I earn a living putting opinions into words into sentences into paragraphs into a designated word length set by an editor, which will eventually make its way on to the printed page.
It’s a skill of sorts, yet I’d probably concede that running my house and raising a family — the cooking, cleaning, laundry, tidying, ordering, nurturing, diarising — requires more skill than journalism. The internet has proven that most people can write pretty well, and that many can write tremendously, whether they’re a plumber or a potato farmer.
I’m not especially skilled; what I am is lucky for having been born at a time when a university education was still cheap enough for me to afford it. Armed with my BA and my MA, my first job in journalism was as an editorial assistant, on a salary of £12k. It wasn’t much, even then. Now, it would place me firmly in the category of ‘unskilled worker’, the Government effectively decreeing that any job paying less than £23,040 is ‘unskilled’ and will earn EU workers who want to move here nul points towards the 70 required to work here. Which is bad news for the hotels and restaurants that we skilled workers love to frequent, not to mention the warehouses that process our organic chicken, the nannies who raise our kids and the care workers that wipe our ageing parents’ bums while we’re busy mastering the universe.
Other than in fiscal terms, who has the right to ordain one skill as more valuable than another? A surgeon can’t drive a 45 tonne articulated lorry. A barrister can’t coax an Alzheimer’s sufferer to eat his dinner. Low pay isn’t the same as low skill. A person’s worth should never come with a price tag. Being dismissed as ‘unskilled’ for not having a degree or a fat salary is particularly pernicious in an era when so-called ‘skilled’ workers routinely conduct themselves in a base manner. ‘Skilled’ workers have crashed banking systems, passed laws that crush hopes and hastened celebrities to early graves. Judge your own worth, and resist people who conflate it with what you earn.
Where’s the beef?
Just when you thought Gwyneth Paltrow’s This Smells Like My Vagina scented candle was as ridonkulous as the genre could get (£58 at goop.com and sold out long ago — for whadyaknow, there really are people who want their living rooms to smell like Gwynnie’s fadge) a new contender enters the fray. Part of its new Quarter Pounder Fan Club range of merchandise, McDonald’s is poised to release a six-pack of candles that smell respectively of bun, ketchup, pickle, cheese, onion and fresh beef.
Did 1 April come early? Nope: these are as real as the nausea you’ll feel if you light all six at once, presumably. I think I’ll stick with my Diptyque Feu De Bois, thanks.
Tequila happiness
When Lizzo downed Harry Styles’ tequila at the Brits, it might have shocked some viewers, but her fans weren’t surprised. This is the woman who recently admitted she was ‘sweating pure tequila’ in an interview on Australian daytime TV; who swigged it neat from a crystal-embellished hip flask while performing at last year’s MTV awards. If Sasha The Flute is Lizzo’s musical life partner, Tequila The Drink is her spirit animal. I came to tequila late in life, dismissing it as vile after too many cheap shots in student unions. Then I met Patrón, and my opinion changed. As London’s legion of Picante fans will attest, tequila drunk is the best drunk there is. As always, Lizzo knows best.
