Cyber ain't rosy.

I can't believe they're doubling down on this. Come on, Fatima, give up this silly hobby you've been training for since you were four and come and sit in this partitioned cubicle. You can put up pictures of ballerinas if you like to remind you of your hobby. Maybe a Degas postcard but not recent ones because the artists are all in the call centre too, doing vital work for the government on Excel spreadsheets we can't lay our hands on at the moment.

I worked in Call Centres or in offices, for fifteen years. Not very well, I was pretty bad at it. Other people weren't and bailed me out time after time, for which I am very grateful. I shouldn't have been doing the job - at one point I was on a technical help-desk - which, as I struggle to find an "on" switch on a computer, was hilarious - unless I was attempting to help you. The tragic thing was that I tried. I really tried. But I was useless at it. I went to bed each night feeling utterly ridiculous - clapped out and superannuated at thirty.

You can see why the government would like you train to be "Cyber First" - their own guys are terrible! How many millions have they spunked into track and trace? How many glitches? Maybe they just need someone who can work an overhead projector with a clear, bullet-pointed list of what the guidance is.

Or do they need artists and writers to make sense of the impenetrable sump-hole they've concocted. People who can give it size and drama, who can tie up loose narrative threads, and lend colour to the cast of drab sociopaths who have peopled this crisis like pale sweetcorn in rich, velvety shit. Something behind the eyes for Matt Hancock perhaps, or a barely glowing ember of humanity for Priti Patel. It doesn't have to be GOOD art: can't we see Boris Johnson punching a mirror and screaming "Who am I?" into a mosaic of tiny, glittering Boris Johnsons with their sad mouths open?

On a practical level: who is going to rethink me and reboot me? Am I doing it myself? Am I paying for it? Are there courses? Is the government asking a middle-aged man with no skills (hello) to reinvent himself as a computer programmer in the middle of a pandemic, before the unknown quantity of Brexit, with unemployment spiralling and just before a second lock-down on the cusp Winter? Is this what they thought would be a good use of public money? Getting a sixty year old tuba player to get into graphic design? Well of course not. This is for young people. This is designed to steer them away from the self indulgent frippery of art and into a useful life in "Cyber", whatever that is. This is national service you can do sitting down.

People my age, people who call themselves "artists", people who aren't rich from their practice but who get by, project by project, doing "proper" jobs in between - the vast majority of people in and associated with the arts then, they can fuck off. The government doesn't know what you're for. They have never seen your work and would rather you weren't there. Could you move along please - Dominic Cummings is test driving a 17 year old eugenicist. Actually, if you wouldn't mind volunteering that would be just great...

*I've done a tiny amount of research and have discovered that this is part of scheme the government did last year that features all sorts of people from a wide variety of jobs getting jobs in "cyber". So always do your research. That said, the fact that I took this at face value as it chimes so closely with the government's current attitude toward the arts suggests it expresses the zeitgeist far better now than it did then. So I'm re-purposing it as art.