The person who cuts my hair is a stand up comedian with a Philosophy degree. He runs a comedy club and wears a (self-commissioned) t-shirt that says I (heart) Zinedine Zidane. When he needs money, he cuts hair. When he doesn't, he doesn't. He tells good jokes, and we wonder what Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir got up to of an evening (smoking small clay pipes and drinking Absinthe, of course). I suggest that Sartre was always giving it some about existential angst because he was only 5ft 1, and God knows that must have made life difficult.
Anyway, I've been turning the hot water tap on and off, and turning the extractor fan on and off, and turning the shower on and off, and opening and closing the cupboard to admire the invisible mend on my floorboad, which has been turned round, and wondering what trade I can take up. In discussion with a friend who is now a little less close than he once was on Saturday night, I suggested doing a ladies' DIY course, learning to cook Thai food, and doing a basic mechanics course, because I want to be the sort of person you could leave in a wood and who would survive. And I've got nothing else to do.
Most work doesn't make you free. For freedom, for really being able to control what you do, you need what used to be called a trade. A practical skill. It's all well and good being able to design shop windows, or madly intelligent City trading networks, or being able to sell things that people don't need, but is writing a marketing strategy as profoundly satisfying as cooking a good dinner for 10 people, or being able to build shelves, or change the oil in your car?
I intend to join the massed ranks of the over-educated middle classes who, equipped with a proper and useful skill that everyone wants, skip through life doing practical things here and there for money, leaving enough time to do the things they really want to do (e.g. dog dancing or ballet). The question is, which one will I pick? Could I get my fat arse in the small spaces required for tricky plumbing jobs? Does the fact I can't really do maths mean 'no' to carpentry? Does the fact that I have the patience of an irritable peanut mean that this is all a foolish dream? And am I consigned to pretending people need the things they don't want for the rest of my life?
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2 comments:
My hairdresser is a stand up comedian with a Philosophy degree from Manchester
Were they alive today, Sartre and Camus would be in line to put him in formaldahide and name it 'Everything We Have Ever Thought'.
Learn to do things with wood. Actually, bollocks to that. Become a gardener. It's sexier, the work is non-existant and you get to charge a FUCKING FORTUNE.
Except they wouldn't. Sartre would argue that Don was accepting the label of 'dead' and as such was not 'authentic'. Camus would then bang on about the fact that he was dead handsome when he was alive, and used to play goal for Algiers.
Sartre ably mocks the whole playing-goal thing for the myth that it is, cannot argue with the handsome thing, and challenges Camus to a Disque Bleu smoking competition.
Nobody knows the result.
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