The ebbing of my days
“It should properly come to you to wonder whether anything you’ve done counts.” – Stephen Jenkinson
I missed posting yesterday’s post which I’d entitled ‘the 1980s’.
When I sat down to write it at 5.20 am, I was ready to weave my poetic magic or whatever the hell I’m doing here on Substack but the words didn’t come. I got something down but it resembled a dismembered and disorientated attack on Margaret Thatcher and her policies – and that’s not my thing.
And so, I laid it down.
But there was something else in the post which I didn’t quite manage to get to; namely, how much of my life has disappeared on the altar of disappointment as a consequence of: (i) not knowing why I was here; (ii) not knowing what I was supposed to do with my life; (iii) doing meaningless, repetitive work; (iv) dangling the faux carrot of opportunity and success that came from studying a law degree; and (v) thrashing in the midnight hour on my way to the promised land of law firm partnership, only to find myself poleaxed by a profession that was intent on crushing my soul. (You’d call this a Faustian Bargain, albeit this only dawned on me much, much later.)
This post is the kite tail of my failed 1980s post but also in the mix is the fact that I’m listening again to Come of Age: A Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble wherein, at the same time, I’ve tried to find a few episodes of Stephen speaking to the book. It was during this search that I came upon the short video that was the pitch for his book, written with Kimberly Ann Johnson, “Reckoning” and that’s where the above quote is taken. It’s worth giving you the blurb from the website to understand a little about the book, especially if you’re not familiar with it or Stephen’s work:
“Reckoning came on: A younger woman no longer young, author and teacher in her own right, sends a note in late fall, 2021, to someone she doesn’t know, an older man not yet old, author too and activist of some kind. She proposes a talk she’ll promote. Her purpose: to wonder about what is happening to the moorings of her generation. Whole-person heartbreak ensues, prompting another session, the next evening. As winter comes on, they do five more. By then, something is born of their wonder. They consider the transcripts, they write a letter to each other, blessings of a kind, bindings of a kind. Reckoning is what they call it.
Reckoning is the cultural cyphering of Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson. It’s an unguarded, sober meeting with Spirit Work, Elderhood, Grief and Plague and Building Culture in a Me-First Era. To be tried at home. With Companions.”
I was born in 1967. It was supposedly the summer of love but my house was shallow and anaemic in that regard. Accordingly, it wasn’t long before I understood that I was on my own, spiritually, emotionally and in all the ways of the world. That’s code for saying: my parents weren’t much help when it came to asking the bigger questions or trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with this thing called ‘life’. Their solution was to point me in the direction of the workplace and leave me to find out the rest for myself.
Even in my early years, I had an inquiring mind and a determination that could border on the fanatical but it didn’t translate or transmogrify into a direction of travel nor my North Star. In any event, having had my life upended in 1975 when my parents decided to leave England and move to South Africa, when we did finally return in June 1977, I found it hard to settle back into school. Also, if I found it hard to make friends before leaving for South Africa, it was doubly difficult when I returned, given my slightly antagonistic approach to anyone and everyone who wanted to give me gip concerning Apartheid. Of course, I knew something was wrong when I got there but cut me a bit of slack: I was only seven when I went and nine when I returned. How do you answer someone who says you’re a racist when you know you’re not?
And so it was no surprise that when I finally got to Secondary School I had zero friends – none from my old school and no one that I knew from my neighbourhood. And for the first 18 months, I was mercilessly bullied until the point where I took up karate and then it wasn’t so much I was impersonating The Karate Kid but for reasons I’m not entirely sure, the trouble stopped following me here and about. I suspect the smell of fear, a lightning rod for kids to make your life hell, had become less pronounced, or perhaps this far out my memory is playing tricks and the bullies moved on to some other unsuspecting, wet-behind-the-ears kid.
My years in Secondary School, apart from being an exercise in keeping my head down and out of trouble (I nearly got expelled in my 3rd year), taught me fuck all about myself. It was, as they say, supremely underwhelming and the teachers’ MO was command and control; it was the only way that they could keep order with a bunch of kids who appeared to have no desire to learn or not learn the nonsense they were being taught. When I left in June 1983, I can still remember the deep sense of relief walking up the school drive and out the main gates.
I was free – at last.
What then?
I didn’t have a clue!
