Omelette, and the Life I Might Have Lived
8 January 1990, Monday, Ampthill
My throat is terribly rough. I keep sneezing. When I sneeze it strips the inside of my throat. I didn’t go to the interview. Bought the Guardian and went through the media pages. Sent off to as many of the adverts as I thought I was suitable for. There are lots of jobs in ‘telesales’. A couple were as librarian/researchers for newspapers or TV. There were also some bottom floor publishing jobs. However unless you have a ladder any building must be entered by the bottom floor. What I am now realizing is the blatantly obvious — if I were offered an editorial job I would not be able to do it. One must be organized, confident, experienced and have contacts. I think I’ll sneak a look around for a couple of months and see if I like the look of it. I should be receiving some replies by now. I am not qualified for anything the BBC might have to offer. Director of Panorama? A lot of these jobs only about ten people in the country have got a serious chance of getting.
There is a point in a certain kind of young man or woman’s life when they wonder whether, if they wanted to sell out, which of course they don’t, but just say they did, there would be anyone who wanted to buy in?1
My friendship with Mark is stalled. It has been for a while. I realised this when we last spoke on the phone. Whilst discussing whether I should go down to his or he come up to mine we itemized what we each did at the other place. They both sounded so boring that we decided to stay where we were! I am in the mood to write letters to everybody I know. Trying to confirm or end our friendships. I wrote a hateful letter to Martin about Charles yesterday, in the letter book. I didn’t send it. The novel seems to be going well. I had a strong desire yesterday whilst lying in bed failing to get to sleep to destroy –—such a dramatic word! — to throw out the pathetic typescript of Omelette. Surely I’ve never written anything worse2. But I am superstitious about throwing out old work – never really having done it.
Re-reading and re-typing these pages of my diary, I feel a frank terror. If I had got any of these jobs I was applying for, my life would have been completely different. Say, some editor or advertising bod or other senior person had taken a chance on unqualified, unsuited but post-Oxbridge Toby — Toby might have started working full time in London, and he might have pursued success within journalism or or marketing or publishing or librarianship. Yah. He wouldn’t have given up writing that first novel straight away. But perhaps he wouldn’t have had time or energy in the evenings. (It was only years later he was able to set his alarm clock and wake early.) Young-Toby might eventually have quit his unwanted career, in an attempt to avoid not becoming a writer, and there’s no telling where that exit might have taken him. He might have ended up in Prague, one or two exhausting years after this. He might have gone to live and work in Łódź or Chemnitz or Tabor or one of the other smaller cities where his university friends were. Looking back, I can only assume that Toby’s job applications are either deliberately or unconsciously rubbish. He doesn’t want what he is saying he wants, and somehow he’s managing to telegraph that. He’s not totally unqualified. His CV has a few things on it. He’s written for Isis, the university magazine, and Cherwell, the university newspaper. He’s interviewed Richard Dawkins and Michael Caine. He’s gone to the regional press screening of Withnail & I and written a review predicting it’ll become a cult classic. He’s co-edited Debate, the Oxford Union magazine, with future journalist and newsreader Samira Ahmed. But he doesn’t want to start by making teas at Beds on Sunday. He doesn’t want to earn his spurs knocking out court reports. He doesn’t want to doorstep families who have just suffered a bereavement. Nor does he want to learn the Dewey Decimal System or how to sell butter replacements (known in the industry as ‘yellow fat’). Luckily, he wants something pretty much exactly like what happens to him. Although he doesn’t know it yet, he wants Prague.
True. Omelette was, in fact, Toby’s first go at a first novel. The title was a shamefully feeble pun on Hamlet — which may give you some sense how bad the rest of it was. As far as I can remember, the story involved a young man hitchhiking and being given a lift by an older woman.