Like most writers, I balance the endless joy of soliciting rejection slips with the demands of a daily occupation. My current one is desperately dull. It has some benefits - working from home for one, which means I don’t have to wear a suit and tie, I save money on travel and can take a tea break whenever I want. But it’s also stressful, soul-destroying and mentally exhausting. I’m effectively at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if not physically then mentally, and with very few holidays.

It’s called terminal unemployment.

Don’t ever think that looking for work isn’t a full time occupation. It is, just with 100% more daily dissatisfaction and 100% less salary. Don’t for one minute think that being (apparently devoutly) unemployed is all fun and laughter. I really wish it was. I wish it’s as depicted on TV or in books - eating Sugar Puffs from the packet, watching Boohbah and devising disturbing new forms of self-abuse. Sure, there may be some people who indeed do live that dizzying lifestyle, but I’m one of the hapless idiots who are actually, perhaps foolishly, trying get a job.

And I’m pretty good at it. I’m an expert in fact at bookmarking jobs I don’t want to do. That said, it does take all day and usually yields nothing. Occasionally some days even offer one or two vacancies you could apply for without the likely prospect of suicide in a few weeks. If you’re especially lucky that is.

Unemployment is not as easy a life as some might think - and it’s usually thought of as such by those with either the good fortune or intellectual vasectomy that enables them to enjoy what they do to earn money, day in, day out. You’re still always tired. You still have to take phone calls. Mostly these are from recruitment consultancy agents. People who think that estate agents are the most devious, duplicitious and downright demoralising form of life have clearly never before encountered this flavour.

The typical recruitment agent will more than happily respond via telephone to your initial application to one of their vacancies (or bait, as I’ve come to call them). However, this is merely an expert tactic to break you down, ultimately so you become so scared/depressed/desperate that you’ll accept any old rubbish they couldn’t pass off to anyone with an ounce of self-respect. They can, and will, go to ridiculous lengths to shatter your own bravado of self-confidence, just so that they can stuff your limp broken form into any box they want. Say no to what they offer you, and they’ll never contact you again, regardless of how well a job fits your own concept of your abilities, or the new ill-fitting suit they’ve stitched for you.

Buzzards, circling.                      Image by Conlawprof

Here’s an idea of what you’re dealing with: one agent called me back within minutes of applying for a vacancy. With predictable idiocy, the speed and directness of her reply foolishly raised my hopes, or at least until she very quickly informed me that I wasn’t remotely qualified. She then commented on the fact that the last few jobs listed on my CV were very brief. I replied that they were short term assignments. She said that I should state that on my CV. I replied that I had, in the (evidently) pointless description of said position beneath its title. In the very first sentence. The first few words in fact. She said that I’d need to make it more clear. She then asked what I’d been doing for the last six months. I told her that I’d been looking for work. She replied that prospective employers wouldn’t like that - that they’d prefer you to be working at the time of application. At this point the conversation essentially went out of the window, having realised I was talking to someone who couldn’t grasp the basic concept of cause and effect. Unsurprisingly, she then proceeded to put me forward for a job that even I could see I wasn’t remotely qualified for or experienced in at all, which surprisingly offered £5000 less than the one I had applied for. I said I’d get back to her. I didn’t.

Most of the time, this is the best you can hope for. It’s rare enough for a job agency to even acknowledge your applications. One particular media agency has to date not answered a single one, in a variety of roles including trying to register for temp work. Still I continue to apply, like a fool, every time. What choice do I have?

Another agency similarly denied my existence until one happy day when they called me in to register after applying for a full time job. To cut a very long story short, it turned out they’d mixed my CV up with another applicant with the same name. Someone eight years younger than me with a degree in Sports Science. Now I’m not an intellectual snob, but I don’t understand why someone with no experience of any description and a degree in Sports Science is better qualified for a junior editorial role than someone with an English degree and over four years’ varied work experience. They felt sorry for me, apparently, for dragging me all the way out there for no reason at all, and put me on their temping books by way of consolation - something I’d been writing to them about for months. I never heard a peep from them after that.

I don’t know which is worse for your confidence - recruitment agents breaking you down, or the mere glaring fact of your own evident unemployability - your four year degree and four years of work experience worth little more than a quick template rejection email, if at all, over and over. You’re even touched when they go to the trouble of doing a mail merge first - a personally addressed rejection adds that little special touch, but you’re always back to square one, again and again, a little more tired, bewildered and less yourself every time.

