Jobs for the boys.

There is nothing quite like unemployment to wear someone down.

Since I turned 16 the longest I’ve ever been unemployed was the year I spent at Lancaster University.  Now, this should hardly be regarded as a time of honour or productivity as that was also the year I spent living off one meal a day (usually noodles or, miserably, a Rustlers) combined with, almost exclusively, imbibing the cheapest of cheap wine.  All this intertwined with a tragic period (two weeks) of wearing different coloured Converse on each foot.  Never in history has it been a good idea to wear mixed footwear, let alone in your first year of university in a town filled primarily with people that frown upon anyone daring to venture out without a Ben Sherman shirt buttoned up to the collar.  I once, in Lancaster’s premium Wetherspoon’s, saw a girl proper twatted out by an implausibly aggrieved woman.  That’s the type of situation that changes everything when you’re still 18 years old - had I ever seen a girl sparked out in Maghull?  Had I fuck.  

Amongst the few things I learned in Lancaster (local girls would end me, southern Catholic girls are disturbed, Cypriot girls look down on entire diets of noodles), one of the things I didn’t realise at the time was how necessary a job was.  Lancaster was my haven, a jobless wonderland where I’d wake up semi-drunk (not even hungover, God bless youthfulness) in the afternoon and merely plan the evening ahead.  Who has the time for job-hunting when you’ve got half a bottle of Lambrini on your windowsill from the night before and the latest episode of Prison Break season 1 has just come online?!

There was simply no time for jobs when your existence entails drinking as much as you can and being a tit; forgetting entire weeks’ worth of memories and trying your hardest to get into the fit posh girl who lived on the fifth floor of your halls who never did know your real name (my name is not and was never “Andrew”) but eventually settling for fellatio from her undeniably less attractive best friend who you lived next door to and subsequently avoided for the next 9 months, wonderfully assisted by the Uni’s decision to put bedroom door peep-holes in our college halls exclusively.

What the fuck was I talking about?  Ah, jobs.  Those elusive, necessary, bastard evils.

Probably should’ve looked for one instead of writing this, really.