Onwards

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for attending your recent interview/assessment. I am pleased to make you a conditional offer of employment at H.M.P. Haverigg, subject to your successful completion of pre-employment checks, which include the completion of a health questionnaire (unless you are already an MoJ employee).

Please log back into your Application Centre to accept this offer.

Kind Regards

SSCL Recruitment Services Team

So, there it is, really real.

I am going to be an actual employee.

I cannot remember the last time I achieved those dizzy heights, and if Nan and Grandad’s amused predictions are anything to go by, I might not be one for very long.

I have never been very good at being employed, which is why I am not. You don’t become a taxi driver until you have been sacked from everything else.

Frankly, I am terrified.

I completed the Health Questionnaire and talked to a lady from the Occupational Health department who rang me afterwards. She went through the form and told me that I had passed as being fit to work. Then I accepted the offer, and looked at Haverigg on Google Maps.

It is just about as far away from anything as it is possible to be. The nearest town is Millom, which would make a good candidate in a competition for being the most depressing place in the world, at least from the point of view of somebody with a taste for expensive hotels, expensive restaurants, and, well, expensive everything really. In its favour, it is right on the coast, which I shall like, especially if I take the dogs sometimes, and also I will be in range of Mark and Ted’s rural broadband, so I will not lack for entertainment.

I am going to stay there in the camper van, I think, and come home on my days off or when I get really sick of it. This will be a new exercise in self-discovery. I have no idea whether or not I am likely to eat proper meals or just live on cheese if I don’t have Mark to cook for, and I might never bother to dust anything at all if I am not trying to impress anybody with my housewifely virtue.

The wages are laughably rubbish, so I will have to carry on driving a taxi when I come home, but I would have probably done that even if the wages were good, so that is all right. Also, there is holiday pay. I have never had that, and am very pleased indeed at the prospect, imagine having days and days when you don’t go to work, but still earn money anyway. I think this is a splendid idea, and am looking forward to it very much indeed.

If you include bank holidays, I will have thirty four days paid holiday every year, which is more than a whole month. I was absolutely staggered by this, hurrah for gainful employment. In any case you are only expected to work for forty hours every week. That is hardly any time at all. I will barely notice it.

It takes weeks and weeks for the checks to happen, so I am not getting too excited yet. I did wonder whether or not we should celebrate by having a night off and drinking too much, but then I went to Asda and bought the shopping for the children coming home at weekend, so that was the end of that.

In the end I unpacked the shopping and came out to work, which is where I am now. It is peculiar to think that I might be earning a living at something else in just a very few weeks.

I am dying to have a new adventure to write about. It is going to be a lot more exciting than trying to find new ways of telling you about dusting.

Onwards and upwards.

PS I am still keeping fit. The training course has got lots of fitness things on it that I am going to have to do. I have been up the fell and to the gym today. My knee is fine but that might be the drugs.