Back on the Payroll

A little under two thousand days ago (is it really that many?), I snapped my wage slave chains and took early retirement from the public service. It hadn’t been planned, though I was of an age to leave, but it was a sudden opportunity that presented itself that was just too good to ignore.

Even on that last day in service, as I strolled the streets of Paris with my birthday girl of a wife on a balmy spring day, I gave little thought to what I might do next, to what my “second career” might be. After all, I was only fifty six – “nobbut a bairn” as they’d say in Yorkshire.

Cue excuse to post a gratuitous photograph of myself on that fateful day.

Do I look happy?

Relieved?

Too young to retire? (Don’t answer that one).

And now I am about to return to gainful employment for the first time since.

But more of that later.

There was no rush to find alternative employment at the time – I had a decent occupational pension, though hardly the golden handshake that many believe awaits anyone, irrespective of finishing grade or length of tenure, that leaves the civil service. And it would be another eight and a half years before I was eligible for my state retirement pension.

But I received an income that supplemented my wife’s continued full-time salary (she would have, barring a lottery win, another eight years before she could follow suit). Once a handful of debts had been paid, the residual lump sum could sit in a savings account growing ever fatter with a 0.5% interest rate.

Although the process of offer, acceptance and departure was a swift and painless one, there were sound personal and professional reasons for my decision. I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the commercial and less caring direction in which the organisation was moving, and felt unappreciated by immediate line management and employer alike. When I added in twenty three years of long distance commuting, I’d had enough.

It “helped”, if that’s the right word, that my father was not in the best of health, and I could now devote more time to his care. And my wife would have her dinner on the table every night when she got home from a ten hour day.

But back to the question of what to “do” next (as if caring and maintaining a home were “doing” nothing).

My preferred part-time job would have been working in a bookshop, but they were already dropping by the wayside in the face of the economic downturn and e-book onslaught.

Book selling had been a long shot anyway, but surely, working in travel and tourism, for which people told me I had a passion and aptitude, would be a better bet?

So I wrote to around twenty travel agents in the area, extolling the inestimable benefits I could bring to their company.

No response.

My education in what happened in the brave new, recession-ridden, non-governmental world of work was expanding daily as my letter box grew rusty with misuse.

I soon realised that, in order to compete for a career in tourism at any level, especially given my age, I would need to “go back to school” and acquire some vocational qualifications. Time was too short to embark on a three year degree course to become a tour guide – for which there were few openings anyway – so I plumped for working towards a prestigious professional diploma from the Home Learning College.

Within a year, I had passed with distinctions in all three elements of the course.

But jobs were still at a premium.

And, by then, having prepared fourteen dissertations, I had rediscovered a long term itch that screamed to be scratched – writing.

There was nothing else I wanted to do. It wasn’t going to pay, at least in the short term, or possibly ever, but it would be the most fulfilling and satisfying thing I could do with my time. I started a blog on New Year’s Eve 2010, focusing principally on my affection for San Francisco, which I maintain to this day – the blog and the affection of course.

In 2013 I published, along with Martin Moseling, my first book, A Half-Forgotten Triumph, which received critical acclaim, but modest sales, in the admittedly niche world of cricket writing. My next book, Smiling on a Cloudy Day, which will attempt to articulate my love for the City by the Bay, is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2015.

I believe that, on the whole, I have managed my time away from the world of “working for the man / woman” over the past five and a half years fairly effectively. And I have certainly never been bored. In fact, how did I ever find the time to go to work?

Do I regret having “retired” when I did?

No.

Have I missed the social interaction, the camaraderie of working in a team, the sometimes unbearable stress?

Maybe, sometimes.

But now an opportunity has arisen that has made me reconsider whether my fierce commitment to customer service, a trait known only too well by my wife as she listens to yet another Victor Meldrew-like rant on the subject, might yet have an avenue of expression outside the home.

Which brings me neatly back to the new job.

A high-end, award-winning cookware company is opening its new state-of-the-art branch in Bluewater, Europe’s largest shopping centre, in October, and I have been successful in securing a part-time position as a sales assistant. As with my early retirement, the process of sending my CV, being interviewed and offered the job took just three working days.

It’s not my first venture into retail – I worked for six months in a local charity shop in 2010 which I enjoyed immensely, though I acknowledge that this will be a far more intense working environment.

Although I had essentially given up on returning to such work, I find myself intrigued and not a little excited at the prospect.

It will mean, of course, managing my writing and other responsibilities more rigorously. And spending less time on Facebook can be no bad thing can it?

But my wife will have to make her own dinner when I’m on an evening shift.

