Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Six - Unreliably Yours

The decision was mutual and beneficial when Boots booted me back onto the dole queue. There I could please myself within my means rather tire people who cared more for their careers than put the my time to their best use. Or nearly. To prove to The Job Centre, should they ask if I looking for work, I picked up from where I had left off five years earlier, when I live in Gainsborough. I returned to doing voluntary work of my own terms. The volunteer work I had done in the mid-eighties was done within a deep pocket of unemployment and economic depression. I did it regardless of the lack of value of the work. If jobs in Nottingham were going the way jobs in Gainsborough had gone, then at least I knew the script. Even if I did not like where it was leading. 

I was pleased to not have advice from mother to submit to the worst choices open to me, in the hope of some distant short term acceptance from people she had known since she was single. I had no need reward her. The people she wanted me to please were self seeking and grasping when she was single and had not changed one jot since. With voluntary work the contract with the manager was usually verbal and it ended naturally after about a year, because of the long term lack of reward. I had learned that much with earlier work. To me that meant that I could take the work at it's surface value.

Money could wander where it wanted to, and favour the few. Work always needed done regardless of payment. What I had to watch was my temptation towards being depressed when feeling ignored. People took evidence of depression as the wish to be rude.

Church based charities had a ready made network for seeking volunteers: their notice boards. I chose what to do through word of mouth and the network open to me.

I worked every Friday lunch time through to mid afternoon in a dry house, serving up meals to the sober homeless who through boredom or depression 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 in a place that was warm and the rough and ready side of homely. They got all they could comfortably eat and drink and stayed until the place closed. For my own creating my own space and small daring to be different I took The Pink Paper in, to read on the quiet. It was a London based free weekly newspaper given away in the health food shop where the content was aimed at, and representative of, gay men. That it was so  London-centric made it news about far away places. If Nottingham had 'a gay community', and a weekly paper attached to it I never found either. I read what I could find, whether it seemed useful or not. The alternative in that place would have been a tabloid paper, probably 'The Sun'. 

In my other voluntary job I felt no need to take anything in to read to give myself a space apart, or 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. I chose popular American R&B and rap of the day, Was (Not Was) and Da La Soul were fine as far as they went. World Party were thoughtful listening too. Other volunteers preferred some nearly 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, or Mike Peters, of The Alarm. The bar was never crowded and the largest numbers were occasional groups of four or five young adult Christians who found the place by word of mouth. The coffee bar was an experiment that in the time I volunteered never really took off, as a venue, but neither was there advantage in changing tack to promote it as a more vital place to go.

Jed who lived in the shared house was partially deaf had a real job. He worked in a gardening centre, a situation that that was a win-win for him given his deafness. Plants were quiet, as were many of the people that bought them. He got into the position via support from the care for the deaf as well. His deafness and minority social status gave him a community and identity that had supported him and made him comfortable as a minority, with the majority culture.

One of the odder adaptions of living in Agape House was how much I became the household mascot of social inclusivity. Settled as Jed was in his job, he used to occasionally apply for other jobs. He reasoned, quite rightly, that jobs were no longer for life, and they change in character anyway, and management and employees change. I was surprised when he engaged with me in conversation about, well, any sensitivity I might have had about him mentioning in his latest job application form that in the shared house he lived in one of the fellow tenants was gay. I replied that I was fine with that: the job he was applying for was what should matter more, what I claimed to be was a somewhat a somewhat tangential point to me. But from the discussion I got this vision of competitive and distant managerial tokenism, where different managements competed with each other to raise artificial barriers against would-be employees in the gentlest terms possible, where the new barrier they raised was individual attitudes towards the inclusion of social minorities.

When recruiting for a post, to randomly reduce the numbers they had to process, the management would ask would-be applicants for jobs about their attitude towards minorities and inclusivity. If an applicant admitted that they were from a minority, and in need of inclusivity being asked about, then unless the candidate was so apt the management could not ignore their suitability, the candidate would be side lined for safe sounding reasons. The management did not care about themselves being inclusive, but were happy to use inclusivity as a litmus test for processing who to employ or reject from their employment. This latest gaming of managerial criteria for employment, the easier it make their divide and rule easier to manage had as much to do with actual inclusivity, people treating each other as equals whatever the difference between them, as had to do with sustainable paid work.

Officially I was fit to work but if I would never pass a teamwork test if it was put in front of me. Before the inclusivity test came in to divide would be applicants between pliable sheep and unemployable goats, the opaque shorthand employers used was 'were you good at sport on school'. I took the question at face value and said 'I was bad at sports, academia would have suited me better.'. Before that the opaque management shorthand for sorting out applicants was 'must be able to act on own initiative' to which the obvious question was 'if they are your employee why do you want somebody that sufficient in their own initiative that they do not need you?'.

My workaround against all these managerial head games was to opt for voluntary work involving simple tasks, where when I was disposable then that much was transparent to both of us, and therefore who managed me had no need for abstract tangential conversation where I could not work where the conversation was leading. 

What I wanted was the therapy I was due, to make my different interests cohere better, and make my life to add up to more that the sum of it's divisions. In one compartment there was my being gay and closeted where my present self could, at last, converse with my past selves and old and new voices seemed more distinctive. In another compartment I wanted to learn more about mental health.  In a third compartment there was the church attendance, in which the majority consensus did not scratch me where I itched - many in my church would publicly say that Freudian therapy 'was of the occult'. But in private people seemed personable enough.

Next to last there was less a division, more a hole in the middle of my life: getting paid work, and a work experience that I could sell to an employer to get more work. I could imagine being employed in some temporary loss leader job where the job had to be done where the sophistry of the management was invisible in the interview to get the job. But as the ACE schemes of the 1980s and work at Windrush Nursing Home had taught me, when the sophistry kicked then I was out, the management would remain to do the same to the next employee.

Finally there was what remained of the identity from life in Gainsborough, which had reduced to weekend visits to my parents and wondering where Graham R was and when he might next contact me. Graham R was my oldest friend. I tried to keep up with him through change of address after change of address. I too had changed address several times. We remained infrequent letter writers. I thought that with the latest change of address, Agape House, I might regain better continuity with him. He had always been an adherent of different eastern gurus, where the word 'guru' signified an otherness rather than simply meaning 'teacher'. I had always been Christian, albeit a Christian who admitted being divided. When we met faith discussions divided us, but were always civil. When he visited me in Nottingham in 1991 I presented myself as having 'caught up' with his ideas about diversity. He still cleaved to teachers who would change the whole world in an instant.  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. That was the last contact we would have for decades. 

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Seven.