Où sont les neiges d’antan?

Not looked in for a while but did yesterday and noticed a post by DougieJ about the Afterword being a busted flush. Well, since I’m hardly here these days, it’s not down to me to comment – but it did occur to post a thing about why I’m not around anymore (it’s not you, it’s me babes).
At the end of September last year I moved to London, to live with my girlfriend and her two kids. I was also insanely lucky on the work front, walking into six months of freelancing that eventually turned into ten months – that engagement only drew to a close a fortnight last Friday. Since October last year therefore, I have been living what we would popularly define as ‘a normal life’: up at 7am, Northern line into central London, slaving away at a hot flatscreen all day, tube home by 7pm-ish, commitments with my girlfriend’s family at weekends and holidays, schlepping most of the length of this island every second month to see my 80-year-old dad who lives in small town on the Moray Firth (while I live south of the Thames).
In the four years before that, summer 2010 to summer 2014, I was a middle-aged Edinburgh layabout who couldn’t get a job to save himself. Consequently I had a great deal of time to faff about on the internet; now I don’t.
Of course, if this was just me saying, ‘Woe is, er, me,’ then it wouldn’t be that interesting but it does encompass matters like politics, venture capital, metropolitan imbalance, age and an entire Bayeux Tapestry of Ye Contemporary Stuffe.
The luck with work last autumn was A Famous Listings Magazine & Publishing Company. As a freelance writer, I contributed Scottish material to their guidebooks from as far back as 1998. The company came close to folding in 2010 – its mainstay being a weekly London listings magazine in the age of the smartphone – but was taken over by a venture capital outfit. They are intent on turning said outfit into the Tesco of online city guides with commercial tie-ins, free content, advertising and franchising as the heart of the operation. (‘Content? Chuck in some lists and photos from Instagram or Flickr.’) Late last year they launched online city guides for Edinburgh and Glasgow and, being in the right place at the right time, I was asked if I wanted to help (this was after four years of radio silence from their HQ). Between October and December 2014 I did the equivalent of ten working weeks cranking out anything from 1,000-2,000 words a day, sometimes more, of listings copy for the new websites. God knows what has happened to it meantime: superseded, overwritten, languishing somewhere at the back of a site that has shiny new stuff thrown at the front page all the time. The day rate was £120 which seemed great after several years of un- or underemployment but – me being a wee Scottish ray of sunshine – there’s always a dark side to consider. Back when the Big Issue in Scotland was launched in 1993 for example, the right-on publishers reached an accommodation with the local NUJ over pay rates and I think the £-per-word was around £100/thousand; the day rate for production or editorial work was £100/day too. Or thereabouts. Run £100 through the Bank of England online inflation calculator and you get £182 to the nearest quid. It was kind of sobering therefore to think that a venture capital company in this Whittingtonian metropolis was making its money by paying freelance writers and editors less in real terms than they would have earned in Glasgow 20 years previously (see Paul Mason and Postcapitalism). Meh & bumcheese. But I was working, writing, getting paid for it and posting bugger all here. (Had pay for low-end media types kept pace with inflation I would have been on £182 a day at least and, had I been paid by the word, sometimes I could have invoiced for over £200 a day; just to be clear, at £600/week I wasn’t complaining – it enabled me to visit my dad, patronise Seychellois pop-ups and drink unfined wine under railway arches in ‘that London’.)
Then came something rather more tangible in work terms, the latest edition of the company’s Edinburgh guidebook, revised, researched, written and edited between Jan and Mar this year, published July. This was not done on a day rate, there was a flat fee that encompassed my fee and research costs. Had I sat on my bum in London and done the whole thing by internet and phone, I could have banked the entire fee but I went to Edinburgh for nine days in Jan-Feb ‘just to be on the safe side’ and spunked about 10% of it on research. Given I was living there until Sep last year, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. The book went to press in early April, there was residual work to do for the firm in Apr-Jun (10-11 days spread over 3 months) but not enough to live off, then in May – just as I was thinking I better get a proper job – the eccentric wee guidebooks section called me back in to help out, editing other books (staff on summer holidays, rush of titles). (It’s eccentric because a great deal of the company these days is occupied by chinless credit controllers, shouting down the phone about business class upgrades, villas in Portugal and ‘the figures from Tokyo’, also 20something social media editors straight out of Nathan Barley, while a bunch of haggard, middle-aged people in a corner are trying to produce guidebooks for Berlin or Vienna on a budget that would hardly pay for a decent City boy lunch in bonus season. Remember the later Hitchhiker’s Guide book when Ford went back to head office? That.)
Anyway, that rumbled on from May-Aug and now here I am, sitting in a pub in SW4, rain outside, hammering away at a laptop, due home presently for an early tea.
Meanwhile Project Fear II seems to hammering away at Corbyn in a slightly different way from Salmond and Project Fear I; the latter being a sleekit, haggis-munching hypocrite while Corbyn appears to be an anti-semite. Quelle surprise. Project Fear 1.5 with the Sturgeonator – the most dangerous woman in Britain in a bikini, on a wrecking ball – just came off as rampant misogyny from a press that’s, um, rampantly misogynist. But hey, that’s what you get when a tiny group of rabidly neoliberal billionaires own two-thirds of the UK print and online press combined. I’ll restrain myself from using inappropriate language here – which is quite hard since I stayed up till 4am the other day, drinking Talisker and watching Frankie Boyle videos on YouTube (so you don’t have to). I nearly spent the whole next day using the word ‘wank’ as punctuation.
Anyway, the longer I live in London, the clearer the situation of the UK becomes, which is nice. A global money node with associated service franchises, wrapped in a post-imperial flag, utterly terrified that democracy might happen. Yup, after ten months of being an economically active Mr Normal, deep down, I’m fucking angrier than ever. Now I’m going home for tea with the kids.

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