I moved to Edinburgh in 2018 and since then have worked in various Scottish cultural institutions as a low-paid customer service worker to support myself, my art and my cat Ludwig.
My art has often been criticised for being too gross, too bodily, but I am only recounting what I have seen and cleaned up in the service industry. It is often people who have never had to work such jobs who take the most offence when they encounter the body and its natural discharges in literature. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writer. Chaucer and James Joyce were indecorous and scatological as hell.
I have checked bathrooms to find large puddles of fresh semen on the floor, narrow-necked ginger beer bottles artfully filled with piss; I have seen a dizzying array of faecal matter and blood. I have had my entire front covered in a stranger’s vomit and then been expected to change and get on with my shift. There is a whole unseen world of chaos only visible to the lowest-paid in society, a community whose health is endangered to make spaces such as art galleries, concert halls, cinemas, libraries and bookshops pristine and delicious for the public. The places where you access culture are kept clean by a roster of workers, yet these people are rarely included in notions of cultural labour.
One of my most recent jobs was at Summerhall, an old university building turned into an arts and events centre. It was home to the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies until 2010, and then transformed by someone with a big trust fund and grand ideas. There are still glass tubes, wooden Victorian desks, jars of preserved mouse parts, an incinerator with bones inside, as if all the veterinarians had to flee in a hurry. An older person at a party told me that years ago, the proprietors of an Edinburgh brothel used to bring their pet chimpanzee to the vet school for medical check-ups.
Sometimes former vet students would rent Summerhall for nostalgic parties and get so drunk they peed in vases and potted plants. We hosted weddings, funerals, concerts, festivals, children’s birthday parties, art exhibitions – a more interesting wedge of the Edinburgh Fringe. As an employee you did a bit of everything. There were endless rooms. I heard rumours of an entire floor of romance paperbacks in boxes. There were locked archives of experimental Polish theatre posters, a room of aeoniums nursed by the resident gardener, an enormous dollhouse, plastic chunks of educational organs like deformed Lego, mannequins in unnerving places, tin soldiers, stilettos, yellowed textbooks of arcane medical procedures involving pigs.
I loved the old anatomical rooms, with circular theatre seats meant for small Edwardian bottoms and sinister hooks on the ceiling meant for suspending large and perhaps exotic animals.
The biggest was the Dissection Room where frozen greyhounds were once dismembered like long, grey popsicles and dead lambs were ‘birthed’ from fake uteruses. There was a hallway speckled with photographs of the artist Joseph Beuys on a visit to Edinburgh and in one of them he is eating a wholesome German breakfast of yogurt and black bread studded with sunflower seeds.
I longed for his breakfast when a staff member at Summerhall made dozens of yellow margarine and cheese sandwiches to sell at a music festival we were hosting. Naturally, hardly anyone bought them as they tasted like candles, and for what seemed like a month the staff ate them for our free lunches. I was turned off sandwiches for quite a while.
I have celebrated my own book launch at Summerhall, and also worked there as a server for book launches where guests would disdainfully ‘shoo shoo’ me away with my tray whenever I offered them more hors d’oeuvres. It can be like skipping from one reality to another, as if the attendees have changed masks, from friendly to ghoulish. Over time cleaning, serving and ushering in cultural spaces revealed the true faces of those I interacted with professionally as a writer. I learned who was rotten and who was rude, as it is often those types, even if you have met them before, who won’t recognise you once you are wearing a staff shirt. Whether or not I am a writer doesn’t matter: how someone treats staff is the real mark of their character. I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.
Some events and festivals were worse than others and the one most of us dreaded at Summerhall was an annual poetry festival. One summer I was ushering the door for a small reading space with a no latecomers policy. Someone showed up late, coffee in hand, and when I wouldn’t let them in, they screamed and told me that I did not understand how literary events worked. I had to be firm and polite, while secretly imagining them hanging from one of the anatomical hooks, their entrails inspected by bespectacled and unsentimental veterinarians.
Working in the on-site cafe during this festival was frightful; it was filled with demanding, older male poets, like slugs in wool and polar fleece, trailed by their younger girlfriends. I am sorry to say, but poets are the least well-behaved of all writers. The wit, intelligence and humour of my fellow staff members, especially in the face of such rudeness, is something such poets can only dream of.
Image © Europeana