But oh to be back in Paris in 2009! (Another gratuitous photograph).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Haight Ashbury Photo Gallery

Readers of this blog will already be aware of my affection for the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Several articles have been devoted to its history, architecture and culture.

Following my recent trip I have revisited my collection of photographs of the neighborhood. It started off as just a series of images but I have found it hard to resist commenting on a number of them in passing.

I will start with the store in which my vacation dollars and I are most easily parted – Land of the Sun, the  best place on Haight Street for tie-dye shirts and hippie paraphernalia such as jewelry, beads, throws and other household accessories.

The other store in which I have often satisfied my craving for tie-dye is Haight Ashbury T-Shirts.  It might not be as enticing as Land of the Sun from the outside, but it is a great place to hang out in, even if it does mean you having to spend much of your time craning your neck to view the merchandise that occupies the entire ceiling space.

But it does have the added kudos of being sited at the iconic Haight  and Ashbury intersection (though not the definitive corner – that honor now goes to Ben & Jerry’s).

Haight-Ashbury is not just hippie clothing and smoke shops of course. It also boasts some of the finest Victorian architecture in the city, as illustrated by this fine pair of Queen Annes situated literally yards off the main drag.

My first port of call on hitting the ‘hood was once Positively Haight Street, a wonderful hippie-oriented store with stunning facades.

In June 2012, new owners opened Jammin on Haight on the same premises. Still dedicated to tie-dye fashion, it is undeniably a beautiful store but I haven’t yet quite warmed to it.  Much of the overtly Grateful Dead apparel and accessories – despite the sign in the window below – have gone (or do I have “two good eyes” but “still don’t see”?), and it exudes a more upmarket, well scrubbed vibe that I can’t readily relate to. The window displays, though sporting different designs, remain beautiful.

I once sang (I use the word advisedly) the Grateful Dead song, Ripple, with a young busker on that corner above. I often wonder whether he was still able to eat that evening.

Though I have not had cause to visit these establishments much, here are some more colorful shopfronts.

Although I’ve still not managed to beat the lines at the legendary Pork Store Café, the following have provided hearty sustenance over the years. And we will get to eat at Cha Cha Cha one day too!

Familiar and long gone (but not forgotten) look out on you every few yards along Haight Street.

No photo gallery of the Haight would be complete without a full frontal view of 710 Ashbury, the Grateful Dead’s home between 1966 and 1968.

Back to Positively Haight Street, once the retail king of the neighborhood for an unreconstituted Deadhead.

With every visit to San Francisco I learn of the demise of more quality neighborhood bookstores. Even since my last trip less than a year ago, Badger Books in Bernal Heights and Phoenix Books in Noe Valley, the latter replaced by an inferior alternative, have closed. I was shocked also to find that Aardvaark Books on Church and Market had been remodeled as a secondhand store.

It is reassuring, therefore, to find that Booksmith on Haight Street appears to be flourishing. I continue to make my small contribution to its future.

Curiuously, in view of my love for the music that originally flowed out of San Francisco music scene in the late sixties and early seventies, I have never got excited about the prospect of visiting the massive Amoeba Music.

It might just be the sheer scale of the place and the fact that it occupies a single floor that disconcerts me. I am, or rather was, accustomed to the stores (Virgin, Tower, HMV) back in the UK  that occupied several tiers which made it easier to find what you were looking for.

Or it may be the legacy of my first visit when I was told rather aggressively that I had to leave the small bag I was carrying at the entrance. I understand that theft may be an issue, but I form an aversion immediately to any establishment that tells me at the front door that I am not to be trusted. I may be naive but this struck me as especially disappointing  on the street where the concepts of love and peace were once so trumpeted.

I haven’t been confronted recently but I still find it difficult to cope with the size of, and lack of warmth in, the store. But that’s as much my problem as theirs. As it happens, I am not a great fan either of Rasputin Music which has recently been providing competition for Amoeba on the street.

I will finish where I started – with the Land of the Sun store and its reference to the familiar Grateful Dead lyric from Truckin’ of “What a long strange trip it’s been”.

There are many other places, events and photographs that I could have included, some of which I have paid tribute to in previous posts, but I am conscious that this post will already have tried your patience.

Many will accuse me of having a romanticized, tourist’s – or even dippy hippie’s – view of the modern day Haight, and claim that what echoes there are of the Summer of Love are slight and inauthentic; that, effectively, it is no more than an open air museum (the number of tour buses that still crawl along the street might reinforce that argument).

