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“In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer”
Camus
Camus
CHAPTER ONE
The Invisible Kingdom Crumbled
It was the autumn of 2018. it might have been the summer actually. Could it have been spring? No it was winter. I really have no memory of exactly when. Whenever it was that’s when my life started to fall apart.
“Good news” my producer said “our colleague has left” I tried to work out how the person I’d been working with for the last year leaving was good news but I was pretty new to TV so I had to bow to my esteemed producers experience in the industry. Producers and commissioners speak in a language I don't understand, they say things like “£5,000 for a year's work is a lot of money” and “quit your job and work on this for free. It will pay off!” As i don’t speak the language I just found it easier to agree and do what they said for fear of being labeled difficult for having to write a TV show whilst homeless.
There are no certainties in TV, but to admit that would mean acknowledging you are completely insane. Most people who work in TV are so warped by the horrors of the industry they don’t even know what is true and what is a lie anymore. You find yourself stuck like a helpless insect in a web of their bullshit as an orgy of hungry spiders liquidize your once fleshy corpse leaving just the withered outline of your soul glistening and shivering in the morning dew.
It’s hedge betting and you are the chip, a worthless piece of plastic thrown down on the roulette table. The name of the game is exploitation, how much work can they get you to do for as little money as possible, the only thing there is an unlimited budget for is talk “don’t worry about money” they say from the comfort of their million pound home. And when two and half years later you are spat out into the street you turn around and the big media building you’ve just come out of has dissolved into sand and you are standing in a desert with just a worthless 30,000 word treatment for company feeling like you are completely mad for ever thinking you were getting a TV show in the first place.
We’d found out our colleague had left with a simple out of office, In fairness it was the quickest response we’d had to an e-mail in the two and a half year process, yes it was an automated response but my esteemed producer had taught me to look at the positives.
As I waited for the head of comedy to get in touch to say there had been some sort of mistake I realised I was completely relying on this commission in order to start my life. So without it I had nothing. My plan was to have my own TV show and become a millionaire from that but I was very much in negative equity when it came to achieving that goal. Why three years before I turned 40 why was a badge for swimming a width my mum kept in a box labelled childhood achievements my only accomplishment of note.
It dawned on me that I was self obsessed, it was time to give something back. The last twenty years had revolved around me, all my aims and goals were about furthering myself with no thought for the worse off in society. Maybe I could do something to make the world a better place for everyone. I can’t remember who rung who but I ended up helping this down on his luck therapist who had failed as an actor and had to give up on his creative dreams and become a psychologist to pay his bills. My calling was to remind him that he had made the right choice, and that you wouldn’t wish the life of an artist on a dead dog rotting in a Nicaraguan sewer, that taking a lid of a pen calling it work and regularly using the phrase “this is the last time I ask to borrow money off you” was no way to live your life. His line of work was honorable and fulfilling and if it took off he’d be very wealthy. Mine was absurd and perverted and very few made money doing it.
I felt bad that his practice hadn’t taken off so I paid him. I could not tell you his name. I mean I’d love to tell you his name I’m sure he could do with the work but I can’t remember it. I think it was Paul or Rob or Dan. I can’t remember his face or what he wore. He would tell me off if I was early, make me wait in the street till the appointment started. It was hard not to be early as giving this guy therapy was pretty much the only thing I had to do with my time. When I wasn’t doing that I would just sit at home and stare at my 30,000 word document that I'd spent 2 and half years working on looking for clues on where it went wrong. Trying to find If there was a hidden message in it, was there any hope in there.
To say thank you for helping him the therapist would offer me pills but I told him he didn’t need to thank me. He insisted on helping me and recommended a business advisor friend of his who worked in the civil service who he reckoned could help me out with some money whilst I got back on my feet and found work. I really needed this guy to pull through as I was not going to make this month's rent.
You’d think that the person you are giving up to 80% of your wages a month and making a millionaire out of in the process whilst simultaneously destroying the chances of there ever being an affordable housing market would worship the ground you walk on and be thankful that you took their shitty mould stained room off their hands. au contraire messeiure. You are expected to be honoured to pay £750 PCM for a bathroom you couldn’t wash a chipmunk in, feel privileged to have a kitchen where you have to prepare all your meals using a kettle and a toaster and be thankful to sleep in a bedroom that is damper than the pavement under a bridge across a canal.
To say thank you for helping him the therapist would offer me pills but I told him he didn’t need to thank me. He insisted on helping me and recommended a business advisor friend of his who worked in the civil service who he reckoned could help me out with some money whilst I got back on my feet and found work. I really needed this guy to pull through as I was not going to make this month's rent.
