Time for a change: Part 2

Back in the lovely café in Dublin. (Clement & Pekoe, by the way). It’s my last day in the city and I’ll be very sorry to leave… The girl opposite me right now is discussing whether she wants to settle in Dublin or Melbourne. Oh Melbourne! Melbourne is a similar type of place to Manchester, insofar as it feels like you could make anything happen there. Or at least that’s how Manchester used to feel. Melbourne is clean, warm, friendly, fun… did I mention clean..? If Manchester has everything except a beach, Melbourne has the beach. It was hard to leave but great to come home in time to host our first New Year’s Eve Drunk At Vogue, which if I do say so myself, was epic fun. We have these parties down to a fine art now, they are simply nights of magic.

Suddenly it was 2014. Before Christmas I had done a ton of DJing to save for Melbourne. It’s an expensive city for sure but if you’ve spent any time in London or the Nordic countries in the last few years you won’t die of shock there. In the end I actually came back with spending money. Coupled with the fortuitously timed savings I mentioned earlier, I suddenly had enough in the bank for my best case scenario: I gave myself January off work. Utter extravagance on the back of a three week Antipodean jolly I know, but I don’t have a strong Calvinist work ethic or anything, I will never be able to combat my debt through working anyway, only through a huge and unlikely windfall, and I actually might never get the chance to do this kind of thing again, so January was the present I gave to myself after fourteen years of office work.

(Some thoughts on working in general: I don’t think work is the best way for people to exist. I’m from a working class family where for the most part work has been insecure, hard to come by, combative, stressful, obligatory. I have no love affair with it. Socialism 101 teaches you that most late-capitalist employment has to be invented and perpetuated to justify capitalism, that salaries are mathematically established to place a life you think you can have forever out of your reach. That’s if you are allowed a life at all, if your work doesn’t kill or maim you, if you are even given the chance to work in the first place. I have and haven’t worked very hard in the past, have and haven’t had job satisfaction, have and haven’t cared much about it, but I’ve always been acutely aware of the position of privilege I am in to be able to work, to have access to the opportunity, albeit one opportunity that I rinsed for over a decade.)

Here’s what I did with January instead of working: sorted out my belongings (chuck, keep, recycle, charity), organised all my photographs and music (epic tasks both), got back into training for the 10K, spent time with my family, replied to all my emails and contacted old friends, cooked loads of great food, let my beard grow, lost weight, discovered loads of new music, read books, tried yoga, learned loads about gay history, hung art on all the walls and made the place beautiful, turned our spare bedroom into a study.

My last day in a real office was December 9^th. I’m three months along the road now, which doesn’t sound much, but if you’ve only ever counted time in terms of monthly paydays, it feels like a lot. So far I am making my money from DJing and club hosting, designing book covers, copyediting books, and doing academic re-writes. Those worlds are sufficiently removed from one another to complement each other nicely. Hopefully the variety of work will continue and even increase. If I could do ten different jobs at once I would, but my main aim now is to get paid for something that I write. I’ve done it before but I've forgotten how it feels.

I have taken to working from home very well. I was up working by 7am yesterday and worked twelve hours. Some days I only work four hours. There have been five days when I did NOTHING AT ALL but watch GIRLS and DJ for myself. Bliss. I might go for a run in the afternoon if it’s get bright, I might run at 8am. All I can say is, everything gets done. I am sick to death of routine and I will never ever miss it.

So, four months in and I am going to start dishing out advice for you:

Learn about being self-employed, get a UTR and start keeping records from the start. Just do it. Millions of people do it successfully every year. The HMRC website is dead easy to use. Don’t forget to look at what you can claim for against tax too, such as a portion of your heating and internet if you work from home. I am going to claim for my office chair and a pair of headphones. Seriously.

Have some emergency money. I don’t have any. Who has emergency money? But you should definitely have some.

Get support, even if it’s just moral support. Get some advice, from anywhere, find out who in your circle is self-employed or can give you accounting advice or who knows about any work going that full-timers can’t do, but you can.

If you have favours outstanding, now’s the time to call them in.

Stand your ground and prepare to be ribbed by people who still work in offices. After working hard one morning (and before I got my office chair) my back was aching so I put on comfy pants and tried a yoga routine for bad backs. My friend came by afterwards, assumed I had just got up and made the typical sarcy comments about watching Jeremy Kyle in my pyjamas. I don’t own a TV. My friend hates his job and his boss. He is forgiven. I went back to work after he left.

