Life experience

The Proms are back, hoorah, and along with them the nightly treat on Radio 3 of interval talks: those 20-minute sessions of directed chat, either through an interview or often just one person speaking about an idea, a memory, a transformative experience. It’s the perfect radio format: long enough to have some real content but not too long to permit the invasion of those distracting thoughts that swirl around like angry bluebottles, waiting for the right moment to settle and take over your mind.

On TV such few precious minutes would be gone in a flish-flash of camera angles and tricksy music; on radio you can be taken right inside a person’s head. This year in a weekly slot, My Summer Job, five writers have been talking straight to mike about their experiences of working in the kind of temporary jobs that promise no rewards or star-making potential.

If, perchance, David Willetts is a Radio 3 fan and has heard them, he might perhaps be persuaded to rethink his desperate suggestion (as the Minister for Universities and Skills) that graduates without the prospect of finding a job worthy of their qualifications should set up their own businesses. Such an idea would have seemed laughable to us back in the not-so-distant (ha ha) Seventies. Not for us the now-ubiquitous ‘gap year’, but the chance to pick up a bit of life — and more usefully — work ‘experience’ here at home.

Such jobs were often very ‘menial’, or rather manual. The increasing popularity of vegetarianism in the Seventies could be said to have occurred because so many of us spent our summers stuffing sausages and plucking chickens to pay our way across Europe from Folkestone to Istanbul. It was in these years I first learnt how to handle a floor polisher without cutting off a patient from the life-saving drip beside their bed (not a skill I’ve had much use for since).