Captain Wilkinson asked me if Vemara was for sale. He has an enthusiast wanting a traditional boat and Vemara is the only classic wooden boat for miles around. So I adopted the Gilbert White approach. Five years ago Gilbert sold Skua 4 for £7 500 and bought Kim II for £30 000. Over the next couple of years he spent £10 000 replacing the engine, adding self-furling gear to the foresails and generally making a good boat better. He has been sailing up and down and across the English Channel and in Rye Bay in his new yacht for four years. Throughout this time his boat has been for sale...for £40 000. ‘Every boat has a price. This is what I will sell for. If somebody offers me £40K I will sell. If they come with an offer I will think about it.’ I told Alan Wilkinson that I would sell Vemara for £36 000.
There was little work going on yesterday. Behind me as I walked into town at eight o’clock there were a million demonstrators getting ready to invade the streets of France... ‘Pardonnez moi monsieur: three million say les unions.’ A third of France’s public sector took part and a fifth of French schools shut down for the day. The largest protest for half a century. In Paris 5000 police turned up for work but train drivers didn’t as half the trains were cancelled.
In Britain a million demonstrators took to the streets...’Excuse me, old chap! Only 400 000 actually. Jolly old Local Government Association says so, eh whatever? Perhaps. But in Manchester nine out of ten council workers came out on strike and 70% of the schools were closed…17 500 in all although it varied a surprising amount from almost none in Hampshire and West Sussex to every school in the North of England. So I suppose we can say we beat the French on school closures by 7-2 but lost 3-1 on demonstrators.
I spent several hours with Heidi on Monday afternoon at The Ship Inn. It was a nice enough. Text messages buzzed across town briefly on Tuesday morning…but reconciliation is not on the cards for the immediate future. Tant pis! Then there was my birthday present to Heidi which like my Christmas present from the Body Shop was not a success. Heidi had seen the film and read the book. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is on order from Ottakar’s. Third time lucky.
Winchelsea Singers are in need of tenor voices for their Spring Concert in Winchelsea Church on 8th April. So as a Journeyman Tenor I have stepped into the breach for the last three rehearsals. Today was the first of them. There are various operatic standards in the first half of the programme…Puccini’s Humming Chorus, a Donizetti drinking song, Wagner’s Chorus of the Pilgrim Slaves from Tannhäuser and Fauré’s Requiem after the interval.
A cloud of gloom descended upon me as I was walking back from town at six o’clock. This happens from time to time…out of the blue…for no apparent reason. Francoise chanced to be passing…back from Hastings Art College…and took me back to her house for a late afternoon tea that became an early evening meal. Today is my ex-wife’s birthday. Later on the boat I got through half a bottle of wine. Thanks Francoise...as my text message said.
Francoise was telling me that her son had advertised for a receptionist for one of his hostels a couple of weeks ago and had received three hundred applications. He interviewed a third of them and reckoned nearly all of them would have been just fine. Francoise was also telling me of the times that she had applied for jobs in the NHS. Normally she would be one of perhaps fifty applicants.
My son decided to change jobs last year. He wanted to move to Gothenburg to be with his fiancée Andrea. He got himself short-listed for several jobs out of dozens of applicants but failed to quite make it into the number one slot. Eventually his present job provider ABB came up with a better offer so he decided to stay in Stockholm commuting every day to Västerås. Despite being very successful by comparison to nearly all the other applicants Nicholas nonetheless found the whole process debilitating and somewhat humiliating.
Ordinary people do not enjoy selling themselves like a commodity on a supermarket shelf. There is something profoundly distasteful about launching yourself onto the job market to tell complete strangers what a jolly good chap you are and how superbly you will do whatever job they throw at you. The hypocrisy is only part of it. There is something else…the sense of contra natura about the whole process. Know thyself. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Such notions seem alien to the World of Jobs. Next week I will take you to Tea in Marshbeck with James Robertson.
Another aspect of this great social underbelly of jobs and appointments are those who never come even close to being short listed. They eventually drift towards the bottom of the heap and the world of welfare hand-outs. I went to court in Swindon with John Papworth five years ago when he refused to fill in his 2001 Census Form. While waiting for his case to come up we sat there as a procession of young single mothers were brought before the magistrates for some trivial benefit mistake or other. Nearly all were lone mothers and none of the options open to the magistrates made the slightest sense. What might have made some sense would have been to give them each a few thousand pounds, send them home and tell them to look after their children.
