The Spirit of the Stairway
There’s a French phrase, l'esprit d'escalier, which refers to that feeling you get when you think of the perfect comeback once it’s too late. Maybe an hour, maybe several years later but that familiar pang of a lost, imagined satisfaction of putting someone, who thoroughly deserves it, back in their place.
Thanks to being in a perpetual state of defensiveness, my internal monologue has become so refined at dramatising arguments that haven’t happened, that I rarely experience l'esprit d'escalier. I am, for the most part, always ready to jab my index finger right into somebody’s softest spot. Made an unsolicited but mild critique of me? No worries, I’ll have had the eventual blow-out planned from opening scenes through to epilogue already laid out in my head.
My therapist noted that without these blow-outs when someone had upset me I tended to slam the door on all communication with them instead. Unfortunately, we never had the chance to explore it further because I stopped the sessions and started to ignore her emails.
The only place l'esprit d'escalier has frequently left me speechless is a hell-mouth I like to call the Jobcentre. There is something about having to sign on that puts you in a state of paralysis. You can’t slam the door on the situation and you definitely can’t tell them to walk into traffic. You just have to relinquish yourself to a job adviser who already has a naked disdain for your existence as a scrounger of the state.
The first time I signed on it kinda made sense. Unlike most of my school friends, I’d chosen to fritter my free New Labour tuition fees away on a degree from an art college only to get a 2:2. My final paper had involved analysing the art of someone who swallowed household objects, shat them out, and then mounted them onto canvas. It dawned on me that I couldn’t caveat all job applications with “I’m very sorry but my degree was about poo.” But, luckily, as a wide-eyed 21-year-old, there was no pressure to be in a job I enjoyed. Yet, anyway.
Every stint on the dole after I had stuck a pin in a career, however, felt like the next frame in a Faces of Meth campaign. What flavour of rock bottom had I hit this time that I had to return to my personal purgatory? What physical weathering had taken place after getting shafted out of another redundancy package?
Remember, this was before today’s neverending Mexican standoff of trying to figure out who’s more hard done by in life and is therefore more virtuous. The enduring assumption, even from the most right-on of people, was very much still that claiming benefits was a symptom of not trying hard enough. At worst scuttling away like the Hamburglar to spend your dole money on Benson & Hedges and scratch cards like the villains of gritty reality TV exposés. At best, the gnawing pity of “well, if you really wanted to be in gainful employment you’d take that demeaning minimum wage gig and turn lemons into a lucrative media empire!“
For the most part, the process was so motivating in its demoralisation that I always managed to wrangle some kind of income before any of the compulsory measures set in. Like having to attend a CV writing session where the tutor uses the forty-five minutes to rant about how they’re self-publishing a book on pyramid selling. But one time my luck just ran out. I was sent to an interview at a small biscuit factory which my job adviser took great glee in sneeringly pointing out that it would appeal to my creative side.
By the next week, I was in a hair net and white coat, piping pumpkins, and witches on to Halloween cookies in a refrigerated warehouse. There was a company policy that once a fortnight there’d be a free lunch where the office staff would come downstairs to eat with the peasants in our sub-zero basement. After the first few weeks, a combination of the cold and repetitively squeezing piping bags meant a bout of carpal tunnel prevented me from flipping the lunch table and trashing the place while calling for a revolution.
On my last day, the kindly older lady I worked next to who spoke no English and politely ignored me eating the biscuits I messed up, grabbed my elbow with a look of abject terror on her face. I had done an entire tray of Christmas baubles with the colour of the stripes back to front. While the icing was still wet she leaped in to try and scrape off my mistakes and I just thought fuck this. I have a degree, dammit! I shouldn’t be here! I should be dropping pretentious French quotes into articles and navel-gazing at a 9-to-5, that was the deal? I shouldn’t be feeling feelings over some fucking biscuits and having someone’s aunty salvage my cock-ups. I was so mortified that I made that my last shift. Even if I had to live off the mounds of stale cookies I’d stolen for the next month, that had to be my last time there.
