Own career trajectory.

Although reasonably settled now in his portfolio career of tour guide, author and librarian, Chris Roberts has done more than his share of quaint and strange jobs over the years. An alphabet of redundant careers is an attempt to stave off the necessity for him to take a full-time job through the exploration of some truly bonkers occupations that an accident of birth spared him from actually having to consider seriously.

In the past, he has sold advertising in Germany without the benefit of speaking the language, and worked as a ‘toast buster’ providing breakfasts for British army officers serving there. This was preceded by various stints in nightclubs as everything from bartender to go go dancer, a position that was mercifully brief, though the owners of the establishment did stress that their bankruptcy hearing had been scheduled prior to his performance. He later took up bingo-calling in a pathetic attempt to compete with his brother who was training to be an accountant at the time, on the basis that they were both working with numbers. A couple of stints in retail, including six months selling sex aids in New York, convinced him that his talents lay elsewhere. Though clearly not in Welsh holiday camps, cooking Mexican cuisine, designing furniture from shop dummies, organising a slumber offsetting programme or as a spokesperson for a nuclear power pressure group.

Unsurprisingly, with hindsight, when he was turned down by MI5,his occupations began to coalesce around London street facilitator, scrivener, bibliographic information distributor or, as he was generously described by one website, ‘general gobshite about town’. He is the author of Heavy words lightly thrown and Cross river traffic, histories of nursery rhymes and London’s bridges respectively as well books on Lost English words and one on Football and Magic. His short stories are dotted about a number of publications and the BBC dramatised a couple on radio 4. One is here. 

He was also editor of and sometime contributor to the 21^st century penny dreadful One Eye Grey, which retells old folktales and ghost stories in a modern context. He is partly responsible for True Blue a musical about the life of Margaret Thatcher and entirely responsible for the online Evening Standard Headline Generator.