England, my England! Sometimes I just want to crush you to my chest and whisper fervent promises in your ear that everything will be all right, one day, one day soon, my darling, you alternately frightened, furious and dyspeptic little fool! The latest urge to embrace the nation has been prompted by research from the Chartered Management Institute that found that asking for a pay rise is the conversation we most dread in life. Breaking up with someone came in sixth. I think we have finally found that working definition of modern Britishness we’ve been looking for. Better to mash someone’s heart into bloody paste than ask for inflation-linking. I almost admire us.
In fact it makes a bitter kind of sense. When you talk about feelings – or the absence thereof – there are places to hide. Language is obfuscatory. Kind. Figures are so much crueller. Somebody put a price on you. If it is lower than a peer’s, runs the thinking, that fault is yours and yours alone. Either you are genuinely worth less (or genuinely more worthless – oh, hello language, decided to get in on the act after all, did you?) or you mutely accepted the pricer’s estimation in a way that your peer didn’t. Which also means you – spineless, gutless, brainless, virtually organless at this rate, you – are again worth less, but within a moral rather than economic paradigm. Congrats.
We need to teach ourselves to uncouple our pay from emotion. As a freelance, there has been nothing more useful or liberating in my career, during which I am sometimes negotiating pay rates on a daily basis, than realising that opening offers are nothing more than what employers think they can get away with. They’re warm-up jokes to test the room, bids on eBay, opening sallies at a car boot sale. Your pricer across the interview desk neither knows nor cares about you. He is on the side of the spreadsheet alone. You figure only as a figure. Bump it up.
A shed of one’s own
It’s possible this year’s 50% rise in sales of the she-shed just reported by Homebase is attributable to the ancient principle: “If you flatpack and market it correctly, they will come.” But I am re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at the moment and am inclined to believe that it also speaks to a deeper need. The predations on a woman’s time, compared with a man’s, don’t seem to have lessened over the years. If I had known, for example, how much talking one is expected to do to a child (as Fran Lebowitz said, they will persist in discussing the colour of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one’s own interest in the topic has waned), let alone the socialising involved (teachers, parents, strangers on the bus with their own contributions to make towards cement-mixer discussions), I would never have let my husband’s unwrapped penis within 40 feet of me.
I take much comfort in the knowledge that she-sheds are sprouting up all around us. Not least because if you can afford one and the garden to put it in, it means women are also starting to pull in the £500 a year that Woolf pointed out was vital to an independent life. It’s enough to hold on to through the next playdate.
Room service with a smile
For me, the holiday bar has always been set low. As a child we stayed in Grandma’s flat in Preston for our summer holidays, our happiness reaching its zenith with a day out in Blackpool – Gipsy Petulengro to our right, raw sewage to our left: the Scylla and Charybdis of late 70s holidaymaking. In my twenties, I stayed home. For the last 10 years, I have known the heady delights of renting a cottage in Norfolk – a whole house to yourself! Just for not working in! – but the human heart is a ravening beast and now I feel new fell desires awakening in my breast. I want to stay in a hotel. No bed-making, no bathroom cleaning and no cooking – I will eat every meal there, every day. For a fortnight. A room-serviced room of one’s own. That’s a holiday. Then home to the she-shed. This is the dream, my friends. This is the dream.
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