It’s not a big pool, especially now, but on my daily scan through the ludicrous amount of websites and email digests I’m registered with I’m much less inclined now to apply for a job if it’s with an agency, particularly if it’s advertised by an agency who have never once replied to me. It’s not as if they’re out of my league - I’d never apply for something I didn’t have a chance at getting. I just appear to be completely unemployable.

Maybe I should just stick to writing novels and short stories - an area in which I’m already more than experienced in not getting off the bottom rung. That and cut out the middle man: always apply direct if you can.

Whenever I ask this question, or anything similar that concerns that quite fundamental aspect of my life, the following cards always appear: Knight of Swords, Justice, the Devil. I’ve even started affectionately terming them ‘the triplets’.

Pat Kavanagh, the noted UK literary agent, has died aged 68 from a brain tumour.

There are a great number of authors currently paying tribute to her no-nonsense, informal and direct manner. I encountered this first hand when I submitted my novel to her earlier this year, kindly referred by my university tutor who she had represented for several years. She responded within a matter of weeks, praising the submission having evidently actually read it, and though she did not take it on, explained quite clearly why and recommended in a not at all general way how I could proceed.

For a first time author trying to get published I can’t tell you how surprising it was to encounter a prospective agent who had not only demonstrably read at least most of what you’d sent them, but congratulated you on it as well, taking the time to write to you personally. Her advice and encouraging tone, in only a brief letter, gave me a huge confidence boost for something I was increasingly losing all hope and interest in. It was enough to carry on, refreshingly different from the usual nameless template rejection letters, exactly three months since submitting each and every time, my manuscript always returned as pristine as I had sent it without so much as a dogeared page.

I find it an uncomfortable thought that at the time she replied to me, she was entirely unaware of the condition that would take her life in only six months time. It’s very sad to think that there is one less individual in the world of that character, and particularly in an ‘industry’ more and more orientated towards its ‘market’ and less towards the individual people that make that market up.

I met Olivia Colman, otherwise known as Sophie from Peep Show, on Charing Cross Road late last night. She stopped me to ask for directions. It was a little surreal - her talking to me exactly as she always has, only suddenly without the anticipated medium of a television screen. As I stared back at her I couldn’t help but become very conscious of a somehow bitter and cynical internal monologue I wasn’t previously aware of.

She was very nice though, particularly as I couldn’t help with her directions and then perhaps slightly perplexed her by asking for a hug.

From the journal…

It’s been six years now since I went to the Fringe with him and Andrew. Andrew’s now a successful headlining standup comedian. John’s now finally starting to get recognised for his music on an overdue scale. There is no greater pain than seeing friends succeed. After I read the review I spoke to a friend who was both supportive and dismissive of my clichéd laments, suggesting that as a musician he knows exactly how any writer must feel - anonymous and invisible. And it’s true. Everyone claims to be a writer at some point because it’s easy to say it. All you need to do is write something. You don’t even need to show it to anyone. You don’t need a stage or an instrument or a canvas that others can view to validate your claim; your identity. Thus the only validation becomes how ’successful’ you are - “do you have an agent?” “Are you published?” “How many copies have you sold?” “No? Not yet? None? Oh.” To paraphrase the original little green man, a writer craves not these things.

It’s a profession anyone can claim and dismiss in a moment, but few truly understand unless it’s something they truly are. I can thus take some comfort from that I suppose. I am a writer. I am. I am a writer. I am because I keep going. I keep writing. Even when I think I’ve given up - even when I think I’ve achieved nothing but ‘failure’ because my markers for success are foolishly set by an uncomprehending society rather than by myself, I still don’t put down the pen or stop typing. I am still writing even in this journal, more often than ever in fact. Is this just habit? Is this courage? Is this faith? Either way I feel that it is not something that ‘failure’ can triumph over. This is the person I am. This is the self I bare to the world.

Ben Leto asks Josh Todd of Bark Cat Bark what year it is, why people in Paris don’t wear baseball caps and whether he’d like another Absinthe.

Josh Todd has started the day in what only the British would consider true Parisian style. It’s not yet lunchtime and he’s had, by his own admission, “plenty of wine this morning.” Here on one of his many visits to Paris, his “local town” and “where his heart lies”, Yorkshire-born Josh calls himself “just a young eighteen year old traveller”. Some of his friends call him a grandad. Anyone who’s heard his music however could only ever call him an upsettingly talented and rising artist.

