Working with children and cuddly animals

Giving up on your dreams gets a bad press these days. You never see anyone sharing a picture of a sunset on Facebook with the words “It’s probably not worth the hassle” embossed over it. I think we need to be more realistic though. Not everyone can live their dreams. If all my dreams came true I’d spend most of my time crawling around the floors of exam rooms looking for my teeth (not easy to do under exam conditions).

This is all a long-winded way of telling you that I’ve quit stand-up comedy. Of all the things I’ve ever quit this was definitely the easiest. There were no headaches, no insomnia, no guilty attempts to return a slightly dented saxaphone. I felt an immediate sense of calm. The sort of calm that only comes with the realisation that you probably never have to go to Plymouth again. (I performed in a lot of places but my brain refuses to acknowledge my stand-up career as anything but six uninterrupted years of Plymouth. Thanks to the city’s history, a lot of the streets and buildings are named Pilgrim, which allowed me to pretend that my regular performances at the Ski Lodge had somehow turned me into a local folk hero.) I always used to tell myself that people weren’t laughing because my material was too clever or too subtle, but eventually I had to accept that perhaps it just wasn’t funny.

The responses from my friends have generally been in the vein of “Won’t you miss making people laugh?”, “You need to have a creative outlet” and, in one case, “But you’re a born clown!”. The idea of a clown being born conjures up imagery too disturbing to describe in detail. If you’ve ever seen ten of them getting out of a tiny car you’ll know what I’m getting at.

In fact I haven’t missed making people laugh at all. I think it’s partly because my day job (I suppose I can just call it my “job” now) has become far more involving of late. I’ve taken on several new responsibilities at the Post Office, the most exciting of which is performing the biometric enrollments for the Home Office. In practice this means photographing new arrivals to the UK using a piece of machinery far too complicated for such a basic task, like a giant selfie-stick designed by Rube Goldberg. It all makes me feel incredibly important. It’s lucky that I’m not a comedian anymore because this is no place for jokes. Last week I was photographing a student and I asked him to close the curtains of the photo booth. He misunderstood and took off his jacket. I repeated my instruction to close the curtains and he began to obediently remove his t-shirt. This is too much power for one man.

Most of the people I photograph are adults but from time to time a baby comes in (usually with an adult rather than of their own accord). This presents a whole new set of challenges. I signed up to be a stamp salesman and now, two and a half years later, I am a government-sanctioned baby photographer. As a rule I’m not great at communicating with children so I try to channel the spirit of the man who took our school photos at primary school. He called me handsome when I was seven and I didn’t discover until I was 12 that he said it to everyone, at which point I had a minor existential crisis.

We have a range of extremely technical equipment for the baby photos. There’s a grey hairdresser’s cloak which the parent holding the baby has to put on in order to make themselves invisible in the picture. I’m not sure if the Home Office recommends this technique, or if they are baffled by the number of levitating babies apparently arriving on our shores. (This is actually more believable than some of the things the Daily Mail have printed about immigrants lately. Coming over here, defying our gravity.) I also have access to a cuddly monkey for use in emergencies, the idea being that a screaming infant will see a fully grown man waving a furry chimpanzee at them and realise that maybe their life isn’t so bad after all.

I recently had to photograph a baby girl who was crying with the sort of anguish usually only seen in medieval tapestries. Her invisible dad stood behind her, clearly on the verge of a similar tantrum himself. I resorted to taking dozens of photos in quick succession in the hope that maybe one would catch her between sobs, but it was no good. The resulting photos were useless for anything other than possibly producing a flipbook called “When Babies Get Sad”. I was out of ideas so I called one of my colleagues over to help me. “Use the monkey” she said, like a sensei in a karate film.

I picked it up and began to waggle it back and forth. The child stopped crying and her face took on a puzzled expression. I began to get into it. I made it dance. I did monkey noises. The corners of her mouth began to tremble and then her face broke into a broad smile accompanied by a gurgling laugh. I snapped the photo with a sense of relief. I felt euphoric. Maybe I missed making people laugh after all. Perhaps I was right when I said that my old material was too subtle. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to the Plymouth Ski Lodge with my cuddly monkey.