I have had a surprise.
It was a rather nice surprise as well, not the sort of surprise that you get when one of the dogs has had an accident on the floor and you are wandering around in bare feet, nor even the sort of surprise that you get in a brown envelope from the Inland Revenue.
It was a telephone call this afternoon.
Regular readers might recall that in my occasional and not terribly effective attempts to join the ranks of the gainfully employed, I have made the occasional foray into the job market, and more than once attempted to fulfil a long-standing ambition to become a funeral director.
I am aware that this is hardly the sort of star-studded ambition one might confide, with smiling excitement, to a careers advisor at school, or indeed to anybody else really, but I have always thought it might be a rather satisfactory career. At least none of my customers, being families as well as the dead people, would be likely to smear kebab and chips all over the place, nor would they be likely to punch either one another or me, nor would they mess about with the radio or ask irritating questions about what time I was likely to finish, and very probably almost none of them would be rambling incoherently with cocaine crusted around their noses.
I have spent the last thirty years rolling my eyes at this sort of customer base, and hence it does not seem entirely unreasonable that directing funerals could be considered a step up in the world.
I might even be good at it.
Anyway, you will probably recollect that earlier on this year I was invited to an interview with a funeral arranger. This involved a great deal of anxious flapping, some scowling about finding clothes which would make me look both middle-class and not fat, and a journey to Morecambe, chauffeured by Mark, since by then I was not in any kind of state to navigate the motorway.
The funeral arranger asked lots of questions to which I answered Umm and Err, pretty much alternately, and then said they would call me back. I waited, on tenterhooks, for several weeks, but they didn’t, and in the end I forgot about it.
This afternoon I was ambling about the kitchen organising our taxi picnics when the telephone rang and it was the very same funeral arrangers.
They would like me to come and talk to them tomorrow, because they have got a job vacancy and they thought that perhaps I might be interested.
I was so completely astonished that I could not think about whether or not I might be interested, and said Umm and Err again, several times, before realising that actually it sounded quite exciting, and accepting happily.
In consequence, tomorrow I am going to go to Lancaster to see them.
I spent the rest of the day in an anxious flap.
Of course I like the idea of arranging funerals very much indeed, but immediately the usual problem asserted itself, which is that I am, as we all know, completely unemployable.
Oliver said that I am not unemployable, that I was doing a thing called Negative Self Talk and that I would be a very good person to employ really. He hardly laughed at all.
Mark said that I might as well give it a go and that I might learn some interesting things in the couple of days before I was sacked, and then he laughed quite a lot.
I have had to think hard. In the end I realised that I would like to do the job very much, but there are some very worrying things to be considered.
The problem is that if you sell bits of your life to somebody then they can just waste them if they feel like it. They can make you hang around an office not doing anything much, even if the sun is shining outside, and you can’t do a thing about it because you have sold them those hours of your life. They belong to somebody else and if they want to say to you Count Those Paperclips, then you should do it because you have sold them your sunny afternoon.
I do not think I like that idea. There is not very much to a person’s life as it is, it seems shocking to think that somebody else could own a bit of it and just squander it on unnecessary drivel.
I think that I might have to make it plain that although I would very much like to arrange funerals, my life is not at all for sale. I could agree to come in and do things which were important and necessary, like arranging funerals and being gentle with sad people, but I would not at all want to ever be hanging around staring at the clock wishing that the sold bit of my life was over and I could get back to my own bit again.
I am going to see if they will mind only buying bits of my life when they have got something that needs doing, and if they will be happy to let me stay in charge of my own life.
I could not sell forty whole hours every week, no matter how much I would enjoy the job.
Forty hours is such a very lot.
