Thu 1st Jan 2009

I spent the first few hours of this year in the City of London. I haven't moved there permanently since I last wrote or anything. My presence was purely just to celebrate all the magnificent achievements in the name of annual calendar remuneration. I appreciate how such a move might have compromised my writings. I know my place. What with the kaleidoscope of noise and colours in a city like London, the blog might end up too dizzying to read on a long-term basis. So I am altruistically destined to remain for the next year, in sleepy Wolverhampton. All for your benefit. I hope you're happy.

Actually, this might not necessarily be true. I am currently awaiting a 2nd job interview at a concert venue in my old stomping ground of Liverpool. This is due to take place on Monday, so I suppose my success or failure at the interview will inevitably be revealed through future entries, what with geographical location inescapably informing one's life and all.

As for my chances? Well the first interview, which took place just prior to Christmas, seemed to go alright. It wasn't without a sticky moment or two, but what interview isn't? One particular question asked what I could personally offer the diverse ethnic and cultural background of the venue's programme. This, I presume, is a question designed to find out whether a candidate is fundamentally racist. On paper, my answer shouldn't seem too much of a challenge. In the past I have found myself being referred to by contemporaries as a 'bleeding heart liberal' and a 'lily-livered lefty'. This sort of labelling has consequently led me to make a couple of assumptions.

Firstly, that political persuasion, rather worryingly, appears to have links to terrible ill-health and weak, inferior internal organs. And secondly, if I have any fundamental values at all, they are in a belief of humanist systems of equality.

I just wish someone had told my brain that. I seemed to embark upon my answer with all the assuredness of a cow's footing, as it trepidly heads back to steady land from the middle of a frozen pond. I'd start a sentence, then become all self-conscious about using vocabulary which somehow felt exclusionary. I seemed to be tripping myself up with short, subtle words such as 'they', 'them' and 'us', in the middle of otherwise-well articulated, if slightly stuttered, sentences. My nervousness then led me to back-track, stutter even more, or giggle in a manner which at worst seemed guilty, and at best, slightly camp. I felt like a fumbling and bungling mess. It was like the scene could have been lifted straight from a lost episode of 'Some Mothers Do Ave Em', in which Frank Spencer has, through some inexplicably bizarre chain of events, been given the task of delivering Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech. With inevitable hilarious consequences.

Of course, I'm being rather melodramatic. In reality it wasn't all that bad, or else presumably I would not have been invited for a 2nd interview. I guess it was just interview nerves naturally magnifying personal failings. And if it seems in poorly judged taste to have used the controversially near-the-knuckle 'Rivers of Blood' speech for such trite allegorical purposes, I can only apologise. It's just there's a necessity for me to mention Enoch Powell. I need his presence as a tenuous appeaser for readers feeling there hasn't been enough 'Wolverhampton-based' blogging so far in this entry. Lord only knows what desperate measures I'll be forced into resorting to, if I actually do end up moving to Liverpool!