Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Epilogue: “Why do you want to leave your current role?”

[Previous chapter]

[Concluding statement (February, 2023)] Dear Prospective Employer,

I’m now even nearlier forty than I was when I began writing this Curriculum Vitæ just over a year ago, and I think I’m now either over my Midlife Crisis, or I’m in the eye of the hurricane.

I feel… well: fine, really. I mean, I’m bed-bound with a bad back. And I still have no Job—which is perhaps unsurprising, given that I never managed to finish this forensically detailed account of my Life in Work; much less to send it to anybody who proved to be interested in or sympathetic to its content. It was never my intention to abandon the previous chapter’s account of my years spent as a cleaner for an Airbnb property midway through. But perhaps the fact that I did speaks for itself, somehow. Perhaps, in spite of how you might feel if you've made it this far, there's only so much you really need to know. To conclude: the Work itself was Dignified and Productive; but it was A Bad Job because of The Commute and because there was no Solidarity involved. (Not to mention the implicit complicity in the depletion of local housing stock.)

Perhaps I should also have accounted for the year and a half I spent as an on-and-off teacher to my daughters over the course of the lockdowns of The Pandemic years? But this, like the years of childcare before, was Unpaid Work for which neither Child could be expected to act as an impartial Referee; and I really did want to keep this Memoir under 400 pages if at all possible, having repeatedly failed to convince any agent with a published email address to take on the 1000-page fantasy Novel I’d finished back in 2017—which was, alas, intended to be the first part of a trilogy. (I did warn you early on about my propensity for Rambling, Prospective Employer...)

At the point at which I abandoned my account of The Airbnb Job, a succession of more pressing Commitments took me away from my Curriculum Vitæ, and would keep me away as 2022 unfolded. Firstly I agreed to help my RAF uncle build a house in my mother’s garden because he was being evicted from his house adjoining a Calvinistic Methodist Chapel on The Island in North Wales, because both the house and chapel were being sold. (The congregation had aged and dwindled to a point of no return.) Secondly, at about the time that Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (February 2022) I suffered a protracted Health Scare due to a mysterious pain in my side, which A Guilty Conscience—following increased alcohol consumption over The Pandemic—led me to believe might be liver cancer. I stopped drinking and immediately became sad and withdrawn. I began to feel the dim pangs of Existential Dread, and considered Getting My Things (whatever those might be) in Order. But the blood tests and ultrasound scans to which I was ultimately subjected after months of very literally nail-biting anticipation indicated that the mysterious pain had no discernible physical cause and might thus be more likely assumed to be either passed gallstones, or the cumulative result of the many hours I’d spent hunched over this laptop on a chair in the front room writing this Memoir.

You see, Prospective Employer, due to the Terrible Internet and lack of a functional and affordable wood-based heating source in my shed-based Home Office (and the spiralling cost of heating the space using the old electric heater we'd brought with us from the children's room in The House on The Corner) my Workplace was not yet fit for purpose over the winter months. And so I almost fell foul of having failed to Assess the associated Risks of “sitting soft” while composing literature. Thus, the humiliating appointment with a doctor (who I inevitably already knew because everybody knows everybody round here) in which I felt obliged to tell the truth about approximately how much I’d been drinking since we all thought the world was about to end (in the presence of both of my children, mind you, due to childcare commitments and/or poor planning on my part) resulted in no Death Sentence—whether justly or unjustly. And the long, winding trip I made through the sunny spring Sunday country lanes to the nearest Proper Hospital in the neighbouring county did not precipitate an abrupt end to my Curriculum Vitae, to mirror that which occurred in the last chapter. Nor did all or any of this lead to a significant change in my Habits, my Priorities, or my overall Outlook on Life. Yes, I stopped drinking for a month, thus unwittingly partaking in a belated “Dry January” for the first and probably last time. And my alcohol consumption, once rekindled, dropped to the more reasonable (if by no means model) pre-Pandemic levels. 

But it was down to the fact that I wasn’t spending my days hunched over the Lenovo laptop, on a chair by the wood-burning stove in the front room, expounding in detail about my second failed attempt to publish The Novel (in 2017)—or the friend’s vegetable-themed PhD I proofread (in 2019) or the chainsaw operation and maintenance Course I completed during a thunderstorm (in 2020) or the third (even more) unsuccessful Poetry Book I published (in 2021)—that my Health Scare became an object in the rear view mirror (appearing closer than it was, metaphorically) and gradually faded away. And with it went the brief threat of a suitably dramatic, if not necessarily personally satisfying, conclusion to this Memoir.

