Rejections...

Perhaps it was just unfortunate timing. What with all these delightful Russian spies being exchanged, Third Man style, in Vienna, the appeal of espionage is probably particularly high at the moment - so perhaps the competition was stiff. Whatever the reason though, I just got rejected by MI5. It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. I already failed to get into MI6 about nine months ago, so the fact that their slightly less interesting sister organization doesn't want me either isn't exactly remarkable. Particularly galling about this latest rejection though is that this time I failed even to make it beyond the initial stages of typing stuff into little boxes, or more importantly, the personality test. Admittedly, the evidence would seem to be that I don't have the right sort of personality for espionage - if I did, I'd probably have the discretion not to immediately start writing a blog about it - but a test asking me to rank my creativity and so on in tick boxes shouldn't be able to tell that. I at least want someone to interview me before they decide I'm an unreliable, pathetic egotist. I'm a complex, individual human being - it shouldn't be possible to work that out in half an hour of automatic questions.

Or should it? I'm increasingly of the opinion that far from being the extraordinarily interesting, exciting, intelligent and different person that I've long imagined myself to be (you know the type - deep emotional problems, repressed creativity, particularly good taste in novels) I'm actually just another Middle Class Wanker, a term I have decided to apply to a common sociological phenomenon, probably best summed up in the blog StuffWhitePeopleLike.com. It's kind of distressing, although obviously, the kind of distress that would probably feature in that blog. Existential angst is definitely a middle class preoccupation - as is writing about it in moleskin diaries. Or for that matter on blogs. This is unlikely to ever be read by more than around five or six disinterested friends who will later mock me about it (to all of you, I'll be prepared, so you'd better be witty at least) but I'm writing it anyway. Why? Because like most MCWs (I think we deserve an acronym, and it’s better than the terribly American ‘white people’) I'm spectacularly predictable. A couple of years back I saw a friend of mine wearing a t-shirt that read 'Lazy Middle Class Wanker'. I think perhaps there should be some sort of test for us, on completion of which we'd all be given that t-shirt and made to wear it just enough to remind us of our own uniformity - our membership of this predictable, unfortunate club. Then maybe we'd get less depressed about taking our prestigious degrees and getting high paying jobs in the city - it's not selling out if we realize we had nothing to sell.

That's probably the future for me anyway. I have an interview next week to work in financial PR. It's the sort of job that's well paid, prestigious, has good prospects - the sort of job that most ordinary, non MCW graduates would probably be delighted to have a shot at. If I actually get it, and take it, I'll probably even quite enjoy it. The problem I have is that being a MCW, I will never be entirely satisfied because I won't be able to stop myself thinking about the books that I could be writing, or the unnecessarily dangerous and uncomfortable countries I could be struggling to travel around, or the other pretentious, self-important authors, journalists and so on that I could be sipping champagne with at book launches and so on, instead of the stockbrokers and directors I will be sipping champagne with, at company launches and so on.

Which obviously is what this blog is going to be about. It's a sap to my predictable, unfulfilled ambitions, attached to vague and unsubstantiated daydreams about book deals and journalism jobs. I hope you enjoy it.

(For anyone interested in trying for MI5, the deadline is July 12th and the website is https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/careers.aspx. I've no issues encouraging anyone else to apply, since with this job, unlike a lot of the others I've been rejected for this year, at least I won't find out if any of my friends get it).


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