The Strange World of Axel Fendersson

I have taken up a new pastime: modern jive dancing.

Dancing of any kind has always been something I’ve been terrified to do. It’s just so…revealing. To be expressing yourself with your whole body. There’s just so much potential to look ridiculous. I don’t mind looking ridiculous, but it has to be on my terms. I’m OK looking ridiculous if it’s because I have chosen to. I’m less keen if it’s because I’m screwing something up. In addition to that, I am quite socially anxious, particularly when it comes to interacting with women. So dancing with partners would be particularly intimidating for me.

But I have of late become keen to challenge myself, to try new things, learn to overcome my anxieties and to try and sort out some of what I am not happy with in life. And so when, a few weeks ago, I learned that a local dancing group were running a free session, I decided that I should go along, as it would be a great opportunity to face my anxieties and try something new without having to spend anything.

So, rather apprehensive, I went along. The initial beginner’s session went all right. By the end of that I was feeling cheerful, pleased that I’d given it a try, but doubtful that I’d come back. Then we beginners split off for a beginners’ review session while the more experienced dancers stayed for an intermediate lesson. By the end of the beginners’ review, I was beginning to get more of a feel for what was happening. I wouldn’t say I was getting the hang of it as such, but there was at least a sense that I was starting to make progress. And so by the end of the evening I was less sure that I was going to leave it at that as a one-off.

Against going back was the fact that it costs £8.50 a week. When you’re trying to live on JSA at £65.45 a week, that’s a fairly substantial expense. Also it clashes with open mic night at Fat Lil’s. But at the same time I had enjoyed it and it seemed a shame not to carry on for at least a few weeks until I had got a bit better at it, and so could better assess whether it was something I enjoyed or not.

In the end I went back the following week, and again this evening for a third session. And I think it’s beginning to click. I mean, sure, I’m still not very good yet. Obviously I wouldn’t be. But it’s starting to feel just a little less awkward and a little more natural than before. And consequently it’s a little more enjoyable So I will keep going for now.

I have a problem. I have spent the last 18 months unemployed. There is nothing on my CV more recent than 2008. And so when applying for jobs, a lot of employers will see this, assume I’m a work-shy slacker and bin my application.

They’re not completely wrong. For a good while I was only making a token effort to find a job and really wasn’t looking all that hard. But now I am genuinely trying to find a job, and I am wondering what to do to paper over the huge gap on my CV.

One possibility is to find some voluntary work. I have been looking into that recently, but I’m not sure that it’s going to be enough.

And so I’m wondering whether I should claim to have been self-employed in that time, as a musician. It wouldn’t be a complete lie. I have, in the past year, played some proper bookings and tomorrow a friend and I will be running a morris dancing workshop for which we will be getting paid. But it would definitely be stretching the truth.

Is this a really stupid idea? Will employers see through this ruse and prosecute me for fraud? Will they decide that trying unsuccessfully to make a living out of music is basically the same thing as being unemployed anyway? Or even that it’s worse? Or is this a good way to explain what I’ve been doing for the past eighteen months without having to make anything up?

I am sick of being unemployed.

I am sick of feeling useless and inadequate. I am sick of being bored because I have copious free time but rarely have the money to do anything with it. I am sick of being lonely because I cannot afford to visit my existing friends who live long distances away, and I have few opportunities to make new friends because I can’t afford to get out much. I am sick of the fact that when I go to a pub, for an open mic night or whatever, I have to carefully consider whether I can afford to have a second or even a first drink. I am sick of knowing that when meeting new people, sooner or later the question of ‘what do you do?’ is going to come up, and that I will be embarrassed as I have no answer: I’m not just out of work, I’ve never been in one job long enough to be able to say what I’d ‘normally’ be doing. I am sick of knowing that my already dubious chances with the opposite sex are reduced to basically zero by my being a 27-year-old man with no job who lives with his parents. I am sick of racing towards the end of my twenties with a sense that I haven’t even got started on life yet. I am sick of knowing that I have long-standing social anxiety problems that I need to try and address, but that I have few opportunities to tackle them properly because I cannot afford to get out and about and expose myself to social situations very much. I am sick of knowing that for as long as I am starved of social contact, those problems are only likely to get worse.

For some time now, I have been living from day to day, without really thinking much about where I’m going or planning ahead by more than a month or so. This has prevented me from being particularly effective in my job-seeking, but has also allowed me to remain vaguely comfortable and not worry too much about all of the above. But for a variety of reasons, I have recently been unable to maintain this any longer. So it’s been a rough few weeks, although at least I am now taking my job search seriously.

