Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 19: “What do you like to do outside of work?”

[Previous chapter] [The Wine Websites: June 2010 – April 2013 (spare time)]

Over the few weeks I was in The Great Wen working at Ad Agency # 1, my long-term Sideline at The Wine Websites finally drew to a close. Malcolm was taking (very) early retirement to spend more time with his family, and to take a voluntary position at the church he attended in whichever bit of Scotland he lived in. When Malcolm first contacted me out of the blue to ask me to write for his websites, I knew very little about wine. But one of his websites was about red wine, and the other was about white wine; and even I could tell the difference to that extent. The Wine Websites only existed because he’d won the URLs at an auction, and thereafter felt he ought to do something with them. Malcolm was an affiliate marketer who’d made most of his money by procuring and developing websites that would serve as an SEO-friendly buffer between the consumer and the product. Prominent URLs (or domain names) were often the starting point; and he’d find people like me who were willing to churn out Content on the relevant topic that would help the website stay relevant in the robotic eyes of the search engines. In terms of Economics, it wasn’t that different to the type of Work offered at The Content Mill; but because Malcolm approached me personally, he was A Nice Guy, and I was writing about Wine on the Internet already—for fun—it made sense for me to do it for a bit of cash, or the occasional free bottle of wine through the post. There was just enough to the Job that it’s worth detailing here; but before I do, I’ll detail The Wine Qualification I studied for in The Haven Town in 2011.

The Wine Qualification

Girlfriend # 3 and I had developed a mutual interest in wine over the course of our relationship, and used to shop at the fancy independent wine shops in The Cosmopolitan East of The Great Wen before we moved to The Haven Town. After we moved, it was mostly back to supermarket wine for us. There was one independent wine shop in The Haven Town, but it wasn’t within walking distance; and the proprietor wasn’t really what you’d call A People Person, so we tended to feel guilty for making him feel like he had to talk to us. We’d been to a wine-tasting at the local Wine Warehouse, and we'd enjoyed that. So we decided to sign up for The Wine Qualification at intermediate level as it was something social that we could do together where we might meet some people who lived locally—and I might be able to improve my Work for The Wine Website, in case I ever worked out how to make that into an actual Job.

It took ages to persuade the admin people who were running local evening classes to get back to my emails, because they kept forwarding them to one another in the hope that somebody else would deal with it. By the time we were eventually directed to a local course, Girlfriend # 3 was pregnant with Child # 1 and thus couldn’t (or wouldn't) take part in the classes. In fact, she didn’t want to because she said it would make her feel sick. So she drove me to The Rented Sports Hall once a week so that I could enjoy an evening class of wine-tasting and education thereupon, run by an elderly gentleman who delivered the entirety of the classes without sitting down, chuckled a lot, and kept his hands firmly in the pockets of semi-formal trousers that were much too long for him.

I didn’t make any friends. Everyone else in the class was quite a bit older than me. Most of them were local; and I think a lot of them already knew each other. For whatever reason, none of them seemed to warm to me. I mentioned once that I was paid a modest sum to keep The Wine Websites, and that this was the reason I'd chosen to attend the classes. But nobody batted an eyelid. I don’t think the instructor guy even heard. (Maybe I sounded arrogant/deluded? I don’t know...) Of course I enjoyed drinking the wine, and I learned a little bit about regional wine styles, famous blends, and grape “varietals”. But I spent most of the Time wishing I was at home with Girlfriend # 3 watching TV and drinking wine there.

Girlfriend # 3 would dutifully arrive to pick me up after the two hours had passed, and I’d stumble into the car and she’d complain that I was drunk; which only seemed like evidence that I'd been doing what I was supposed to have been doing to me, but for which I’d apologize. Of course, this was an inevitable result of the pursuit of this particular branch of knowledge. Unless I was to spit into the provided metal bucket on the t able; which nobody else did, and which I didn’t really want to.

The examination was more difficult than I expected. But I passed, and gained my intermediate-level wine-and-spirits qualification, which would theoretically allow me to work in an entry-level role in a wine shop or a bar. I somehow suspect that everyone passed. One of the guys from the course took down everyone’s names and contact details because he said it’d be nice to all meet up for a drink some time, and we all agreed that, yes! It would. But I never received any communication on the subject; so either he never bothered to arrange anything of the sort, or he did, but for some reason chose to omit me from the invitation. Naturally, I like to assume the former.

The role

Most of my writing for The Wine Websites was reviews of wine that I’d drunk. I reviewed most wine that I drank over the couple of years that Malcolm kept paying me to do so. I also did a bit of news; but that only counted as a third of an article, and didn’t get as much traffic. And the odd feature; but those took quite a bit longer, so weren’t really cost-effective from my perspective. I got about ten pounds per article initially—which wasn’t terrible, as I could bash a review out in a quarter of an hour; though it did take a bit longer to upload it via the CMS, and add an image, etc. I’d also accept wine as Payment, where the wine had a retail value of equal to or greater than ten pounds. Which it sometimes did.

