Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness \u2013 in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black.<\/p>\n
\u2018Oh good\u2019, he said cheerfully. \u2018That gives me a few years before I start worrying.\u2019 He was twenty-one, had dropped out of college after first year. Why?\u2019 I asked sorrowfully. \u2018It was irrelevant\u2019.\u00a0 And he laughed.<\/p>\n
He had thoroughly enjoyed the life of a student unencumbered by distractions like studying. His parents were worried. But like Napoleon\u2019s favoured soldiers, he had a marshall\u2019s baton in his rucksack: he was lucky. Somebody spotted his real talent – he was \u2018cool\u2019, a nerveless boy racer \u2013 and he trained to be an aircraft traffic controller. At first we all worried about using air transport, but it soon became obvious he was a rounded plug in a round hole. I had spotted it first. When I asked him what the hell he was going to do with his life he calmly answered:<\/p>\n
\u2018You must remember, father\u2019 (my children always addressed me like this when they were being ironic), \u2018I am lazy.\u2019 I didn\u2019t worry about him any more. Any young man who can be thus frank with an outraged patriarch has confidence in himself. Or perhaps he realised I\u2019m just a softy. I suspect that boy may be among the minority of my extended tribe who will not be upset by something or other in this old man\u2019s gossip.<\/p>\n
Years ago I delicately reminded him he was in the demographic of the four hundred males who top themselves in Ireland every year, but he reassured me: \u2018Don\u2019t worry, I\u2019m enjoying myself too much.\u2019 He gave me hope.<\/p>\n
It is time to confuse this narrative with facts. There follows a list of my pre-twenthy-five-year-old occupations, and what I learned from them.<\/p>\n
Age 13<\/em>:<\/strong> Slop gatherer for my Granda\u2019s pigs \u2013 a lesson in humility. …she’s a bit of an ugly duckling you must honestly confess, Once I reached twenty-five I became a television technician, then a producer\/director, then an independent film maker. All of those occupations passed the time while I was working out what I would do when I grew up. That is still a work in progress.<\/p>\n I console myself by thinking that such a C.V. would look interesting on the back of one of my unpublishable novels; probably even superior to the novel’s content?<\/p>\n Just listing the jobs makes me yawn and reach for a nicotine chewing gum. I gave up smoking years ago. The pipe tobacco had become too expensive when Social Welfare took fifteen Euros off my old age pension. I\u2019m easing off, slowing down, reminding me of a gyroscope, a toy that amused us as children. It was a kind of posh spinning top, with a fixed protective frame and a groove in its single foot which rested on a tightrope of string held taut by us children.<\/p>\n The energy of its internal spinning enabled the gyroscope to defy our altering the angle of the tightrope. It seemed to have a survival instinct, like a living thing. We could make it slide up and down as we wished, admiring its balance, its defiance of gravity and our expectations. Inevitably the initial impetus of its spin weakened, it wobbled and collapsed.<\/p>\n We young dei ex machina<\/em> would catch it and start the whole game again. More sophisticated versions of the gyroscope are nowadays used by rich and paranoid civilisations to keep tankers and telescopes, space ships and satellites, guns and drones on their straight and deadly paths. To me the gyroscope is still a toy but a serviceable metaphor for life: keep spinning until you drop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness \u2013 in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black. \u2018Oh good\u2019, he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":7505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1048,3918,4905],"class_list":["post-7501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-bob-quinn","tag-gyroscope","tag-jobbing-artist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAge 14<\/em>:<\/strong> Caddie in Milltown golf club \u2013 an introduction to the Irish native bourgeosie
\nAge 16<\/em>:<\/strong> Milk bottle counter in Hughes Bros., Rathfarnham \u2013 I lost count after an hour.
\nAge 18<\/em>:<\/strong> Shipping clerk in Palgrave Murphy on Eden Quay \u2013 meeting drunken sailors and horse protestants with names like Jameson and Pakenham and Pim.
\nAge 19<\/em>:<\/strong> Clerical officer in Dublin County Council \u2013 how to surmount job dissatisfaction and survive boredom.
\nAge 21<\/em>: Worker in Lyons factory, Hammersmith \u2013 how to sort rapidly moving strawberries on a conveyor belt.
\nAlso that year<\/em>: lifesaver on the Serpentine, London \u2013 how to attract bathing beauties.
\nAlso<\/em> (it was a very busy year:, agricultural \u2018praktikant\u2019 on a farm outside Munich \u2013 learning the German work ethic.
\nAge 22<\/em>: Booking clerk and travel guide with Michael Walsh Travel, Dublin \u2013 how to entertain fifty-four girl guides on a trip to Rome.
\nAge 23<\/em>: Bottle washer with Coca Cola \u2013 I lasted a day.
\nAlso that year<\/em>: Labourer in Gouldings Fertiliser, Ringsend \u2013 I lasted a morning.
\nAlso<\/em>: Farm labourer in the Gaeltacht of C\u00fail Aodha, Co. Cork \u2013 how not to learn Irish.
\nAge 24<\/em>:\u00a0 Commercial traveller with Rowntree Mackintosh \u2013 how to eat a four pound box of chocolate samples meant for customers, in one day.
\nAge 25<\/em> – Bus conductor in Leeds \u2013 the bells, the bells!
\nAlso that year<\/em>: Pub piano player in the same city \u2013 as near to concert pianist as I\u2019ll ever get.
\nAlso<\/em>: English teacher in Pforzheim, Germany.\u00a0 I learned that Germans take their studies seriously. Every age<\/em>: aspiring writer, singer, actor \u2013\u00a0 I realised early that a very amateur talent is as inadequate for a career on the stage as that of Mrs. Worthington’s daughter:<\/p>\n
\nand the width of her seat must surely defeat her chances of success.<\/em><\/p>\n