CV Attached.
An abridged history of my employment.
Do you live to work, or work to live? Have you written so much for pay that you’ve forgotten how to write for pleasure? Are you juggling jobs? Self-Unemployed? Overworked and underpaid? Are you one of the unpaid army mothers, parents or carers? Have you used up all of your sick days and need to call in dead?
Join writer, creative writing mentor and bookseller Aimee Ballinger for a workshop exploring writing, art and culture around the theme of WORK.
You do NOT need to be a (working or un-working) writer to attend, just bring something to write with.
There are only TWO spaces left on the in-person session at Burning House Books on Saturday 11th July and you can pick up tickets for that HERE.
The online version of the workshop is on Friday 31st July and you can pick up tickets for that HERE.
Curriculum Vitae.
The Cobblers – 2004/5.
The first job I had that wasn’t babysitting for my auntie’s hippy neighbours, where I would arrive to the kids fast asleep in bed and listen to Bob Dylan records and eat an entire loaf of homemade bread, was the Saturday shift at the cobbler’s. My mum had worked at the cobber’s since before I was born, and so I was familiar with the thick solvent smell of shoe glue, and the rushing sounds of the buffering wheel and industrial leather sewing machine. As a lazy fourteen-year-old committed to not following in my mother’s footsteps I was not allowed near the shoes unless I was rubbing suede protector into them. On good days I would engrave kinky slogans onto dog-tags and give them away to my friends when my boss went out for his lunch. If his wife was working, she would let me smoke her Marlboro menthols on the cold stone steps that lead down to the cellar while I polished sports trophies with a flammable Silvo-soaked rag. I bought a vintage leather mustard-yellow belt with my first paycheque. Once I had to change the battery in a watch that an old man had not taken off in almost five years. The watch was warm and heavy in my hands. When I prised the back off, a perfect circle of greasy yellowing dead skin crust fell out. It was and still is one of the worst things I have ever smelled. Not long after that I told my boss and my mum that I had found another weekend job in a café that had recently opened, which wasn’t true but freed me up to spend Saturdays sitting in the park with my dog-tag wearing friends again.
The Supermarket – 2006/08.
In the mid 2000’s working for a big supermarket was probably the best paid work a teenager could get, which is why I started working at Waitrose the day after my sixteenth birthday. It was the first time I hadn’t been paid directly from a cash register, back pocket or sweaty fist. I had to open my first proper bank account to receive my wages, which increased incrementally every six months even though I only worked eight hours a week. I had wanted to stack shelves and wander around the store making mental lists of things I could buy when payday came around, but the person hiring took one look at my scrawny frame and sent me straight to the checkouts. Working for hours at a time on the checkouts was boring but I liked talking with the customers. I’m not sure why I started lying to pass the time? I think it might have been that the clientele was just so rich, or at least comfortably middle class enough to spend hundreds of pounds with every shop and I wanted desperately for them to like me. I wanted to learn how to impress them so that some of their affluence might rub off on me. When customers asked me what my plans were after I finished school, I would tell them that I was going to study medicine, or move to the USA to study economics, or volunteer at an orphanage in India for a year. At that time, I had no real plans beyond school, getting through my shifts at the supermarket and drinking with my friends every weekend. Once I’d figured out which lie worked best on which customer, their interest in me and praise for my industriousness really helped to pass the time. An elegant older woman, a wealthy bohemian in draped skirts and pancake make-up used to come to me every week at the end of her Friday evening shop. I really liked her and she really liked me, but maybe only because I told her I was going to read classics at Oxford the following autumn. When I finally left Waitrose a year or so later (not to read classics at Oxford but to study English at a significantly less prestigious university that I would drop-out of after a couple of months) my line manager presented me with a gift the woman had left for me after hearing she has missed my last shift. I unwrapped the delicate tissue paper to find a notebook with a cover hand painted with beautiful ducks and geese floating on a silver-blue pond, inside the first page she had written for your studies.
The Cool Clothes Store – 2012/13.
