suggzy

Hello again.

Yes, it’s been a while, but my excuse for the delay is much better than the usual apathy and laziness. In fact, I have been a busy bee indeed. For, after a good year and a half of trying, I have finally landed a Proper Job. After countless trips to Birmingham, Cambridge, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Kent, And Coventry. And York. Oh, and Warwick, and London. All of those opportunities, all of those experiences (some of which I shall chronicle in the coming weeks), and where did I finally manage to lay out my wares successfully..?

Qatar. Doha.

Of course I did. Why would one choose the straight and simple road, eh? Conformity’s for losers, etc.

In 24 hours from now, it’s hi ho and off I jolly go. A suitcase of clothes and e-cig liquid, some snaps of the dog and wife, and here goes with eleven months of beavering away at UCL Qatar. Air-conditioning, scary cab rides, and a year in prospect of little or no booze and absolutely zero bacon (unless I gather together a note from my Big Boss indicating that pig purchases are on the menu – one of the many idiosyncrasies of life by the Gulf). Still, career-wise it’ll be a winner, and should take us back into the black/keep the hound in clover. In many ways my boldest adventure yet. Probably.

How did all this come about, you may very well ask? And I will of course let you know, as time goes by. However, first, a little planning and a characteristic digression away from the main subject of this symposium.

I am going to have some time on my hands, it is fair to say. SWK will be visiting me, and I’ll pop back to Blighty a couple of times, just to make sure you are keeping the place suitably ship-shape. Therefore, sensible use of that time needs to be considered. No doubt I shall gather together a new chum or two, and will seek as best I can not to fall into the wrong crow of ne’er-do-wells. No doubt I shall also have a certain amount of work to get on with, too. However, I am determined to also mine my various seams of hobbies. With the creation of homemade wines and beers very firmly off the menu, it’ll be the more wholesome pursuits of running (I have become a bit too spherical in this indolent interregnum, and need to take my midriff firmly in hand), a little swimming, some new adventures in cooking, and a good deal of writing that will fill the emptier hours.

On the last front, I’m intending to change tack a bit on the Blogulatory front. I think something more by way of a regularly-produced diary is in order. A fortnightly bulletin of my triumphs and disasters, with the working title of ‘Cox of Arabia: Nearly a Year in Qatar.’ What fun we shall have, if my laptop continues to function and I stay out of clink.

But there is something else on my mind that will take some time to leak out onto these pages before I am fully at rest on the matter. And that’s the business of trying to find a job. It’s been a none-too-splendid couple of years, if the truth be told. Various self-serving insurrections, posturings and some none-too-friendly manoeuvrings at my last employer but one saw me out on the street quite abruptly, a little time short of my 42nd birthday. Quite the Kristallnacht, it was, and not just for me, either. This came at a high price for them in the form of the guilt-soaked £££ that kept me going for the first of those wilderness years, but for me in the form of some confusion and at times some misery.

It’s all very well looking for a job when you already have one. Looking for one as your bank balance starts to dwindle, and the creases around and the bags under your eyes gain prominence? Not so much fun. The opposition always seems about half one’s age, and possessed of an alarming number of PhDs, winning smiles and an absence of careworn early middle age. Being Old School just makes you bloody old. Nevertheless, with the memory of a certain tall man and a certain little man, neither of whom would ever be the better for meeting me in a dark alley, very much thrust into the background, I went out into the world with my CV.

As we know, after ten months of schlepping around, I eventually fell into a spot of temporary work that, in the final reckoning, turned into a year of not-unhappy beavering away on the fringes of things at the local Medical School. I combined that with several additional months of facing up to various whey-faced and cheerless interview panels, and performing a range of endeavours, all in the pursuit of the square route of bugger all. Right up to the point when I got an e-mail on a Thursday morning telling me to fly to Qatar the following Tuesday to be interviewed for the job that I have now secured.

As I sit and type this, I reflect that it’s been a life of some not unusual forays into the world of work, and at times the recruitment process has been bewildering, annoying, frustrating, hilarious and other things beside. I think I am going to spend a little time drip-feeding some of those experiences into the forthcoming tales of life by the Gulf. I express the humble hope they will amuse you, and test how far you can raise one or both eyebrows.

Perhaps I might begin with one from the far-off past, before even my Higher Education ‘career’ really took off?

