Risky business

The road of kings, and the kings of the road

All business is risky. However, the business portrayed in the Tom Cruise film of the name was less risky than risqué, since sex has pretty much always been a dead cert. It has been, and will be, here for ever. I think that, besides AI providing certain ancillary accessories, its chances of supplanting sex is slim: sex is here to stay. But not everything is.

I think it’s fair to say that, had he written only The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare would today be as well known and celebrated as his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. That is to say, not that much. And Kit Marlowe was a much more interesting figure, acting as he did as a double agent and earning an assassination for his troubles. Except he didn’t write 38 plays.

In many ways, The Winter’s Tale is based on a concept far beyond its time. It is two plays, split neatly either side of the intermission. In the first half, we have royal infidelities, jealousies and recriminations, intrigues and death, abandoned children and a bear pursuing some guy off stage. Just before the half-way mark, two shepherds chance in on the scene, only to discover the abandoned child and, within seconds, the mood has changed from the most serious of dramas to brilliant, ribald comedy, with dialogue that people don’t laugh at these days because it’s Shakespeare, but because it’s genuinely funny.

In the second half, the lost child, for which the adoptive parents can find no better name than Perdita (the lost one), has grown 16 years and is looking for a mate. The final scene features a statue made by the, now, remorseful king of the queen he executed for infidelity, which, in the nick of time to save his soul, miraculously comes to life. All in a day’s work, eh? No wonder they call it a problem play.

Whereas some suspicious spouses set private detectives to spy on their other halves, crack mobile phone codes and track their misdeeds online, Leontes, the jealous spouse of the piece, pursues his wife by seeking intelligence from no lesser a source than the Oracle: the king sends two emissaries off down the road to Delphi to quiz the vapour-infused lady of the smoke.

She crops up hither and thither in Greek storytelling and, at one time, was consulted by Pelias, who, of course, wanted to know how he would die (who doesn’t, if we’re honest?), and was told by the soothsayer that he’d be done away with by him with one sandal. Cue Jason, absent a sandal, which has washed off his foot while crossing a river, whom Pelias sends off to find the golden fleece. That close shave with destiny nets Jason a fine epic tale with his Argonauts and the goddess Hera, protector (to come full circle) of women in childbirth.

I doubt whether the Oracle of Delphi could ever really be counted on to render truly reliable predictions. The best theory that I can come up with is, in a way, allied to the idea that you will always hear the truth from drunks and children: in their stupor (and, for children, their innocence), a pathway of realisation is opened up that by-passes all worldly tact, diplomacy and untruth: the hallucinations are an alternative reality that is untouched by human mendacity. The vapours that acted upon the Oracle were akin to the atmosphere of an erstwhile opium den.

Perhaps slightly greater reliance can be placed in the faith engendered in the human spirit when its owner subscribes to an insurance policy. There is genuine comfort in knowing that, in exchange for the premiums remitted to the insurer, the insured can rest easy, sleep tight and be confident that, should the worst befall them, their compensation is as sure as the Bank of England. The fact that health insurers in some countries routinely deny perfectly valid claims does admittedly tend to weaken that confidence somewhat, as does one of the initial scenes of the Hollywood movie Erin Brockovich, when the eponymous heroine is told by her insurance agent in response to her enquiry “What is insurance even for?” that, “Why, it’s for your peace of mind.” Nevertheless, insurance is also a sort of prediction of the future, except that, unlike King Leontes, insurance companies prefer just to deny what transpires rather than admit they got it wrong. But not always.

One of the clients of the law firm that I worked for in Glasgow in the 1980s was the Eagle Star Insurance Company. In the 1970s, world-famous Clydebank shipbuilder John Brown and Company was suffering after the industry’s migration to the Far East once the boom to replace the merchant tonnage sunk in the war had receded. Down in Cheltenham, at the insurer’s headquarters, an assiduous young accountant noticed an anomaly in one of their accounts: John Brown and Company was due and resting owing to the Eagle Star Insurance Company in the princely sum of one shilling, or five pence. A demand was duly remitted to Clydebank, and instantly paid. As the 1970s had progressed, however, the scope and seriousness of asbestos as a human health hazard had gradually come into prominence. Asbestos was widely used in shipbuilding for lagging boilers, and, but for that one shilling of premium, Eagle Star could perfectly legally have declined cover to John Brown’s. Instead, by demanding it, the insurer incurred a liability that would eventually run into millions of pounds, all for a shilling’s worth of premium. Karma.

The Oracle of Delphi was in her time the only way to foresee what the future held. The ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians entered into bargains with the gods, assuring them of material reward, if only they would succour to the mortal’s material wants. They sacrificed animals at the altars of temples in gratitude for a turn of the Wheel of Fortune. However, sometimes it needs a push.

Image: lorries pushing around the Road to Hell, as Chris Rea dubbed it: London’s M25 motorway.