I don’t presume to know whether there is any vestige of truth in that or not. What I do know is that, amid the upscale stores and expensive accommodation (the Haight boasts more single millionaires (283) than any other San Francisco neighborhood), it still means something valuable and relevant for many people – those who lived through the sixties and those who are their grandchildren. You only need to walk the area during the annual street fair or 4/20 festivities to recognize that.

May the trip continue to be long and strange!

 

 

 

 

 

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The Kindle Has Landed

The fateful day has arrived. I have just taken custody of my first Amazon Kindle, a birthday present from my wife.  

But why? After all, I have expressed my love for books here on a number of occasions, and stated my distaste for a hugely popular but soulless phenomenon that has blasted many of my favourite bookstores into oblivion. 

But I have also acknowledged that the time would come when I would not be able to resist the inexorable march of the e-reader, in fact when I would only be “cutting off my nose to spite my face” by rejecting its blandishments. Trying to stem the tide of history didn’t work for Canute and it is not going to work for me either. 

But this does not mean the beginning of the end of my reading the traditional paper-based books. I’ve only just published one myself – hardback, dust cover, high quality paper – the works.

No – far from it.

I’m not going to suddenly ditch my entire book collection at a stroke. Indeed, neither my buying nor selling strategy should change, other than that I will purchase an e-book where the print version does not exist. Several books have come on the market recently that I would like, but are only available in electronic form. I have no alternative, therefore, but to acquire the means of reading them.

There is an added motivation in that, in this same spirit of “if you can’t beat them……”, I am contemplating self-publishing my next book as an e-book. So I need to join in the game sooner rather than later.

Now, rather than spending weeks beforehand deciding which book(s) to take on holiday, I will be able to download the two or three in contention, affording me the added advantages of not only of reducing the weight of my cabin luggage on the outward flight, but creating space for the addition of “proper” books for the return.

So – Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, Maupin, Bryson and company – rest easy, you will continue to have a cherished place on the bookshelves, or wherever I can find room for you in the house. You are no more likely to be destined for charity shops and boot fairs tomorrow than you were yesterday. 

And I fully expect that the arrival of my e-reader will encourage me to read much more than, shamefully, I have been able, or rather chosen, to do heretofore.

No more agonising for hours beforehand over which books to take with me to the local coffee shop or on a train journey.

And no more risk of developing back problems carrying too many bulky books around with me just in case I changed my mind as to which of them I wanted to read in transit.

If further evidence were needed of the reluctance with which I’ve taken this momentous step, I have, or rather my wife has, only purchased the basic model – bells and whistles are conspicuous by their absence.

But I might as well buy a fancy leather cover while I’m at it.

Oh……and my first download?

101 Free Things To Do In San Francisco by Daniel Davidson.

Now there’s a surprise.

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San Francisco’s Independent Bookstores

I’ve taken pen to paper, or rather finger to keyboard, on two previous occasions on this blog to bemoan the demise of “high street” bookshops, both in principle and in my adopted city of San Francisco. In the first, I lamented the closure of the large branches of Border’s in Union Square, replaced now by a DSW shoe emporium, which, to add insult to injury, my wife loves, and 2nd and King opposite the ballpark. I consoled myself at the time with the knowledge that the Barnes and Noble branch in Fisherman’s Wharf was still carrying the flag, only to discover, shortly afterwards, that it too had made way for an expanded Cost Plus World Market.

But, in one sense, that has been a blessing as it has forced me to seek out San Francisco’s rich family of neighbourhood bookstores. As a result, I’m no longer sure that I miss the big chains as much as I did three years ago.

On my recent trip I had the pleasure of visiting a number of the independent stores – some new to me, others old friends – and discovered a very different story to the one that confronted me when the giants (no, not those) were collapsing around me a couple of years ago.  Phoenix Books on 24th Street  in Noe Valley was my local store where, on the first morning of my vacation, I picked up a discounted copy of Comeback Kings, a book on the Giants’ (yes, those) 2012 World Series victory.

A Sunday afternoon stroll down Valencia Street in the Mission unveiled the dual delights of Dog Eared Books and Borderlands Books, though the latter’s sole focus on science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery is not to my taste. But the painstakingly prepared coffee was! A happy birthday to Dog Eared Books, a partner of the aforementioned Phoenix Books, Badger Books (of which more below) and alley cat books, which turns 21 this very week! On the evidence of these two thriving outlets, the declaration on its website that ‘reports concerning “The Death of the Bookstore” have been greatly exaggerated’ rings resoundingly and joyfully true.

What struck me most about all of the bookstores I visited was the sheer number of people frequenting them, not just browsing the shelves but writing their own blogs and engaging in social media on their laptops, drinking every conceivable coffee permutation and interrogating the community noticeboards for apartment lettings or reiki classes and, in some instances, all three.

