A job no poet could abide

‘Sometimes,’’ she said, ‘‘as I was going in to work, especially on a Monday, I used to fantasise about just driving past and keeping going.’’

‘‘I don’t think that’s unusual,’’ I said. ‘‘There in the windscreen stood the Southern Alps, all snowy, silent and remote and I’d just think, what’s stopping me? Why shouldn’t I just drive into the mountains and beyond until I get to somewhere else, some place I like the look of. Then I’ll get out and start a different life.’’

‘‘I think most people fantasise like that from time to time,’’ I said.

‘‘What I didn’t understand,’’ she said, ‘‘was what was chaining me to my current life. I’d sleepwalked into it. Why couldn’t I wake-walk out of it? But somehow it seemed to have a grip on me that I couldn’t explain. What trap is this, as the poet once asked, where were its teeth concealed?’’

‘‘I think,’’ I said, ‘‘we’ve all felt like that, that we are frittering our time away on a life that doesn’t quite add up to what we hoped. As another poet put it, ‘this is not what I meant at all’. And yet we stick with it. Who were you working for?’’

‘‘The council.’’

‘‘You have my sympathy.’’

‘‘You haven’t heard the half of it,’’ she said, ‘‘I was a community development adviser.’’

‘‘You have my utmost sympathy,’’ I said. ‘‘Though you have to admit there’s a majesty to the job description. Rarely can 11 syllables have been employed to say so little. Community development adviser – whoever put those words together was the prince of anti-poets. It’s bureaucracy triple-distilled.’’

‘‘Do you want to know what the job entailed?’’ she said.

‘‘Not in the least,’’ I said. ‘‘I only want to admire the use of language: the brace of abstract nouns to numb the mind and a third noun so bereft of vigour it belongs on the mortuary slab.

‘‘Community’s a hooray word, a thing everyone approves of but no-one can define. Does it mean the city as a whole, or the cohesion of neighbourhoods, or the people, often selfappointed, who purport to represent those neighbourhoods or what? And the answer is that the word means whatever the speaker wants it to mean as well as whatever the hearer takes it to mean. And it is this ambiguity that brings joy to the bureaucratic heart.

‘‘The word is code for all the things the council likes to imagine it fosters, a warm and woolly sense of everyone together, don’t you know, a single beating heart of scones and swimming groups and sing-songs for the elderly and projects run by the sort of people who like running projects.

‘‘And the word development implies that it’s the council’s job to bring us all together round the camp fire of happiness, toasting the marshmallows of cultural exchange and sipping on the non-alcoholic grape juice of loving tolerance. Though if these things don’t happen to come about, if we remain all cussed and apart, it’s not their fault. They are only advisers. It’s the ratepayers, as always, that let the side down.’’ ‘‘Now tell me what you really think,’’ she said. ‘‘Sorry,’’ I said. ‘‘How old were you when you were in this job?’’

‘‘Twenty-something. I escaped by getting pregnant. My daughter’s now 19.’’

‘‘So something good came out of it.’’

‘‘Call it community development,’’ she said.

PS: To everyone who wrote or rang or emailed in response to last week’s column about Blue, many thanks for your kind words.