I Hope That Donkey Doesn't Have A Heinie Troll...

Well It’s been a month since I last updated my blog, every time I’ve started writing it I end up getting distracted, but this time I’ve decided not only to update it but I’m going to take an oath…

I John Robinson do solemnly swear that I will to the best of my ability update my blog on a weekly basis.

So now there should be at least one blog a week, I might also change the look of the site too as this layout is making me yawn a bit now.

So on with the blog…

The job hunt hasn’t been too successful, there’s been absolutely nothing going, even the agencies and job centre have said so. If you look in the paper they may have so many pages of jobs but normally they print the same job several times or just advertise jobs which are 200 miles away. As I type this though I have just posted my CV off for a photographic job which I’m keeping everything crossed for as I have a really good feeling about it.

Anyway this job stuff is boring, moving on…

As the summer holidays drew to a close I realized that I had done nothing all summer, partly because I had no money. So just as I was entering moaning mode the phone rang, it was my cousin asking if I could help with another sofa deliver, this time to London, I jumped at the chance. When my cousin came to collect me he introduced me to my driver for the day, unfortunately Anthony wasn’t available so Guy was driving to London. Guy wasn’t as chavved up as Anthony was, plus he drove at speeds which didn’t melt your face so I was ok with that.

We picked the sofas up from the warehouse, dropped my cousin home and headed off to London. Guy was a lot chattier than Anthony, we put the Pulp Fiction soundtrack on and with the aid of sat-nav we were soon in London (and we didn’t get lost once). The first house was in Chelmsford (I think), it was a really posh area and I knew these people were going to be trouble.

We walked up the drive, rang the doorbell (which had it’s own bell ringers who played the Westminster chime) and waited, I noticed a sign saying ‘beware of the dog’, I braced myself for a rottweiler attack, the door opened and a Yorkshire terrier ran out and started yapping at us. The woman who opened the door said she wanted the sofa in the room at the bottom of the garden…so the shed?

We carried the sofa through to the garden and I saw this ‘room’, it wasn’t a shed, it was more of a bungalow at the bottom of the garden, it had 2 sofas already in there plus a pool table and a HD plasma screen TV on the wall. We put the sofa down only for the woman to say it was too small because her husband was really tall.

At this point I could picture this 6’10” monster coming out and kicking our asses because his settee wasn’t big enough. The woman carried on moaning and told us to put the sofa back on the van, as we were doing so I heard her go ‘ooh, my husband is here now’, I turned round to see this man who couldn’t have been any bigger than 6’2” start walking up to us and making some cockney noise about apples and pears or something, to be honest I felt more threatened by their Yorkshire terrier.

They paid a £100 delivery charge and we went on to our next delivery which was just around the corner. This house wasn’t as big, the man who lived there was Asian and it looked like he had been decorating his house while his family were away. We carried the first sofa off the van but my fingers slipped on the plastic wrapping so to avoid dropping it on the floor I tried throwing it up and catching it on my arms, unfortunately as I threw it up it hit my chin and cut it open, then as it landed it scraped a layer of skin off my arms and cut them open too.

We got the first sofa in the house after unwrapping it on the drive to fit it in, as we were about to get the 2nd sofa in the man told us that he didn’t think the sofas would be big enough as his wife has a rather large posterior. So because of his wife’s fat ass we had to get both of these settees back on the van, the man paid his £100 delivery fee and gave us both a can of diet coke and a carton of pineapple juice, I felt like going back and asking if I could swap my diet coke for a normal one, I think his wife could use the diet coke more than me.

The next delivery was in Watford, when we got there we realized that the house we were delivering to was halfway down a one way street and there was nowhere to park, we had to stop the van in the middle of the road and quickly take the sofa off before parking the van further down the road. Luckily these people kept their sofa, I would have probably killed someone if they hadn’t.

As we went to our final delivery I started to get hungry, I really wanted a Chinese, it was all I could think about, I managed to put the thought out of my head though so we could deliver the final chair. As we were carrying it in though the people we were delivering it to were eating Chinese, I felt like crying…or eating it.

At the end of the day I had a few cuts and bruises and was absolutely starving but the main thing is I got out and did something…and got paid of course.

