Ruminations

A few weeks ago I went to a reunion of ex-Ottakar's booksellers and met people I hadn't seen for nine years. For a few hours, it felt as if I'd woken up from a bad dream and that we were all back together again. 

To add to the feeling of discombobulation, nobody appeared to have aged, even slightly.

It was a bittersweet evening. It was lovely to see people that I'd once felt a genuine affection for, but it also made me sad that I'd lost an enjoyable and rewarding career. Working alone in a remote barn, for a slowly diminishing income, isn't what I envisaged I'd be doing at this age.

However, I'm not alone. Most of my contemporaries have either experienced 'burn-out' or been made redundant. The world of work is becoming increasingly cut-throat and it's hard to compete with someone who is half your age, full of enthusiasm and willing to accept a lower salary.

Of course, male employees can always crack open the Just For Men, go to a gym and try and seem a little bit crazy, but they'll still come across as embarrasing dads having a midlife crisis. It's an unforgiving world out there.

A friend of mine complains that there is nobody in her office over the age of 35. Where have all the middle aged people gone? I suspect that like me, quite a few of them are eking out an existence, some more comfortably than others, trying to juggle the demands of young children and/or elderly parents.

Next September, my son will hopefully be starting at a new, specialist school, which could be the making of him. I will be taking and collecting him by car every schoolday for the best part of two years, so any work I do will have to fit around that schedule.

At the end of it, my son will hopefully be independent enough to make his own way to appointments and lessons. Legally, he will be an adult and in theory, I'll be free to find a proper job. But what will I do?

Men of my age aren't exactly hot property in the jobs market.

Self-employment can be a godsend if you have a child with 'special needs'. I've lost count of the number of meetings I've had to drive to, or the hours that have been spent coaxing my son back into the outside world. But the erratic income and social isolation can be debilitating.

After sitting alone in a shed for a whole day, I don't come home brimming with energy and my limited repertoire of work-related anecdotes usually involve birds, rodents or invertebrates. I feel bored by myself.

For my own sanity, I need to find something else, even if it's just a succession of temporary or part-time jobs. I can't imagine never working with anyone again.

But, of course, there are also positives to being self-employed. The other afternoon, when I ran out of work, I was able to come home early and go for a walk with my younger son. We stopped here and for the first time in years, I lay on the grass and watched the clouds merging into each other:

The whole afternoon cost nothing and gave us both more pleasure than a visit to any tourist attraction. My son started to tell me about all of the things that were on his mind (most of them involved Lego) and for a while, I felt like a half-decent father.

So I think that answer is to carry on as I am for two years, then look for a part-time job that doesn't involve wearing a green uniform or short trousers. But what, how and where? That is the question.

A Man With a Van

I am a broken man, crushed by the ordeal of physical labour. I don't suppose that I've done anything out of the ordinary - thousands of people load and unload vans every day - but it has been a shock after seven months of relative indolence.

I won't bore you with the details, except to say that I have been moving some furniture for someone over the last couple of weeks, driving a large van that has 166,000 miles on the clock and a suspension that amplifies the tiniest piece of grit on the road into something that resembles artillery fire at Stalingrad.

I'd burned some CDs of Radio Four podcasts to relieve the tedium of motorway driving, but even at full volume, Andrew Marr couldn't compete with the constant squeaking and rattling of metal parts trying to separate. I hadn't heard metal make noises like that since Das Boot.

The nadir came when the wipers stopped working during a flash flood on the M23 and the view ahead turned into a pointillist landscape of greys and dark greens. I took the first exit I could find and stopped at a layby, where I texted Bob, the van's owner: "Coming back. Wipers not working."

20 seconds later, my phone buzzed with a new text message: "Is it raining?"

In fairness to Bob, he fixed the fault quite promptly, swapping the broken fuse for the windscreen wipers with the one that operated the indicators. It was a novel solution, but I would have preferred to have been warned, as the honking and v-signs were making me quite paranoid.

The next day I did my last job for Bob, who gallantly provided me with a man who could stick his arm out of the window if I wished to turn left. Fortunately, the route was only six miles long and quite direct, so neither of us were required to perform any hand signals.

It looked as if everything was going to be all right after all. Sadly, at the final destination, I miscalculated the angle I needed to reverse into someone's drive and ended up getting stuck in the middle of their lawn. It took an hour to free the van from the quagmire I'd created and as we crept forward, it revealed a scene of desolation that reminded me of the Somme. I felt awful.

I'm not quite sure how I ended up agreeing to work for Bob. I think it was something to do with the mindset that comes with being self-employed, feeling obliged to say yes to any opportunity that comes along, regardless of how suitable it is.

But perhaps I also just liked the idea of driving a very big van.