‘SO, what do you DO?’ What do I do? It’s a good question isn’t it? A perennial favourite at the dinner party. Find your pigeon hole, slot you in.

I used to quite like to say I was a barrister. It sounds properly cool and glam. Of course it isn’t, as anyone who’s ever been to court will tell you. There’s an awful lot of hanging about in stinking courts, the kind of places where the furniture is bolted to the floor. There’s also quite a bit of carrying massive piles of books around, and smoking. Oh, and heavy drinking. Basically, in this country they let anyone be a lawyer just as long as they can drink two bottles of claret, remain standing and still wing it successfully in the court room the next day without vomiting. (I was a natural.)

Right now I am a teacher. People have PLENTY to say about that, but we’ll leave that for another time.

I have had what could be described as an eclectic career, i.e. I do something for a few years, and then I get bored and I do something else. I have spent quite a bit of time over the years, thinking about work. And this is what I think: it’s a great big con. And we’ve all fallen for it. Well not all of us, clearly, but enough of us to keep capitalism going I guess.

When I was working for The Man, I was completely taken in by the whole work thing. How it was all terribly empowering, how we all MUST work, work, work and must earn money and buy stuff and that if we weren’t working then we were a burden and time spent not working was time wasted.

When I became a Stay at Home Mum <bleugh at acronym>, everyone said how terribly bored I was bound to be, how I wouldn’t have any adult conversation and I would be going mental within a fortnight.

That wasn’t quite true. This is what I found:

1. There are adults everywhere, not just at work, and you can start conversations with people even when they aren’t paid by the same employer as you. And when you don’t have to talk about books or meetings or contracts or sandwiches or whatever it is you’re paid to talk about, you can end up talking about all sorts of things. Flowers. Why people hate rats and love foxes. Theories of music education. The terrible price of petrol and, often, the weather. These conversations are, on average, no more or less dull than those that happen at work. They just happen in different places.
2. Loads of stuff needs doing that you don’t get paid for. You’d be amazed. In the years when no-one paid me anything at all, I have, among other things, walked dogs for old ladies with bad legs, showed new mothers how to wrap their babies up nice and tight to stop them crying, hoovered the gritty carpets of the newly bereaved, helped toddlers stick pasta onto bits of card, driven stinky old men to the hospital to get their dressings changed. I did a LOT of latching on. Changed a LOT of nappies. I have role-played Caesarian birth with teenage mothers, made endless cups of tea, baked cakes for stalls, stood in my black suit singing funeral anthems, and played many many games of ‘Pop to the Shops!’ and helped put stamps into albums. Was this work? Was this more or less important than sitting in those tedious meetings dropping Danish pastry crumbs down my suit and trying to concentrate on the agenda?
3. Although we place no value on all this stuff-to-be-done-and-not-paid-for, it needs doing. Capitalism has messed with our collective judgement so much that we have lost sight of that. So a child-minder is doing REAL work, but a stay-at-home-mum isn’t – she’s just a burden and a scrounger. (Unless, of course, you make the decision to go back to work, at which point you’re the evil unfeminine bitch who isn’t making the sacrifices she should. And don’t tell me that I am only talking about the women, and say what about the men? Yes, good question, what about the men? I mean, tell me about it. Where are they? They’re at work of course, eating sandwiches at their desk in peace and ‘missing the train home’ to avoid the domestic chaos waiting for them for just a little longer, and who can blame them.) What would happen if we all fell for this confidence trick and went back to paid work? Who would run the pre-schools, the drop-in centres, the mother and baby groups? If all the volunteers, the unpaid helpers and the stay at home parents in the country all went on strike for one day, then we would see that just because something isn’t paid doesn’t mean it has no value.