Badger Books on the corner of Cortland Avenue and Bennington Street in urbane Bernal Heights, displayed a particularly fine secondhand selection and boasted a lovely children’s section complete with multi-coloured stools.

Needless to say, City Lights in North Beach afforded me several opportunities to part with my dollars and the Book Passage in the Ferry Building, though relatively small, always contains an interesting and eclectic collection. Besides, there are few better places to sit and read than outside with a cup of Peet’s coffee from the adjoining concession.

Aardvark Books on Church Street near Market, where I bought a set of vintage San Francisco postcards at just fifteen cents each, The Booksmith (another regular haunt) and Browser Books on Fillmore between California and Sacramento are also fine places to stay awhile.

I may, to the purists, be about to join the dark side with my purchase of an Amazon Kindle, but I will never lose my love for plunging into bookstores (preferably those with adjoining cafes and a place to park the laptop), and divesting them of their stock. I expect that I only scratched the surface with San Francisco’s independent bookstores this time, but if the above branches are typical, their future is bright.

I dearly hope so.

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And the Beat Goes On: North Beach

Many who have read my pieces on San Francisco will have concluded that Haight-Ashbury is my spiritual home, and they are probably right, principally because of the music that exploded out of there in the mid-sixties. But it is the cultural movement that pre-dated the hippies by a decade and more that most plays to my sensibilities.

The Beats, with their emphasis on free expression in literature, poetry, music, theatre and lifestyle (sex and drugs), were, whether they knew it or not at the time, the major inspiration for those young people in London and other urban areas in Britain who flocked to coffee bars and folk clubs in the late fifties and early sixties, just at the time that I was becoming aware of wider societal issues. Moreover, many of the rock stars that, a decade later, I worshipped, for example Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Jorma Kaukonen of the Jefferson Airplane, learnt their trade in the coffee houses of the Bay Area, heavily influenced by the events a few miles away.

Although the Beat Generation originally emerged in New York with the early works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, it was San Francisco’s North Beach, the “Little Italy” neighbourhood nestling beneath Telegraph Hill and rubbing shoulders with bustling Chinatown, where it arguably took root.

And, although North Beach may not quite be the Italian enclave it was half a century ago, the influence of the Beats remains to this day. Certain landmarks are place of pilgrimage for both my generation and anyone who believes in free expression and alternative perspectives on the issues of the day.

My walk begins at my favourite San Francisco watering hole, Vesuvio, interestingly still called a café rather than a bar, and not just because it is where Neal Casady, inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s classic Beat novel On The Road, first met the writer at a poetry reading in 1955.

A few groggy steps across Jack Kerouac Alley stands one of America’s most famous and important bookstores, City Lights, which celebrates its sixtieth birthday this year. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 94 and San Francisco’s unofficial poet laureate, and Peter D. Martin, first opened its doors at around the time of the coronation of the new Queen, Elizabeth II, across the Atlantic.

I never leave San Francisco without visiting the bookstore and coming away with at least one book. Many of the more interesting and challenging books on the city’s past, present and future are published by City Lights and they are not easy to get hold of elsewhere. Two and counting at present on this trip!

With the addition of The Beat Museum on Broadway in 2003, the devotees’ experience of the area has been enriched still further. Aside from the fascinating exhibit in the museum itself, the adjoining shop sells an amazing collection of books, DVDs, posters, t shirts and other Beat memorabilia. Whilst I managed, at least on my previous visit, to resist the blandishments of a signed book by Wavy Gravy at $45 (but there’s still another trip), I still bought another. If distance makes visiting the museum itself out of the question, they run an excellent online store too.

Although I am not qualified to say whether Broadway, which cuts across Columbus, has the same caché as it once had (though I think I do know the answer to that), there can be no question that the days of Lenny Bruce’s risqué comedy act at the hungry i and Carol Doda’s historic breast baring at the Condor are long past.

North Beach is still awash with coffee houses, many of which were haunts of unemployed writers and musicians in the heyday of the Beats. Café Trieste is perhaps the most prestigious with its live opera, oh so cool attitude and blisteringly strong espresso. Seats are hard to come by for all those reasons – well, at least inside! 

I think it’s only fitting that we should finish back at Vesuvio – I hear that Bob Dylan has dropped in for an espresso.

And I’ll leave you with an image that describes the Beat’s relationship to polite society like no other.

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Books: Case for the Defence

Kindle, Sony, BeBook, Elonex, iRiver and now Kobo –  the march of the e-reader is becoming louder and more intimidating, like Hitler’s stormtroopers goose stepping across the heart of Europe.  Is the end of the printed word nigh? Or can I stem the tide by building a barricade with my extensive book collection?

