I remember that as my fortieth birthday approached back in the summer of 2016, I tried to think of something I really wanted. I was experiencing some form of turmoil; I had just been told that my work contract wouldn’t be renewed [when one week prior I was told it would, for a year], and I inhabited that horrible limbo when you’re still pressing on but you find it increasingly difficult to do so. It’s not that I wanted to stay at HSBC for ever, far from it, but I had spent the previous year looking for a job; to find myself nine months in and jobless again felt hardly edifying.
And so, as I was looking at my possessions at home and thinking about something else I may have wanted, a passing thought crossed my mind; I want to stop being discarded all the time.
This morning, after the dog walk, I returned braced and clear-headed, for it was a grey but colder morning than many have been throughout these holidays. I resolved to walk down to Harrods, taking the opportunity to buy one of those [rather beautiful, I must tell you] canvas bags with leather handles that they sell in the food halls for a friend of mine. She was ogling mine just before Christmas and I made a mental note to get her one.
Unlike Chelsea, Harrods wasn’t dead at all, it was very much alive with people from everywhere, very many speaking languages I couldn’t even identify. At some point, I found myself in a bottleneck not dissimilar to the path out of Wembley after a concert, when the scant half a mile to the tube takes two hours of creeping amongst a sea of locusts. Eventually, I made some way and was able to peruse racks of sale dresses and trousers and coats, and then I did the same in menswear, and then I did some more in beauty. On floor one I took some pictures of beautiful Valentino crystal bags. Across at Prada, I snapped the Galleria, also crystal-encrusted. I stopped for a moment as I realised that at the back-end of 2022, I was considering this very bag, for it comes in an array of colours. Had I simply grown out of that desire? Not quite.
In November 2022 I was, again, made redundant and unlike 2016 [or 2019 or 2008 or…etc…] the sense of foreboding I experienced was infinitely more acute than on any previous such event. Even though ageism had not yet come into the clear focus of my mind, it was percolating at the back of it; I was, quite simply, not at all confident that I could land a job faster at 46, than I had at 32 [when it took me two years and eight months and I very nearly bankrupted myself]. This time, I quite simply did not flog a dead horse for any way near that long; within three months I was learning candle-making, and within six I landed my first, 5-figure animation commission.
As I moved around Harrods, looking at new sequinned dresses and new crystal bags, at nice things and useful things, that thought returned to mind; I want to stop being discarded all the time.
True, as weeks turned into years, I found that all the things I have serve me well. I don’t feel a pressing need for more, that’s what I am saying here. But it would be really hypocritical of me not to acknowledge that I also felt oddly cold when the thought of something nice and joyful like a new bag was completely obfuscated by the searing hot impact of redundancies across my life. I told you recently [hang on, yesterday? Could be] that I am a renter and believe you me, I do not rent by choice. Renting isn’t easy; it is, in fact, harder than to have a mortgage [and I did that too] because you have absolutely no agency in your own life and that very life can be thrown into the air at a moment’s notice. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be a millionaire today if my corporate work trajectory had been a gentle upwards curve, instead of a graph showcasing seismic activity during an earthquake.
I got the bag for my friend. I will put a big red chiffon bow around its handles and will hook it to her front door so she finds it when she gets back in a few days.