For as long as I can remember I’ve always really struggled with the question all kids are asked.
“What do want to be when you grow up?”
In fact at the tender age of 60 I confess. I STILL don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve had many adventures, I’ve done so much stuff, I’ve learnt shit loads on a wide variety of topics, and yet, there is still this nagging question of who am I and what is my place in the world? I’ve been self employed virtually all my life so I guess we can say one thing. I’ve always been the boss.
At fourteen I moved from a quite liberal comprehensive school in outlook, to a more conservative one. It was an ex grammer school and and although it was trying to be a comprehensive it was still a grammar school at heart. There was a more rigid and traditional approach to learning and to life. So the question of what I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do was asked with even more pressing urgency. I was hurtling towards my A levels and some big life choices had to be made. I showed promise in the sciences, but also excelled in music and drama. I enjoyed both equally and that didn’t make the choice any easier, especially as the idea of having more than one career was really off the table. It was quite simple, you had to make a choice, and I’ve never been good at that. So I set work to try and work out just what I really wanted to be when I grew up.
After much navel gazing and day dreaming I came up with the answer, but I had a feeling that poet and philosopher was not the right answer so I kept it to myself. Instead I decided to study physics and music at University (you see I still couldn’t really decide) and see where that took me. I failed in that endeavour due to the fact that I never made the final grade on the trumpet. My trumpet teacher was the conductor of the local brass band, and I really felt that he didn’t like me. On reflection, he was probably just frustrated and annoyed that I just never practised. I put my failure down to his bad mood, but let’s face it, if Miles Davis himself would have taught me, I’d probably would never have practised.
Not knowing who I was and what I wanted to do (A favourite pastime of mine) I took a year out of studies and lived with my sister in Muswell Hill. It was at this time that I got the only ‘proper’ job that I ever had in my life, a temp job as an admin assistant in a tax office in Winchmore Hill. I have no lasting memories of this time in my life, in fact up until writing this I had forgotten that it had happened at all. My only vivid memory was buying a new pair of shoes as I didn’t have a pair of shoes to go with a suit. I think I may have had to buy the suit as well. I got them because they looked like the sort of shoes someone who was successful would wear. They only succeeded in pinching my feet and giving me blisters, but that wasn’t the most pain I had to endure. That was the intense pain of boredom. It was a three month contract and there was lots of filing. There was a large store room full of paper files (this was the early 80s) and I seemed to spend most of my time in it. That and the occasional exciting excursions to the photocopier… if I was a good boy. There was another temp there. I forget his name, and confess that we have not kept in touch. He seemed ok with the mind numbing futility of what we were doing. He told me it was the start of greater things. He had ambition and hoped to rise up the ranks of the Inland Revenue. The Civil Service was, for him, a good career with great prospects. As for me, well I had found out what I didn’t want to do and made a solemn vow never to do a days work in my life again.
As a teenager I had fallen into acting with a walk on part at the local rep theatre. At my brief time in London I had carried this on by joining a number of local community theatre groups. So it was at this time that I decided that I wanted to be an actor. Career, job and where I would be in 20 years time were not in my thoughts. I just found it fun and exciting and I liked the people. That was good enough for me.
By the summer of 1986 all thoughts of being a musical physicist had vanished as I emerged with a second class honours degree in Performing Arts from a red brick polytechnic. I moved from Leicester, where I did my degree, back to London and officially became an actor. I took the first job I was offered like all needy actors. It was in TIE (Theatre in Education), touring South London schools. After a year of this I now had three clear ideas about my career path. I was never going to do a days work in my life, I was never going to do a TIE acting job ever again and one day I WOULD be discovered. Quite how I was going to be discovered I never worked out, but it would happen.
I should say at this point that this was not the first time that I was drawn to the creative industries, nor was it the first time that I had flirted with the idea of being ‘discovered’. In my last years of school I one day decided that I was going to work in television. I would start at the bottom making the tea, and work my way up to telly star. I would be noticed as a brilliant performer, just by the way that I made the tea. So I had two options. 1) Research what I needed to do to have a career in television and action this, or 2) Go to the Granada studios in Manchester, ask for a job, and refuse to leave until I saw the Director General and got one. I, of course, decided to do the latter. “This is it!” I thought to myself. “This is the start of my career in television. I won’t take no for an answer, and if I fail on the first day, I’ll return EVERY day until I get what I want. Persistence, that will impress them.” So, I promptly hopped on a bus to Manchester. I arrived at the Granada Studios. I gathered all of my courage together and launched my job finding campaign. I marched up to the front desk. “I want to work in Television” I triumphantly announced to the desk clerk, thinking that the lowly servant would wave me upstairs immediately. “Don’t we all!” was his terse reply, and have to admit that this flawed me. I slunk off, and that was that. This may seem like my first lesson in the fact that the world doesn’t owe me anything, and it sounds like I’m arrogant and lazy for thinking that it does. But it really isn’t. It’s just that I’ve never been able to see the steps (usually small) that it takes to get somewhere. I just want to teleport to the destination, and then teleport somewhere else. I’ve always fallen into things that offered the path of least resistance, things that were offered to me, and not things that I had to go out and get. If I had been offered a job on that fateful day in Manchester, I probably would have been really happy just making the tea for years, but that’s not how it panned out. It’s no accident that I’ve spend a whole life working for myself, like so many people I know with ADHD. Yes it has a lot to do with fitting in with my creative bonkers brain. Yes, it has a lot to do with being able to be creative and work on my terms, but there is also a part of me with my massive imposter syndrome that sees myself as being the only person who would ever consider hiring me, and it seemed like the easiest thing to get a job from me. Plus I’m not likely to fire myself, although I’ve come close to it on many occasions.