Be vulgar and talk about money when you need to. If you need to make some cash urgently, say that you need to be paid promptly. If you need more money when you’re doing the work, say so when asking for your fee. Be fair to yourself and your client with your fees and be really good at what you’re doing.

Be strategic about favours and what you do for free. At this point in my life if I had charged for everything that I’d ever done for free – editing, re-writing, design work, promotions, DJing, advice – I would be typing this on a yacht. If I’m DJing, don’t offer to pay me in beers. If you have money for the beer, pay me for the work I’m doing. I don’t want to write for you for free for ‘exposure’. It doesn’t work. Seven thousand people visited my blog in February. I’m exposed. I want to write something that somebody wants to pay me for because it’s good and because it’s work.

Be prepared for bad luck, and good. I’ve had some of both: I bought myself a cheap but (I thought) reliable laptop to DJ with (recorded as a business expense of course) because it was getting too damn troublesome using the same laptop for DJing in clubs and writing/editing at home, in terms of software, disk space, insurance, safety, everything. Then, while I was out DJing on Valentine’s Day, our flat was burgled. They took my work laptop (where I did all my writing) and my partner’s Mac (where I did all my design). We weren’t insured. Then the new DJing laptop turned out to be faulty. Several laptops and complicated returns and horrible computer shops and borrowed machines down the line, and I am back on my feet. Your computer is your life, look after it. My friends had a whip-round for my birthday and raised the money for a new laptop. It is fast and smart and I love it and I love them.

Cultivate amazing friends who might do something like the above for you in an emergency.

Okay back to work.

Time for a change: Part 1

I am writing this blog post in a lovely café in Dublin. It is a Friday afternoon. There is nowhere else I should be at this moment. How did I get here? Let’s find out…

Symptoms I’ve been bothered with in the last few years that my doctors potentially attributed to stress:

Insomnia

Nightmares

Hyperactivity

Inactivity

Reduced attention span

Bad temper

Recurring sore throat

Strep throat

Chest infection

Skin infection
Dermatitis

Eye infection

Post-viral bronchial hypersensitivity

Nasal drip

Globus sensation

Beard alopecia

... and hypochondria

Things that have made me stressed at various times in the last few years:

Money worries (twenty years of…)

Feeling lonely

Feeling antisocial

Being too bored

Being too busy

Being both at the same time

Feeling overstretched

Feeling like an underachiever

Not knowing what I want to do when I grow up (except be a writer which hasn’t really worked out…)

These circumstances were, to put it mildly, unsustainable, so I decided to make a positive step towards change. If this post starts to read like a self-help book; good, that’s what I want. I read one of those things for the first time recently and it was the absolute worst kind of tosh. I can do better. I think only people who are unsuccessful should write them anyway, that’s much more fun.

I was having no luck with the conventional method of looking for a new job (let alone any enjoyable or rewarding employment). By ‘no luck’ I mean literally no response at all to dozens of applications over several years, and certainly no interviews. On the day I went to collect my Masters certificate I did the sensible thing graduates should so and I spoke to a careers advisor. I was something of an unknown quantity: in my mid-thirties, working in publishing, minor advertising experience, DJing and event hosting on the side as a poorly-paid but successful labour of love, but ultimately craving to make my living as a writer. The advisor was honest. ‘I don’t know much about this whole world you’re in, really,’ he admitted, referring to the ‘jack of all trades’ banter I had given him. ‘But it strikes me that hosting the launch party for an international festival should probably be on the first page of your CV and not under ‘Other achievements’.

In the end I came away from the meeting with two important ideas in my head:

1.     I should have a skills-based CV, not a regular employment CV. (I’d never heard of a skills-based CV before).

2.     I should stop looking for a job, and start looking for work.

The idea of freelancing presented itself, and there followed a series of happy and fortunately-timed events that brought the possibility closer to reality:

I finished paying for my MA.

I finished paying for my BA (fourteen years after graduation).

I moved in with my partner after living alone for six years.

My bank loan was due its annual holiday.

My partner gave up freelancing and took a full-time position worthy of his talents.

Crucially though, the fear of whether I could make a go of life as a freelancer was outweighed by the stress of carrying on as I was. We had already booked to spend Christmas in Melbourne. Figuring there was no better way to book-end a big life change than by going to the other side of the world, I gave notice on the job that I had said yes to in April 2001, and packed my suitcase.