After a while, Malcolm asked me to upload other people’s reviews as well. There was a South African guy who worked in the wine trade in some capacity. Like most wine writers, he was quite dull; but he knew his stuff—especially about South African wines. There was an American wine-and-food-blogger who wrote in a very enthusiastic manner, but had zero interest in editing (or even punctuating) her own work. And there were a few other people that I managed to enlist via Gumtree to provide a constant stream of Content for The Wine Websites, in order that one day Malcolm might be able to sell the URLs for a greater price than he’d paid for them. I even enlisted Lou, fellow ex-boyfriend of Girlfriend # 1, who’d also freelanced for me at The Music Website.

There was never any real suggestion that there was a long-term goal for me or my Freelance “Team” to Work toward; although Malcolm and I had a bit of back-and-forth over the years about how the sites might be moved toward a profit-making entity in and of themselves. He pointed out on one occasion that it might have been a lot easier if he’d managed to bag the URL “wine.co.uk” instead of redwine.co.uk and whitewine.co.uk. I couldn’t disagree. One time Malcolm was late paying an invoice to the South African guy, and the latter copied me in to a complaint to our mutual Bossman—thereby revealing to me that he was ordinarily paid £5 more per article than I was. Malcolm was flustered by this accidental revelation, I could tell. But I didn’t really care. The South African had been writing for Malcolm before I turned up. And I’d gone up to £15 an article at some point anyway; so I was managing to scrape together £100 a month by the last year of my involvement with The Wine Websites. The Work was never difficult, and never got in the way of anything else I was doing. It encouraged me to keep trying to find new wines to drink; even after we moved to The Wine Desert of West Wales, where almost all of our wine would subsequently come from Aldi.

Good Job or Bad Job?

I learnt more via The Wine Websites Job than I did in many Proper Jobs, Prospective Employer. However, almost everything I learnt while writing about wine was about wine; so very little of that Knowledge has been Transferable to non-wine-related pursuits. I learnt, for example, that the wine we drink today bears relatively little resemblance to the wine that was drunk as recently as one hundred years ago, let alone in ancient times; and that the wine industry is changing all the time, and that the wine we drink in twenty years might not even be that similar to what we drink now; and also that because of an insect from America, almost every Old World vineyard was destroyed in the nineteenth century, and had to be replanted and hybridized with North American vines, which were resistant to the bug that had wrought the widespread devastation.

One summer, a specialist importer that only existed very briefly sent us a whole case of high-end New Zealand Pinot Noir, sourced from a couple of different vineyards; and I’ve yet to taste anything so amazing—from France, Italy, or anywhere else. I once got to review a cordless Bosch screwdriver product that was specifically designed to open wine; which was exactly as daft as it sounds. (But which I still own, and very occasionally use for its intended purpose.) By my usual criteria for judging the quality of a Job, I could hardly say this was among the best. I’d have starved if I was solely relying on it as an income stream, for one thing. There was no “Team” as such. And while Malcolm was A Nice Guy, I never actually met him in real life, or even spoke to him on the phone, and almost definitely now never will; so I could hardly say there was Solidarity involved. But there was more Dignity in wine writing than there was in a lot of writing Jobs I’ve had; even though it was just as subjective and, arguably, as unnecessary as music writing. As for Productivity; well… did my Work have any discernible impact on the UK wine industry? For example: did one single person ever buy a bottle of wine on the strength of my recommendation, or one made by one of my Freelancers? Judging by the amount of traffic to the sites (which received very few comments) I’d imagine probably not.

My wine writing was once singled out for commendation by the founder and CEO of the world's first (and undoubtedly the world's last) wine-themed social media website, in a post on LinkedIn. I thanked him privately and told him to contact me if he or anyone he knew ever need somebody to write about wine in exchange for money, but I never joined his wine-themed social media website because I didn't see the point in it. And eventually his American investors came to share my perspective, and the website ceased to exist. Alas before any of their money could be funnelled in my general direction.

But I was being Paid to Write about Wine, and could thereafter always accurately claim to have done that. So whatever the technicalities, I must throw out my own criteria on this occasion: I still consider it to have been A Good Job.

Concluding Notes

• Three years after Malcolm put his wine websites on ice, he received an invitation from a Slovenian PR company to an all-expenses-paid four-day trip around six vineyards in “The Land of Eternal Sun” (Then FYR Macedonia; now North Macedonia). The PR woman promised: “We will take care of everything: your travel arrangements and sleeping arrangements.” Malcolm was busy with his kids and his church; and he’d never been much of a wine-writer anyway, by his own admission. So he asked me if I wanted to respond to it. I was tempted. But it sounded too good to be tru e. (Had they even looked at the outdated websites we hadn’t touched for three years?!) While I was desperate to find out if this could actually be A Real Thing—and not just a flimsy pretext for organ harvesting, if you'll excuse the cheap anti-Eastern European bigotry, which I feel my heritage just about affords me the liberty of indulging in, Prospective Employer—I too was by then very busy: looking after my kids, doing bits and bobs of Freelance work, and rewriting The Novel. What was more, the unshakable memory of the miserable five days I’d once wasted at a Belgian music festival urged me to exercise caution where wild optimism might have counselled otherwise. The absolute best-case scenario I could imagine? I pitched a report of the tour to The Guardian, got promised (as an unknown hack) about £500 for a week’s worth of work, spent three or four days travelling back and forth, and four days in a country I’ve never been to, with people I’ve never met, and without Wife # 1 and Children # 1 and 2 to enjoy it with… what sounded idyllic at first soon lost its appeal upon closer inspection. And it was, after all, much, much likelier that I’d end up stranded in Ljubljana or Skopje—or worse still, The Great Wen—with no battery on my phone, having had my wallet (if probably not my kidneys) stolen. I guess we’ll never know…
  