But I digress,
So I had the acting bug, and after a few years of bumming around London, squatting and living hand to mouth I finally did something that would give a bit of stability in my life of constant career changes (at least in my mind). I started busking. Not on street corners with a guitar, playing Ralph McTell songs no, performing comedy, circus and physical theatre at London’s famous Covent Garden, the home of modern street theatre. I fell into that as well. A friend wanted to do it, but didn’t have the courage to do it on his own. I went along with him for the ride and then he quit. I just stayed. Again it was fun, and I could earn some ready money. The late eighties were an exciting time for street performing, and an exciting time to be in London. You could be poor, and bohemian and survive. “Brilliant!”, I thought. I could perform regularly, earn a bit of money. It would only be in the short term, because of course, one day I would be discovered and whisked away to tinsel town. “Better get down to practising my signature so I can sign autographs.” I thought. And I confess that’s exactly what I did.
Looking back on it, it’s no accident that I was drawn to performing, particularly the intense, flying by the seat of your pants world of street performing. It was here that my undiagnosed ADHD brain thrived. And as for acting, well, it was the same. You only had to be in one place at one time. Not only that, you were forced under contract to turn up early. Once you were there, again you just flew by the seat of your pants, and boy did I fly?
After a few years of not being discovered an interesting side track happened, an avenue which I gladly jumped into. I was in a double act and we fell in with a new, go getting agent on the street theatre scene. Without lifting a finger I was suddenly whisked all over Europe and occasionally the world. Being paid a decent amount of money just to turn up with a suitcase of props and be funny. All thoughts of fame and fortune were quickly forgotten and for a short time I was living the dream.
The inevitable happened. As the agent grew she took on more clients. Clients who were far more professional and polished than I could ever be. They actually worked on material, did marketing (I once designed my own promotional leaflet in the days before the internet, I learned desktop publishing software for just that purpose, a task that I found fascinating. At great cost I had a shed load printed and then set about making a mailing list of potential work contacts, a task that I found both boring and painfully overwhelming all at the same time. Years later I found the unopened boxes of leaflets in my storage). They also invested in props and costume, worked with directors, and really tried to develop what they were doing. We just ran around, clowning, making people laugh and having fun. So the work dried up and the double act dissolved and I was back busking in Covent Garden for a living.
Back in the daily grind of London life my creative, ever thinking, ever day dreaming, ever scheming, over active mind suddenly remembered about the whole fame and fortune thing. Maybe I should be furthering my career, levelling up my income, raising my profile, and in short getting out of street theatre altogether. It was time to re train, move on, do something legit, but what? All of this was happening towards the end of the nineties and I mention it in some detail as a pattern was emerging. The ensuing decades seem like a blur when it comes to career and work but when I look back on it the pattern was always this.
1) Earn just enough to get by
2) Throw my all into something new and spend as many hours as I can with my new career love and/or hobby
3) Spend money and time on training courses
4) Get frustrated and start to focus on my lack of skill, and/or the imperfections of what I’m trying to do
5) Get bored, loose focus, and loose confidence
6) Give up as soon as the first obstacle or criticism arises
7) Go back to street performing
This pattern played itself out many times and with many different things over the years but I do remember trying to seriously take up the following as an income stream.
Playwriting
Web design
Hard copy design
Blogging
Compiling Cryptic Crosswords
Importing and selling electronic gadgets on Ebay
Forex trading (that one didn’t last long thankfully)
Acting
Computer programming
Video editing
Sitcom writing
Cabaret and Stand up
Small scale theatre producing
Electronic Hardware product design
Inventing the world’s first telescopic garden office. (a small outside office building that folds neatly away when not used. Perfect for the urban garden with limited space.)
And that’s just the things I remember I’ve done. I even blogged about being a busker, before well… going back to being a busker. And then there was the time that I lived in France for a few years and went into some kind of bizarre semi retirement (this was in my late thirties). I was hanging around a Tibetan Buddhist temple, doing lots of meditation, and when the money ran short I would commute back to London and, yes you guessed it, continue to be a busker.
And then around 2018 I started to seriously run out of road. Physically and mentally exhausted after four years of my time, and thousands of pounds of my own money, trying to be the next Edinburgh hit one man show sensation, I was back in Covent Garden. I was returning to my safety net. I remember vividly staring out at the Piazza as my show was about to start. I’m sure I thought, “here we go again”, and as I picked up my very very heavy and cumbersome case full of props for the thousandth time a searing pain shot through my groin area. It felt like I had ripped a muscle like never before, and I had a massive swelling to prove it. Turns out it was not a swelling and it was not a pulled muscle. It was the joy of a hernia. Turns out that constantly starting again, that constantly trying to re define yourself is pretty bad for the old bank balance. In fact I’m now trying to work out if I have ever had a year where I’ve earned even the minimum wage. I shouldn’t be too down on myself, I’ve never really had to. But years of hand to mouth. Years of overspending and not saving have put me in a vulnerable position when things really did need to change. Here was a case in point. I had to carry on doing street shows. I had no choice. It was all pain, and quite frankly not much gain. The only winner was the hernia, which by now had developed into a double hernia. And then life threw me a very strange lifeline, one that even I could not have predicted in my overactive imagination.
To Be Continued