But now I am also sick of job-hunting. I am sick of finding a vacancy that looks promising, of working up enthusiasm for an employment opportunity, of waiting for a response, and having my newly-fledged hope dashed when the response comes back negative. I am sick of having to write accounts of myself that are both honest (or, at least, free of outright lies) and overwhelmingly positive, despite my poor self-image and natural distaste for immodesty. I am sick of knowing that every day spent without a job further diminishes my chances of finding one, especially one that I don’t find particularly unpleasant or disagreeable. And I’m sick of not sleeping well because I’m feeling stressed by the whole enterprise.

I am disgruntled.

According to a popular online dating website, “At Match we’re proud that every day 160 members leave us … as couples.”

That does sound pretty good. But how did they get that figure? Fortunately, thanks to trading standards laws, there’s a handy footnote explaining.

According to a poll of 1000 people who had ended their memberships of the website, 17% said it was because they had found a partner on the site (and so no longer needed it). Multiplying this figure by the 344,681 people who left the site in one year, and dividing by 365 to get the average per day gives you 160 (rounded to two significant figures).

Assuming the poll was representative (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), that seems a reasonable enough extrapolation. I could raise the slightly pedantic objection that when they say ‘every day’, they mean ‘on an average day’, but that doesn’t really bother me that much. However, there are other numbers we can get from that poll as well. For example, 5,500 people leave the site every week without having found a partner there. Or you could just take the simplest figure of all: five out of six memberships end without having resulted in the love that most members are presumably hoping for when they join.

At this point, it could be interesting to speculate a little about the other reasons people might leave. One that doesn’t directly involve any deficiency in the service would be if the person leaving had found a partner by some other means, and so had no need of the site any more. I admit this is unlikely. Cruel stereotypes and my own prejudice tell me that people who are trying to find partners on the internet aren’t going to have much luck finding them any other way. However, for now, I’ll charitably assume that this happens as often as people finding a partner through the site. That is to say, it applies to 17% of cancellations, or about one in six (if nothing else, this makes for tidy numbers).

Armed with this assumption, we can now claim that two-thirds of people who join the site leave it just as single as when they joined.

But what if that assumption is wrong? In all honesty, it doesn’t matter much. If the assumed figure is too high, then that just means the proportion of people who leave the site single is more than two-thirds.

But what if it’s two low? Well, in that case, members are being charged money for a service that is less likely to find them what they are looking for than they were to find it for themselves anyway. I think that’s probably even worse.

Interestingly, just how much this service will cost is not advertised. The front page invites you to “register for free to meet new people today”, but this does not get you a functional service. Further down the page it explains that this will allow you to view other people’s profiles, but you will have to pay to be allowed to actually contact any of these people. Presumably once you’ve registered and feel that you are committed to the endeavour (and have spotted some other members that you really want to meet) it will then tell you how much it’s going to charge you for this dubiously useful service.

All in all, I can definitely see why they went for the “160 people a day leave as couples” figure.

I heard back today from a job I applied for about a fortnight ago. I didn’t get it. That I didn’t get this particular job specifically is only slightly disappointing. It would have been a good opportunity to get into a job that would provide development and training, and which might have involved some interesting work, but never mind.

What is a problem is that they rejected my application without giving me an interview. If they had interviewed me and then decided that of all the candidates, I wasn’t the best, that would be fine. There’d be other jobs. But instead they looked at my CV and without even having met me, they decided I wasn’t someone they should be considering for this job.

Now, obviously, this has happened before. A lot of the jobs I apply for I don’t get interviews. But a lot of those are just things I apply for on the off-chance I might get them, so it hasn’t particularly bothered me. This, though, was exactly the kind of thing that, over the past month or two, I had come to the conclusion I should be going for, that I could do and might, just might, actually like doing. They, however, evidently felt that this was not an appropriate position for me. Since there were no formal requirements for the job besides some production experience (which I have) being an advantage, I can only conclude that this means I am essentially unemployable.

Increasingly I fear I have negligible prospects of ever finding a job that I want, like, or even don’t particularly mind. I will be doing well if I can just find a job that will have me.

So, election tomorrow. And for the first time since I became old enough to vote in 2000, the result is not a completely foregone conclusion. Except that in this constituency it still is. Whatever the overall result across Britain, it is pretty much certain that David Cameron will still be MP for Witney.

So in fact doesn’t really matter how I vote, since in the end my constituency will elect a Conservative MP and my vote will be counted as a vote for the Tories. Even though I’d rather have another five years of our current shambolic excuse for a Labour government than see the Conservatives back in power.

This hasn’t bothered me much before. When the general election result was a foregone conclusion, it didn’t matter so much that the result in Witney was just as predictable. But that isn’t the case this time. There is some uncertainty this time around and suddenly it does bother me that I won’t get a say in which party forms our next government.