Walking aimlessly through Soho on my lunchbreak from my unpaid internship I was approached by an attractive slender young woman in tight high-waisted pants and a ponytail. She told me emphatically that she loved my look. I was twenty-two years old, also slender and I suppose as attractive as anyone in their early twenties can be. I was wearing a flared mini-skirt, and my waist-length hair was also tied up in a ponytail. By the time I returned to the office, a small room on D’Arblay Street that smelled like paper and strong coffee and had once been a brothel, I had secured a full-time job at American Apparel. While the tall, hot and mostly Scandinavian girls were distributed between the larger central London stores, I was sent to a branch located in a train station. I’m not saying that the people I worked with at American Apparel weren’t attractive, I was so intimidated by everyone I met the year I lived in London because they all seemed so much hotter and cooler than me, but employees who were too short or too tall, had a fringe, crooked teeth or a thick accent inevitably ended up working in our cramped little consignment. Although I hated working at American Apparel, I loved smugly telling people about my job at the cool clothes store and flexing my discount. I loved my skintight riding pants (much more flattering than the more popular disco pants) but not wriggling into them in my dark bedroom at 5am so that I could open the store at 6. I loved touching up my make-up in the changing room mirrors with the good lighting, but I didn’t like wiping mystery bodily fluids off them. One day a general manager came in and because I failed to greet her at the door, she pulled me out onto the station concourse, put her face very close to mine and said in an American accent thick with disgust, “do you know who I am?” I didn’t know who she was, and I didn’t care. The next day my contract was terminated. I stormed out mid-shift with the store keys still in my bag. I made a big deal about bringing the keys back and my manager almost got fired for forgetting to take them off me in the first place. Eventually a couple of weeks later I spat a big wet oyster-like phlegm into my cupped hand with the keys in it and threw them through the open door on my way to catch a train somewhere. I truly am sorry to whichever of my ex-colleagues picked them up.
The Junk Shop 2016/17.
I started working at the junk shop after my first attempt at opening a bookshop was thwarted by a useless landlord and puddles of rising damp. I lost a lot of money, and I couldn’t face going back to working all night in bars, so my friend Percy found me a job at the chandlery he had been working in which was slowly transitioning into selling second-hand stuff. When he realised his chandlery was losing money, our boss at the junk shop started blind bidding on storage units that had been abandoned either because the owner had defaulted on payments, disappeared or died. After he had driven the contents of the abandoned units back to the shop, Percy and I would pick over it like vultures for stuff we could sell or list on eBay. We found deeds for houses, passports, tiny vials of cocaine, trinkets, nude polaroids, hundreds of personalised mugs, t-shirts and pencil cases, intervention letters and entire libraries of Reader’s Digest condensed classics. Occasionally we would find gold, or money in trouser pockets, and once we found a real ruby. A commemorative edition of Mein Kampf turned up once in full gothic font with the dedication page ripped out. In the back we had two separate piles, one for used sex toys and the other for lightly soiled mattresses that we shot pellet guns into while we waited for a skip to arrive that we could toss the whole lot into. Sitting at my desk at the front of the shop one afternoon, listing crap on eBay, my boss walked in and asked if I knew anything about horses? Not really, I replied and he tossed a huge plastic bag filled with leather and metal heavily used BDSM gear onto my desk. The whole time I worked at the junk shop I was covered in a greasy film of filth. The entire place stank of spilled vape liquid and BO, every single paycheque was short, but I found some of the best things I own in that disgusting place.
The Chef – 2018.
Not a job I accepted, but during a brief stint of living in Berlin I applied for a job as a server and barista in the canteen of an international language school. When I arrived for the interview, it turned out that the job I had applied for was actually a chef position. Instead of admitting that I had misread the German in the advertisement I did the whole interview as if I were a trained chef, racking my brain for every piece of chef-like information I had picked up during my many years working in food service. The person interviewing me was sufficiently impressed by my knowledge and offered me a trail shift the following day, which I graciously accepted out of a very British sense of duty and awkwardness but never actually showed up to.