As I’ve written about before, the options were limited and limiting. I could either join a Youth Training Scheme or go to college. I looked at Torquay Boys Grammar school, who had a 6th form, but the prospect of wearing a uniform for another two years made me nauseous, and so I opted for the local Technical College, where I spent the next three years retaking and taking a few more O-levels and completing a BTEC in Engineering. I only did so because I couldn’t think what else I was going to do; and more than likely because my father was an electronics engineer and even though I had no aptitude for it, I figured I would eventually be able to find some sort of employment, locally or further afield, much like he’d done. Quite what engineers did, mind you, I had no idea.
I did pretty well and could have gone to University to study Mechanical Engineering but somehow that quiet, resilient voice that I’d started to tune into convinced me that I wasn’t an engineer and I’d probably known that from the get-go. It was about this time that my father was made redundant and he and my mother moved to Bristol for him to take up a new job as a civilian teacher to the RAF. For a while, I lived with my grandparents in Brixham but I didn’t feel I wanted to stay locally and moved in with my parents in Bristol.
It was 1986.
At this point, you may be wondering why I’m sharing so much of my early years. I hope all will become clear but in case not, the simple truth is that these early years have played out across my life, i.e. the inability to find solace in my work; or to find a home for my intense desire to do something useful; and not to feel I’ve pissed my life away doing the wrong thing.
I’ll quicken the pace but once I arrived in Bristol, I worked briefly as a recruitment consultant and then for six months at British Aerospace. Neither job was a success. And neither job helped me get to grips with my increasing sense of hopelessness. I should add that even though I struggled to adapt to work and the workplace, I secretly harboured a desire to be successful – not in a material sense – but more than likely to run my own show. Actually, what I wanted to do, was to emulate Sir John Harvey-Jones, not as the Chairman of ICI, but as a troubleshooter – see the series by the same name.
In early 1987, having been unemployed for three months and living off £14.00 per week, half of which I gave to my parents, I saw an advert in The Daily Telegraph:
URGENT: RECRUITMENT CONSULTANTS WANTED
OTE £40,000 + BMW 316i
Times Recruitment Limited
Tel. [xxxx]
I applied. As pathetic as it sounds, I didn’t even know what OTE meant but after three interviews, I was offered a job. It would make this post too long for me to share all the details of Times Recruitment (not the one currently registered at Companies House) but let’s just say that it was what they called a boiler room which is where illicit brokers engage in high-pressure selling, over the telephone, of securities of a highly speculative nature or of dubious value. In our case, we had legit candidates but the business was a front for something much more nefarious. I was paid £7,500; it was enough to cover my rent (I shared a room in a house) and travel from Tooting Broadway first and then Kilburn to Baker Street. It didn’t leave me with any money for food or clothing and most weeks I had to survive on rice and not much else. During my three-month sojourn with Times Recruitment (during this time they had turned over around 50 people from their basement at 95 York Place) I met William (Bill) McGowan who was twice my age and had 20 years of experience in accountancy recruitment.
Long story short: he and I decided to leave Times Recruitment and set up on our own. I stayed behind and funded his salary for a couple of months with a loan from my parents – I think it was £1,500 – before leaving to join Bill. We ended up calling the business Ambassador Recruitment (“Ambassador”) and rented a serviced office (one room) in Greycoat Place, Westminster. The aim was to offer both permanent and temporary accountancy staff. Needless to say, we were seriously undercapitalised and operated on fresh air. We recruited Pat as an administrator; she also typed the CVs; and we limped along for the first nine months just about covering our outgoings.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being way out of my depth but, for the first time in my life, I felt I had a purpose and felt the white heat of fear that comes with knowing that failure is just around the corner. We had a stroke of luck though, or rather I did, when we hired our first recruitment consultant, Ginny; she had worked in sales recruitment for Austin Benn. I quickly found myself transitioning out of accountancy recruitment into sales recruitment where I had an uncanny knack for placing candidates where I’d struggled before, partly I suspect because I didn’t have the gravitas or hutzpah to pass myself off in the slightly crusty world of accountancy. Ginny left after six months but left us with her clients which was my second stroke of good fortune because within the client base there were quite a few stationery companies and it was on the back of that I decided to make this my specialism. I should add that I’ve had a lifelong love of all things stationery so recruiting people for some of my favourite brands at the time – e.g. Parker Pens, Staedler and Pilot – wasn’t difficult at all.