18 years ago, I was working in a temporary capacity for the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. The latest in a series of temporary contracts that were keeping the wolf from the door as I worked on finding something grown-up to do. I’d done some marking in a draughty warehouse, and had spent a couple of weeks ferrying scripts in a van, back and forth to northern Birmingham. The latter of those gigs saw me throwing pallets into a furnace, on one occasion, at the want of anything better to do and with a local manager keen to make use of me. On another occasion my lunch at Corley Services on the M6 was interrupted by a man attempting to sell me knocked-off watches that were hanging from the inside pockets of his jacket. As I am fond of saying, it would not do to be bored. I rarely have been.

After a time, I was engaged in a short period of something called Script Management, which was undertaken in the steaming cellars of UCLES HQ. One descended into the dark, and acted as a human pit pony, lugging around wheeled receptacles of freshly-scribed A-Level papers, ripe for being marked.

My abiding memory of this came one day when, in yanking one such bin of endeavours across the cellar, I saw beneath me a single page of lined paper filled with the untidy scrawl of an examinee. A teenager’s missive on some subject or another. It had been torn from an answer book, and wore in the middle the impression of a large footprint, presumably that of one of my colleagues, although I suppose it may have been a bold and unlikely additional bit of final punctuation on the part of the writer? Whatever the case, I took it to the person in charge. I do hope that its misappropriation has not robbed the world of the next Orwell. There is no way to know, of course, and in truth I would rather not know.

Anyway. One such sweltering day came to an early end, as I had to collect my ailing Skoda and whizz home to change into a suit and then whip back up towards town so as to attend an interview at the Open University. First stage of the operation was to actually get into the car. Not as easy as it sounds as, by then, although mechanically in full working order, the Favorit had picked up some cosmetic oddities, such as door handles that no longer functioned. Consequently, it had, in recent days, become necessary to enter the vehicle through the passenger door, to then cradle one’s testicles in a spare hand so as to draw them clear of a potential spiking on the gear stick, and sort of shimmy to the right, into the driving position.

Even that uncommon form of egress was denied me, that hot July lunchtime, owing to a misfunction of the other door handle also. So it was, then, that I opened the hatchback boot, removed the parcel shelf, and made my way into the car over the rear seats and through the gap where the handbrake lay waiting to puncture me. Just the sort of operation a chap on a tight-ish time table wants to perform. Happily, there were no Constables attending, so I got away with it, but gave some lunchtime commuters something to chuckle at. I’m not unhappy that Instagram was not yet a ‘thing’.

Roared sweatily home, showered, and pulled myself into best bib and tucker. Attempted to roar back, in suitable time, only to be met with traffic that rather blew my timing. A ponderous half-an-hour or so of swearing and seating followed, together with a lot of snaking through various back streets until eventually a parking space appeared. Off came the jacket, as I performed the exit procedure in reverse, and fell out onto the hot tarmac looking a bit like Michael Douglas’s William Foster, in the closing scenes of ‘Falling Down’.

It was 2.00pm. My appointed time of arrival for interview. I bolted down the road, and into Cintra House, full of apologies and sheened in perspiration. After a few moments, a kindly face appeared from the lift, and ushered me in, whereupon I broke into a full-on pouring sweat. By the time we exited I was an utter grease spot, speaking only in machine-gun sentences in-between gulps for air.

“We’re a little behind” said my handler, looking at her watch – “I’ll take you straight into the interview room”.

I attempted to tuck a few things in, straighten my tie, and drew a hand through my soaking hair. My penultimate mistake, as it came back rather ‘slick’.

In we went. A small sea of alarmed faces greeted me, and I was told very kindly to sit down, take a few moments to myself and “help yourself to a glass of water – these things happen, and we quite understand”.

“Thanks awfully” I said, and plonked myself down. I withdrew my crumpled notes, straightened them out on the table in front of me, and, driving one last enormous boatload of oxygen into my screaming lungs, reached for the jug of iced water.

I might still pull this off, I thought. I had visions of a Lazarus-like comeback. A victory against all the mounted odds. But it was not to be. Higher Education would have to wait a few months before I made my bow. Why, you might ask? Well, mostly because as soon as I had hold of the very full jug in my very wet paw, it slid through my fingers, and so the contents were emptied over me, my notes, and the most proximal of my interlocuters. The further delay that followed was an uneasy affair of paper towels, lowered eyes and general dampened awkwardness. To give them their due, the panel went through the rigmarole off taking me through their questions, having already no doubt made some preparatory notes like ‘Loose Cannon’, ‘Timekeeping?’ and ‘Heart attack risk?’

It was not my day. And on a number of other occasions it has not been my day, but in fairness not all of those days have been quite my fault. As you’ll see, when I describe to you the Day of The Shield, when I write to you next as a citizen of the great nation of Qatar.