“Be a trucker.” Thus the advice of a friend of mine. The future of intangible skills is questionable to non-existent. What the world needs now is love, sweet love, and, as I said above, AI cannot supply that. What the world also needs are more of the skills that AI can’t do. And Europe is screaming out for truckers, or what the US sometimes calls teamsters. It’s a lonely, responsible, sometimes dangerous craft, for which many ordinary motorists have scant respect, until the supermarket shelves run empty, that is: Europe needs them and I’m being encouraged at age 63 to retrain in order to be a trucker. In the words of John Bunyan (almost): He who would valiant be, let him come hither, one here will constant be, come wind, come weather. There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a trucker.

I hold a law degree, several in fact, and I am admitted by the Belgian State as a translator from and into English, French, Dutch and German, all directions. But the state that has authorised me to do that work has, in three years, not been able to send me a demand for the fee that will make my enrolment in the new register (since 2019) definitive, on the ground, so they say, that they cannot get a meeting organised that includes one of their members in order to formalise the admissions. It is a problem that affects about 75 per cent of the state’s translators, who are still, exactly five years later, on the provisional roll.

My law qualifications are so old that I would need to entirely requalify to practise the law, and I don’t see the profit of returning to university for two years at my own expense at the age of 63, to then only have two years of practice ahead of me. The statutory retirement age for me is no longer the 65 I was told when I embarked on my working life, but 67, so that there are four years of useful working life between now and the day I can draw my state pension. As things currently stand, drawing my pension would be a great jump up in my monthly income, and it will be warmly welcomed, when the day comes.

When I was at school (and some of those I was there with do read these columns), I was told that I would have at least three careers. It is not something that was told to previous generations at that school. My brother, for instance, who is but seven years older than I am, opted for a career in dentistry, and a few years back he retired from that career. People get two sets of teeth, but he had one career, his entire life long. One of his contemporaries went into the traditional career path of the military. Baron Houghton of Richmond has now retired as well, after he achieved the highest army position in the UK. He too had one career. Others entered the clergy, and others entered the world of mercantile banking, scientific research, medicine, all the traditional middle- and upper-class professions.

Boeing machinists in Seattle, Washington, are also illustrative of this idea at work. The recent pay settlement between them and their company was arrived at by the union accepting the management offer by 59 per cent to 41 per cent. The 59 were those who had joined the company after the McDonnell Douglas merger in 1997, since when the company’s fortunes, in the grip of a profit-above-all management style, had steadily declined and its current, multifarious quality problems had started to emerge. The 41 per cent were the older workers, who had known a spirit of loyalty that, on the whole, despite occasional ructions (a total of five strikes in the eight decades from the company’s foundation in 1916 up until the merger), cut both ways, from machine floor to board room and back again. That loyalty had been washed down the toilet by the post-merger management (with CEO James McNerney telling the press that he would stay in his job as long as his heart was beating and the workforce were cowed). The current CEO, Kelly Ortberg, who hails from neither McDonnell Douglas nor, like Mr McNerney, the General Electric Company, will have his work cut out to secure the airliner-manufacturer’s future, which, as yet, is far from secure. The pre-1997 workforce banked on a mantra that, upon entering the company from school or college, they would be part of a family for life; the new generation, on the other hand, need to have second jobs to provide baseball coaching to their children. In the union vote, the 59 per cent were those who needed to get back to work for their kids; the 41 per cent were the old guard, who felt they could have got more out of the board room, like their defined-benefit pensions. It wasn’t to be. Defined benefits are a thing of the past; my father’s past.

Some of my fellow school-leavers back in 1980 will have ventured into self-employment, as did I. And that now poses a problem, for me at least. Because self-employment itself is a far riskier business that even building aeroplanes. When all goes well in a self-employment situation, then the advantages are considerable: by withdrawing from the business only the funds that are strictly necessary for routine living expenses, the excess profit gets stored in the company and can be paid out as dividends at a reduced tax rate, or converted into future pension promises, or expended as business expenditure. There is no especial, humanities-based logic behind why one who incorporates should be endowed with such fiscal opportunities, whereas one who is employed should not. Nevertheless, as you will see, there is a trade-off: when the dole starts to loom.

The truth of the matter is that business expenditure is any expenditure that you say is business expenditure, until such time as the tax man comes along, does an audit and tells you, “Oh no it isn’t.” And, because tax men tend to audit big fish rather than little fish, the little fish have a fair amount of de facto latitude in which to expend accumulated income on matters that in fact are personal to the business’s owner. It’s called a fiddle. And even the big fish get to play fiddle when neoliberal governments pare back the Revenue’s enforcement teams until they can barely catch their breath with all the run-around they get.