Poetry book # 1

As an interlude, here I will mention my first Poetry Book, self-published on my 30th birthday in June 2013. Poetry was never a Job for me, Prospective Employer, and it never will be. I wouldn’t want a poetry Job because it would pay badly and I would be bad at it. And it would almost definitely be funded by some or other Quango whose very existence I was ideologically opposed to. But I’d enjoyed writing poetry from time-to-time since I went to The Little Welsh School on The Island in North Wales, where, when I was ten, the teacher was so impressed with my poem “The Spooky Wood” that he got me to stand up and read it in front of the class. I still remember it:

The monsters in the spooky wood

Would eat small children if they could,

But as they creep from tree to tree

The children see them and they flee.

So… tonight the monsters have no tea.

Ever since my narrative poetry collection set in a fictional North Welsh village but based on the plot of Thomas Hardy's “Return of The Native” had been rejected (based on a sample of six poems) by Faber & Faber in 2005, I’d been writing Issues-based poems and posting them on a poetry blog called “Alexander Velky Has Doubts”. I decided not to submit any of these new poems I’d written to anybody else in advance of publishing, because I felt this would give them greater DIY/punk integrity when I finally decided they were good enough to publish. Besides, I reasoned; if Faber & Faber didn’t want me, I didn’t want to be published by any of the others, most of whose Physical Products looked and felt dreadful. I got Gilbert from university and Greg from The MA Course to proofread the 33 poems I’d chosen for inclusion. My younger brother designed and typeset the volume, using a photograph taken by my mother of the edge of an ornately framed piece of art on a white gallery wall for the cover. 

I called it “Mistaken for art or rubbish” after the last poem in the volume; and it was simultaneously meant to be a not-wholly-serious exploration of what art was, and also, at the same time, art. I crowdfunded the production of 200 copies via the website Kickstarter. 44 people backed it, raising £720, and although it thus immediately broke even, to date just under half of the copies are still in my shed, and many others are available second-hand online. I sent out a few copies to newspapers and periodicals for review, and some to various famous people I admired (although I was unable to source postal addresses for BBC Breakfast news presenter Bill Turnbull or Metatron from The Meads of Asphodel). Of the latter group, only one responded: Bill Drummond from The KLF said he’d “read, understood, and valued” the book and he even used the word “enjoyed” in relation to one of the videos of me performing a poem in my shed. I was of course thrilled by this; I’d been a fan of his Work for years, ever since I enjoyed watching his band (and Tammy Wynette) on Top of the Pops when I was eight. However, it seems I’ve since lost or deleted this email, so I have no evidence whatsoever that I’m not Making This Up. You may choose to believe what you like, Prospective Employer. But I believe I am a mostly Reliable Narrator.

Less wonderful were the actual reviews my Poetry Book garnered. Bear in mind, Prospective Employer, that it’s almost unheard of for a debut poetry collection to receive A Bad Review in the UK press; mine got two. I suspect the provocative press release had something to do with this. But then, had I not written that, it’s likely nobody would have reviewed my book at all. In the press release I bemoaned the state of UK Poetry, suggesting there was a gaping chasm between semi-popular but largely insubstantial Stage Poetry, and nepotistic, academic and almost unfathomably insular Page Poetry; and also that both were usually of very Poor Quality. I also claimed that nobody need worry, because my book would tackle this perceived problem by uniting everyone in admiration—of it and me. The first review by a poet I’d never heard of was interesting and not badly written, but concluded that I was “disappointingly traditional and pedestrian”. (Factually inaccurate, because I could legally drive by this point.) The next one, by a different poet I’d never heard of, was even less forgiving, but not as well written. The only quotable part declared “he probably thinks this is funny; it’s not”. The copy I sent to Nicholas Wroe, then poetry editor at The Guardian, ended up for sale on Amazon within two months having (the advertisement proudly declared) "never been read".

Undeterred, I memorized almost every poem from the book, and recorded performances of them all in my shed in The House on The Corner over the next few years. The final one was recorded as the shed was in the process of being dismantled to house a new biomass boiler, which would finally equip The House on The Corner with central heating. Few noticed these artistic efforts, and fewer still cared. The book didn’t make any more money; so poetry clearly wasn’t to be a Job for me. Nevertheless, I’ve included it on much smaller CVs than this one; so I couldn’t omit it for fear of seeming Coy.

[Next chapter, soonish...]