Everybody's Free

If you’ve ever had a spell of unemployment, you will know the money covers basic subsistence and nothing else. Forget about your five-a-day, or takeaways, or nights out. You’re supposed to be uncomfortable as a Dole Wallah.

Now stretch that spell out into a year, and you start to take extreme measures.

I’ve sold my guitar for a pittance, sold a tee-shirt I bought back in 1998. I’ve considered selling my body; it’s not in bad shape. But heterosexual male escorts are as plentiful as decent jobs. So forget about being the male belle de jour, unless you fancy men or fancy being conned out of money (those sites on the internet or those classified ads are pure fakery). And you can forget about earning cash from home and modelling work, and just about all the other get-rich-quick schemes out there.


Reality is horrible, and sobering, and a pain in the ass.


I have no plan B. But I’m always open to suggestions, always on the lookout for something that pays more than the minimum wage. I’m looking into teaching, not in the school system though. I’ve lived with quite a few teachers and know it’s not for me.

Back during the last recession, I taught unemployed adults for a year. It was quite dispiriting because the training company were cynically exploiting people down on their luck. I faked exam papers to get the poor unfortunates through, it was positively encouraged. The more NVQs the more money for El Crappo Training Enterprises.


The company selected the best students and made them into unpaid teaching assistants. They hired some, paying a shocking salary. Like the orchestra at Auschwitz, the former students played along, faking results, putting up with shoddy treatment. They were desperate and the company knew that.

I met decent people there. Some Nigerian former boy soldiers, an ex Civil Servant who had been jailed for dope possession and lost his job in Whitehall. An Irish girl who had come to England for an abortion. An ex Pop Star, who had blown his record company advance.


Training company’s do well in a recession. Who needs to know how to re-jig a CV or shine at an interview when jobs are plentiful? I’ve been sent on two such back-to-work courses by my jobcentre. And I play the game, and ask questions, and even write fake comments on their questionnaires. But most of the time, my minds back in EL Crappo Training Enterprises, in a different recession, on a different side of the classroom.

I drank a lot during my time at EL Crappo, drank at lunchtimes, and even taught a class half drunk. Now that was embarrassing. After work I would drink with the former Pop Star and Irish Girl, The Whitehall Dope Fiend and whoever else was around. I drank more as autumn became winter; I drank into the spring. At night I would talk to complete strangers outside Camden Town Tube, or fall asleep on the train and find myself in South London.

And when it wasn’t drink, it was drugs. Rave music was still quite fresh, Ecstasy plentiful and popular. I remember siphoning off drinks discarded by e-d up builders in our local pub, and going in search of an elusive club called The Love Lab. When we gate crashed a South London Poly student bash, I danced with the Nigerian boy soldiers to Rozalla’s Everybody's Free. It was Christmas and the training company closed down for a couple of weeks.


A blur is all I have of January through to March. But in April, things changed. Or rather I changed things. I stopped going to the pub and joined a gym. I had a trainer and drank protein shakes to bulk up. With my freshly cleared mind, I looked into PHD Scholarships, and fantasised about becoming an academic. Except my heart was not in teaching, and my enthusiasm took a nose dive. I soldiered on, faking NVQs, reading out of text books to my more able students.

On my birthday the director of El Crappo Enterprises called me in to his office. I was sacked on the spot. It was called redundancy.

He did me a great favour, set me free. And for a little while I felt the same about this redundancy. Except the current recession feels deeper, and my reserves are depleted, and I’m that much older, and Raves already been revived once since Rosella sang Everybody’s Free.