E - Job Club Diary 5: October 23rd - 24th 2002

Job Club Diary 5: 23rd - 24th October


I've had to take a few days off from these diaries. Being at
the Programme Centre was hard enough without sitting down to write
about it afterwards.


On Thursday, after spending five hours at the Programme
Centre, I burst out of the glass front doors of the business school
like a kid running home to catch the start of Grange Hill. After
sitting for so long in the stuffy, dog-eared silence, I wanted to shout
and scream, to run about, to do something that reaffirmed that I was
alive. I walked through the empty streets toward Greenwich Park, past
Georgian fronted houses, past curiosity shops filled antique books and
shiny brass telescopes, past comfortable looking pubs with interiors
that announced their age in mahogany and tile. Leaves piled against the
curbs, the last gasps of the hard sunshine making everything look
powdery, as if there was a residue of grey dust over everything. Away
from the shops and main tourist part of Greenwich, there is a strange
desolate feeling, four and five story houses facing each other across
wide roads, empty of people, as if you had stumbled across a film-set
on a back lot. By rights fog should have hung heavy in the air, the
weak glow of gas lights drawing not so much as a reflection from
windows and puddles on the ground. That afternoon I half expected
gentlemen in capes and hats to bustle by me, walking canes tapping out
Morse-code on the pavement as they rushed to a Royal Society meeting or
to meet clandestine chartists behind hushed shop fronts, women in
bonnets stepping lightly into carriages, the steam rising from the
snouts of horses.


Standing at the point where Burney Street meets Crooms Hill,
I turned slowly on the spot, starting with Georgian shops in front of
me, multiple squares of glass forming their front windows. Anti
clockwise I turned to face St. Alfege's Church, the white stone pillars
of the entrance dwarfing the tiny looking door, as if it had been
designed for the return of something larger, as if it were waiting for
the return of giants that would dwarf mere people. One of the fifty
churches projected by Christopher Wren, St. Alfege's is a testament to
an older utopian vision, a vision of white stone and immensity, a kind
of beacon for dreaming. Turning further I face the old Greenwich Town
Hall again, a deep rust colour in the weak light. Another monument to
utopian ideas, another possible future bypassed and forgotten.
Walking through Greenwich is tantamount to time travel. During my
breakdown I would wander these backstreets, on days with much the same
weather, feeling adrift in time, slowly learning to speak the forgotten
languages of the city. Although not in the same place inside, I can
still feel it everyday going to the Programme Centre, the quiet babble
of stories, the slow whispering of history.


The park is massive, trees planted along the paths. A royal
park, the Royal Greenwich Observatory sits on a hill at its centre. As
I walked squirrels skipped through the leaves, conkers in their mouths.
Tourists, necks swathed in scarves, faces ruddy with the autumn air,
laughed and took photographs. Just five minutes from the Programme
Centre, I was struggling up the steep path to the summit of the hill,
London opening out over my sweating shoulder as if it were a tiny scale
model of itself. Pushing my legs harder against the gradient, I just
wanted to get out, up to higher ground, to somewhere where I could find
some perspective. Greenwich, the Royal Observatory, is the centre of
time and space, prime meridian, the place where all measurements begin
and end. No wonder the experience of the Programme Centre is as
grounded in time as much as anything else.


Time at the Programme Centre had dragged by as slowly as the
rosette of damp inching slowly across the carpet, the leaking water
dispenser a keen topic of conversation and consternation. People would
come in, put their tea bag or their coffee in the plastic cup, go to
the machine, depress the tab, then stand and look blankly at the lack
of water splashing down. Only then did someone break the silence and
tell them that the machine was empty and broken. It was like there was
two rituals in play, the ritual of the water dispenser and the ritual
of silence.


There's always a misunderstanding about time. Time was
originally a religious construct, where festivals and rituals featured
not as points to commemorate the passing of special events in the year,
but as active interventions to keep time moving. Without the
maintenance of ritual, time was supposed to stop dead. The Programme
Centre feels the same. By Thursday I had looked at all of the
newspapers and bled them dry of employment opportunities. I had sent
out an armful of letters. There was nothing left to do. I'd nipped
outside to smoke so many fags that I felt sick.