The next day we all went to the Black Country Museum - a museum of queues, beef dripping and working class catchphrases, it had been a couple of years since I’d last been so unless it had evolved into the 21st century I very much doubted it would be any different to how I remembered it. When we got there we faced a queue which stretched right across the car park, I had a feeling that the people near the front had actually been waiting since the 1800’s, luckily the queue went down quickly and within 20 minutes we were in.

One of the first things we did was get some of the famous fish and chips that are cooked in beef dripping, we had to queue for about an hour and half for these chips so it was a good job they tasted good. We soon washed our chips down with a pint of beef dripping from the pub there.

After the pub we watched someone give a talk about how they looked after horses back then, only they couldn’t call it a horse, they had to call it an ‘os’ because the other half of the alphabet hadn’t been invented then.

We then joined another queue for an hour for the mine, there was an annoying family in the queue who’s 2 year old kept trying to beat up Carl, as much as I would have liked to have kicked this kid in what few teeth he had, I would have rather saved my energy for kicking the parents’ teeth down their throats (which combined wasn’t much more than the 2 year old).

The mine itself wasn’t too bad, it was where they mined for beef dripping back in the 1800’s, the only problem was that it was pitch black, one of that twattish family even made that point as we had to turn our lights out…

“I can’t see anything”
“…Nobody can!”

When we left the mine it started raining beef dripping so we had to take cover in the school, there was already a lesson going on where they were learning about beef dripping so we decided to go to the old fashioned cinema.

When we got there we sat down and were given a talk about how the film was made from beef dripping back in them days, we then watched a 15 minute Charlie Chaplin film, it was at this point where I realized that I would have hated to have lived back in those days, I’ve decided that next time I go there I’d wrap myself in foil and say I’m from the year 2506 just to confuse people.

After stopping off at the sweet shop to buy some sweets which were made with real beef dripping we went to the black smith to have a look at some of the chains which were made by melting beef dripping into various shapes and sizes. The black smith had probably gone to the loo because he wasn’t there so we went back to the museum part to have a look at the old cars. These cars smelt funny and probably didn’t work any more, they ran on petrol…I mean, you wouldn’t put beef dripping in a car, that’s just ridiculous!

The next weekend was my nan’s 90th birthday, I’d been really looking forward to this for months, we’d planned a big posh meal at Nuthurst Grange in Hockley Heath and it was all a surprise for my nan. Unfortunately though 2 days before I came down with a cold and couldn’t go, I was gutted, but they saved me some cake so it wasn’t all bad.

Over the summer I’d been expecting my college results, however because my work was being marked differently due to me going back and redoing the 2nd year my work had to be marked differently. I spoke to my tutor the other week and he told me it still hadn’t been marked and that I had to come in for him to mark it.

I turned up last Monday and after looking all over the college for my tutor I finally found him and he got round to marking my work. I got a pass for all my photographic work because I had to repeat the year, I was fine with that, I was just happy to have it all finished. I also got a merit for my web design which he said was exceptionally good, I’ll be putting my website online for you all to see soon. My tutor also told me I had to take all my work back with me that day, this basically was…

1 20 page A3 portfolio
1 A3 folder of photos
5 20 page display books
5 20 page A4 plastic folders
1 A4 ring binder

I managed to fit the ring binder and the 5 A4 folders into my bag, while carrying the rest, I got to the bus stop which was full of school kids, now through experience if you get on the same bus as school kids you’re not likely to get a seat, I decided that I was ok carrying my stuff and I’d walk into Solihull and have a look at the jobs. I got into Solihull absolutely exhausted, these things weighed a tonne after a while and a bus was just pulling into the bus stop, so I got on it, there was no way I was going to walk around Solihull with all of this work.

This week we decided to go and watch Clerks 2 at the cinema, now anybody who knows me will know I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan and I’d been looking forward to this film all year. I’d heard mixed reviews about Clerks 2, Jonathan Ross absolutely tore it to shreds on TV but I wanted to see it for myself.

It turns out that Jonathan Ross is a stinking great liar, Clerks 2 is like the best film ever! If you haven’t seen it yet I highly recommend you do so right this second!

…Ooh cake!