The squeeze

OK. This post isn't going to be fun.

I am lucky. I have a job doing something I love in a beautiful and endlessly interesting place, but I am awake at 5am because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of work that lies ahead of me. Like I say, I am lucky because I have a job, but the 5am thing is as much a product of recession as the anguished and increasingly flat entries of my former fellow students on Facebook, as they fill in the umpteenth application form and wonder whether they will even get a reply, never mind an interview.

I have to do the work of two people over the next few months because we need to get things moving to secure a future, but income from investments is so low that money for staff barely scrapes above my salary, which is roughly 30% below the level I could expect for my qualifications and experience. My stress is matched by colleagues in other museums who are, some of them, down by half in their staffing but still have to achieve the same outputs.

(If you start to go down the road of thinking museums/heritage centres as expendable luxuries, then stop right now. You tell that to the the hundreds of thousands of people whose family income relies on servicing the tourism industry, and they will have you for dinner. Heritage and culture is the single biggest draw to Scotland: 49% of visitors come for it, as opposed to 3% for golf. Not a luxury: a core product; part of the economic machine. So lets get that out of the way).

I don't think museums are being hit harder than anybody else, it is just the area I know. Nobody from my course last year has managed to launch into the world of work properly. One four month job, three internships, one PhD. By this stage last year two thirds of the newly qualified curators were placed. The rash of graduates from under-grad courses is now spilling into the workplace, where they will be lucky to hold onto the cafe and bar jobs after the season, never mind finding career starts. I was lucky to be able to return to mine.

There has been much in the news about A level results this week: crazy stuff about 92% pass rate, 2 % up on the top grades, but shortages of university places. Also the telling aside that one teacher gave her A* pupils an English exam paper from 20 years ago and they all failed it. It is clearly arse-over-tit, the whole thing, but do you blame school leavers for wanting to go to university or college? It is the right thing to do to try to improve your CV, and the sensible thing to do to remove yourself from the horrendous non-jobs market and indulge in the opiate of student life. The student loan debt is, of course, a huge issue, but as my son said recently, you should just not worry about it, as no-one is getting jobs which pay enough to kick-start repayments. While I don't feel sorry for them at all, will the banks ever get it back? At what point will they and the government say hang on, student loans are too high a risk?

So you ignore your student debt, pick up your degree and do what David Cameron wants everyone to do, which is volunteer. That sounds so public spirited and nice, and anyone who says "why should I work for nothing" is branded a heel. But that is the reality of what he is saying. Apart from the fact that volunteering has already been at capacity for years, people need to eat, and sooner or later the volunteers are going to have to sign on, and so the money flows out in social security and the fiscal deficit suffers still more.

It feels like the country is closing in on itself. The only people I don't see suffering are people I don't like; ruthless opportunists, bad employers, "I'm-all-right-jack"s. The good guys are struggling across the board.
I can't remember it ever being this close to the wire.

So no, I can't sleep. Because we have to collectively do something. It is not Cameron-style volunteering, it is deeper than that. It is a fundamental shift in the way we live and interconnect as communities and individuals. When I think I have a clue to what it is we need to do I will tell you. And if you have a clue, please tell me.

And now I have to go. It is dawn, and in three hours I will be arranging a lobster pot, netting needles and some very itchy-looking fishermens long johns in the heritage tent at the Oban Games. Like I say, I am lucky.