The youth of today…

Well, let’s face it, they’re fucked. If AI doesn’t get them, they’ve suffered covid and are all addicted to ‘devices’. Most are more ‘hardware’ than human. But apparently the problem is because they don’t take ‘Saturday jobs’. So they get no experience of the discipline and basic interactional skills which work entails and engenders. Otherwise you get sacked.

My brother got himself a Saturday job when he was about 14. He went into a local electrical repair shop to buy components to build a nuclear launch facility or a new amplifier or something no-one else had a clue about, and they offered him a job there and then, which he took. And loved it. Because he could spend all day Saturday being much cleverer than everyone else and getting paid for it.

So I wanted a job. Even though I had no skills off the football pitch. But at 14 my dad’s mate, a bespoke tailor, needed a ‘gofer’ on Saturdays, at his shop in Soho. This was 1970. Soho didn’t look like it does today, all poncey and corporate and filled with generic stores. Back then there were no ‘multiples’ in Soho. There were fantastic music shops, clothes shops, Carnaby Street was for shopping, not the horrible ‘tourist attraction’ it has evolved into. And there was sex. Sleazy ‘sex shops’ selling all manner of deviant stuff. Above half the stores were brothels. Hookers were everywhere, along with other valuable society members like pimps and drug dealers. It was something of an ‘eye opener’ for me. As I walked around picking up cloth and buttons and tailory stuff, as that was another big thing in Soho. I had my first ever cappuccino, as the Italian cafes there were the only places where such things existed.

But I’d have to meet Paul, da boss, very early on Saturday, to whizz up to the West End in his Lotus (loved that), so after a year or so I quit. And moved more locally. To a clothes store in Ilford High Street (I avoided ‘upmarket’ wherever possible, on principle) called Mr Byrite. They had about 30 stores in and around London. Owned by ‘the Levy brothers’, one of whom was the daddy of Daniel Levy, the recently retired chairman of Spurs.

Mr Byrite sold shit. Cheap shit. You bought a shirt, wore it that night to go out, then threw it away. Washing their clothing was never really recommended. But no-one minded, they just bought another one next week. It was so busy, in addition to the full-time staff, there were at least 10 Saturday-boys. Standing around, smoking, (we all smoked, it was a job requirement), messing around, looking for any stray girls who were brave enough to enter what was probably a rather forbidding environment. But selling shit-loads of clothes. Every week we all put in a few bob (small amount of money, ffs) to buy any new albums that appealed. No rubbish. No ‘pop’. Just great music. Played all day at volume 11. Whilst we smoked, lolled around, attacked girls and sold a truck load of crappy clothing. A win-win.

Because this was a very ‘cash purchase’ time, and the eastern parts of our fair City have always favoured bundles of the stuff passed down alleyways to avoid the prying eyes of HMRC, at the end of a Saturday we’d have thousands of pounds in cash. Which we took the bank in a little leather pouch-thing and deposited into the ‘night safe’, attached to the bank’s wall. Obviously, with gangsters and robbers and armed thieves all over the High Street, you have two options. Bury the pouch in a bag and take it discreetly to the bank with all due nonchalance. Or get a gang of 12 and march down to the bank singing, screaming and pushing innocent bystanders out of the way (especially old and infirm ones), normally whilst carrying large blunt instruments. Due to a lack of subtlety in my youth, we opted for the second.

So go now; get a Saturday job. You could become a proper thug.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

PS. If I drop Donald Trump a fifty, do you think he’d come for Kier Starmer, like he did Maduro?