It was the same routine of rituals each day, the newspapers,
the letters, the telephone directories, the desperate search for
something, anything to do. Time somehow moves differently there, in a
fuzzy, warm blur like when you're ill in bed as a kid, the sunlight on
your floor slowly inching across the room. Stuck there, staring out of
the window in the silence of the main room, eyes resting on the
vertical line of the clock tower, deep orange brick meeting the empty
blue of the sky, I was half dreaming that I was involved in some sort
of secret government experiment with time. The part of the old town
hall the business school is in is called Meridian House, after the
Greenwich Meridian, the line from which all measurement of time begins.
Time is exported from Greenwich to the world. It is in turn distributed
to Greenwich from the clock tower, stood over its surroundings like a
stern father. By the time it gets to the Programme Centre, the cheap
plastic kitchen clock on the windowledge is only left with the dregs to
distribute, the washed out, half used time that no-one else wants. The
time there is polluted, like breathing air tainted with soot and fumes.



On Wednesday I made a list of potential employers, pulling
the addresses from the lines of text that swam in front of my eyes in
the telephone book. I drafted a letter, trying to pull together the
correct words from the thousands that constantly move and whirl just
behind my eyes, like trying to pluck birds from the blue sky outside
the window. In the mulled quiet, the sound of me tapping my pen on my
teeth must have cut through my fellow jobseekers like the screech of
chalk on a blackboard.


I typed it in the computer room down the corridor from the
Programme Centre and around the corner. The floor of the corridor is
shiny linoleum that reflects the dull fluorescent light, old enough to
be pitted and beaten by thousands of feet into a surface that reminds
me of the dents and knocks in my mother's old brass ornaments. In
contrast to the filthy cream colour of the walls of the Programme
Centre, with its dirty finger smudges and grey marks above the
radiators like the ghosts of fires long gone, the corridor is well
decorated and colourful. The walls are stippled a peach colour, lined
with the kind of primary coloured prints that grace mental health
consulting rooms and councillor's offices. It is always full with
business students striding forcefully, well scrubbed, talking excitedly
to each other in loud voices, thumbs working quickly over the keypads
of mobile phones. We from the Programme Centre, on the other hand,
stick to the walls, heads bowed as we slope by, fully aware that this
isn't our place.


The computer room was occupied by people doing the free I.T.
train course that I was accidentally offered by Cath, working through
the various applications for the modern office, talking an laughing
like a classroom of committed school children. It was then that I
realised why some people seemed more comfortable and settled at the
Programme Centre than others. It's because there is a secret divide
between those that wanted to come here, and those that were forced. We
aren't involved in anything participatory, anything as a group. We are
just there with our newspapers and our CVs trying to get out. I could
hear them talking and laughing in the corridor as they went home, while
I sat sticking envelopes and signing identical letters.



By Thursday it felt like, after all of the rituals had been
completed, time had stopped entirely. Nothing moved, nothing breathed.
I felt suspended, as if the next minute would never come. Hunched over
the adverts for look-a-like performers in 'The Stage' (unfortunately I
only look like myself, and sometimes not even that), I saw out of the
corner of my eye one of my fellow jobseekers pack up her things, put on
her coat and leave the room, only to reappear outside of the window a
few seconds later, smoking a cigarette. Desperate to do anything to
make time move again, I stuffed my things into my bag and rushed out to
join her.


"Is it alright to join you?"


"Be my guest." She pulled at her cigarette and gave a throaty
laugh. She's about forty with an open face, skin deep brown like
lacquered and polished wood, her head always concealed under a woollen
hat.


I asked her what kind of work she was looking and she gave a
soft snort, telling me social, project worker that kind of thing,
nothing less than twenty thousand. "I've got a fourteen year old
daughter. I sat down and worked it out, and twenty grand's the lowest I
can go. Course missy there is growing up now and they all want all the
labels all of that stuff."