Don’t get me wrong – I embrace technology as willingly as the next man or woman – I wouldn’t be blindly cobbling something together every few days for this blog if I didn’t.  I love my iPod, laptop and mobile, and participate in several social networking sites.

And I can see the immense advantage of having an e-reader.  I could carry my entire library around in my back pocket, available to dip into at any time and anywhere.  Depending upon my mood, I could skip from a novel to travel diaries to poetry to sporting memoirs at a few touches of a screen.

Neither would I have to agonise for weeks before going on holiday, deciding which two books I should take, and then leaving at least one of them behind because I knew I was planning to buy several whilst I was away, placing potentially intolerable pressure on my wife’s miraculous capacity to bring our cases in within a milligram of our luggage allowance.

And think of the space the absence of so many books would open up in the house – decluttering at a stroke, though we might need to buy some new furniture!  There’s the small matter too of the environmental damage that the continued production of paper based books could cause.

Then there’s the actual e-reader itself.  Slim, lightweight, compact, long battery life, easy touch, low cost downloads, no glare screen, high contrast E ink display – the list of its attractive features goes on. What is there not to like about it?

And the biggest irony of possessing one?  I would almost certainly read more, more often and more widely, an essential requirement for a writer.  So what’s the problem?

Well, in defence of books it is the sensual and emotional elements that carry the day for me. Their look, feel, texture and, in the case of old books, smell are central to the reading experience.  The turning of the page, the safe depositing of the bookmark, the sight of a well stocked bookcase (doubling as a nice piece of furniture)  – all of these have a richness that cannot remotely be replicated by their upstart rival.

Many books that we possess may have started their life as gifts or be associated with an event or period in our lives that carries resonance. Downloads, even as presents, cannot invite the same emotional investment.

Books don’t break – they may get a little dog-eared but, again, that’s part of their charm.  They don’t run out of batteries or risk short circuiting and losing their entire content.  E-books, at least at the moment, can neither display illustrations nor adequately present large works of reference. And, as someone commented on another website, “how do you get an author to sign an e-book?”.

Bookshops, and even libraries, may be in decline but browsing their shelves remains, one of the most relaxing, and at the same time, stimulating of retail experiences, though I acknowledge that their purpose for many today might be to direct them to their next downloads rather than paper purchases.

P.G. Wodehouse claimed that “as life goes on, don’t you find that all you need is about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke (Pekinese)?”  I’m not so sure about the third, but I don’t think he’s far wrong otherwise.

A final thought – perhaps the answer is compromise.  Buy an e-reader purely to use on holidays where the baggage weight is an issue, but continue to read the printed word at all other times.

I fear the menacing thud of those jackboots is getting closer.

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Another bookstore bites the dust

Jerry Seinfeld once said that a “bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence that people are still thinking”.  If that is true, and I rather incline to the view that it is, then ignorance has claimed another modern victim. I learnt this morning by e mail that the giant Border’s bookstore in Union Square, San Francisco is about to close.  I’m not sure what date it will finally shut its doors, but I do hope the sale that began yesterday will still be in full swing when I visit towards the end of next month.

An oasis of culture in my least favourite part of the city, I have always looked forward to spending an hour, and a few dollars, there when on vacation.  It was one of the first bookstores in my experience that appeared to actively encourage customers to stay awhile and browse through the books and magazines before purchase.  Equally, it possessed a (Seattle’s Best) cafe that was always packed, even in the minutes leading up to its midnight closure. Thankfully, that has become a model for the diminishing number of bookstores in the UK in recent years.

In one sense I am hardly surprised – the Border’s bookstore in Oxford Street in London closed a couple of years ago, replaced by yet another tacky youth “fashion” emporium.  And another San Francisco branch – in South Beach – went out of business in October. Both were victims of the economic downturn in general and the rise of internet based competition.

Now, I can’t abdicate responsibility for my own part in the demise of the bookstore.  I can never pass one without going in – after all they are increasingly rare sights -but it is as often these days to check the price of books I want before rushing home, going online and buying them at massively discounted cost at Amazon.  I have resisted the allure of a Kindle or similar e-reader up till now, although the convenience might prove too much of a temptation before long.  What I will never lose the love for, however, is the feel and look of books and the generally civilised atmosphere of bookstores. 

At least I can still comfort myself with visits to the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, Barnes and Noble in Fisherman’s Wharf and the Booksmith in Haight-Ashbury on my forthcoming trip.  I just hope I’m not lamenting their demise too before the next time I take that eleven hour flight west.

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