Back to Life..

I’ve decided to get a job. I realise now I’ve been wasting my degree and the four years I spent getting it. I realise now that I’ve been doing that because I have a fear of facing people I don’t know; and I realise now that my fear of facing people is mostly due to the embarrassment caused by my mother. How could I face our neighbours when the chances were mother had thrown up in their garden the night before? How could I stride comfortably into the village shop, when mother may well have been in there this morning, hurling abuse at the till girl because they wouldn’t sell her sherry at five past six in the morning? I went to university to get away from all that, and it all came flooding back within a week of moving back in with her.
Now she’s gone, I’m starting to understand just what an effect she was having on me, and I’m now taking steps to emerge from under her sherry-stinking shadow. Admittedly, that shadow was big enough to cover most of North Norfolk and its neighbours, but I’m just looking after my particular part of it.
So – employment. I visited the impossible-to-use JobCentre website today. I entered ‘science’, ‘research’ and ‘laboratory’ as my three main search criteria and it sent me back two available jobs:
Trainee District Manager for a chain of expensive convenience stores, and Call Centre Operator answering incoming calls for a premium rate homosexual porn provider.
I think I should have stayed at university.

RC 4-9-08
1708 BST