I've just come back from a wedding; a lovely Cornish wedding complete with cliff-tops and sunshine and the opportunity to go bare-legged for the first time this year. It was pretty 'ansom, as they say down there.
In the weeks running up to the wedding and since I last wrote a month ago, I have been mostly exploring ways in which I can earn money before the academic year begins. It has been a most monumental waste of time. Naturally I turned to temping, only to find that securing a temp job has become as impossible as I find it to secure a third date. The most alarming discovery for me in all of this has been the realisation that, if I had not chosen to follow the teaching route and, as a result, become embroiled in months of school observations and interview preparation, I would have experienced this dearth of work much more keenly and would probably not be sitting here writing this now. I would have built a raft and would be floating on it somewhere mid-Atlantic way, hoping that nature, as my last resort, would point me in the right direction. And if nature couldn't help me, I would have just carried on floating. This would have been infinitely more enjoyable than being forced to beg to become an 'Office Angel'. And fail. After exhausting all possibilities, I have been forced to accept that I may not be able to nourish my bank account with enough cash to enable me to indulge in my already-planned-summer-plans guilt-free. I'll just have to travel with a heavy conscience. Better than no travelling at all though, I suppose.
It was with this renewed sense of optimism and laissez-faire attitude that I landed in Cornwall last week. Windows down, gay dance anthems blaring, my friend and I drove carefree into the county of Cornwall and felt that our summer had begun. It was the perfect day for a wedding. It was, I would argue, the perfect wedding. Not that I'm at all qualified to judge, having only ever been to two of them in my life. Still, you get the picture. Standing outside the marquee waiting for the newly-married couple to step out of their beautiful old car and onto the lawn where my friend (the brother of the bride) and I were slurping back our second fizzy pink drink, I looked out to sea (yes, we were atop a cliff) and I felt serene. And a bit drunk. Lovely.
The question caught me completely by surprise. I suppose I should have expected it. After all, I've thought about nothing else for the past six months. The friends of the bride were mingling around and about us and turned to introduce themselves. Formal presentations were made; names, reason for being at the wedding ("friend of bride", "boyfriend of friend of bride") and we all nodded at each other's nearly empty champagne flutes creating that jocund atmosphere that mutual inebriation appreciation often does.
"And what do you do?"
The question seemed as strange to me as asking a policeman in the street what he does for a living. I had not prepared myself sufficiently. I knew there wasn't a simple answer to this so I dug around in my mind for the reason. I tracked back: unemployed-teacher-training-recession-radio job-Christmas-winter-cold-resignation-journalist. "I used to be a journalist," I announced with relief. My interlocutor's eyes lit up. "Oh wow, I'd love to do that. Cooooool. That sounds great. What sorts of things do you write about??" Questioning eyes glaring in anticipation and admiration.
Hang on a minute, something was amiss. Something wasn't sitting right with this conversation.....
Shiiiiiit! Stop this conversation! Call the police - there's a profession-stealer on the loose!!! Are you typing 999 yet? Are you??!
"Oh, no, I mean I WAS a journalist," I blurted. "I'm not doing that any more. What I mean is, I went for a bit of a career change [ironic smile] and I'm going to start training to be a teacher in September." Phew. Gulp of champagne. This was odd. It was all a bit outer-body-experience for a very warm sunny day and I was beginning to feel light-headed. Maybe that was the champagne. Canopes. Bottle in my face again. "More champagne, Miss?" "Erm, yeah, great, thanks...Where was I? Oh yes, so I'm going to start my PGCE in September...." She looks blank. The twinkle in her eye has gone. She's looking out to sea, at her empty champagne glass, at the floor. "I'm going to be teaching French and Spanish." "Ah, great, yeah. That sounds good. Great. Wish I spoke a language, that's great. My parents are teachers." I have never been the person to deflate a conversation and yet here I was on a perfect, sunny day, oiled with champagne and the potential for plenty of conversational gems, seemingly boring the arse off another wedding guest. I felt deflated, as if someone had pricked my big, shiny balloon head with a pin and burst it in the middle of this lovely occasion, leaving my shrivelled rubbery carcass lying forlornly on the very green lawn. While I was conjuring up these weird and slightly grotesque images of my body as a shrivelled balloon, my new company had already reverted back to commenting on the weather and the lack of champagne in her glass. So, she'd rather float in the middle of the Atlantic on a raft of boring conversation than run head-first into an even duller conversation about the career her parents chose - and probably complain to her about every day. I had conned her. I hadn't delivered the conversational banter that I had led her to believe I was capable of.
I had never not delivered. The world of journalism always delivered. In conversational terms. There was always some crazy story to pull nonchalantly from the archives. "You did that??" "You met WHO??" Strange feeling not having that. I had been re-branded. My new profession now painted a new picture of my life. From journalist Charlotte to teacher Charlotte. I felt a bit ill. Was I sure it wasn't the champagne? Not entirely.
Back home in the north, I was making the weekly journey to my tutee's house for an hour of French essay revision on the topic of the Auvergne region (which, incidentally, did you know has a population density of less than half the national average probably due to "l'exode rural"?) when I found myself sitting behind a Skoda in the queue for a set of traffic lights. A sticker on the inside of the back screen read: "It's a Skoda. Honest." What a funny way to market a car, I thought. I knew that Skodas used to have a fairly comical reputation but have never been enough of a car buff to know why. Now, however, I found myself wanting to slap this car about the bonnet, tell it to pull its socks up, stop being pathetic and start believing in itself. I came home and had myself a googling session. I typed the advert's slogan into the google bar and before my eyes was revealed a sorry catalogue of self-deprecating advertising campaigns. The one I had spotted had first appeared in 2000 but sorrier still was the one that came out a year later: "It's a Skoda. Which for some is still a problem." For this self-pitying campaign Skoda apparently paid £2m. Research carried out by Skoda's ad agency, Fallon, had found that, although a year on from the first campaign many people believed that Skodas were better quality that Citroens or Fiats, most would still not actually buy one. Well, I thought, surely that's their problem and not the reason for the company to spend another £2m trying to convince their prejudiced wallets to part with cash? But apparently that was how much it cost at the time to try to stamp out car discrimination. And they went ahead and did it.
It was all a bit sad. I felt sad. For Skoda. And I felt a bit pissed off at myself. I had allowed myself to adopt a Skoda mentality. The whole business with this self-pitying car had made me realise how pointless an exercise it would be to try to convince people that I wasn't a piece of journalistic scrap metal. I knew I wasn't so so what if they thought otherwise? I had to grab the reins and crack on with whatever teaching/writing/exciting plans I had and let my actions and time prove that there may yet be a Ferrari lurking within me..
