Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) (7 page)

Was it gift wrapped in a bow and sent from an absent-minded uncle?

Terrible, terrible stuff.

At the time I thought it was potentially award winning.

The ego was swiftly knocked out of me as I started to send some material out for consideration.

I’m sure it was considered… considered a good substitute for the tea-coaster on the editor’s desk, that is.

I must have posted out roughly seventy or eighty copies of my dreadful short stories, film scripts and novellas, before finally getting the message that I was either monumentally untalented, or so far up my own arse I could see the plaque on the back of my teeth.

The desire to continue dwindled and I put my writing on semi-permanent hold.

I did quite a lot of writing at university, as most students do, but it was all flowery hogwash. A lot of pretentious observations on the rise of the post-modernist text in contemporary literature, or the role of hegemony within 18th century fiction. The kind of stuff only utter tossers would read outside the confines of an undergraduate degree. So while I’d put the writing career on hold
per se
, I still hadn’t managed to remove my head from my arse.

Anyway, three years of university rolled by and despite soiling myself in front of my peers, it was a hugely enjoyable experience.

I won’t bore you with tales of these years, as one man’s university experience is more or less the same as another's:

Essays, drinking too much, waffling lecturers, pretentious conversations in seminars, sex with anaemic art students… that kind of malarkey.

At the end of my degree (if you’re really interested, I walked out with a 2.1) I went into full time employment and found it
very
boring indeed.

I needed something to keep the old synapses functioning, to prevent them drying up like a worm caught in the mid-day sun. So I returned to writing, armed with a bit more life experience and more big words in my vocabulary.

What I wrote was better than my teenage efforts - if not by much.

Bad rip-offs were replaced by original stories, but I did have a tendency to use too many words.

Where only a brief description was needed, I would launch into verbose and obese sentences that sounded convoluted and meant nothing.

Here’s an example:

 ‘The tenuous link the restaurant had to the halcyon days of yesteryear were exemplified by its archetypal furnishings and nostalgic uniforms.’

Gah.

If I wrote that sentence now, it would read:

 ‘The restaurant looked like it did in 1958.’

Yet again, I sent my product off to literary agents and publishers - and yet again received countless rejections. All of them as valid as the one I got for the psychopathic hedgehog story several years previously.

Malaise set in once again and the Writer’s and Artists Yearbook went back into mothballs.

To fill the gap, I started amateur dramatics with a local company, and played a particularly fine country bumpkin in that year’s pantomime Mother Goose.

I thought acting was easy.

I later learned it was
pantomimes
that were easy and proper acting - in proper plays with proper characters - was most definitely
not
.

There’s nothing quite like drying on stage during Death Of A Salesman to let you know you’re probably not cut out for the stage.

Remember we talked about time and how it goes slower when you’re not enjoying yourself?

Well, time stops
completely
when you walk on stage, forget your lines and see an ocean of faces squinting up at you, expecting their money’s worth.

It eventually took a panicked member of the stage crew to whisper the line to me, which I delivered in a voice so strangled the audience thought my character had been poisoned.

When the play ended, I removed my costume, went straight to the nearest pub and proceeded to blot the incident out - with remarkable success.

With my acting career buried in an unmarked shallow grave, I turned once again to literary pursuits.

Not quite like the last time, though.

I thought I’d try a spot of journalism and started writing non-fiction for a variety of magazines. These stories were short, to the point, contained no flowery words and were all my own work.

I sold three in six months.

I made a grand total of two hundred and fifty quid on all of them, but it felt like I’d made two hundred and fifty
thousand
.

I’d found something of a niche for myself and intended to exploit it. Opportunity knocked when my girlfriend of the time - who’d later become my wife - cut out a clipping from the jobs section of the local paper, advertising for a copy-writer at a marketing firm.

It was one of those companies who get jobs in from clients, knock up the required advertising copy and charge extortionate amounts of money for the privilege.

I liked the job as soon as I got it.

And I still do.

I’ve worked there ever since and my need to write is serviced by the material I produce.

Chances are you’ve read some of it yourself - if you're in the UK, anyway.

Every so often I’ll catch a glimpse of my work in a magazine or on a billboard and a feeling of pride will wash over me.

The only thing wrong with writing this way - thinking up copy for marketing purposes - is that it tends to be quite soulless.

When you work in marketing you’re essentially bullshitting for a living…

The job of the marketer is to sell the product and nothing else.

Never mind if said product has been recalled to the factory six times, or independent research has shown it breaks after more than ten uses. Your job is to make it sound like it’s the best thing since sliced bread and that every home should have one. Or even two, if you’re
very
good.

It may go against all your instincts to say that this brand new vacuum cleaner is so powerful it can change the axis of the earth’s rotation, but you’d better damn well put it down on paper like the client asks - otherwise you might find yourself with a P45 and a future likely to suck harder than the vacuum actually does.

It only takes a while before this has a negative affect on your creative output.

I was getting to the point where the whole thing was depressing me more and more - when I woke up one Saturday morning with the idea to write a book in one sitting.

Which brings us bang up to date, doesn’t it?

Writing the right thing - clumsy sentence structure there, my humblest apologies - is sometimes crucial to the success of a product and sometimes not, but writing the
wrong
thing can be a disaster of epic proportions.

I was nearly sacked a couple of years ago because of a missing L in copy I’d written and proof checked before sending to print.