But what goes up can also come down, and nothing comes down with quite such a crash as something that is dependent on a skill that AI has now learned to equal if not better. Twenty-or-so years ago, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the vagaries of the Belgian speech-recognition technology company Lernout & Hauspie, the future of translation as an industry seemed strong. Colleges like Marie Haps continue to churn out graduates in languages, but the emphasis these days is on viva voce interpreting and sign-language, rather than written translation, which any old AI can now do to the standard exacted by the average customer. Which tends to be not that high. People on my street who run a tent-rental business recently put out publicity that they had translated into English using Google Translate. It contained some howlers, and I told them, along with the fact that, for five euros, they could have had the text translated by me, three houses and a click of a mouse away. They are unrepentant, and they are now typical.

When I set my business up, the law of the land required me to invest 18,000 euros (they were francs in those days). Without that investment, I could not establish my own business. Now, after the statutory changes that came in in 2019, I can set up a business with … two euros. I will not comment on what kind of guarantee that offers to the business’s creditors or on how much easier it would have been to have set my company up in 2019, as opposed to 1999 (even if doing so would have been pointless, so it transpires). Laws are laws, and laws change with the times. The problem in my case is not setting the company up, anyway; it is winding it down.

For all the state was very exacting in the requirements it demanded in order for me, after twenty years of being a sworn translator, to continue in that position and prove my qualifications (which had all been proved previously), it has not entrusted to me a single sworn translation for the state since I went through the requested procedure. Not one, not a single one. Instead, what the state does is farm its requirements out to large translation offices, which then cherry pick their favourite translators, who naturally work for the cheapest rates, to actually do the state’s work. Many get the work done by AI, and have the real translator simply rubber stamp what the machine churns out. I hesitate to accuse the Belgian State of fraud, but there is a deception in there somewhere.

So, what happens when a one-man business starts to fail? Well, the first thing that happens is that hope is engendered. Things cannot be all that bad. Surely, this is just a temporary lapse, and things will soon pick up. Never say die. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Once more unto … maybe not that. Who knows, though? Maybe even the state might ask me to translate something again, like they did when they were trying to extradite General Pinochet, or catch the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, or even when they were pursuing the terrorists who blew up Brussels Airport and one of its metro stations in 2016. You know: those occasions on which my services were indispensable (even if reading the witness statements was pretty harrowing at the time).

One falls back on one’s savings, in order to pad out the income that has reduced in quantity owing to the fall-off in business. But after a while the savings, too, are at a low ebb. Gradually, one starts to eliminate items of expenditure, such as luxury foodstuffs, pubs and alcohol, television, magazine subscriptions, the second car, trips to theatres and cinemas, parties, lights and immersion heaters, involvement in amateur dramatics, Christmas presents, attendance at nephews’ weddings and newborns’ baptisms. Clip, clip, clip, the general fun aspects of life get snipped back until there is little left. Until a warm shower once a week becomes an item of untold exuberant luxury, and a walk in the park with a friend becomes an excursion worthy of a picture postcard and a whoop of joy.

The expenses that remain tend to comprise the expenses of running the company that is making no money: accountants’ charges and VAT due on the little work that still trickles in. The annual rates on the house, and the costs of running the car. Gradually, we cancel all the insurance, which generally doesn’t pay out even if you have a claim—my last three claims have all been refused because they weren’t high enough, although they were high enough to make a serious dent in my available funds. Then one starts to divert the small amounts of income coming into the company towards one’s essential outgoings—the current account between the company and its owner grows.

That account can be cleared by declaring it as paid earnings to the director, but one needs to have enough free disposable income to pay the tax charge on it. If one cannot do that, then one must keep the current account running, but interest is accruing on it and its situation is getting no better. In short, I don’t have enough money to liquidate my company. Sounds daft? It is daft. It is the ravine, the gulf, the chasm that separates the indigent who are bereft of employed work and the indigent bereft of self-employment. And it is great chasm, for it proffers little in the way of social protections to the self-employed.

If I declared the company bankrupt, the administrator would come after me for the entire current account. I cannot sue for voluntary liquidation without first having cleared the current account. But the improved situation that was banked on when the current account was growing still fails to materialise. Meanwhile, every quarter, 900 euros are due as social security, whether I earn a penny or not. It’s to secure my social position. It will magically transform into my pension. In four years’ time, when I can use it to start repaying that current account. More whoops of joy.

When they said at school that I would have three careers, what they omitted to say was that the longevity of each career must be guaranteed (perchance by the Oracle of Delphi) up to an age when it is feasible for me to switch to the next one. And each of these careers would best not be in self-employment, because when the self-employment you have chosen ceases to exist as an industry at all, the point at which retraining requires to be undertaken can in fact transpire to be a point of no return.

I have tried not to make this into a rant, or a complaint, or a dig, or a tale of woe. It isn’t any of those things. It’s a story, and it’s my story. And it’s the story of many people. If you felt like helping me, you could, by taking out a paid subscription. If you don’t feel like it, that’s okay as well.

I have a clean licence, and I know how to reverse a vehicle with a trailer. So maybe I could get a grant and retrain as an HGV driver. Yesterday, a friend engaged me to pick orders for their online store, and that’ll help me survive November. But the call of the open road is great.

After all, I always fancied myself as a rubber duck …