The Best Job in the World
Today on the news we heard that a candidate has been selected for the 'Best Job in the World'; a caretaker for the paradisal Queensland Island on the Australian coast. For an excellent salary, the caretaker is to undertake a twelve hour week of maintaining the island, feeding the fish, snorkelling and generally patrolling his territory, and perhaps even more importantly, promoting the island through various means including keeping a blog (well of course!). Promotion is the key word here, as this superlative among top jobs was 'advertised' world and media-wide and attracted 35,000 applicants. Bit of a marketing triumph there then.
But what really is the best job in the world? Radio 5 was debating the question this morning as I was getting ready, still a bit behind my ideal daily schedule. There were some worthy answers from people in various helping professions and those in the public sector. Then there were some fun ones: I have the best job in the world as I'm an explosives expert and get to blow things up all day! Can't argue with that.
There's the sensible life-coachy answer to this question, which I was expecting to hear more about on the chattering airwaves today - you know, the response that tells you to search your soul, or even just your CV, and 'find the job that's right for you': that particular path which uses your specific qualities and qualifications. Your people skills, your technical skills, your literary skills, your linguistic skills, your negotiating skills, your key values and your core vision. We used to sell plenty of those 'ideal career' titles when I was a regular in bookshopland (I even thought that bookselling itself was my career path for a while). One was called 'What colour is my parachute' which is an excellent question to front such a book. Don't remember looking in the book ever but I've not forgotten the phrase and cover photo...
There's another way of looking at work and that's a more symbolic, metaphorical way, which tries to capture the essential images and actions that a particular job involves and then gives it a greater, universal resonance: this or that job somehow sums up, acknowledges, takes some steps towards healing our human condition.
Well perhaps that's pushing it a bit. But nevertheless - a greater resonance in the specificity of image and action. It sounds as though I'm about to turn to poetry, and in a way I am, although the two examples which came to my mind are both from popular contemporary fiction. The first is from Julia Bell's novel for young adults, Massive. It's a cool story with an ending that's yet not too easily resolved. Fourteen year old Carmen moves to Birmingham with her highly disturbed mother who's trying to make a fresh start in life. Her mother's family are all nearby but remain conflicted. Carmen's mother for instance won't speak to her own sister, Lisa, whom she considers beneath her in terms of aspiration, fashion - and employment: for Lisa runs a fancy nail bar in Birmingham's Bull Ring, though she is facing (and successfully negotiates) enforced relocation herself. But she clearly finds holistic and artistic focus in this art of adornment which contrasts starkly with her older sister's body-erasing anorexia. Carmen finds a kind of solace and a kind of magic in the first professional design Lisa gives her:
'She paints swiftly, accurately. Two stroked a nail. Then she sticks a purple star on each one and covers it with a quick brush of clear blue lacquer.' Carmen ignores the squabbling between her mum and her nan. 'As we walk through the stalls to the esalators I hold my hands out in front of me; my fingers look magic, like wands with spells at the end of them'. Just what she needs at this stage of dullness and emotional entrapment. Lisa is immensely skillful and transmits something of the art of stillness, of taking time, through this apparently trivial creative trade:'Moving too quick, trying to pick things up, putting your hands in your pockets, or lighting a fag, will spoil it, put scars in the soft lacquer. You have to be patient, learn to meditate, take time out from the rush and bustle. Lisa tells me these things, while she tides up. Watching nail polish dry is a fine art.' I do like this. And I shan't feel guilty about making sure my nail varnish dries properly in future, without being scarred by the constant rush of life.
Secondly, Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper is a novel I read a couple of years ago - it was a holiday purchase a couple of years ago, having had great publicity from Richard and Judy. Not that I'm going to wax poetical about their particular careers. But Edwards has her central character, David Henry, as a doctor but with a real passion and vocation for photography - 'Remembering the light-filled images of Paul's [his son] bones, David was filled with a sense of wonder. This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone'. Photos and images are resonant througout this book as David receives images of his daughter Phoebe, a child born with Downs syndrome and whom David 'gave away' at her birth in a moment of panic, telling his wife that Paul's twin sister has died. Phoebe herself grows up in a close relationship to her adoptive mother and finds her job in a photocopy shop. 'I make copies...lots and lots of copies,' she says. She is insightful, accepting, wise. Her job an echo of her father's photographic passion. Making lots of copies, being patient. Pretty important actually.
I do a fair amount of that at university, on a literal if not a metaphorical level, photocopies - images, extracts, starting points and documents. Do I love the symbolism of my job? The rhetoric and sense of educational mission and the mix (as I put in a previous post) of performance-extraversion and withdrawal-introversion. We try to steer would-be writers away from copying and towards informed originality. And it's a job with lots of reading, if not enough writing. Yes I do. But I don't mistake it for poetry - poetry itself, arguably one of the few vocations which seriously eludes attempts to translate it into a full-time job. But then perhaps it would be difficult to find the symbolism, the 'poetry' of writing poetry, as it's arguably the focal point, and the vanishing point, of a working life perceived as metaphor.
