I often think about how my life could have gone down a different road had I realised my inner talents. It could have been more lucrative, too. What if I had set myself up as a nutritionist, for example? This requires no skills or qualifications. I could just ‘teach’ people to have better, more healthy lives on the basis of pure quackery. Then, I read about Prince Andrew’s mate Ghislaine Maxwell, who has made a decent living as a socialite. And then, tonight, I am drawn to a social network of someone who claims to be a transformational coach. This could be the way forward.
All I need to do to become a transformational coach is to call myself one. I don’t need any qualifications to set up business. I just need to come up with a few vacuous slogans that somehow sound deep and profound, charge customers £50 an hour and that’s me sorted. I can certainly be a nutritionist because all I need to do is cut and paste a diet sheet from the internet and suggest some exercises and it’s job done. Again, no qualifications required. I can call myself a nutritionist because anyone can. The job that requires qualifications is a dietician. So I’m buggered on that one. Best of all, is the socialite. Ms Maxwell, daughter of Mirror pensions thief and all round fraud. She’s a socialite. What does that entail?
Well, the Oxford dictionary describes a socialite as “a person who goes to a lot of fashionable parties and is often written about in the newspapers, etc.” Now, that does not sound like the most arduous job in town. Go to posh parties and get written about in the newspapers. I’m not sure I particularly fancy the newspapers bit, nor the posh parties either, but it’s a job, I suppose, and quote a lucrative one if you have to live on circa £80k per annum left to her by her crooked father Robert Maxwell who allegedly drowned off a yacht in Tenerife. I can think of better things to do in Tenerife, but not many.
Anyway, these lovely non jobs, eh? I suppose the nutritionist can find a gig at any level in society. You don’t need to be rich to persuade credulous people to part with their cash, witness the success of people who trade off the imaginary spirit world which doesn’t exist. Doris Stokes, Derek Acorah; little more than common thieves in persuading the sad and gullible to part with their money. And a ‘transformational coach’, the kind of subject you might expect to get a degree from at a less than stellar university, but it turns out there’s not even an NVQ, just a made up qualification that means literally nothing at all.
All these non jobs have the eggy whiff of scamming about them. You can set up a business calling yourself pretty well anything you like – from tomorrow I am becoming an international motivational speaker, even though I am no more qualified to become one than, well, an international motivational speaker and tomorrow night I am launching my real career as a socialite. No more will I be visiting the little pubs of Bristol. I shall be getting away from the riff-raff, the hoi polloi, and I’ll be the friend of the stars, you know, by partying.
With the economy deep in the shit, I expect we have millions of nutritionists, transformational coaches and socialites being furloughed at the taxpayers’ expense, not to mention aromatherapists, homeopaths and psychic mediums, the latter group will no doubt have learned greater skills in lockdown by carrying out cold reading by Zoom. And fair play to them, as well. Cold reading, as demonstrated by real experts such as Derren Brown and Tom Binns, who freely admit they have no psychic skills, takes some knowledge, along with a proper brass neck, when you have a live audience.
Non jobs are the future, I reckon. Why bother to do something useful when I can otherwise go to shedloads of parties, pretend to people I can make them healthier or transform people’s lives with skills I don’t possess? Judging from social networks, I could make a lot of money doing this. But more fool me, eh, for being a little more honest?
