Hello, hello! For those of you still with me, hello! And to newcomers, hello! This is your very last chance to grab a half-price annual subscription - the offer will close this Sunday at midnight. Until then, it’s only £30 for a whole year of The Distractionist. That’s like, one tube of Pringles a month or something. For that, you’ll get everything behind the paywall, including my memoir, A Brief History of Lies, which is all true, and also all the bitchy book reviews that I wouldn’t let you read for free. Once you pop, you won’t be able to stop.
Now on with the post:
You could be forgiven for thinking the British class system had somewhat broken down over the past couple of decades, what with the Royal Family wearing trainers and going to Taylor Swift concerts and the Governor of the Bank of England making tiktoks about how much skibidy rizz he has in his sigma account or whatever. But let me tell you, as someone living the ‘downstairs’ part of the Upstairs, Downstairs lifestyle, there are parts of this land where everyone still very much knows their place and wouldn’t dream of getting ideas above their station.
I’ve been housesitting in one such place for the past few weeks, and I fear it may have sapped my will to go on.
Forget about wealth indexes and private school fees. You can tell that a town is really posh when it has only two vape shops – and one of those exclusively sells the finest French vapeur.
There are other signs of poshness, too. The way that the houses don’t have numbers, and instead have stylish plaques on the gatepost identifying them as The Lodge, Bent Crispin, or Clenches Butt. The fact that the choice of supermarkets is between Waitrose and M&S. The way that the supermarket car park is full of Range Rovers – sleek, black, and pristine, like they’ve just been cleaned and valeted, leaving no trace of the blood and teeth of the peasantry they’ve clipped while speeding past Ocado vans to deliver Faun and Mirabelle to their violin lessons.
And then there’s the people. All the women here look like either trainee P.E. teachers or retired P.E. teachers. The men look like either P.E. teachers or failed comedians. Many of them are golfers, which explains the preponderance of golf courses around the place. Seeing a golf course always reminds me of a great piece of advice my dad gave me when I was a kid, and which has stayed with me throughout the years. “Golf is a game for cunts,” he said. I bear this in mind as I walk the dog around the edge of the golf course, although I doubt any golfers will come near me anyway, since I look poor, and also if they do come closer they’ll find my hair smells of cat food because of the fact that I have to feed the cat I’m looking after with a silver spoon while he reclines on a velvet pillow and takes vicious swipes at my head. That isn’t because he’s posh, though. It’s just because he’s a cat.
Naturally, however, the dogs are posh. You won’t find any of those tubby little grandma dogs here, and the only smiling staffies you’ll see are actual staff members employed by the posh families to pick up the dog poop. Many of the dogs themselves are too posh to speak to you – they’ve been trained to sniff out poverty and turn their noses up at it. And I’m not sure if the correlation is meaningful, but a lot of dogs here are also quite gay.
While walking out in the woods and fields with Quentin, my canine charge, we’ve frequently had to fend off the amorous advances of other boy dogs. I was warned about this by Quentin’s owner, who explained it was down to the fact that Quentin still has his goolies and dingdong. This apparently incites ‘jealousy’ in other dogs. Yeah, I’m not sure that’s the right word. It’s less of the green-eyed monster and more of the one-eyed variety, if you ask me.
Quentin himself has shown no real interest in other dogs, except for one occasion when he tried to mount a charming cocker spaniel.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to the spaniel’s lady owner. “He doesn’t usually do that.”
“Oh, Freddie’s used to it,” said the woman. “Dogs are always trying to roger him. He’s already been buggered senseless by a golden retriever this morning, haven’t you, Freddie?”
Poor Freddie.
In addition to the entertaining dogs walks, there are naturally some benefits to being in such a posh place. Benefits like never having to step over a homeless person to get into the Aga showroom, and not having to avoid eye contact with Big Issue sellers when you just wanted to pop into Oliver Bonas and spend twenty-nine quid on a pair of socks. And of course, this is a wonderful place in which to live out your dream of becoming a full time writer.
I’m pretty sure that at least 25% of all the P.E. teacher-looking people here wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if you put them on a pommel horse. I bet they actually spend most of their copious free time organising pride marches for their poodles, and writing novels about torrid affairs taking place behind the closed doors of the McMansions on their private road. That, or gritty crime novels set on gang-ridden council estates, which see them hailed as the essential new voice of a marginalised generation.
Something I didn’t understand when I was younger is that the route to becoming a full time writer is surprisingly easy. I had thought it would be a hard road, full of challenges to overcome as I learned my craft and paid my dues and worked my way to success. Turns out that it’s actually a lot simpler than that, and mainly involves having a fuckload of money in the first place. Which is obviously where I went so very, very wrong.
I’ve often berated myself for not having made a plan for my life. But the truth is that I actually did have a plan from very early on. It just wasn’t a very good one. When I was six, my teacher Mr Ward asked all of us in his class to say what job we wanted to do when we grew up. I don’t remember what anyone else said, but I know I was the only kid who said they wanted to be an author, because I was the only kid who knew what the hell that even was, and I had to explain it to the other little thickos. Mr Ward said, “I’m sure you will become an author one day, my dear,” because he was very old and very sweet, and had no idea that by the time I got my shit together, the world of writing and publishing would have turned into a blazing dumpster fire.
I definitely wish someone had warned me that simply being a very good writer is, if anything, a disadvantage when it comes to actually making a living. That being good at writing simply makes you a target for unscrupulous people selling you fancy pens and writing courses and books about how to write even better. Writing is not actually a career path so much as a statement of naive vulnerability in the face of ruthless capitalist get rich quick schemes.
As for being a full time writer, or rather, making a living out of writing, that’s in the realms of the fantastical. As far as I can tell, there’s only one author who wrote her way out of a life of poverty and abuse and into a life of full time writing in a floaty négligée in a castle, and she spends half her time fending off rape and death threats from other writers who don’t like her ideas about how babies are made. All the other full time writers come from wealthy Scientologist parents or are related to Kingsley Amis.
So my life plan turned out to be a really crap one. I should have come up with something better, like being born to wealthy parents or marrying a software engineer. Or - if we’re going to get really far out - actually developing some kind of skill other than being able to make sentences in a more or less satisfactory fashion.
I sincerely wish that I had learned how to build a house, calculate a tax return, or safely and legally remove someone’s appendix. (Anyone’s, really.) But no. I put all my little eggs into one stupid basket with a big hole in its bottom, and now I’m reduced to spoon feeding cats for posh people and trying to get internet strangers to send me money. I mean, I can also tell when a dog is gay, but I don’t know how to monetise that skill, and anyway, they do make it kind of obvious, don’t they?
“Let me read you a chapter from my new novel, Mary. It’s all about a young fellow from a dreadful council estate. Tory austerity policies and generational trauma have pushed him into a life of gangs, drugs, and knife crime. It’s called, They Fack You Up, Innit Bruv.”
“Oh very good, Sir. Very authentic, I’m sure.”
It’s why I am slowly hating The Guardian more and more. So unbelievable out of touch with the actual world. Amazing investigative journalism but only 5% of the paper belongs in reality.
Just my opinion, obv.
You and me both, my friend, as you know, and even worse, I had this whole idea I had to DO IT ALL MYSELF as that was the only authentic way, little realizing how much help and support many successful writers had. My only consolation is that if I'd married someone in the kind of profession who could support us both, I'd have probably become so bored by him I would have had to smother him in his sleep. (On the other hand, no worries in prison about rent and food, and plenty of time to write. Hmmm.)