But what really is the best job in the world? Radio 5 was debating the question this morning as I was getting ready, still a bit behind my ideal daily schedule. There were some worthy answers from people in various helping professions and those in the public sector. Then there were some fun ones: I have the best job in the world as I'm an explosives expert and get to blow things up all day! Can't argue with that.
There's the sensible life-coachy answer to this question, which I was expecting to hear more about on the chattering airwaves today - you know, the response that tells you to search your soul, or even just your CV, and 'find the job that's right for you': that particular path which uses your specific qualities and qualifications. Your people skills, your technical skills, your literary skills, your linguistic skills, your negotiating skills, your key values and your core vision. We used to sell plenty of those 'ideal career' titles when I was a regular in bookshopland (I even thought that bookselling itself was my career path for a while). One was called 'What colour is my parachute' which is an excellent question to front such a book. Don't remember looking in the book ever but I've not forgotten the phrase and cover photo...
There's another way of looking at work and that's a more symbolic, metaphorical way, which tries to capture the essential images and actions that a particular job involves and then gives it a greater, universal resonance: this or that job somehow sums up, acknowledges, takes some steps towards healing our human condition.
Well perhaps that's pushing it a bit. But nevertheless - a greater resonance in the specificity of image and action. It sounds as though I'm about to turn to poetry, and in a way I am, although the two examples which came to my mind are both from popular contemporary fiction. The first is from Julia Bell's novel for young adults, Massive. It's a cool story with an ending that's yet not too easily resolved. Fourteen year old Carmen moves to Birmingham with her highly disturbed mother who's trying to make a fresh start in life. Her mother's family are all nearby but remain conflicted. Carmen's mother for instance won't speak to her own sister, Lisa, whom she considers beneath her in terms of aspiration, fashion - and employment: for Lisa runs a fancy nail bar in Birmingham's Bull Ring, though she is facing (and successfully negotiates) enforced relocation herself. But she clearly finds holistic and artistic focus in this art of adornment which contrasts starkly with her older sister's body-erasing anorexia. Carmen finds a kind of solace and a kind of magic in the first professional design Lisa gives her:
'She paints swiftly, accurately. Two stroked a nail. Then she sticks a purple star on each one and covers it with a quick brush of clear blue lacquer.' Carmen ignores the squabbling between her mum and her nan. 'As we walk through the stalls to the esalators I hold my hands out in front of me; my fingers look magic, like wands with spells at the end of them'. Just what she needs at this stage of dullness and emotional entrapment. Lisa is immensely skillful and transmits something of the art of stillness, of taking time, through this apparently trivial creative trade:'Moving too quick, trying to pick things up, putting your hands in your pockets, or lighting a fag, will spoil it, put scars in the soft lacquer. You have to be patient, learn to meditate, take time out from the rush and bustle. Lisa tells me these things, while she tides up. Watching nail polish dry is a fine art.' I do like this. And I shan't feel guilty about making sure my nail varnish dries properly in future, without being scarred by the constant rush of life.
Secondly, Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper is a novel I read a couple of years ago - it was a holiday purchase a couple of years ago, having had great publicity from Richard and Judy. Not that I'm going to wax poetical about their particular careers. But Edwards has her central character, David Henry, as a doctor but with a real passion and vocation for photography - 'Remembering the light-filled images of Paul's [his son] bones, David was filled with a sense of wonder. This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone'. Photos and images are resonant througout this book as David receives images of his daughter Phoebe, a child born with Downs syndrome and whom David 'gave away' at her birth in a moment of panic, telling his wife that Paul's twin sister has died. Phoebe herself grows up in a close relationship to her adoptive mother and finds her job in a photocopy shop. 'I make copies...lots and lots of copies,' she says. She is insightful, accepting, wise. Her job an echo of her father's photographic passion. Making lots of copies, being patient. Pretty important actually.
I do a fair amount of that at university, on a literal if not a metaphorical level, photocopies - images, extracts, starting points and documents. Do I love the symbolism of my job? The rhetoric and sense of educational mission and the mix (as I put in a previous post) of performance-extraversion and withdrawal-introversion. We try to steer would-be writers away from copying and towards informed originality. And it's a job with lots of reading, if not enough writing. Yes I do. But I don't mistake it for poetry - poetry itself, arguably one of the few vocations which seriously eludes attempts to translate it into a full-time job. But then perhaps it would be difficult to find the symbolism, the 'poetry' of writing poetry, as it's arguably the focal point, and the vanishing point, of a working life perceived as metaphor.
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