Melbourne

It was never on my radar to go to Australia, but you fall in love with an Australian and look what happens. I’d just quit my job after twelve years in publishing (more of which later) and flying to the other side of the planet seemed a good way to buffer some enormous life changes. We decide to go for 3 weeks and spend Christmas in Melbourne where my partner Oisin’s sister lives with her partner and their seven-month-old baby girl. While the plane waits on the tarmac, my own sister is in hospital awaiting the appearance of my new niece. The last shred of 3G before we are asked to switch off our phones carries a picture of little Penny Jean – healthy, pink and screaming blue-murder. A happy relief before we hit the skies.

Ten years ago my fear of large aeroplanes might have prohibited the trip. I’m much better now, but I admit my stomach flips when I first see the three rows of seats (three rows! THREE!? this thing is too big to fly, IT’S TOO BIG TO FLY!). My advice for flying east around the globe is to have a bad night’s sleep the night before you leave. I re-set my phone to Australia time the minute I get up, so despite having only been awake a few hours it’s time for bed when I get on the plane. With the help of over-the-counter sleeping pills I nod on and off through the first seven hour leg of the journey.

When I come to, I seem to be in the airport sequence from The Fifth Element, also known as Doha airport, Qatar. There’s just enough time to go to the bathroom and we’re back on a different plane where I now have to stay awake until we hit Australia. I find it impossible to read so my well-intended Hilary Mantel remains untouched while Oisín does the sensible thing and chortles through Despicable Me 2. Make no mistake, the thirteen hour leg of the flight is hard work. The trick is to make your world as small and comfortable as possible with blankets and music and movies. It is bedtime when we arrive in Australia. We go straight to bed and sleep well and wake up on Australia time.

First impressions of Melbourne, and specifically Melbourne in December: It is a huge metropolis made up of smaller neighbourhoods, each with its own character, train station and/or tram stop, and if you’re lucky, beach. It feels as if Irish and Asian people have come together to build a city in the sunshine. (Note: in Australia ‘Asian’ is most often used to refer to south-east and north-east Asia, rather than south Asia as it tends to mean in the UK). Christmas is optional and lightly festive, not aggressive and avaricious like back home. In a list where Canadian and Australian cities dominate, Melbourne was found to be the number one most liveable city while not quite ranking in the ten most expensive. These findings seem to ring true. Easy-to-use transport proliferates and there is healthy food (or unhealthy if you prefer) to fill you up all day for a few dollars.

Oisin’s family are, of course, extremely lovely and welcoming. They are Irish/Australian/Chinese/Norwegian, ­which is to say, Australian. They are warm, fun-loving, healthy, culturally savvy, and generous. These things strike me as very Melbournian. Their neighbourhood is Footscray, close to the city, on the cusp of regeneration (though hopefully not extreme gentrification), ethnically diverse, though predominantly home to a Vietnamese community.  Our first couple of days in the city are an exhilarating blend of world accents, Turkish sandwiches, Christmas lights, 28 degree picnics in the park, espresso, gyoza, laksa, grenita. Courtesy of lovely Michael, we head to a grand beach house at Sorrento while I gather up my further impressions: Melbourne feels like it’s growing and filled with potential, not rammed to capacity and panting over the side like London or New York. It feels as if your favourite bar might not have opened yet. Quality of life doesn’t feel hopelessly out of reach. There are too many KFC’s and Nando’s and McDonald’s and it needs fixing. There is more exciting vegetarian food here than you could hope to try. Jackson 5 and Cat Stevens are playing everywhere. We see two enormous poisonous tiger snakes and a dolphin at the wilds of Portsea. I feel extremely far from home and it feels brilliant.

Notable places that we eat or drink are Mamasita, Corte, Journal, Buckley’s Chance, The Plough, Short Round, Ombra, Shebeen, Spicy Fish, Boney, Izakaya Den and the rooftop bar at Curtin House. Rooftop bars are very Melbourne, originally intended to dull the effects of the smoking ban, they are now an essential part of a summery drink.

The 42 degree heatwave dips and we spend Christmas Day on the beach with home-made sushi rolls and wine and friends and family. The sea is warm. We swim and stay until the sun sets.

(Here are some Melbourne photos.).