Leeds

I’ve been thinking about blogging about this for a little while, but it took some time to settle in and I’m still not sure what it’s going to lead to. In a way it’s still premature to blog, as I’m just confused.

When I passed my viva in May I was quite anxious as to what I was going to do next. I applied for a number of jobs, not as many as I should have, ten maybe, although I was happy to let everyone believe that I’d been way more active than I really had been in this respect. But the vulnerability of not having a job got me thinking a lot about all those around the world who shared this with me, and in somewhat more dire circumstances.

I became a lot less judgemental about people who took jobs at big supermarket chains, and wondered if it was true that many in the developing work actually do want the exploitative jobs they have, because they’re better than none at all. The constant talk of economic downturn and the lack of response I was getting from the places I applied to was on the whole depressing, and made me feel totally irrelevant with my ivory tower Ph.D. in social science.

I developed a bit of a thick skin, thinking that sending in applications was very much like sending resumes into the stratosphere. Once you sent it, you stop thinking about it, and you write the next one, maybe at some point you’ll hear back from the stratosphere, but don’t count on it. I told myself and everyone around me in the same situation that we could hope for 5 little bites out of every 100 applications and a “little bite” was not a job yet. Then, on my 11th application, I got an interview. Two hours after the interview, I got the job.

I had planned to spend some time in France with my family around that time, but I shortened the holiday and started on the 18th of August. I was eager to start as, for some reason, my new colleagues reminded me of my Durham bunch of Quakers, very socially and environmentally aware, they were the type of folks I hung out with in my free time anyway. This new job was going to be a big fired-up-coffee-time-after-quaker-worship affair and I was looking forward to it.

The job is at an infrastructure organisation, i.e. an organisation designed to be available for and assist voluntary sector organisations in their everyday activities. So I get to meet lots and lots of voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises. I’m also meant to be useful to them, which means picking up a lot of the information, knowledge, skills and red tape which they might need. The job includes setting up social enterprise fairs, volunteering fairs, and picking up the brains of random people and activists for a database of third sector intelligence. I’ve met the some of the most touching, exciting, dedicated people of this fair island just by turning up to work. And I’m picking up some serious compassionate practical wisdom eight hours per day. It’s like I’m being force-fed the stuff.

The job is also in Leeds. I’d picked up in countless conversations that Leeds was one of the most activist cities in the country, very unlike Durham, but I’d never actually been there. The place is very vibrant but also in many ways very fucked up, it has the best and the worst of Britain, all of it very much in your face, so you can’t pretend that either don’t exist.

I didn’t even do that well in the interview. But I fell into this thing I needed so much, when I was too lazy and clueless to go seek it out. I feel like I’ve been pushed out of my inertia, which I loathed with all my heart but was too discouraged to address. You want to mix with the best do-gooders under the British rain? There you are, enjoy the ride.