves
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
Don’t Feed the Ducks by Liam O’Connell
Purchased:
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
It’s Superman by Tom DeHaven
Crash by J.G. Ballard
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The Old Devils by Martin Amis
Recommended (to me) Reading:
The Damned United by David Peace (by Prof. Scott)
The Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig (by Katie B)
I’m still reeling from my Magistrates court summons for non payment of council tax. It’s infuriating from the standpoint that it’s not only grossly ridiculous, deleterious to my being a solicitor, it’s also horribly miss-applied.
I had sent my first council tax exemption form along to the office during the first request, some time around November, and had thought nothing of the following letters since the ball was surely footed within their own court. We received a ‘Too Late!’ final demand last week, (Why do Council Offices send out final demands on a Saturday when the banks are all closed and you have to then have your weekend ruined?) and managed to speak to a guy at Hammersmith & Fulham Council who told me that he would push the summons forward post-haste if I didn’t give him my credit card details.
Needless to say, I didn’t like being held to ransom.
So I got an electronic copy of the exemption and sent that off to the local taxation division as well – but that seems a little too complex for the peons over at LBHF.
The demand requests that I attend court the same day I have my advocacy final exam, which is amusing because I’m considering going, making my oral representations and getting one of the lecturers to come along and judge my competency accordingly.
Sadly such summons is insufficiently clear as to the next procedure, and so on Monday I shall be forced to again, not study and instead leap through more of their loopholes in order to avoid court. It’s at times like this I wonder whether I should bring an action back against them (or ‘countersuit’) and prove to them that they fucked with the wrong lawyer when they tried to bully me, or blithely comply and avoid the tedium of the courts system.
Part two of ‘Reading, Writing, Doocing, Image and Death’ shall appear shortly
I sat in the library hammering out the first chapter of that novel, the one that’s been fudging around in my head for (now) quite literally, years. Sadly upon re-reading I had the violent compulsion to wrench the screen from it’s wall mounting, throw it to the floor and beat it with my hands and feet screaming ’You bastard!’… which wouldn’t have been too good for a library computer.
My problem is that as I’m currently on a rather large Michael Chabon bender* I am obsessed with having such deliciously delicate prose as the master. I finished reading ‘The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay’ late last year and I’m midway through ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union’, as far as I can tell, I should have been reading Chabon years ago – few writers of angsty, grown-up literature (or the sort that grown up people who live in London and read in coffee shops whilst chatting up nubile young literature graduates read – and no, despite four months here, I’m still not that pretentious. I don’t have the cheekbones or fringe to carry it off). Anyway, the point Is that I’m feeling rather inadequate as my literary voice has disappeared, as much as I can drench these little ditties in irony and sarcasm, doing the same for a full blown novel is doing some harm.
It’s one of two things I’m mulling around in my head at the moment, the other is that in 2007 I had made the new year’s resolution to get a 5 minute pilot into Channel 102, and didn’t. In 2008 I made a similar resolution but time has so far been unkind. The two ideas that I’m trying to turn into a reality is a me-fronted parody of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, entitled ‘Secret Diary of a [Male] Call Girl’ – the gag being, that no-one as unprepossessing as myself** would never be able to engage in having people pay me for sex. The other, which has the benefit of being slightly more promising (as in it’s not one-note) is entitled ‘The Game’ and is inspired by my reading of Metro every morning on the tube.
Whilst not a sports fan, if you ignore the final 3rd of the Metro you suddenly find yourself lacking anything to read (and I could never get away with reading books on the tube. Every time I pulled it out, there would be a crush at Green Park and it’d be wedged into my face so fast I’d have to pull paper from my sinuses), coupled with my Monday evening’s quiz team’s inability to answer sports questions, means that I’ve started to read them. What I’ve found is not the sport itself that’s interesting (I am talking about Football, after all) but the business that surrounds it – the playing, the moving, the shaking, the personalities off the pitch which actually do sound like some sort of engaging, West-Wing esque drama surrounding the fortunes of a football club.
Which is what the show is going to be based on – I’ve never seen a film relating to the business of sports, rather than merely glamourise the excesses of the sportsmen themselves – and if I can make said show funny, then I shall push it into production post-haste.
Speaking of which***, I’m a little excited and almost tempted to give Ian McEwan’s Sebastian Faulks’ Bond novel a go – or I was until he revealed, derisorily, that he had ‘fired it out’ over a couple of weeks. Sadly I had hoped that perhaps Chabon’s taste for writing would mean that serious authors would write books about things like explosions and boobs, as opposed to the inertia one middle aged man feels when his wife goes mental (Waterland), his child is stolen from a supermarket (A Child in Time), he gets stalked by a mental Welshman (Endless Love), but no, as far as Faulks’ is concerned, he fired one out like a casual piece of public toilet onanism after seeing a particularly attractive woman sidling past in the street.
Moving on..
*A pun, surely?
** Fugly.
*** Or not, since when I re-edited the passage, the segue was lost in the annals (hurr) of time.
