Chapter One

And I quote,

‘You know what you can do with your job? You can take it, and your eye teeth, and your franking machine, and all that other rubbish I have to go about with, and you can shove it right up your arse‘.

Of course it wasn’t me who said that, it was young James Cooper, the working class hero in Quadrophenia. I didn’t say it because I’m not Jimmy - I’m not nineteen and I’m not working class, at least not any more. At thirty five I still do rather see myself as a mod, obscene though that may be, but I don’t have the nervous hatred any more, I don’t have the bile, even if I do have the parka. So although I longed to say what Jimmy said, my civility and judiciousness required that I instead tendered:

“There’s no easy way to say this boss, so I’ll come right out with it. Something has come up in my personal life which means I’m going to have to leave the company.”

Which does not have quite the same impact you’ll agree, and I buffered it further to extinguish any potential burning bridges.

“Well it’s Julie really, she wants to spend a year or so in Goa, India, and I’ve agreed to go with her. I’m not going to work, I’m going to write a book.”

I was too spineless to take the blame myself so I did what so many men do when they lack the courage to deny their peers and blamed the wife. And of course my resignation was quickly and professionally accepted with a well wishing handshake. No imploring or beseeching, not even any real expression of sorrow, just another businesslike anticlimax.

I wish resigning from a job could be a euphoric, defining moment; a defiant gesture of independence; two fingers to the system, like it is for Jimmy. But it never is, at least not for me. The problem is I think I’m more important than I am, and I expect the company to be devastated at the loss. But, like Jimmy, I will simply be replaced by someone else, and the business will resume largely unaffected.

Up to now, my line of work has been market research. A career I had not planned, but one that had already spanned some fifteen years. It began by accident and had continued by accident. I was in charge of a call centre conducting market research, hiring people on a freelance basis to phone other people to answer questions on a good-will basis. I largely employed layabouts and drifters who needed short-term money without having to sell out long term, and I liked this because I could continue to imagine that I had not sold out either. But the devious commercial spirit surreptitiously possessed me, killing the inner Trotsky, and after less than five years, I was a corporate bore, taking it all too seriously, seeing it symbiotically; the job and I depended on each other. Like so many others, I had been drugged by the comfort of a regular salary, institutionalised by the money - the salary as pacifier.

I had been trying to justify this concept of the salary as pacifier to myself for some years, trying to substantiate money as medicine, seeking to mitigate my guilt for becoming a bread head. But I’d failed and could only claim diminished responsibility as a corporate junkie. I am frankly amazed at how easy it is to be allayed by promotion - a pat on the back and a small hike in income is all that I’ve needed to follow doggedly in the way of the work. There is nothing as flattering as being worth more money. Each time I had become disillusioned in a job, my wily superiors seized the opportunity and gave me a higher dose of the pacification soma. And I lapped it up. This was not just the work treadmill any more, not the trap of paid labour versus poverty that is quite easy to beat for us would-be Bohemian types. No, this is psychological containment, the Catholic work ethic perhaps: guilt, money and obedience - the comfort of institutionalised security. They give it to us and we take it, we enjoy it, and who wouldn’t? It is enabling. The money has enabled me to take part in the conversations about house prices. It has enabled me to travel around the world on sanitised two-week package breaks to meet other well-heeled salary slaves to discuss house prices and the lack of Health & Safety in the developing world.

It took fifteen years to recognise I’d been duped. A customary mid-life crisis meant it had to change, and I decided I was to be pacified no more; from here on I would live without corporate sponsorship, without pandering to the pay rise, without the buffering bonus. I had to leave the country to be sure of escape. I’d go somewhere where I could not be tempted by money or a better job, somewhere that my company skills were useless. I would go to India.

Cold Turkey. No rehab for me, just straight up No Work, for a year at least. I was sure I could break the cycle and get off the salary for good, but I went to India to be sure. India, a place of spirituality and sense, a place of frequent madness and enormous frustration, the one place I knew where business couldn’t tempt me, where pay was so bad that I could ignore its lure, where my skills as a call centre manager would be useless, I mean, they don’t have call centres in India.

Hang on a minute…