Signed to Playground Records aged only 13, Josh has since been releasing music under the name of Bark Cat Bark. As a classical musician playing the undeniably modern, it’s refreshingly difficult to crowbar his sound into any one genre, much like his contemporary influences of Beirut, Patrick Wolf and Final Fantasy, amongst others. He’s a polymath with what seems like every instrument any musician has ever heard of and a few I certainly haven’t, including the Bouzouki, Gayageum, Euphonium, Kinnor, Bandura and the Kokyu. Musically ignorant folk such as myself would probably be found trying to order these names in a Korean restaurant, whilst talking to Josh for only a few minutes can make you feel like you eat too many Doritos and watch too much TV by contrast.

It was with this slightly sinking feeling of having wasted the twenties I spent my teens looking forward to that I sat down with a cup of conspicuously unFrench coffee to ask him some fatuous and irrelevant questions.
 
 
Ben Leto: Okay then, here goes, straight off the top of my head.

Josh claps his hands once.

BL: Let’s play with synesthesia. What colour would you say typifies your last album, Rest in Tale?

Josh Todd: Can’t we start off like, “hey, hey, I’m currently in Paris, yeah…”?

BL: You see, I’m not very good at this. To do this properly we’d have to be sitting at a café des artistes with a notepad and dogeared copy of Rimbaud on the table next to an overflowing ashtray and two empty glasses of red wine.

JT: Ha ha! Those interviews have happened before, and let me tell you, they’re not so good. Half the time both of us wouldn’t even talk about anything. The Newcastle Metro interviewed me like that, and we didn’t even get an interview done. Still haven’t.

BL: They’d be good with me. The interview would last seven hours and we’d be smashed. Think Withnail and I meets Time Out.

JT: Ha ha! Sounds great! We shall do it sometime then. But in answer to your first question it would be ‘brown’, as it is very dismal, and mucky.

BL: Ha! I knew it! A rusty brown.

Josh laughs.

BL: See? There’s hope yet for this interview.

JT: Ha ha! Come on, keep them coming. I’m on a roll.

BL: Shit… um… (orders another Absinthe)

JT: Such a good drink!

BL: Would you say you were a loner at school? If so, was it by choice, and if not, did you care?

JT: I was very popular at school actually. I always used to get nodded at as I walked through the corridors with my violin in hand and known as the ‘class clown’. It was only in college when I started really settling down and being what I found to be myself. I like my inside time, and also love going clubbing with a selected few.

BL: Some people would say the ‘class clown’ avoids being taken seriously - standing out just to fade his true self into the background. Were you quite open about who you were, or did you let people assume you were who they perceived you to be?

JT: I have always been very open. I really couldn’t care less about what someone thought. If I enjoy what I do, I enjoy what I do. No one can tell me different.

BL: There was something you said before about your music being like a relationship between a man and a woman. What does that mean? And why the male/female dynamic particularly? Would you say you consider your music’s like the feelings in romantic or sexual relationships?

JT: Well, let’s say the woman is the music I create. The woman can irritate me and my emotions which then causes us to fall out and stay away from each other for a while. Then when I return to her we are full of love again. Just like any normal relationship between a man and a woman.

BL: Is it therefore a conscious choice that you use female vocalists? Have you considered using a male vocalist for any of your songs?

JT: There is a song in production where Jack Colwell is appearing on vocals. Jack is a talented young man indeed. As for female vocalists, I don’t know how it came about. It depends what mood my music gives out and then I will decide if I want a female or male to sing or even, in some cases, no one sings and it stays as one instrumental, then later in life they come back and we put vocals to it. ‘I Saw A Wolf’ was officially an instrumental on an old vinyl of mine, but then last year we thought of some lyrics and Katie Morrice arose to the challenge of singing them.

BL: You mentioned that you don’t like performing in England anymore. Do you think of yourself as an English musician when you’re playing abroad? Songs like ‘Baron’ have, I think, a definitively British parochial sound. Is this something you try and express in other countries?

