I don’t know why I always get the weird burst of motivation to come on here on a Sunday night when I’ve spent the day feeling sorry for myself after one too many glasses of deliciousness in town. I also don’t know what I want to write about, but after going through the effort of publicising that I had had some sort of drastic rebrand on here (i.e. changed two pictures and binned off the cream background) I feel as though I should just write ‘something’. So let’s have a catch-up.
Since I last posted here I haven’t been too good ‘upstairs’, but for once I want to avoid too much about all that. It’s good to talk, and I’m happy to talk about it, but I don’t want this to become somewhere where that’s all I do. Then it comes across as if that’s my entire personality, which it’s not (entirely). Other things have been happening too.
I’ve alluded to my job on here before but never actually said what it was, mainly because I found it a bit embarrassing. But now that I’ve left, I can happily say that I survived 15 months working as a picker at Tesco. I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life already, and have worked in some capacity since I was 12 (paper rounds count, okay) and can honestly say that Tesco was the worst of the lot.
Should anyone from there actually read this (which I doubt, but anyway), the people there were sound. I didn’t speak to many of them but the ones I did were good people.
The job itself just stank.
Fifteen months of getting up at 4.30am to drag my ass to Aylesbury to start at 6am took its toll. It was mentally draining.
When we weren’t in lockdown, it was hard to maintain any sort of social life when you have to go to bed at 8pm and all your mates are still at work whenever you have your free time.
Walking around a supermarket for eight hours a day being a slave to the scanner you carried with you might ‘sound’ easy enough. I thought that too, that’s why I applied for the job when I desperately needed one. But you soon realise it’s just a mental game, one that I’m still not sure whether I won or not but am nonetheless happy to not be playing anymore.
So with Tesco firmly knocked on the head and fucked off to the back of my mind where it belongs, I’m starting a new job this week. Nothing too exciting, but it’s local, pays good and allows me to properly focus on the actual thing I’m trying to achieve, which is getting back into journalism.
Something I never mention to anyone when I see them apart from to everyone every time I see them is that I was, before that big cold that went around, a sports reporter. Unfortunately when said big cold became quite a bit more serious than that, no sport was allowed to happen, which put ol’ Volleys out of a job.
However, ol’ Volleys had actually got very lucky bagging that job in the first place seeing as he had not actually passed the NCTJ qualification the first time around (bloody law exams).
So, that’s why last year I went back and started the course again, and it’s been going well so far.
I’m using a lot of my old grades where possible rather than re-doing things that I don’t need to (work smart, not hard), but I still managed to get an A grade on one of the new exams (my first ever A on any exam I’ve ever done, which felt just *mighty fine* 🤌) and I’ve got a shorthand exam coming up this week that I’m feeling mildly confident about too.
In all, that side of things is going well. There’s a difficult stretch to come now, where I’ve got to put a lot of focus into law (the bane of my fucking life) but with that being the only major worry (as opposed to the four or five I had at this stage of the course last time) I should hopefully be okay.
Probably the last little catch-up point is that I actually left the southeast of England for a little while last week, for the first time in what felt like too damn long.
I went back to Anglesey, where my mum comes from, for the first time since 2018, and the first time I can remember since I was a kid where my brother and sister were there too.
It was nice going back to all the old beaches and towns we would go to when I was younger, although my siblings probably have better and stronger memories of some of the more out-of-the-way places. My Anglesey experience as a kid was largely limited to Holyhead. That place is just one big anomaly…
Just being somewhere different seemed to calm me down a lot. The anxiety troubles I’d been having in the weeks previously definitely subsided a lot and since I’ve been back I’ve stayed roughly around that level. Maybe getting out more would actually be beneficial.
Anyway, I’m bored of this now so I’m going to not check any of it and just hit publish anyway. Even though it’s a rambling mess it was nice to mostly write about something not to do with what most of my other posts are about.
I’ll do them still as and when it’s appropriate, but it’s nice to have something refreshing on here.
Right. Byeeeee.
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