I am in dire need of a) a laugh, b) a drink, and c) the company of people that I actually like, but apart from that, life as an M&S checkout girl is continuing ok. Things are getting better now that I know what I’m actually doing, and the people are all lovely. A couple of weeks ago now I spent an hour when we should have been stacking nuts instead chatting to a great guy called Ronnie. (Well. He did most of the talking. I had his whole life story, but fortunately, he’d had quite an interesting life.) Ronnie worked as a professional musician for 25 years before he became an alcoholic and ended up in M&S. He made albums and did gigs in swish hotels and sang in front of the queen. He lived in Geneva for 5 years and had a record manager who turned out to be an Austrian con man with three fiancées. He told me a fantastic story about the time he was asked to host a Red Cross talent contest. It was full of the elderly, sick and infirm, etc, old men and women almost on their way out. The last guy to sing actually hobbled off stage and dropped dead at the side. Unfortunately, the judges also awarded him third place. And so Ronnie, who was handing out the prizes, had to tell the audience that ‘he’s not feeling very well, so we’ll give him his prize later’. Heh!

Driving has also been progressing well too, apparently I am a natural at everything apart from steering. The first time I reversed around a corner I did it almost perfectly, and my driving instructor joked that I was better at steering backwards than forwards. He later took that back (I am not that bad). There have been a few moments of panic, one the other week when I was trying to turn right and indicated with the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator, but nothing life-threatening or anything like that, so all is good really.

I couple of weeks ago I took part in what will officially be known from now on as my least fun gig ever. It was an evening of extreme boredom and humiliation. Stephen’s hand-bell group were asked to provide the entertainment at a local village’s annual harvest supper. And I suppose the food was alright, and the hand-belling went as well as it could have gone, for what it was, but it was still awful, and something that I never want to do ever again, for as long as I live. A hall full of 100 old people humming along to Alouette or Home on the Range wouldn’t sound at all out-of-place in a horror movie, and has the potential to haunt my dreams for years.

On Friday I took the train all the way to Warwick and back (a total of 9 hours traveling, not fun, especially as it contained London in the rush hour), just to have an hour’s interview/chat with the guy who is director of VentureCo, one of the gap year organizations that I’ve been looking at. Among other things, I told him about how we played gamelan at RHUL without any shoes on and how I admire people who have no sense of Cool, which made him laugh if nothing else. But he offered me a place, and so I am about to commit myself with a 400 pound deposit to 4 months in South America with a bunch of randoms that I’ve never met before. May well be insane. About a dozen of us will go out at the end of January to Quito, capital of Ecuador, for a month’s language course, then we will spend a month volunteering, before going off all around Peru and Bolivia and Chile for two months, cycling down the Andes, white-water rafting down the Amazon, going on jungle safaris, taking jeeps over the driest desert on Earth, doing the Inca Trail trek, visiting Lake Titicaca, etc etc. It is both incredibly exciting and terrifying at the same time. Thankfully, however, there is a ‘build-up weekend’ in the Peak District in three weeks time, during which everyone will meet everyone else and so if I end up with a group of people that I just don’t get on with at all, then at least I’ll know before we leave in January. Ha ha. But, actually, if that really does happen then I will be able to change my mind and simply lose the 400 pound deposit, so it’s nice to know that there is a sort of back-out clause, just in case. But I’m already slightly nervous about this weekend, and that’s just a weekend, in England, instead of 4 months in South America. Argh.

A number of people have commented on how brave I am, but actually, I think I might either just be stupid or desperate.

Favourite Mower Part of the Week: rubber grommets.