JT: When I play in different countries I see myself as one of that nationality. I give all my songs their country’s sound. But when I am back in England I see myself as just a normal Englishman - a Yorkshireman. I tend to gasconade about being from Yorkshire. The songs that you hear that sound like they are not English in any way at all is because they’ve not been recorded in England. They have been recorded in different parts of the world, e.g. Bahrain, Paris, Arrecife… Ichabod Crane was recorded in England, hence why it sounds like a 17th century English classical piece. And the Sitrah album was recorded in Bahrain where I used sitars, darbukas And qanuns which are their country’s instruments. I like to experiment in different countries with different instruments.

BL: I actually thought Ichabod Crane sounded more French! Like something from the demise of aristocracy!

JT: Oh no! I was listening to a lot of English classical artists at the time, and the riff and everything just came to me in my room.

BL: Is that how you compose? Do your ideas generally come from soaking up other pieces and allowing them to shape your own, or do you start off with an idea and then listen to others to give it form?

JT: In all honesty, 10% of my music has come by listening to other artists and the other 90% is just sitting there in a quiet room.

BL: So do you find it easier to compose whilst travelling, or once you’ve returned?

JT: I like to take my dictaphone with me and whilst travelling in other countries by foot I will attatch my dictaphone to my belt, walk and take an instrument at random with me and play anything as I’m walking around, taking in the scenery and playing what I feel like, looking into the details of the scenery. Then if I’m not recording whilst I’m over in that country, I can bring my dictaphone back with me and listen back, then record it over here with it sounding that I’m still over in that country.

BL: Do you ever go busking when travelling? And do you ever play whatever you want then or just stick to written songs?

JT: I do love to go busking, without permission. But it is phantasmagoric! And you attract the right crowd! When I’m in countries like Macedonia I like playing the songs which they’re familiar with like Opa Cupa or Zemjo Makedonska. But when I play my own they seem to enjoy it, and that makes me gratified as can be.

BL: I can see you busking in the Piazza della Signoria. Have you?

JT: I have not played there, but I will most likely in October when I visit Florence!

BL: Crowley once said England is “the most fertile mother of poets, but she kills the weak and drives the strong to happier lands… The English poet must either make a successful exile or die of a broken heart.” I had that in mind when you were talking about the differences in audiences’ reactions in the UK and abroad.

JT: I like that! I’ve never read that before.

BL: Do you feel that we don’t appreciate artists here like they do overseas?

JT: I feel that way. I think it’s because people these days in England are too afraid of what people might think. This country’s people have sadly gotten this way.

BL: So what year is it in your head?

JT: Anytime from 1678 to 1741.

BL: You have a Yorkshire passport, but you suggested Paris is your home. Can you say why, or does it simply sing to you in a way UK cities don’t?

JT: The people in Paris have class whereas the people in England have baseball caps.

BL: So it’s just the people then?

JT: I personally think so, a mass majority. But again, I love the countryside in England. It’s absolutely breathtaking - where I can record some of my folk music over the grass and cornfields, where there are few people to be bothered by. I think the whole point to this travelling hobby of mine is that I can’t get what I want, unfortunately.

BL: When an artist gets what he wants, he stops being an artist and goes into HR.

JT: Music is my true partner, and a true partner never leaves. It would be half a millimetre from the impossible scale.

BL: It’s funny you say that about the people in Paris and the UK. I think London, for example, is a beautiful city - so much history and culture embedded into the stone and cobble when you walk the streets. It’s just the attitude of the majority of the people here I don’t like. I’ve found Paris can be very similar to London in terms of people’s attitude to each other, and particularly foreigners.

JT: I see what you mean. I did enjoy the historical side of London and the lovely places to go. But there’s something more about it that switches me right off the place.

BL: Do you have any vices, and do you think your music would suffer or benefit without them?

JT: I don’t really know. I make my music until it pleases my ears. Once my ears are pleased, I am pleased overall.

Josh laughs.

BL: Not one for creative celibacy then? The last of the great sensualists is alive and well! As Oscar Wilde once said (though strictly off record), ‘finish on something fatuous’: who from all of history would you most like to support in concert?

JT: My dream would be to travel round France to Lebanon with the man that is Zach Condon - me with my accordion and Zach with his ukulele and magical voice. There would be nothing greater in my eyes. Dream what you want to dream, go where you want to go, be what you want to be; because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do. It will happen.

BL: That’s a nice note to end on. Shall we have another Absinthe?

JT: Absinthe it up!
 
 
Bark Cat Bark is currently down and out in Paris and Yorkshire. He likes Rosé, anything by Zach Condon and playing with Mariopaint Composer. Order his latest album here while you still can.