Psycho Commissioning Editor

I’m sat at a table in a café with a coffee in front of me that cost the same as a pint. As the whipped cream melts in the brown foam, I feel a tightness in my throat. My teeth ache and my jaw is tight. The black cherry flavoured syrup is too sweet, this chain-coffee shop too hot and the lights far too bright. I put on my coat and put my book away in my bag. It’s early evening and the place is fairly deserted. It’s dark outside so it’s hard to see the people walk past on the pavement. The large window reflects an image of me. I am a Commissioning Editor.

Publishing is recession proof, they insist. But it isn’t. The darkening mood across the country is tangible. In a way it mirrors my own mood. My hangovers are getting worse, I tire out more easily and I am finding it harder and harder to drink properly during a weeknight. At the weekend I ramble around on the internet and pad to the kitchen in my slippers, drinking wine and staring down the barrel of middle age.

I deal, supposedly, in intellectual content. I ponder the lack of thinking that’s gotten us to this point. The lack of engagement with this intellectual content. The greed of those who have walked away with huge fortunes while the markets crumble. Those sitting on pension funds and living in paid for houses in the country as companies go to the wall. As I put another monograph to bed and pass it over to production, the process seems tame, puny – an irrelevant act compared to billions being wiped off the value of companies. Pension schemes are going under, people are losing their jobs and business are collapsing. Was it an anti-intellectualism and irresponsible faith in free markets that got us here? The lack of regulation that gilded the late 90s for so many finally come home to roost.

I read an article recently about how the graduates of this generation are finding it impossible to get jobs. They’re being tagged ‘Generation Crunch’, but the gist of the article was that the collapse of the Milk Round was saving them from themselves. Saving themselves from highly-paid salarymen jobs of tedium and mediocrity. Saving them from gilded insulated lives lived in opposition to the talent that got them there. A generation of agile minds grown flaccid in a detached house in Kent or Surrey.

I sit on the fence; I’m not sure. It was hardly as if the rest of us turned down the prospect of cheap and easy credit. Taking on multiple credit cards and entering into a contracts on mortgages that were clearly over five times our annual salaries. There were stories of course of feckless people racking up forty grand on bar bills that they simply couldn’t pay back, awaiting bankruptcy like a mark of assurance.  But for the most part, didn’t we all quietly place our trust in the pyramid scheme that was the property boom, the low inflation, the relatively full rate of employment?

The coffee bar charges me pounds for a coffee that costs a few pence to make. It kicks hardly anything back to the people that grow this valued crop. But don’t so many industries do the same? In a pub somewhere in London, the four pound pint is here already – four pounds for 586ml of cheap, fizzy lager in a factory-pressed glass with tacky embossing on the side. But the crowds are still here, vertical drinking on a Friday night. People vote with their feet as well as with their ticks and crosses on ballot papers. Someone heads up the counter and orders a slice of cake for three pounds and a hot chocolate the size of a bowl of cereal. They are yelping into a Bluetooth handset as they wait at the barista counter. I put on my coat and head outside. The is world is neon and advertising and something and something –