“Ted, come and look at the monkeys!”, I yell for the third time, unconvincingly. My five year old son remains unmoved, his attention transfixed by a Lego model of a snow leopard. “This one’s from Asia”, I half-heartedly add as he boggles at the plastic model of an animal whose flesh-and-blood inspiration is currently situated in an enclosure less than fifty metres away from where we’re standing. I sigh and put the paper map of the zoo back in my pocket. This is going to be a long half-term.

As previously documented, I’m currently between jobs. School is closed all week, and therefore it falls to me to provide this week’s entertainment for my high-energy son. I began with earnest plans of BBC-esque public service: educate, inform, entertain. But now it’s midway through day two and I’m happy to just shovel flapjacks into my kid’s face until my partner finishes work at 5pm.

I thought the zoo would be sure-fire: we took him here once when he was three and didn’t make it past the soft play area at the entrance. Now he’s nearly six, I reasoned, we’d be able to explore the various flora and fauna of Twycross Zoo together, marvelling at the incredible gifts bestowed upon us by Mother Nature. Instead, I’m trying to persuade a child to come and look at a tired flamingo because I’ve paid £37 each for the privilege of being here.

It all starts out so promising and precise.

Clean, straight lines of green frog tape demarcate the areas to shield from the paint. A bucket of sugar soap solution sits primed and ready to wash the walls clean. Neatly arranged dust sheets are in place to protect the carpet from unexpected blobs of emulsion. Your rollers and brushes lie clean and pristine in their trays, ready to, well, roll.

I’m painting a room, and it’s starting off well.

I’m sitting in an unfamiliar car with my foot glued to the brake pedal, dashboard beeping angrily at me as cars whiz past. I try—for the third time—to put the vehicle into reverse, moving the gearstick to the clearly-indicated “R” position. I gingerly take my foot off the brake again, and the car inches forward, even closer to the parked vehicle in front. I swear in frustration.

You join me as I collect a courtesy car while mine is being repaired (many thanks to my friend of last year who reversed his van into it while it was parked). The hire place took so long to supply me with the keys to the car, and all of the communication from the disinterested young employee has been so vague, unclear and rushed, that I dismissed him with an “I’ll figure it out” as he tried to explain how the automatic handbrake worked. I am now somewhat regretting my choices.

My own car is a decade old, and it’s cheerfully basic. I’ve barely driven another vehicle since learning to drive in 2019, and I’ve just been handed the keys to a brand-new car with less than 5000 miles on the clock. In fact, even the keys are alien and new: there’s no ignition and the key fob sits in my pocket. Why am I still inserting my key into a lock like some kind of peasant?

The room smells like microwaved hotdogs and sweat. Six computer tower units wobble precariously on someone’s mum’s dinner table, fans blasting hot air into the already-thick atmosphere. Cans of knockoff Red Bull litter the table and someone is crouched on their knees trying to find the other end of a patch cable. Welcome to a computer game meetup in the early 2000s.

Kids of today missed out on so many formative experiences from that era. Some they were lucky to dodge: dial-up internet, memes about President Bush, MiniDisc players and the music of Limp Bizkit. But in other areas, I pity the children of Gen Z, because they never got to experience things like CDRW mixtapes, the early internet before its enshittification, attending school before everyone had phones and cameras, and, of course, LAN parties.

For the uninitiated (or youthful): a LAN party was one of the only feasible ways to play PC games with friends before online multiplayer for games consoles was as ubiquitous as it is today. You’d bring your computer (and enormous CRT monitor, and keyboard, and mouse) to someone’s house—probably a friends’s parents’, given this was a mostly-adolescent pursuit—and play games together.

I’ve spent a lot of time in limbo these past few weeks.

I remember learning at university about the concept of “liminality”, which (Wikipedia helpfully tells us) is about:

the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.

In other words: I’m interviewing for a new job while currently unemployed.