Unemployed again

Sun's out guns out

For not even six weeks I have been working at the biggest bookshop in Europe, a booming behemoth on Piccadilly, sunsoaked and hectic. Yesterday I was abruptly dragged off the shop floor and into Head Office, where my soulless coward of a line manager didn’t look me in the eye even once as he read out a printed statement about how I refused to engage with customers (a lie) or respond to management’s interventions (I first heard of any of this three shifts ago), so my employment was being terminated immediately, at the exact halfway point of my probation period.¹

I was then marched to the back door, thanked for my efforts over the last few weeks – ‘Whatever,’ I scoffed – and sent out onto Jermyn Street. I wandered to Soho where I started drinking while I texted everyone I know in disbelief; then I got the sweltering bus back to Peckham and continued my solo piss-up. A nice middle aged man and his publishing agent girlfriend invited me to join them, listened to my woes and gave me a cigarette and talked about books with me. I continued drinking till I was absolutely obliterated, then I walked home and went to bed at 8PM.

Today my mad brilliant friend Lola (@pussytitty) invited me for a coffee in Dalston. It’s screaming hot in London at the moment; the streets are goldpaved and everyone is sexy, making more of an effort because in the windows you can only see your own sweaty sunlit reflection. After getting off the train I realised my card wasn’t working and a woman in a wheelchair used her free travel pass to open the gate for me. I met Lola and we had a few caffeine-heavy drinks in a few cafes and green spaces and we talked for long enough that I could confirm she’s still the best. Once she’d ditched me I went to Burley Fisher books and bought a book of Doris Lessing stories for £2. On the train home there was a woman with gorgeous dark curls and a lacy white dress. In Peckham I walked past a man who was yelling into the thick hot air about how he was Jamaican and if you don’t like it ‘That’s your own dumb-arse–fuckin’-problem, boy!’ In Tesco a very short Italian lady asked for my help lifting down a jumbo bottle of Coke, and on my walk home a trio of teens in school uniforms jovially teased me for carrying a loaf of Warburton’s wholemeal with extra protein. ‘Protein bread,’ they laughed. ‘Sun’s out, guns out,’ I replied.

This is what I love in the world: the jostling weirdo multitudes. It’s what I loved about the job, for the brief time I had it; the infinite river of tourists students locals, Americans Africans Canadians Poles Turks Italians Indians Arabs Dutch French Japanese Chinese Germans and, yes, even Brits. I loved the TikTok teens in search of Dostoevsky, the mums buying Kristin Hannah or Mick Herron, the builder who proudly declared his love of ‘very violent crime novels’, his Latina wife who wanted something that had won the Pulitzer, the musclebound chad who was looking for something called The Way of the Superior Man, the gorgeous Iraqi with a handbound notebook and flowing skirt pursuing a minor Capote, the crotchety old German aghast that none of my colleagues seemed to know who Tom Stoppard was, the Australian woman who shot me sympathetic looks as I placated him. I loved them all and I love them still. I’m jobless again and the sun is out and I am the happiest man alive.

1. The given reason is flatly nonsense; my ego is settling into the assumption that management simply couldn’t stand the presence of a bookseller who actually read real books for grownups, and not romance novels or middlebrow slop like Yesteryear or I Want You To Be Happy. More likely it’s that my disability renders me too slow for what is still ultimately a fast-paced retail job in Central London, and they needed to come up with a diversity-friendly reason to can me.