To restructure my life after Boots had booted me onto the dole queue, and to prove I was still willing to work to The Job Centre, I picked up from where I had left off five years earlier and returned to doing voluntary work of my own choosing. When I worked as a volunteer in the mid-eighties Gainsborough was a deep pocket of economic depression amid an uneven country-wide upward mobility. If Nottingham was even a bit like the Gainsborough of the previous decade then I knew where I was better than other people did for whom 'being in the wrong place at the wrong time' was a first time experience. 7
Even better, in the 1990's my parents could no longer tell me to submit to the worst choices that were open to me in the hope of some weak short term acceptance, To them I was now a guest who they could co-opt into performing old routines-Mother's area of interest in particular-on my visits to them. But I was no longer the person who would obey her blindly, not even recognising my own blindness. The Gainsborough of her memory was gone anyway, along with the manpower services commission scheme jobs. 13
The advantage with my voluntary work was that I found out who to work for, based on what I could see that I could do. When I limited the work to what I could see how to do it, that made the work more agreeable. Any charity of any size that had to rent a building to operate was already going to be tighter for money, so the free labour that came it's way could negotiate when and how to be most useful. Church based charities had a ready made network for seeking volunteers, their church notice boards. It was through that network and word of mouth that I chose what to do.19
The disadvantage to my presenting my voluntary work as an effort to work was that when most paid jobs required either a degree of sophistry, a disguise for the lack of employer support, or some mild degree of coercion to make the reduced choice for the new employee seem attractive, then presenting my open choice of subscribing to good natured voluntarism went against the disguised market forces that were behind the new recession. I quietly resisted the poorly disguised bad deals, when bad deals were the norm. But what if I bad deal presented itself as unavoidable? 25
Jed who lived in the shared house was partially deaf and worked in a gardening centre had found a job that that was a win-win. It fitted well around his disabilities-plants were quiet as were many of the people that bought them. With 'my nerves' and my unresolved feelings around my being gay I was unsure there was any job that would be a win-win that readily fitted around my weaknesses and needs. And if there was a win-win job for me then it would not take much of a change in economic climate for that job to become a win-lose. And anyway I saw my job that year as 'working my way 'out of the closet'', escaping being a bruised square peg who had been hammered into a round hole, rather than looking for better disguised bruising through employment. My voluntary work fitted around my agenda. 34
I worked one day a week in a dry house, serving food at lunch time to the sober homeless who might be tempted to getting drunk on the cheap elsewhere but in the house they simply wanted somewhere to sit down and be sober with their mates that was warm, and be served a meal and all the tea they could comfortably drink. For my own small daring to be different I took The Pink Paper in to read on the quiet. It was a weekly newspaper where the content was aimed at, and representative of, gay men. It was London-centric, rather than having much about Nottingham in it, but that was fine. If there was local content in it that would have been my entre into local gay life then I doubt I was ready to use the knowledge gained from the paper as my introduction. If the newspaper had a purpose for me it was to prove that homosexuality was a thing of words and civil life at least as much as it was about having nothing to say and much reduced means of meeting people socially, well beyond waving my willy in the toilet as if I were drowning in the wrong choices, or waving as if there was nothing wrong and I liked being silent. 46
In my other voluntary work I knew better than to take 'The Pink Paper' in to read in quiet moments. I worked one night a week-either a Friday or a Saturday every fortnight in a Christian coffee bar that St Nicholas church subsidised as an alternative to the notoriously troublesome alcohol based night life in Nottingham. I liked the sound system they had and as a volunteer I could sometimes choose the music. Was (Not Was) and Da La Soul were fine as up to date R&B sounds went as far as I was concerned. World Party were thoughtful listening too. Other volunteers may have preferred some up to date Christian music-the sort of artists who had recently headlined at The Greenbelt Christian Arts festival which I had neglected to attend of late. Say, Deacon Blue, and Mike Peters. 54
But however much I found workarounds for some of the expectations I wanted to break down there was a central problem facing me that I did not know how to negotiate my way around. My life was unevenly compartmentalised. In one difficult compartment there was my being gay which I dearly wanted to be less secretive about, in another I trying to learn more about mental health though I knew that some in my church would say that Freudian therapy was of the occult. In a third compartment there was the church attendance where only at the very edges were the complexities of the lives that people had were accepted. E.g. when Celia whom I had prayed with for a few months, admitted to her friend that she had feelings for me that were far nearer a Mills and Boon fantasy future than the safe sense of accepting merely being prayed for/with which I'd intended. 64
Then there was what to do about paid work. How ready was I to be some sort of loss leader in employment, financially, which left me on housing benefit. I could live with doing such a job but only if it had a no-fault exit back onto the dole from it. Windrush Nursing Home had taught me that much. Then there was my work record. I had done too many ACE schemes and done too little other work to disguise my dependence on government schemes with. What did employers want most? Would they apply the old catch 22 logic of 'you don't have experience? Then say I was barred from the job, because it would give me experience.'? I had found the catch 22 wearing enough last time....72
Finally there was the identity that I had collated as an adult in Gainsborough of part dole queue drop out,/part late period hippy, part record collector, where if I was bad at making relationships then I was better at making relationships with friends through music, lacking in foundation as such friendships would always be. My last and oldest friend in that line was called Graham. Through ease and difficulty, address change after address change, we had stayed in tenuous touch with each other. In the spring or early summer of 1991 he visited me in Nottingham and I tried to show myself more receptive in one area of life where we had always differed. He followed several recently living eastern teachers, where their term for teacher was guru, all of whom promised that the whole world could be transformed in the right instant. We talked about this and I stuck to my Christian belief, but admitted that I preferred the Creation Centred Spirituality of a teacher I'd found over historic, traditional, church teachings, and I was part of the diversity that the household I lived in represented. My tone was conciliatory. 86
But either I hit the wrong note with him, or I could not know that he visited me mostly to say that he was returning to Cornwall for good this time. Where with previous attempts at living in Cornwall he had never lined up both a permanent well paid job and a good long term place to stay, he had pulled off that combination this time. I.e. the visit was mainly for him to say 'Goodbye'. 90
Whether I saw his visit as a delayed fresh start, and he had difficulty saying that the visit was always his last as far as he knew is impossible to say given that his visit to Nottingham was thirty three years ago as of 2024. What can be said is that it would be a long time before I realised how permanent his departure from my life was, and we would both be very different people to who we once were when he finally rediscovered me. 95
No comments:
Post a Comment