Before long, I started to see an uptick in the number of placements which translated into me generating nearly all of Ambassador’s turnover. From memory, we did £86,000 in our first year and £250,000 in our second year. I would say that I probably generated upwards of 90% of that revenue. Mind you, it came at a price: I was working upwards of 100 hours per week and could often be found doing my laundry at midnight on a Friday because it was the only time I had available. My work ethic was at times a little too extreme. I can still remember ringing a candidate on Boxing Day only to be told by his wife “to get a fucking life”. Yikes. Lesson learnt.
You might think this the beginning of a rags-to-riches story. It isn’t. Yes, I managed to buy a flat but it wasn’t long before we were being buffeted by a heinous recession, with interest rates hovering around 15%. Combine this with our inability to recruit and keep staff and Bill losing his mojo and despite me working as hard as humanly possible, we couldn’t place people fast enough to cover our outgoings. And so, the faecal matter finally hit the fan. Unbeknown to me Bill conspired with an insolvency practitioner to place Ambassador into voluntary liquidation. Here today; gone tomorrow. To say that I was crestfallen is an understatement; I was suicidal and had it not been for Allison, my fiancé at the time (we’ve been married now for nearly 32 years), I’m sure I’d have gone under:
“Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.”
― Antonio Machado
I was able to move on from this debacle but, having given NatWest Bank a personal guarantee, I had to do some fancy footwork and eventually agreed on a repayment scheme to get me off the hook from my share of the £50,000 overdraft.
By now, we’ve crested the waves of the 1980s and we’re plunged into the beginning of the 1990s.
Pausing for one moment and to summarise the 1980s (my 1980s), it seems to me now that, at least for seven years (1983-1990), I spent a large part of it, if not the whole frigging deal, thrashing about, wasting great gobs of time trying my best to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life, only to find myself on the receiving end of a failed business which pretty much stole my whole life. No, I’m not looking for sympathy – it’s a long time ago now – but it strikes me that there was next to no planning or well-wrought decision-making and, at best, I was acting on instinct or the melancholy of knowing that I had to do something with my life. There’s also a large part of me that wonders if my time at Ambassador might have been better spent doing something very different. Like what? I don’t know. But I never thought about going to University, nor travel, nor seeking out a teacher or elder. It doesn’t help that I’m too self-reliant and will very rarely, if ever, ask for help. It stems from the fact that on the few occasions where I’ve done so, there’s always been a reckoning along the way, and I don’t want that. Also, I’m not very good around people – yes, really; I used to be sullen but less so these days. Now I’m much more likely to take myself out of a social situation or gathering and sit quietly on my own. I can’t fully explain this – perhaps I’m shy – but I quickly run out of things to say and then I’ve got to deal with those awkward silences which if I’m not careful, I’m apt to fill with gibberish.
I was going to dash into the 1990s and regale you with the minutia of my time in the legal trenches but I realise that this post is already quite long – prolix – and I think it best left to another day. One thing is clear though, from the time I went back to University in 1992 until the end of the decade, all I did was study and work, study and work, study and work. I did find time to get married and start a family, but my abiding memory from that decade is of being scared. Scared I’d fail my degree. Scared I wouldn’t get a training contract. And scared I wouldn’t be offered a job as a solicitor. I wish it were otherwise but there it is. Should it have been like this? I’m not sure. As the first person in my family to ever attend University and the first ever to make it in one of the professions, I felt then as I do now that I was an imposter. Who me? A three-piece suit and a loud, confident voice only gets you so far.
And then we traverse the 2000s, the 2010s and the early part of the 2020s.
How would I sum up those years? Don’t forget that’s nearly a quarter of a century. Probably no different to the previous 20. How sad is that? Yes, there have been a few high spots but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to the fact I’ve this strong sense that nothing I’ve done counts…for much. Yes I’ve helped a few people and yes my wife and have raised three children and I’m grateful for the good fortune that has come my way, but I’d be lying if I didn’t feel supremely underwhelmed with my life.
That begs the question, or it does to me, if you had your time again or someone could give you back your wasted years, what would you do?
That’s for another post.
Love, Julian
PS. I’m very conscious that there’s way too much detail at the beginning of this post and not much at the end; I’ll remedy that and apologies in advance if my writing is veering off into the abyss of a narcissistic treatise.
PPS. I’m going to record a podcast in the coming days. I feel I need to mix things up.