On my weekly outing to get the job paper this morning I was unavoidably hit around the face several times by a disturbing thought: I’m unemployed. That’s right…UNEMPLOYED. For a few months now I’ve been waltzing around in my little bubble thinking, “I’ve just left uni, it takes time to start a new life”. Well, that lovely state or existence that I’ve been living by was unceremoniously punched out of my brain and I have been thrown out into the cold, dark and depressing world of this never-ending job hunt. Problem is, this job hunt has been going on for far too long now and to no avail. It seems that when all the graduates left the start line to find their treats I went the wrong way round. While everyone reached the finish line clutching their prizes I was still admiring the daises or hopelessly looking in every nook and cranny to find my prize. And to make matters worse the sun is going down, the rain is beginning to pour and I’m pretty sure I can hear an ever approaching storm heading my way in the form of the credit crunch. But despite these obstacles I keep looking and clambering on. As everyone keeps telling me….”something will turn up”…..I swear if I had a pound every time someone said that phrase to me I would be a millionaire.
This current mood I was in was swiftly worsened when I had to dodge a stream of vomit carelessly strewn across the pavement followed by a heartfelt greeting at the door of my local newsagents by a group of spotty faced youths asking me for a “fag”. Oh and all of this was musically accompanied by Morrissey singing the lyrics “Heaven knows I’m miserable now” into my ears, which provided a fitting soundtrack for my current state of affairs.
Being unemployed is a funny place to be in. Well if I’m being totally honest it’s a soul destroying, tedious and exasperating hell hole to be in, but it can have its little quirks. With all the time I seem to have on my hands its inevitable that my silly little brain will work in overtime….ideas will begin to flourish, thoughts will begin to wander and all of a sudden you start to address things in life which may have previously sat on the back bench. However hard I try, I’m afraid that this is the only positive I can find out of being unemployed….oh maybe renewing my old musical affair with my saxophone and piano is another positive but trust me there is only so many times that I can play Joni Mitchell’s Blue till I start to feel…well blue.
Anyway I must dash and carry on with my hunt…if anyone can point me in the right direction I will be eternally grateful as I seem to be temporarily stuck in the worst Labyrinth of my life……the only thing that could make it worse is if David Bowie turned up in those skin tight trousers…or maybe it would somewhat improve matters.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
An Ode to Public Transport
I do feel like a sentimental old fool sometimes. Occasionally (although since leaving my beloved friends in Bournemouth the word 'occasionally' should really be replaced with the word 'daily') I have these agonising pangs of grief where my eyes well up, my stomach flips and a lump forms in the back of my throat. Now, not only is this an attractive picture in itself...being all red eyed and snotty nosed...the worse thing is it regularly seems to be happening in public places. For example: Today I was journeying home on the 065 bus from Ipswich and I just started to cry. Then and there. No warning, no holding back and worse of all....no bloody escape. And do you know what it was over? I broke a nail!! Ok...ok I do realise that this was not the sole reason for me losing it on public transport...in fact unemployability, missing my friends, missing Uni, missing the freedom and being forced to grow up in what increasingly seems to be a cruel and heartless world maybe what contributed to this explosion of emotions. And of course there then came the concerned looks, the strange looks and the 'she must be on day release from the local psychiatric ward' looks. I know this may seem trivial to some people but leaving university really is an agonising experience. It’s like leaving your family behind….everyone has played a particular role in your life which helps you to be who you are today.
Anyway back to the incident at hand…..I’m sure where I was at that specific time did not help in the slightest to lighten my spirits. I shall now paint a beautiful picture depicting a typical Ipswichian Bus décor. Firstly there’s the machine itself….the bus seems to make a choking sound when it moves, every time the driver puts his foot down on the gas the bus jolts from side to side and the engine relentlessly makes a wailing sound. You know the sound that Chitty chitty bang bang makes? Well…actually……there’s no similarity whatsoever, well maybe if you replace the 1st and 3rd syllables with a sh. So, as you can imagine the engine seems to be from the middle ages which doesn’t bode well for the 50 people squeezed onto this pathetic attempt of ‘safe, public transport’. But never mind I will try and get a seat near the window, I enthusiastically try and tell myself. I perch myself on a precarious looking seat after wiping the remnants of a McDonalds lunch off it. I turn to open a window and am faced with two living nightmares: Firstly there seems to be no window…..well no window within my reach anyway. And secondly the window I seemed to be sitting next to seems to have been recently defaced. Now, when I say “defaced” I don’t use this as a poncy phrase for ‘graffiti’. In fact, I wouldn’t mind a bit of graffiti artwork on my window to stare at. No instead I was faced with…mmmmm this is gonna take some imaginary use of vocabulary. Okay, it looked like someone had wiped the whole window with PVA glue. No, wait; I have a better way to describe it. Think back to your high School days when you were forced, by some unbeknown reason, to cover your textbooks with either tacky wrapping paper or a sheet of plastic most commonly used in the grown up world for laminating stuff. Well, you know when you cover your book with that horrible plastic stuff and you don’t quite get it right and what you are left with is about 100 little air bubbles? And throughout time you start to pick these air bubbles and the book just looks as bad as it did before it was covered, if not worse? Well replace the school book with a bus window and that’s what it looked like. A really bad, child like decorating job. Which had the undesirable effect of making whoever was forced to look out of it consider possible theories of suicide.