The text was for a large metropolitan college, who’d paid a king’s ransom for a prospectus that would amaze and delight anyone who happened to pick it up for a nose through.

It was a stunning combination of amazing photography, showing how great the college’s facilities were (faked) and equally brilliant copy about how its courses were far, far better than anyone else’s (lie).

One of the subjects this thing advertised was Public Services.

A course that existed - as far as I could tell - to teach the young people of today how to be the soldiers of tomorrow. Which no doubt involved learning how to drink too much beer, pick fights with the night club bouncers and catch gonorrhoea from the local prostitutes.

Now you know the title of the course, I’m sure you can work out why that missing L caused such a fuss.

Yes, a hundred thousand copies of this weighty tome went to the local populace, and emblazoned in bold Helvetica font on page 48 was the course information for:

Pubic
Services.

Two-Year Course.

Learn all about this fascinating area and prepare yourself for a job in the field!

Oh dear.

There were phone calls, there were meetings, there were arguments in hallways. It really is incredible how one letter can cause a catastrophe of such magnitude.

I personally thought a two year course spent delving around in someone else’s genital region sounded quite appealing, but I was in the minority. It would be the type of course any aspiring pornographic film star would have jumped at the chance to be on.

I was called to my manager’s office like a naughty school boy who’d been caught wiping bogeys on the class hamster.

He proceeded to tell me - at length - about the importance of proof reading and how mistakes like this can damage the company’s reputation.

For my part, I sat there silently, desperately trying not to laugh as he described how the principal had rung him wanting to know why we were selling his college as the kind of place that encouraged sexual deviance.

…it could have been worse though.

I could have accidentally added a letter F to the Performing Arts section of the prospectus, which would have had the college advertising:

Performing Farts.

Two year course.

Improve your skills and entertain the public.

I managed to talk my way out of that mess in the end.

I passed the buck successfully onto the printing department.

It wasn’t difficult as they’re a strange bunch down there - all cross-eyed and twitchy. The ink fumes addle their brains over a long enough period of time, I’m led to believe.

God may have cursed me with a brain that gets me into trouble, but he also blessed me with a mouth that can get me out of it again.

I’ve always been very careful with proof reading since then and I make sure my writing never contains any silly spelling mestakes.

1.39 am

15170 Words

Blimey, it’s getting late.

I was going to mention when midnight passed (and make some half-arsed gag about it, probably) but shot straight past it without remembering.

I’m pretty happy about that, it means horrible old mister clock is losing his grip on me as I get further into the book.

With any luck, I’ll have forgotten about him completely by the end and will live the rest of my life in the peace and tranquillity of the relaxed and inattentive.

In the meantime… it’s now Sunday, the day of rest.

No rest for Mrs Spalding’s little boy, though.

He’s still got a lot to say and hopefully the time to do it. I suppose it all depends on that bastard on the wall.

How are you doing as we head through the night?

I’ve bumped the heating up a bit as there’s nothing more annoying than catching a chill in the wee small hours.

There are some blankets in the airing cupboard and you’re more than welcome to drape one across your legs if you like.

I've refilled the coffee thermos, so there’s plenty of caffeine to keep the eyes open and brain awake. I’d hurry up and drink it though, it’ll be stone cold again in a few minutes. I own the world’s only anti-thermos. It keeps cold stuff hot and hot stuff cold.

…can you hear those people outside?

Noisy aren’t they?

They must be coming home from a night’s heavy drinking - making the kind of commotion that annoys the brave and frightens the timid.

Don’t worry, they’ll be past the window soon and well on their way home to bed, where they’ll sleep the sleep of the just.

The just about to throw up that is…

Then they’ll wake up tomorrow morning in the safe and secure knowledge it’s Sunday and the pain of getting up for work is still a day away.

Nobody likes work.
No-one
.

I don’t care if you’re Brad Pitt and you’re making a movie where you spend the entire running time having naked lap dancers caress your body.

I don’t care if you’re Bill Gates and you spend five minutes a day looking at specs for a new hard drive and three hours playing tennis with the guys from Intel.

No matter what job you do, there’s always a frisson of dread accompanying the sound of that infernal alarm going off at 6.30am on Monday morning.

You may not feel the dread too much if you happen love your job, but it’s still there – deep down where the animal in you just wants to roll over and go back to sleep.

The Chinese have a saying that goes:

‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’

Spalding has a saying that goes:

‘Find a job you love and the groan escaping your lips at the crack of dawn will be quieter.’

For most of us, the groan is usually
quite bloody loud
, because we’re not movie stars or multi-millionaire business moguls.

We’re ordinary working folk, who live by the clock and have to obey that hateful ritual of rising when the birds are delivering the morning chorus.

We shuffle around like zombies until we’ve had our cup of tea and bowl of Cornflakes - or Bran Flakes if we’re not, you know,
regular
- which wake up the brain cells enough to negotiate the shower and the complicated business of getting dressed.

The shower lasts for five minutes, but seems like five seconds and getting dressed is unnecessarily difficult because most of the clothes we’re wearing today were left turned inside out in a heap on the floor last night.

…although that last problem could just be mine. I’m a messy sod, I admit.

Then off we go!

To our place of work, where we spend more hours a week than anywhere else and sometimes think we might as well bring a sleeping bag in and cut out the middle man.

It’s not natural. None of it is.

We’re supposed to be hunter-gathers.

We’re supposed to rise when our body clocks tell us and spend the day in honest work, revolving around eating, fucking and raising our young.