Loose Screw

I am considering a new adventure.

Regular readers will know that I have found it difficult to adapt to our new lifestyle of getting out of bed when it is still dark and then Mark going off to do a proper job. It has become tiresome already and we have hardly started yet, Mark has only been doing it since November and he probably won’t retire until he is seventy. This does not bode well for the future.

I have become disillusioned with the joys of housewifery all day, especially when it is coupled with working all evening. Also I am fed up with not being able to have a day off.

Since life seems likely to carry on in this vein for the foreseeable future I decided that I would do something about it, so, you will be pleased to hear, I did.

I thought that I would enliven my own life with the prospect of a bright and glorious new career.

It is all right to do this these days because you are not allowed to ridicule job applicants for being elderly any more. You have got to find a jolly good excuse not to employ them because otherwise somebody will say that you are discriminating against people for having grey hair and wrinkles and then you will be in trouble with the Government.

I know that this is a serious matter because of the Inland Revenue.

Anyway, with this in mind, I absent-mindedly filled in an online application for a job whilst I was at work the other night.

After some consideration of my details they decided that I probably met the basic criteria, and the next day I was invited to perform an online aptitude test.

I did not think very much about this, because long-time readers will recall that I have done an employment aptitude test before, at the time when it was decided that I was unsuitable to be an undertaker, in an exceptionally disastrous interview which might even have resulted in my being forever blacklisted by the Co-op.

Last night I was sent an email explaining that I appeared to meet all of the requirements, had passed the aptitude tests, and inviting me to a full-day interview, with more tests, next Thursday.

If I am successful at this then I can start pretty much immediately.

So, I can hear the question burbling through everybody’s thoughts, what is this new budding career for which she will turn out to be terribly unsuitable.

You are allowed to laugh. Mark had to try hard not to.

It is as a prison officer at Haverigg Prison.

I think it might be interesting.

Grandad – as in Nan and Grandad – was one when he stopped being in the Marines, although I don’t think he enjoyed it very much. He said it was quite stressful spending his life trying to stop people from murdering both him, and one another.

I suppose he might have a point, but it is indoor work without much heavy lifting, provides a pension and paid holidays, and has got to be more interesting than dusting. Also even the shocking wages paid to prison officers are an improvement on two pounds an hour, which is what I earned the last time I came out to work.

In any case they are absolutely desperate for staff and therefore I have probably got a chance of being accepted.

Also I think it can’t possibly be that hard. One of the aptitude tests – the maths one – included the question: “count these prisoners”. There were forty three, presumably to eliminate anybody who was going to need to take their socks off to work it out.

I accepted their invitation with some excitement, and so, readers, on Thursday next week I am going to present myself at Strangeways Prison in Manchester to be assessed, and possibly recruited.

I have been to Strangeways before, but only to visit some of the more disreputable of my acquaintance. I think it will be an exciting new experience, even if I don’t gain employment out of it.

There is, of course, a difficulty.

The day’s interview and assessment includes a fitness test.

They sent me a video about this.

I watched it three times.

After the third time I sat in front of the screen and considered things, quietly and thoughtfully for a while.

You have got to run up and down a gym for three and a half minutes.

I have not run anywhere for twenty years.

Three and a half minutes is a long time.

After some contemplation I went downstairs to try running around the kitchen to see what would happen. I set the stopwatch on my phone to see how I would get on.

I have never done anything like this before.

The dogs were horrified. They stood on the stairs and barked and howled, and eventually Roger Poopy hurled himself on top of me in a frenzy of worry.

Eventually I stopped running from sheer exhaustion, heart pounding and legs trembling.

I had managed twenty three seconds, not including the bit where I was fighting the dog off.

Clearly this is going to cause some Issues.

I have been practising running around the kitchen ever since. I am not going to run anywhere else for the obvious reason of looking completely ridiculous.

I look ridiculous in the kitchen, but nobody can see me there.

I am not really terribly worried about it, other than the humiliation of a truly spectacular fail, because we all know perfectly well that I will not get the job anyway.

The point of assessing people for their suitability for employment is really just a way of seeing how good they are at doing what they are told, and in my case the answer inevitably comes back ‘rubbish’.

However it will be An Adventure, and will be a splendid story with which to fill these pages, and so on the whole, unemployable as I am, I am looking forward to it very much.

Watch this space.

Have a picture of the Lake District.