I tell her that I used to work in the social sector, that my
breakdown means I can't go back.


"I know what you mean, you keep going, you think you're doing
okay, coping and getting on with things, then?" She gives the throaty
laugh again, staring out at the sharp and empty trees opposite and
pulling on her cigarette. "Then you flatline. My dad died, I was doing
okay then I wasn't doing okay. I've sort of lost so much confidence."



As she talks she looks away, into the distance, as if she
were a prisoner gazing out over the wall at the rest of the world. Each
time I say something she almost jumps in surprise. I ask her how she's
finding it, and she laughs again.


"Well, I'm not one for socialising much, but it's horrible.
Everyone just sat there in silence, you go in there and you just want
to scream, and when you try and concentrate, it's always so stuffy and
hot that you feel your eyes drooping. And the staff, always over your
shoulder like 'are you alright?' and 'have you found anything yet?'. If
I'd found something I wouldn't be bloody here."


I tell her that I think it must be even harder when you've
had an established career, especially in social work, because now it's
like you're on the other side of the fence. She says that the one thing
you need though, in any job where you deal with people is empathy.



"I suppose it's meant to be off-putting, so you know exactly
what your place is. What worries me is what comes next, if you don't
get a job here."


I run through the possible future for us, the New Deal,
followed by the four options. She interjects at each one, shaking her
head and looking down at the black coins of old chewing gum on the
steps.


Training, "For I job I don't want."


Full time voluntary work in the community, "A full time job
for no pay they mean."


A subsidised work placement, "Doing somebody else's job for
no money at all. Exploitation that is, I tell you. And when you get to
the end of the placement, there'll not be any job for you"



Work for the government's environmental task force, "Cleaning
the bloody streets, I don't think so."


She stubbed out her cigarette and smiled at me. "I'd better
get back in there, serve my time. What's your name?" I tell her and
offer my hand. "Mine's Pauline, I'll see you back inside."



Back inside the light began to thin and people left one by
one until there was me and Pauline left. We both sat, opposite each
other, occasionally pointing out things in the newspaper, both looking
longingly at the cheap plastic clock on the window ledge. Even though
there was nothing to do, we had to stay, to serve our time to the end.
Cath came in, picking up newspapers and tidying them, looking as weary
of the place as we were. "Can you pack your things up folks, we're
closing at four thirty," she said moving things around on the desks.



We sat tight, waiting, squeezing the last few minutes out of
this day so we wouldn't be down, so we could say that we'd done our
time. Another of the Job Club women came in and told us they were
closing.


Pauline didn't look up from her paper. "We know, Cath told
us."


"But we shut at four thirty so can you?"


"We know. Cath told us." Pauline's voice was cold and hard,
the opposite end of the spectrum from her throaty laugh. It was the
voice that is heard by all authority anywhere, the voice of the
insubordinate soldier, the uncooperative prisoner, the voice of a
person pushed into a corner. I wanted to whoop and giggle and egg her
on.


The Job Club woman sort of stuttered and choked. "Alright, I
was only? There's no need?. Okay?"


I felt a gush of excitement that felt like the thrill of
breaking glass. As Pauline and I exchanged goodbyes, I could hear the
Job Club woman in the office talking to the other Job Club women, "She
was so? So sharp, it cut right through me. There's no need to be nasty,
is there? No need to be nasty?"


Sat at the base of the monument on top of the hill in
Greenwich Park, gazing out at London, I watched them run down the flag
on the Observatory, the dome oxidised copper green against the grey
sky. Around me people took photographs of each other standing on the
meridian line. People came from all over the world to home of time, I
came here to Job Club.


'The Secret Agent' by Joseph Conrad was based on an attempt
to blow up the Observatory in 1894. I suppose it wasn't just a blow at
authority but also a blow at the imposition and control of time.
Walking through the fallen leaves and watching the squirrels hide nuts
in the green grass, I could fucking understand that.