Episode 1: Peas

If you are a sensible student, you can normally leave pack your summer sabbaticals away from university full of enviable experiences. Some of my friends have opted to go back packing to Thailand, others to accrue work placements with a £1000 + salary, whilst others are building houses and libraries on the coast of Africa. These people, in one way or another, seem to have money, unlike my dear self. Whilst others admit to overdraft-inducing behaviour such as expensively "amazing" nights out with their friends or exotic trips away with whatever "Soc" they join, I flew into my overdraft in a rather embarrassing style. Perhaps it was the three packets of crisps a day. Perhaps it was dropping my iPhone down the toilet. Perhaps it was always losing my train tickets home and having to replace them £20 a pop, only to be told your parents didn't really understand why you bothered to come back anyway. In a very roundabout, verbose fashion, this blog post begins my confession: my summer has only just began because I have been ironing out my financial dent by working in my city's finest pea factory.

12 hour shifts. 6-6, four days, two days off, four nights, two days off. Thick, white, figure rejecting overalls that were clearly designed by a misogynist. The smell of decaying vegetable. Itchy hair nets. Trucks of peas, waiting to weighed and removed of snails, faeces and a horde of other delightful substances. And of course, peas. Lots and lots of peas, green and miniscule, waiting to be trod on and never fully eradicated. One day, when I was feeling rather brave, I decided to take three trays of these green monsters to the back of the factory, ridding me of a literal 60kg on my shoulders.

This is a simple enough activity for most ordinary people. I do not mean ordinary in the sense that I am soon going to speak, Justin Beiber style about how "random" I am (Christ) but how my physical abilities have failed me once again. Bordering on dyspraxic, I received many kind epithets at school about my physical failures, the most enduring being the politically incorrect "Jas the Spaz".

Now a lot less bitter and a lot more accepting of my downfalls, I strode towards the pea pit, and quietly assessed the fork lift entrance in front of me. Despite the warning sign, the markings on the road and the hefty kerb ahead, something in mind told me this was a viable opportunity. The event went as follows:
1) Entered the main of the dangerous road.
2) Successfully carted 30kg of peas across one kerb.
3) Echo of beeping from the forklift entrance.
4) Beeping became louder.
5) Cart of peas I halt in the middle of the road.
6) Shutter opens.
7) I yelp, and the 30kg of peas fall to the floor.

Destitute and panicked (and met with a few curt words from the forklift driver), I began to sweep 30kg of the green victims down the 30cm x 30cm drain available in front of me. Only when I had blocked the drain, twenty minutes later, did I realise how moronic I truly had been.

Oh, and I did it twice.

I'm even leaving a pictoral confession for you all, an image I hope you sympathise with, and that will hopefully be so tear inducing I might even be allowed to wreak havoc on the factory yet again next year.

                                                           3am delusion and somehow still smiling.

Thoughts on being twenty...

If you have arrived into the cyberspace of this blog successfully, you will not only be reading this sentence, but will have also realised that the blog is sardonically/worringly/smugly/paradoxically entitled "I am 20 now" (not I am twenty now I hasten to add, because some smug bastard already beat me to that one, thanks for making me look like a grammarian's wet dream). I am not twenty now. After counting on the tips of my fingers how many days there are until I am twenty, I have arrived at the most probably wrong figure of eighteen days until the big one.

Why is twenty the big one, I hear you enquire? Twenty is the age I can no longer use the excuse of being a teenager to denote my various inadequacies- for example my inexplicable sleeping pattern, tripping over my dear house rabbit on a frequent basis and me being one of the laziest human beings to ever traverse this dear earth. Twenty is the decade I actually have to consider being gainfully employed for a survivable salary, whether I will ever be able to geographically relocate without singing songs to my parents down the phone, whether I can commit to another human being to the rest of my life (perhaps just a consideration) or whether I want to procreate enough to look after numerous spawn in worldly self sacrifice (definitely a consideration). Twenty is the age that teenagedom is cast aside in favour of an ill-fitting adult label, leaving the only song that has successfully, yet embarrassingly covered this ground as B-Dogz "I'm not a girl, not yet a woman."
But really, what exactly will change as a twenty year old? By this age, I had already planned to have written a ground breaking treatise on women's rights, be the star guest on Parkinson (these are old, old dreams) as well as have a column in a half-decent newspaper with the cult following akin to Charlie Brooker. There were also dreams of acting in A-List movies, dancing in the vein of a skilled ghetto street dancer and learning to sing less like a nasal-ridden Yorkshirewoman, but these dreams were ones of immaturity and must be cast aside. Alas, I have entered the realm of the everywoman! This year charters mediocre accomplishments such as successfully living in a shared house between six people, (potentially) passing the second year of my degree, getting a half-decent hairstyle and not kicking my mum in the face when she speaks to the aforementioned rabbit.
So, what will entering the twenties bring? As you can see above, hopefully bloody miracles. However, as you have probably have noted, probably more self-deprecating, self-centered spiel to narrate this "bildungsroman"of mine.