Thus, my CV remained and remains incomplete. I continued to Develop our Property, and to try in vain to prevent otters, foxes and sparrowhawks from periodically massacring our chickens. And in my weekly Welsh Class I very slowly progressed back toward and eventually overtook the standard of Welsh language competence I’d briefly enjoyed as a fourteen-year-old boy, before we left North Wales for England. And I wondered, while doing these and other things, how I ought to complete my Curriculum Vitæ, when I still didn’t really know what I was for. What should come next? Was my own Working Life Story to be shelved like so many other Projects I’d been involved with over the years?

The board-game I’d tried to develop over summer 2021 based on the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy (entitled “Maids of Wessex: The Long Depression”) remained abandoned, folded in-between the filing cabinet and the wall behind the dusty desk in my barely used, shed-based Home Office—groaning under the weight of its many hand-illustrated cards and counters, and its multiplicity of contradictory rules. I made vague noises when about domestic tasks, complaining that one or other of The Board Game or The Memoir—or even The Novel—must surely be the best way for me to make Money in order to afford the necessary Tools and Materials to continue Developing our Property in order to achieve Fulfilment at some point between now and death, or at least a Legacy of sorts to hand over to the children, in order for them to liquidate in pursuit of whatever destiny they had in mind by that point in their own Curriculums Vitæ. And Wife # 1 would invariably enquire sarcastically about some or other wall or shed or path that I’d begun, but which remained similarly—and in her view more pertinently—incomplete and unfit for purpose. Actually, more often than not, Wife # 1 would be working: so the unfinished wall or shed or path would have to enquire silently—if no less sarcastically—on her behalf.

At the time of writing, Prospective Employer, I am not confined to an armchair in the front room, as I might have been in previous winters. This February I am, as I briefly mentioned above, confined to my bed with crippling back pain brought on by an ill-advised weekend’s afternoon work, hauling boulders on a sack barrow through The Long Bog in an attempt to create terracing for raised beds along the public footpath, where I hope to plant a vegetable garden. That this is what I had to be reduced to in order for me to conclude this Work is a shame that I feel acutely—on your behalf as well as on mine. Yes, I applied for some Jobs last year in a more concise and conventional manner. I reasoned that The Memoir had to reach a Conclusion in order for me to conclude it—and that that conclusion probably ought to have involved me getting a Job: with or without The Memoir’s help.

But even as last spring’s Health Scare faded away, and the annual crop of sycamore sap spoiled as a result of contamination by an unknown foulness come floating through the air, Unpaid Work that cannot be called a Job continued to come knocking at my door. Trees needed felling. Logs needed splitting. Storm Eunice blew over a dieback-riddled ash, which smashed into the corrugated-metal roof directly above the desk I’d have been sitting at if my Home Office wasn’t too cold to Work in. (I think I mentioned that in my first letter to you, Prospective Employer? If so, please do consider this repetition as a rhetorical device rather than an annoyance.) So then that tree needed processing too, and the roof needed repairing. And our house needed painting. The outside. All of it. (And it’s pebble-dash...) 

Furthermore, the old cast-iron gutters needed removing and replacing with fashionable and commodious galvanized-steel upgrades. New walls needed erecting, and old walls finishing. Steps needed cutting into various hillsides. Paths needed covering with gravel and drainage ditches needed digging. Later in the year, the younger daughter’s bedroom needed redecorating in order to accommodate a cage in which to keep guinea pigs, for some reason. And throughout all of this I had to suffer the ignominy of protracted, passive-aggressive email-based arguments with the National Park and the Environment Quango about exactly how flood-prone the outbuildings we want to convert into holiday lets really are—ultimately concluding with the environmental authority refusing to provide me with a map to indicate exactly which bit of my garden (never mind the buildings themselves) might feasibly get wet, according to their computers, in a “one-in-a-thousand-years weather event” in order that I might exclude that part of the land from the buildings’ proposed curtilage when re-submitting our planning application. We invited the Welsh Government’s historic environment service, Cadw, to consider both buildings for listing over the summer, in order to prove that they ought not to be condemned as ruins; they eventually decided to list The Mill in December. So although we can't legally convert it into holiday accommodation, we can now be prosecuted for allowing The Mill to fall further into disrepair. Cadw didn’t want to list the much older Cow-shed because nobody really knows what it was before it was a cow-shed, and thus nobody could be sure what to put it on a list of. (Mills? Farmhouses? Cow-sheds? Tithe-barns? Centuries-old vernacular buildings condemned to oblivion by the environment agency’s wildly speculative computer-modelled climate-change forecasts?) 

