The Day Job

The Day Job is something actors, artists and musicians nearly always require. They need it to sustain their ambitions, teetering on fragile financial foundations. The arts are a glamorous but often stupid career choice when it comes to staying alive.

Chaim Soutine cleared ditches, Suzanne Valadon rode bare-back in a saucy circus and James Buckley worked as a carpenter/fitter when performing for the ‘In Betweeners’.

In London The Day Job was various things for me. I worked in catering as a barman, gofor and waiter. Long hours on your feet requiring social skills. I also worked as a cashier and doorman for a Sicilian boss at the ‘Doll’s House Strip-tease Revue’ in Soho; then as a medical illustrator, drawing from cadavers in a mortuary. Eventually I did a mix of free-lance illustration and teaching, which could be stimulating but uncertain.

You hear people say – ‘Don’t give up the day job’. For many aspiring talents The Day Job often becomes their only job. Too many leave art school never to touch the subject again. A former tutor of mine once said 90% of people who leave a three year course in art and design in this country will have nothing further to do with the subject a year after exit from their courses.

The stats may have changed but, that’s an unacceptable rate of attrition. What are the time-servers who run art schools up to, apart from sitting pretty?

In London, the Day Job nearly became my only job. I ended up doing ten, even twenty hours a day at a screen, moving letter forms around on behalf of some Cockney captain of industry, requesting me to move an uncial five thousandths of a mil across the X axis, ‘Cos it looks betta’.

That type of work is anathema to me and my Celtic ancestry, I decamped to the West Country and went to chainsaw college instead. First Cannington in Somerset and then Newton Rigg in Cumbria, where I learned about trees and caring for them.

Working with arborists and forestry contractors, I became hardened to a physically demanding job most nimbys would die at. After lifting six foot bars of Corsican pine all day, I earned a place on a three man crew as a cutter. If you know your timber, Corsican pine is the densest, heaviest softwood grown in the British Isles.

As a cutter on a clear fell you are expected to harvest 100 trees each day. The business is hard, felling trees becomes a haptic thing – you just feel your way. Not unlike being on a battle-field, there can be heavy machinery, steel winch cables, vehicles, timber and trees moving all over the place. Highly dangerous, but healthier than being in an office.

One of my best moments was when I felled a huge Larch which had grown on the edge of a steep embankment next to a post and rail fence. Using a powerful ‘Husky’ (Husqvarna) saw with a thirty six inch guide bar, I made plunge cuts on both sides of the tree to cope with its diameter. Plunge cuts require precision and accuracy. I laid the tree down gently, exactly where I wanted it.

John and Lil (my fellow lumberjacks) exclaimed ‘How the fuck can you do that at eight in the morning?‘ If the fall had gone wrong it’d have cost us a day recovering the tree and the fence would have needed repairing.

The tree community are completely off piste when it comes to ‘correct behaviour’, and good job too. It imbues them with a rare freedom to do as they please. Swearing is ‘de rigueur’, most tree conversations involve sporadic connectives between endless strings of expletives. All the time.

Tree wallers are exceptionally blunt and heartless, but it’s a darn site more humorous and healthy than watching your Ps and Qs amongst the office hierarchy. I don’t feel bad about working on clear fells, I’ve planted as many trees as I’ve felled. Currently there are forests growing over the Wiltshire plains which I’ve had a hand in creating.

The Day Job took me into hard landscaping and garden design. My upbringing in commercial horticulture and our dalliance at Waterperry under the auspices of Beatrix Havergal, meant I was naturally inclined to this sort of thing, rather than typography, screens, offices, city living and …. (groo) graphic designers.

Garden design requires a good knowledge of plants, materials and nature. Plus you have to be good at selling, customer relations and business management. Estimating quantities can be very stressful, with lorry loads of materials arriving on someone’s posh driveway, you have to trust the numbers. Collaborating with other trades is also necessary and oh yes, you also have to work like fuck.

Art school skills come into it, being able to sketch a concept rapidly and present designs can help. AI will do all that for us, apparently. But it can never compensate for imagination and the ability to visualise a garden into the future or have a natural feeling for place and time, or an educated eye for colour.

St. Martins School of Art didn’t do what it said on the box, however I learned a thing or two about the rules of design, which are applicable in any discipline.

Being out in all weathers is preferrable to the fetid warmth of an office, redolent with the smell of trouser seats on plastic chairs – through recycled air. Nor do nimbys commune with nature much. A lunchtime stroll round Hyde Park can never equal watching nature do it’s thing in the fecund landscape.

Tolerating all weather conditions is a prerequisite of the Day Job. Once we were doing tree work in continual, pouring rain – stair rods. We got soaked to our underwear three times in an afternoon, it was November – freezing cold. But we did the job and got paid.

Looking back, the scenery and circumstances I’ve worked in are infinitely preferrable to being cooped up in a poxy little office with bars on the windows to protect the stupidly expensive kit within. I’ve worked in prisons, not much difference. You still have to ask the boss if you can go for a shit.

Co-operating with other sole traders and contractors requires interpersonal skills and an ability to communicate. You get to meet some great characters who leave a lasting impression. And most important: you can be irreverent and have a laugh, no Nazi thought police telling you to do otherwise (yet).

Art school can be a lark, but essentially it’s for toffs and people who don’t have to support their own efforts in the process. In my experience, having the chilly winds of free enterprise blowing through your pants is something very few teaching and admin staff know about – it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So thanks be to my own temerity and the Day Job.

Photos by Alan Dedman, Robin King