Okay I’m sure you really do not want to hear the rest of this exciting bus story I am retelling but I will continue onto the inhabitants of the bus. Like visiting a zoo or encountering endangered animals in their natural habitat I am both fascinated and repulsed by those that travel on public transport. Firstly there are the chavs. Usually located at the back of the bus, they travel in large groups and disguise themselves in baggy sports gear and baseball caps. The theme track of the lives seems to be the latest happy hardcore anthem or a similar wailing nonsense which they insist on replaying on their mobile phones for the whole journey. Next are the young teenage mothers. They are located near the front of the bus, clutching their buggies so tight in case the bags of MK One clothing they have precariously piled on top may collapse. There doesn’t seem to be any child sitting in the pram, in fact like the MK One bags the child too is sitting in a precarious position upon the mothers lap. Then the elderly sit at the front alongside them tutting at the state of youths today while knocking out everyone around them with the overwhelming stink of lavender.
God I can’t wait to drive.
Anyway back to the incident at hand…..I’m sure where I was at that specific time did not help in the slightest to lighten my spirits. I shall now paint a beautiful picture depicting a typical Ipswichian Bus décor. Firstly there’s the machine itself….the bus seems to make a choking sound when it moves, every time the driver puts his foot down on the gas the bus jolts from side to side and the engine relentlessly makes a wailing sound. You know the sound that Chitty chitty bang bang makes? Well…actually……there’s no similarity whatsoever, well maybe if you replace the 1st and 3rd syllables with a sh. So, as you can imagine the engine seems to be from the middle ages which doesn’t bode well for the 50 people squeezed onto this pathetic attempt of ‘safe, public transport’. But never mind I will try and get a seat near the window, I enthusiastically try and tell myself. I perch myself on a precarious looking seat after wiping the remnants of a McDonalds lunch off it. I turn to open a window and am faced with two living nightmares: Firstly there seems to be no window…..well no window within my reach anyway. And secondly the window I seemed to be sitting next to seems to have been recently defaced. Now, when I say “defaced” I don’t use this as a poncy phrase for ‘graffiti’. In fact, I wouldn’t mind a bit of graffiti artwork on my window to stare at. No instead I was faced with…mmmmm this is gonna take some imaginary use of vocabulary. Okay, it looked like someone had wiped the whole window with PVA glue. No, wait; I have a better way to describe it. Think back to your high School days when you were forced, by some unbeknown reason, to cover your textbooks with either tacky wrapping paper or a sheet of plastic most commonly used in the grown up world for laminating stuff. Well, you know when you cover your book with that horrible plastic stuff and you don’t quite get it right and what you are left with is about 100 little air bubbles? And throughout time you start to pick these air bubbles and the book just looks as bad as it did before it was covered, if not worse? Well replace the school book with a bus window and that’s what it looked like. A really bad, child like decorating job. Which had the undesirable effect of making whoever was forced to look out of it consider possible theories of suicide.
Okay I’m sure you really do not want to hear the rest of this exciting bus story I am retelling but I will continue onto the inhabitants of the bus. Like visiting a zoo or encountering endangered animals in their natural habitat I am both fascinated and repulsed by those that travel on public transport. Firstly there are the chavs. Usually located at the back of the bus, they travel in large groups and disguise themselves in baggy sports gear and baseball caps. The theme track of the lives seems to be the latest happy hardcore anthem or a similar wailing nonsense which they insist on replaying on their mobile phones for the whole journey. Next are the young teenage mothers. They are located near the front of the bus, clutching their buggies so tight in case the bags of MK One clothing they have precariously piled on top may collapse. There doesn’t seem to be any child sitting in the pram, in fact like the MK One bags the child too is sitting in a precarious position upon the mothers lap. Then the elderly sit at the front alongside them tutting at the state of youths today while knocking out everyone around them with the overwhelming stink of lavender.
God I can’t wait to drive.
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