But Jobs, Prospective Employer: I know you’re more interested in Jobs than any of this. And I didn’t quite manage to get any Jobs last year. There was one offer of one freelance Job for The Language Consultancy. They got in touch in April with a large spreadsheet indicating a two-week full-time insurance-company Job, which would take place while I was supposed to be in The Isle of Man on my first holiday in three years, and which seemed to have originally been allotted to somebody called “Jason”. After much Soul Searching, it turned out that I (whether or not I was to be called Jason thereafter) did not want that Job. Meanwhile my RAF uncle’s house—ordered as a sort of large-scale flatpack affair from Estonia—threatened to consume the whole of 2022, and with it him, my mother, my mother’s partner, their dogs, their house and garden, and (on a more occasional basis) me. A year on and his house is almost ready to be lived in. (Just as my four-year-old shed is almost ready to be worked in.) Indeed, I was helping to cut metal tubing to conceal socket cables in his kitchen just shortly before I wrote this sentence. (And I was helping to erect a makeshift shed around his external water tank shortly before editing the previous sentence, and adding this one.)

There was one actual interview for some actual writing work in 2022. Back in… March? Maybe April? There was a Career Coaching Company on LinkedIn that wanted a Content person for their Website. I went to mum’s (where the internet was less terrible) so I could call a guy in Essex on Microsoft Teams. We’ll call him Jod. Jod talked for 45 minutes about his own professional background, which he was evidently very impressed with, and then spent another 45 on the Big Plans he had for The Career Coaching Company. Jod asked me literally nothing about me. (Perhaps I should have emailed him a draft of this CV?) He also boasted that he had five more candidates to interview that day. So I wished him well and told him that I hoped he didn’t lose his voice—I only realized after I clicked to "sign off" the call that he might have thought I was being rude and/or sarcastic. But I wasn’t; I really meant it. If Jod talked anywhere near as much in the other five interviews as he did in mine, he’d have been hoarse by the end of the day; and in no clearer a position of who he ought to employ as his content person—unless he was basing that decision purely on how willing they were to silently listen to his life story, or what they looked like. Anyway, he’d thoroughly convinced me I didn’t want to Work for him or his Career Coaching Company; so I finished that interview no nearer to knowing what I was for, nor whether I’d ever be for anything again. So I went back to helping my RAF uncle with his house for a bit, before buggering off at 2:45pm as usual in order to be home in time for Child # 1 arriving home from The Big School on the bus. Jod never emailed me, and I never emailed him.

The year passed, as years do at The Mill House, with the thundering of the river and the leat; with the longer days heralding a flurry of increasingly unmanageable invasive species trying to bury our house, land, and chickens in a misery of biomass, before winter arrived on cue, and everything suddenly died. As we all must, come our own winter.