The thing is when a precaution becomes a necessity yanking that parachute open doesn’t elicit the relief you think it will. This is all compounded by a myth that gets parroted that no matter how shitty and degrading the job is, people feel good when they’re working. Maybe this is true when you have a Saturday job as a teenager and can spunk all your pay on Bacardi Breezers but as an adult? The bar should not be so low that wanting a job you enjoy and are good at can be belittled as a pipe dream, because I guarantee most people do not feel fulfilled solely via the exchange of labour for money.
The first proper byline I had was in a local paper. I imagined myself pulling late nights, feet up on the desk chomping Chinese takeaway out of an oyster pail, mouth full of food as I bounced ideas back and forth with the editor. Maybe I could get really into chain-smoking, too? And I could furiously fill my reporter’s notebook with shorthand interviews and scribbles of 3 AM brain waves. Then one day I’d uncover a dry story about, like, a local MP getting a parking ticket that would turn out to be the tip of a global conspiracy.
The reality was quite different. The office was a portacabin just outside of a block of actual offices. It was coming up to a cold snap when I started there so you either risked burning the place down with the electric heater or getting pleurisy. Between transcribing and posting letters to debt collection agencies on behalf of my editor, who I’m pretty sure was living in his car, there wasn’t much time for spitballing over spring rolls. But I kept the faith because even when the work was about as invigorating as sticking glass up your urethra I just had this unshakeable belief that things would work out, that this was the path for me.
Since that first byline, I’ve been fired, made redundant many times over, and lost thousands in unpaid invoices. I’ve stood in offices as job cuts were announced en masse for convenience's sake because the losses were so wide-sweeping. I know there is something painfully self-aggrandising about being sad over an industry imploding when it doesn’t involve saving lives or building a house with your bare hands. And I know that journalism, for a long time, has been a burning ship but it’s been my burning ship.
But the last time I signed on felt different. I’d been obsessively revisiting the story of Joyce Vincent. A woman who was found dead in her Wood Green bedsit over two years after she’d passed away. Her TV was still on and the now skeletal remains were surrounded by half-wrapped Christmas presents. What had got to me about the story was the lengths she’d gone to conceal her final job as a cleaner after a high-octane life working in the City and having brushes with celebrities. Was there anything wrong with being a cleaner? Of course not. But to deny that ascension is something we all strive for and that to have it interrupted triggers a particularly painful type of wounded pride is just not true.
As I was watching the documentary about her life while sitting on my bedroom floor stuffing envelopes for small cash I thought, “Shit.” For some reason, I’d decided that doing a series of random, poorly paid jobs was preferable to switching lanes because that would mean admitting to myself that I’d failed at The Dream. But the alternative of returning to a career that was so fraught with failure anyway also rattled me. If I were to lose yet another job in journalism I’d totally be the kind of person who’d feel so humiliated they’d close the door on everything so they could die in front of Netflix in peace.
It must’ve been the next month that I stomped back into the Jobcentre resolved to shoot any semblance of my old career in the face. I would, instead, get onto the slightly less on fire ship of teaching and never look back. My training loan had been approved and all I needed was a few quid to tide me over for a travelcard and I could press reset on my life. Of all the times I’d signed on and written a bunch of lies in my job seeker diary to appease the DWP Gods this, surely, warranted some slack. There was an end goal in sight rather than me mumbling about getting into copywriting.
So imagine my surprise when a monster in navy slacks and coffee breath glided over to inform me that, verbatim, she didn’t “care” about my training and that unless I was immediately available to work I should leave because benefits come from taxpayers money.
For a split second, I could feel that l'esprit d'escalier shock setting in, that disbelief that prises your mouth wide open yet allows no words to come out. But then a decade-long build-up of distilled rage at stagnating wages, at dwindling opportunities, at student debt, and at avocado toast jokes detonated something inside and, boy, did I go straight for her jugular. The spell was broken.
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