Please Release Me

I’ve had more jobs than Mr RE’s had hot dinners. I’ve been a call centre operative, a milk money collector, a record shop assistant, a nursing assistant, a primary school teacher and once I was even paid to write for a pilot comedy magazine but the worst of it was probably when I gave my services for free as a volunteer.

As I don’t travel, I chose well-known charities around the Bethnal/Shoreditch area. I worked for Release as a paper pusher, legal advisor and heroin helpline counsellor. Latterly, the calls dried up when the weather got hot, that was the good side, (it’s amazing how drug user’s woes evaporate as soon as they have a shot of vitamin D) not so good was when an ex-Mishcon de Reya superbitch waltzed in with the express purpose of whipping me into shape, the feet up on the desk world of sipping tea and putting the world to rights disappeared, (which I romantically imagine had up until this point been part of Release life since Caroline Coon set it up in ‘67), and as this old order departed, so then did I.

Soon afterwards I taught English to Bangladeshi women in the wonderful Toynbee Hall, chosen because my hero Tony Benn is a patron and I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that John Profumo spent most of his adult life atoning for his ’sins’ there. I’m not sure I was very good though, as I wasn’t a qualified teacher in those days and I was always a little disgruntled that they were lousy at paying my expenses.

So this has been my experience of putting something back into society, and I’m still looking for the best way to do this…

~ by Suzy Norman on 15/01/2008.