But however old my back might currently feel, I am not yet in the winter of my life, Prospective Employer; and there is no grim guarantee of an imminent death at this juncture to spare me from further Work. No spring chicken am I; but no stew-pot hen as quite yet either. If I was going to lay a golden egg, perhaps it’s fair to suppose I’d have done so by now. But nutrient-rich eggs aplenty might yet emerge from my cloaca (hopefully only metaphorically) for decades to come. So to conclude, Prospective Employer, yes: I would still rather like a Job, if you have one. There’s plenty to do about this place; I am hardly twiddling my thumbs. This Career Gap of mine has been no Gap Year. I have not abseiled up or down Machu Picchu or taken a selfie in sunglasses beside Angkor Wat. And I still don’t understand how anybody with any Hopes, Dreams, or Ambitions, can really afford tattoos. But the Cost of my latterday Life seems by now greater than the Value of my unremunerated Labour. When Living becomes close to impossible for the poor, it eventually becomes difficult even for those of us who are, by comparison, reasonably well off. As long as my wife still has her Job, she can pay our mortgage, and just about afford to keep me in jeans, beer, and bacon sandwiches. But I’m beginning to feel nostalgic for the professional future I once thought I had; which is not to say some highfalutin “senior” or “managerial” Career in The Great Wen; just an honest-to-God Productive Job of Work, where that Work involves words. Well... that, and The Pinch. And yet... as less and less of my time tends to lead me into my home office (or anywhere else containing chairs) to open up this old Lenovo laptop in order to tap out little black shapes onto white mock-pages—whether for fun, or for profit—I have to wonder whether my entreaties to you, Prospective Employer, are being made at this late hour as much from habit as they are from genuine conviction. Why did I ever want to become a writer in the first place? I always enjoyed reading, sure. And as my teachers gradually began to encourage my efforts in that department, from the last years of primary school, I came to enjoy writing too. But there were many other things I enjoyed just as much back then. Possibly even some other things that other people thought I might be good at...

And just as there are only so many poems one can compose before one becomes—on some level, and whether good, bad, or indifferent in the eyes of others—a poet, there are only so many packs of roofing battens one can order from the local builders' merchants before one becomes—on some level, and whether good, bad, or indifferent in the eyes of others—a builder. Can one be both? What implications might such a seachange carry for the trajectory of my social mobility? If my next poetry book fails to reach sales in double figures, and no office manager will agree to employ me once more as a writer, will I eventually cease to be a card-carrying member of the middle class? Or if I someday come to command a more reliable wage by the wearying of my body than my mind, would that make me once more—in spite of my expensive education and couple of year's worth of savings, not to mention decades of effort on my parents' part—a prodigal member of the working class?

Of course we came to The Mill house hoping to change it. To impact upon its environment. And so we have been doing over the six or so years we've lived here so far. But as we pass into the uncharted territory that makes it the longest I've ever lived in any one location up to this point in my life so far, I know that (as I somehow expected) it has changed me much more than I have changed it. I still write, occasionally. But not religiously. And not for at least four years professionally. I am much likelier to be found at any given time of day moving wood or stones or gravel around the garden than I am to be found moving nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and (heaven gravely forbid, Prospective Employer) adverbs around a text document. Even in my own creative pursuits, it feels like there is less writing that needs or perhaps even wants to be done nowadays. This very process, as I'm sure you can read, is beginning to feel a bit like pulling teeth. And I have no dental training.

Meanwhile, as I know just as well from the decreasing instances of my being summoned to Wife # 1's office to help with a tricky paragraph on a PowerPoint slide as I do from the increasing instances of people from my old copywriting network complaining of a lack of steady work in their LinkedIn blog posts, Artificial Intelligence has shifted its aim from long-distance lorry drivers (whom it was originally supposed or at least rumoured to be lining up for obsolescence) and got professional writers and other such "creatives" squarely in its sights. Indeed, in the relatively brief period I've been working on (and, to be fair, off) this CV, the rise of AI has swiftly graduated from being a buzzworthy industry talking point among strategy folk to being an existential threat to the white-collar workforce on the scale of that posed to agricultural labourers by the threshing machines that loomed large over Hardy's Wessex.

So where does that leave me, Prospective Employer? I ask you because I feel you are unlikely by now to ask me.

I need to work; I've been told. By George Osborne, by Wife # 1, and in even starker terms more recently by my own bank balance.

So I will not claim to be Eustacia Vye, “capable of much” but “injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control”; for as you have seen, Prospective Employer, I arrived at this “end” mostly by my own Means. But having near crippled myself this past weekend in order to construct a boggy vegetable patch that cannot hope to ever put enough food upon our table to sustain us—when even the stagflated bullcrap that passes for writers’ wages nowadays could probably still comfortably fill my vegetable drawer without breaking my back—I’m beginning to fear that I might perhaps pass for a Clym Yeobright, if glimpsed by a local up on the heath at dusk.

I am native to no one land, Prospective Employer. And thus only to the words of this English language, which I once made the tools of my trade.

Thus, by your grace, I would like to return to them.

If it’s not already too late.

Yours hopefully,

Alexander Velky, February 2023