Working for a living

In a strange moment of synchronicity, the last week brought a terrifying tax bill and the possible means to pay some of it. In fact, my enforced sofa-time has come into its own, as my friend has passed some proofreading my way, and where better to do it than the sofa? This has been an income-supplementing plan of mine for some time, as I reckon an English teaching CV featuring Eton College has got to be worth something more tangible than a lingering sense of republicanism, an instinctive distrust of David Cameron and a sock drawer full of starched wing collars. So, rather than spending hours on my computer researching the nether regions of e-bay, I have set to work on proofreading hundreds of management consultancy reports.

It is, naturally, in the nature of anyone working for the arts that they have a distrust of the world of business. It is a world that the proper aesthete aims to avoid at all costs; a world full of sordid cash, shady deals and precious little else. A world I have fully embraced in the interests of paying my tax bill. Bring it on.

What has struck me most about the nature of this work is the clear sense that the report writers are all keen to sound as impressive as possible. This means, unfortunately, that jargon is thick on the ground, and the full stop is conspicuous by its absence. Everything needs to be restated in as many complex ways as possible. There has been an obvious collective decision to treat the word ‘data’ as plural, which would be fine, were it not for the fact that it comes so unnaturally that almost every writer treats it as singular too. Americanisms and coinages are everywhere. There are ‘business-speak’ phrases abounding, that I simply don’t remember encountering in my degree specialism on Arthurian literature. In short, it has proved quite hard work, and not the skim-through for typos that I expected. Which is good, because it allows me to use my brain for something other than working out how best to take that tricky corner in ‘Burnout Legends’ on my PSP. And I will be able to pay my tax bill.

In the meantime, William continues to test Daddy in his own special way. ‘Old Macdonald had a wheels on the bus go round and round’. Charles Ives would be proud. And I’m hoping that by working until 1am last night in order to clear the decks a little today, I won’t simply have freed up my computer for William to demand a go on the Thomas the Tank Engine website. I’m hoping that it’s freed it up for surfing the nether regions of ebay. I want to fantasise about spending my new city salary on Hi-Fi.