Is it going to lead to a proper job eventually?
Like everything in life, not having a ‘proper job’ has its consolations and its trials. Having been made redundant from a fairly senior corporate role, I decided to change my life. Consequently, I am now a History PhD student. One of the consolations is that I can work pretty much anywhere where I can plug in a laptop, such as Caffe Italia in Melton Mowbray. I love the place, it’s tiny, but that just makes it feel exclusive. Also, Caffe Italia epitomises the stripped down no muss, no fuss, real Italian cuisine; great ingredients, simple food, fabulous flavours.
Today I’m just having coffee. Well, that’s not quite true, because although the British coffee ritual is more about fending off that bleary-eyed feeling through the forceful ingestion of caffeine, there’s something much more romantic about the whole thing when the Italians or the French do it. One does not go to Caffe Italia to ‘just’ have a coffee. There are real honest-to-God elderly Italian men sitting outside chatting in Italian over espressos and cigarettes, and although it’s not politically correct to say so, the fags suit them, it looks right somehow. I’m probably stereotyping.
If Caffe Italia is one of the consolations of not having a proper job, then social occasions have become not exactly a trial, but at least amusing-cum-slightly-irritating-after-a-while. Picture the scene, standard bourgeois stuff, gin and tonic in one hand, Hambleton Bakery canape in the other, lots of investigative waffle as we verbally circle and figure out questions of social standing. Isn’t Fever Tree tonic soooo much nicer than Schweppes? That type of thing. Then the important one, sooo, what do you doooo David? Always the question to me first because, well, I know we’re all ‘modern’ and everything, but the man is still the main earner usually, right?
I’m at university in Nottingham
So, you’re a lecturer?
No, I’m a PhD student.
Oh….er…(looks confusedly from me to the wife and back, dawns on them that she must be the main bread-winner)…
Fantastic! Must be great to be a kept man!
Actually, I do get a stipend…but the damage is done, his wife looks after him.
Now this experience, repeated often, has been most valuable and instructive. Being male, white and pretty middle-class, I’ve always been in that group which encounters very little prejudice. I’m not suggesting that I am now the Vale of Belvoir’s embodiment of Rosa Parks or Mary Wollstonecraft, but I have been able to experience a tiny fraction of the prejudice which some others experience continually. Of course, no-one would suggest that a woman at University was ‘kept’. Object to such comments though, and I’m being ‘sensitive’. Nowadays when I hear that a woman is ‘sensitive’ because she has finally objected to a casually sexist comment she has heard a million times over the course of her life, I understand a little better.
And although it’s subconscious, the implication is not just that it’s not right for me to be ‘looked after’, it’s also that women are somehow not supposed to have that economic upper hand over men. It says much about how we still filter gender in society.
What’s even worse with me is that my subject is History, not a ‘proper’ subject, not something useful, something you can do something with. And to really add insult to injury, I am rubbish at ‘manly’ things like DIY. Fortunately, my wife likes tinkering with power tools and was positively orgiastic when her new powerful strimmer arrived. If something needs doing to which she cannot attend, we call for assistance on someone who lives locally, Alan, or ‘Alan the Real Man’ as we refer to him. Many a Sunday has seen Alan and the wife talking earnestly over a broken-down mower or a recalcitrant hedge trimmer, when Alan glances up to see me through the kitchen window, pinny on, glass of wine in hand, cheerfully stirring a risotto starter. I wave, Alan smiles a thin smile. Alan the Real Man is always nice enough to me, but I can tell he’s suspicious, there something just not quite right about a man who stirs risotto whilst his wife wipes oily hands down her jeans. Alan the Real Man looks from me to her, back to me again, glances at his phone, wonders if he should call someone, I can see it in his eyes.
I’m not the only one though. My cousin’s husband, Jon, recently revealed that they too have a similar individual in their lives, they call him ‘Fixy Pete’. Like me, Jon used to have a ‘proper job’ and was made redundant. Recently he has been writing for and designing children’s multi-media, pursuing a real interest and passion. Queue eye-rolling and knowing looks, ‘so his wife looks after him then?’.
It’s clear that although we’ve come a long way in recent decades, people struggle much more than one might think to really accept the concept of a bread-winning wife supporting a 49-year-old student husband. It still goes sub-consciously against our expectations. So will you eventually get a proper job? they ask.
What’s that? One of those jobs I used to have, where I work hard to convince people that they should buy stuff they don’t really want or need because if they don’t, they’ll somehow fall behind the neighbours in social standing? That’s what Karl
Marx called ‘commodity fetishism’. Marx had never heard of the iPhone two million or whatever we’re up to now. But he’d probably nod knowingly if he could see the desperation in people’s eyes, to own the next version of something that does pretty much exactly what the last ten versions before it did. And Marx didn’t have a proper job either, typical!
But that’s the problem with students. They’re all bleeding-heart scrounging lefties. Sod it, I’m ordering the puttanesca and a glass of chianti. After all, the wife’s paying.