I Hate Martin Amis et al. by Peter Barry Page A

job, you walked out and took another one down the road. Not like now, when you have to go on bended knee to get yourself the most menial of jobs. I started out as a teacher, went through teacher training and everything, but never took it up. One or two of us at the college dropped out, disgusted with the way the Conservatives, as with everything else, were forcing people out of the public sector and into the private one, running the system down, paying teachers less than they were worth, and allowing school facilities to rot. I became a janitor instead, because I didn’t want to work in a rotten system and be paid a pittance for what I considered to be a vocation rather than a career, and because I didn’t want my life’s work to go totally unappreciated. Anyway, it gave me time to write. That was my dream, to be a writer.
    The kids were different. Their dreams were almost too big to be contained by the walls and fences that ran around the playground. They were mega. You could interpret their dreams from the way the kids dressed. Even though many of them came from poor backgrounds, they were dressed in Nikes, Adidas or Reeboks. They had all the gear their heroes wore. Around the basketball hoop I saw miniature Charles Barkleys, Scottie Pippens and Shaquille O’Neals. They even imitated the stars’ movements: the swagger across the court, the cool, unsmiling look, and the high fives every time they scored. It was uncanny. That’s what most of them wanted to do: they didn’t have time for this studying lark, they were in too much of a hurry to get across to the US of A and play for the NBA. This was true of the kids who were only four foot nothing, who’d never be allowed to even step onto an NBA court. In their dreams they not only dreamt of being the next Shaquille O’Neal, they saw themselves as being at least six foot seven. Size obviously came with the dream.
    They believed all that. And if they weren’t going to be basketball players, then there were two other avenues open to them. They could be either a film star or a rock star. (Girls were a little different; they dreamt of being supermodels, even the fat, spotty ones.) But they weren’t dreaming all of this, that was the strange thing: to the kids this was more like reality. This is what’ll happen, they told themselves, this is what I’m going to do with my life. You could see it in their eyes, the faith. Like Teresa of Avila, they had visions.
    â€˜I’m going to play for the Lakers,’ said one small kid, drumming the basketball on the ground.
    â€˜The Lakers suck,’ said his friend. ‘I’m playing for the Knicks or the Bulls.’ They sounded like it was all agreed, and they were going home later that day to pack their kit and head off to the airport.
    I heard one kid say he was going to play for Manchester United, another that he wanted to be a rock star and trash hotels, another that she’d be bigger than Naomi Campbell, another that he was going to star alongside Arnie in an action movie. Sitting in the playground, I heard it all. All of the kids spoke seriously, thoughtfully, as if they’d weighed up all the possible avenues of success, and these were the ones they’d now chosen. They never considered failure, nor were they content to look at the possibility of being on a lower rung of the ladder, of simply being a model, joining a local band, or playing in some amateur basketball team. No, they had to be up there with Naomi, Mick or Shaq.
    I’m all for people having dreams, but these kids were dreaming way out of their league. They were fooling themselves. They were doomed to failure. They weren’t going anywhere, except straight down the road to the unemployment exchange. Then they were heading back to the abusive wife and the snotty-nosed, screaming kids, the refrigerator full of beer and crap fast food, and the debt collector banging on their front door every