Another factor that has got me thinking more about this election than usual is that I know one of the candidates personally. Paul Wesson, who is standing as an independent candidate, I know as a fellow member of Ducklington Morris. There are lot of things, politically, on which I do not agree with Paul. But they are mostly national and international issues on which an independent MP would have little to no influence even if elected. Meanwhile on local issues (most notably the issue of a Carterton-Witney-Oxford rail link) I find a lot of common ground, and I do suspect that Paul would do a good job as a local MP, representing his constituents’ concerns and interests in Parliament.

So how to vote? Not for Cameron, obviously. The man’s a slimy, shape-shifting weasel. And, worse, a Conservative. And while the current crop of Tories may claim they aren’t the party of Margaret Thatcher any more, the evidence suggests otherwise. Joe Goldberg is also out. I first started paying attention to politics in my teens, when Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and company were re-shaping the Labour party into its current form. I was suspicious of them then. Their fetish for privatisation and insistence that a free market would always fix everything (what kind of lunatic wants to shop around for hospital treatment?) never sat right with me. Their dragging the UK into an illegal foreign war under false pretences was shameful. Their numerous illiberalities (never mind irrelevant paper tigers like ID cards, what about extending the length of time suspects could be detained without charge from 36 hours to 28 days?) were disgusting. All along I grudgingly admitted that for all that I disliked Labour, they were at least doing a good job with the economy, which stayed strong and stable for many years. Now it turns out they weren’t even getting that right. So no, Labour, you don’t get my vote.

Voteforpolicies.org.uk says I should vote Green. Stuart Macdonald does seem to be one of the few non-Tory candidates for Witney with a genuine interest in the constituency and who isn’t just a paper candidate. But while I do have a lot of affinity for the Greens, I am also wary of the party’s lunatic fringe, and it is my understanding that they still fail badly when it comes to science.

The one party that clearly doesn’t fail on science is the Liberal Democrats. Historically, I’ve tended to vote Lib Dem and of the three main parties they are currently talking the most sense. Sure Dawn Barnes will not win the election in Witney and isn’t particularly expecting to or prepared to, but another LD vote that is then discarded due to the system will at least add further weight to their cries for electoral reform.

Overall, I think the Liberal Democrats will be the most likely recipients of my vote in this election. But I might still change my mind and vote Green or for Paul Wesson. If only because if Paul were to unseat David Cameron it would be hilarious.

I don’t think this is news to anyone by now, but I have been booked to play at this year’s Oxford Folk Festival (see here, near the bottom of the page).

I must admit this is quite intimidating, for a few reasons. I’ve played at OFF before, but not by myself and, Melomania aside, not for a few years. As a solo performer, I’ve played countless open mic nights but very few other gigs and, again, not recently. And only to non-folkies.

Odd as it might seem, playing to people who are fans of this sort of thing is more intimidating than playing to a more general audience, because for those people it has novelty value. If someone is attending an open mic evening, they are presumably willing to be fairly open-minded about what they listen to, and although a bad act will be all the more loathed if it is also a novelty, provided you can get people to enjoy what you are doing at all, they will generally enjoy it all the more if it’s something they haven’t heard before. In addition, if it doesn’t go well, you can always tell yourself it was just because it wasn’t their sort of thing, rather than because it actually wasn’t any good.

But a group of people at a folk festival are mostly going to be people who already like folk music and to whom what I do is not going to be particularly novel. Since I don’t write songs, but instead perform largely traditional material (and the odd contemporary cover), they’ll likely even have heard these same songs before, quite possibly performed better by someone else. Which means they may well be much harder to impress.

There’s also the fact that this was the first gig I’ve had that I initiated. Previously when I’ve done something I’ve generally been asked to do it by someone, but this time I contacted Tim myself and asked to play at the festival. And I feel that having said ‘hey, you should book me’, there’s then more pressure to deliver on the day.

I also haven’t heard anything about Melomania this year, and if nobody’s said anything by now, I’m inclined to suspect that it won’t be happening. If that’s the case, then appearing on stage may well be my only route to a free ticket in future, and so I need to do well enough that they’re willing to have me back again next year.

This worry has made playing open mic nights more stressful, too. Normally, if it doesn’t go that well it’s a bit disappointing, but no big deal. But now it gets me worrying: what if I have a similar ‘off’ day when I’m on at the festival? I’m not sure what would be worse, just not being good enough, or being plenty good enough normally but somehow not doing myself justice when it actually counts.

In other news, I’m also going to be playing a small spot as part of the Witney Music Festival. This is a smaller local thing, made up of lots of little events rather than being a single monolithic festival. At present I’m not sure exactly how much I’m going to have to do, but it should be at the Hollybush on the evening of the first of April. If nothing else it’ll make for a good practice run for the Folk Festival a fortnight later.