A FAIRLY hectic schedule this morning - career shift ad vice, the emergence of the society playhouse, Eliot's deployment of anti Semitic discourse, the rejection of the critical consensus that homogenises innovative fiction under the rubrics of post modernism and metafiction as autonomous and self absorbed, colonial assumptions underlying Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, plus the interaction between familial strategies in Tuscan provincial life and the politics of early Florentine government.
No jokes then?
No. Oh all right, a riddle. Look at your man, pillar of society, all charm, decentest fellow you could meet, has it made in an honest business, lovely wife, grand kids, big house, Mercedes 300 (in the drive), a Mondeo for the wife and the holiday home in Spain, and all that though it's well known the mother was a bad lot and the father worse, indeed the whole family before him were well known to the police. What did he do?
He licked it off the streets.
Well done. His arrival, or more correctly descent, did not take place during the most recent downpour?
He didn't come down in the last shower.
Very good. You are on the ball today. Now career advice time again.
I was reading the other day about clock maker Annie Siggins, who gave up her work as a film art director: "The money in the film business was great, but the work was terrible. The hours were endless, the people childish and I got fed up standing around Sheriff Street or the Wicklow Gap in sheets of rain."
It is good to read about the reality of the film making business bereft of its usual ludicrous connotations of glamour. From a career point of view, the message is that people who like working with children should consider the film business as carefully as the nursery, and that those who enjoy the outdoors, no matter how wet, might enjoy film work too.
But look, how do you know when you are in the wrong business? I was reading about a Ms Joan Brady, who worked as a registered nurse in a hospital in New Jersey, but hated it. Then she read a report about a race horse who panicked in a stall fire, was led out, but then suddenly reared up and bolted back into the inferno, where it died.
The article apparently said this is what horses do when they panic - they head back to what they know.
Ms Brady read this, swallowed it whole and decided she was behaving similarly, and not just with nursing jobs: "My romantic relationships with men were basically unhealthy - I'd get out of one, and then find another man just as bad."
Within two months she had left her job and her unhealthy men friends and moved from America's East Coast to California, where things began to look up. Her first novel, God on a Harley, will be published by Simon & Schuster next Thursday.
This is interesting, but I am nervous about offering Ms Brady's experience as a formula in the current nurses' dispute. The outlook for the nation's health is not likely to improve if our nurses start comparing themselves to racehorses being led from burning stables, and a suicidal decision by a single animal is hardly the best basis for career change. Huge cultural disruption is also likely if nurses suddenly move en masse to the other side of the country and start turning out novels, of which we have far too many already.
I will say nothing about the traditional romantic relationship between the nursing and the teaching professions. There is a lot more at stake here than a threat to the PCW and the giving of a potentially dangerous lead to the other public service unions.
Ms Brady's story also suggests racehorses all behave in the same way, which is nonsense. I have only to check back through very recent racing coverage to find, for example, that Desert Green "hates the sight of Newmarket", that Regal Archive (son of Fairy King) is "a very laid back horse", Risk of Thunder is an out and out galloper who never gives up, Talina's Law has been a revelation since fitted with the blinkers, and Power Play, though he finished full of running to take second place five lengths adrift of the impressive Curragh winner Truth or Dare a couple of weeks back, has been rather cruelly described by trainer John Oxx as "pretty green".
I have to leave the other stuff till later. {CORRECTION} 96051100078