The Roof Over My Damaged Head
Why was I so desperate to pay my landlord anyway. Woe betide any landlord who gets me as a tenant, but why should I treat anyone with respect who’s taking 60% of my wages making themselves rich whilst simultaneously reducing the chance of me ever being able to buy a property. Why do we hold landlords in such high esteem when their only skill is having enough money forty years ago when property was affordable? Having money 40 years ago is not a skill that’s just luck. If I was thirty forty years ago i’d have bought a property, instead I was thirty ten years ago when wages had stagnated and all the cheap properties had been bought meaning that instead of a flat I own a cup for life, a bag for life and an oyster card none of which will increase in value or fit a bed in.You’d think that the person you are giving up to 80% of your wages a month and making a millionaire out of in the process whilst simultaneously destroying the chances of there ever being an affordable housing market would worship the ground you walk on and be thankful that you took their shitty mould stained room off their hands. au contraire messeiure. You are expected to be honoured to pay £750 PCM for a bathroom you couldn’t wash a chipmunk in, feel privileged to have a kitchen where you have to prepare all your meals using a kettle and a toaster and be thankful to sleep in a bedroom that is damper than the pavement under a bridge across a canal.
Look, I’m not asking them to send me flowers every time I pay the rent on time, just not reach for their phone to call Rentokill when you say hello to them in the street. I wouldn’t be surprised if some silicon valley tech entrepreneur isn’t working on an app for tenant free properties.
If jizzing £800 up the wall every month so some cunt can have a holiday home in Portugal wasn’t galling enough if you want to live anywhere that isn’t a disused youth hostel in South Woodford then you need to share with someone. That someone should be my wife and kids or maybe a friend my own age. Sadly whilst all my friends were pursuing a normal life where you earn a salary, get married and buy a house I was running around Soho six nights a week drinking it dry of white wine and turning my bedroom into a place for what one tourist on trip advisor described in their review as “l'expérience sexuelle la plus dégradante de ma vie d'adulte.”
If jizzing £800 up the wall every month so some cunt can have a holiday home in Portugal wasn’t galling enough if you want to live anywhere that isn’t a disused youth hostel in South Woodford then you need to share with someone. That someone should be my wife and kids or maybe a friend my own age. Sadly whilst all my friends were pursuing a normal life where you earn a salary, get married and buy a house I was running around Soho six nights a week drinking it dry of white wine and turning my bedroom into a place for what one tourist on trip advisor described in their review as “l'expérience sexuelle la plus dégradante de ma vie d'adulte.”
If I did move in with a friend now the only way that would work in the overpriced London housing market would be if I shared a room with one of their children. I find conversation awkward enough without throwing asking to share a room at a reduced rate with one of their children into the mix so I’ve had to settle for sharing with a Rolling Thunder Revue of losers, gig economy workers and randos off the internet. This has had varying degrees of failure and by that I mean they’ve either moved out straight away or I’ve kicked them out after a year due to their presence depressing me. I’m not living with a couple so that rules out a large chunk of the population. I want to avoid people's happiness in my living environs, let it flourish in the outside world but this is a safe space for singledom and misery. A flat for the wretched masses of your teeming shore yearning to breathe free.
Most people’s dream is not to pay £500 PCM to live with a failed depressed writer in a flat on the Seven Sisters road that has the faint smell of jizz of a 1000 bachelors who lived here before me. There is an argument that if you paid politicians more money you’d get a better standard of MP so with that logic if I was living in a house and not a shoe box that smells of wotsits I might get a higher standard of of applicant but looking for a single person on a micro budget isn’t going to turn up the best candidates. You are going to turn up all sorts of dregs, people who cut their own hair over the toilet, people who throw a whole raw chicken in the bin then go inter-railing around Europe for two weeks; who you don’t realise are devout christians until three months of living with them and it randomly comes up that they don’t believe in dinosaurs and have specifically moved to London to meet a Christian Emma Watson, or it could be someone who’s dad turns up secretly at 6am in the morning to smuggle your housemate and the bed you bought them out the flat without telling you, or a Turkish shop assistant who only comes out of their room to ask if they can borrow your yoghurt or say they are going to fine you if you don’t do the hoovering. The depressing possibilities are endless.
And If living with someone you hate in the flat of someone you resent wasn’t bad enough I’d once again been fired from my job. Unemployed, living deep in squalor and with just seventy worthless pieces of paper to show for two and a half years work I thought I best ring my girlfriend and let her know the good news.
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