I’ve been working in Banbury for the past week, one out of three which I am spending there in total. It would be a really easy place to get to if I drove, but not driving makes it more troublesome. This week I have been getting a lift off a colleague most days, but it was taking me over an hour to get to the place which she needed to pick me up from, so it wasn’t much of a treat. And often I actually prefer taking the train to getting lifts from people because I’m a bit antisocial, and anyway, the train is an opportunity to do more work. Let’s just say this job is very time-pressured

One does, of course, have to be grateful to still have a job. That’s what I have to keep telling myself after my father got reduced to a three day week this week. But generally, I am rather miserable. I really, desperately want to spend time learning Czech and had even made myself a timetable of which chapter I was going to study each week (I’m a bit sad like that!) but I have failed to fit it in all week Well, I’m getting up at half five and working until half six, getting home at half eight, eating, watching the news, responding to various emails and then falling straight asleep. It’s not a very exciting life, nor one which feels like it is achieving anything… I’m very good at feeling sorry for myself, and it’s totally unjustifiable because Babel has a cold and is therefore worse off.

It is important not to lose the ability to laugh at yourself. I was laughing at myself on Thursday when the girl giving me a lift was attending a stock take, so I got the train to Banbury. I arrived at 8.18 but Banbury station is sort of strange, and so I couldn’t find the taxi rank. Seeing as how I have Google Maps on my phone and this told me the journey to my client was less than two miles, and seeing as how I had over 40 minutes until I needed to be at work, I decided to be brave and try walking. It seemed like such a good idea…

The first problem I encountered was trying to work out where I was. The trouble with stations is that you don’t always come out of the right door – so often they have two entrances – and I blatantly wasn’t in the place where Google Maps expected me to be It took me a good fifteen minutes and a lot of careful reorientation of the map to figure out exactly where I was, and after walking in a circle for the best part of a mile, I finally arrived at the starting point for my two mile walk. Hmmm

Undaunted, however, I decided to carry on as opposed to wimping out and taking a taxi. Things went swimmingly well for the next mile or so, until construction works meant the road I wanted to walk down had the pavement obstructed. Somehow I managed to cross the very busy highway and made my way down the grass verge on the other side. When I arrived at a large traffic island, however, I was stranded for several minutes whilst I tried to figure out a way to cross without being killed, and in the end I accidentally took the wrong turning and walked another ten minutes out of my way

I am proud of myself, however, that I did realise that I was going on, and was able to navigate my way back onto the correct route. The correct route involved me walking along a muddy grass verge on a busy dual carriageway before risking life and limb by hurtling across it at speed when I needed to take a left turn. The dual carriageway which followed was even more frightening, and clearly not designed to be walked along, because the strip of grass can only have been a foot or so wide. I was genuinely terrified that when one of the lorries came past at speed, I was going to be knocked off into the road and run over.

Happily I wasn’t, and I arrived at the client only twenty minutes late. So much walking in my work shoes had taken it’s toll, however, and I now have the most horrific blisters I have ever experienced in my entire life. I could hardly stand up at all for the rest of Thursday until I was able to get home and cover my poor feet in plasters.

The moral of the story? I need to learn to drive. I am going to learn to drive. I have messaged my ex for the third time about the driving school he used to learn with, and I am practising differentiating between left and right. I intend to book a lesson very soon, but won’t do anything about it this weekend because Babel and I are planning to go to a murder mystery evening next weekend so I will be in Leicester most of the time.

Something to look forward to at least

The place where I’m working this week is a 15 minute walk from a small suburban train station in East Birmingham. It’s not a good area, and the client is located on an industrial estate which is rather dark and lonely. I don’t mind walking through it in the morning, in fact I quite like a bit of exercise to clear my head, but in the evenings it’s slightly less fun.

One of my colleagues was commenting on it yesterday and saying that at the place where she used to work, I would have been told to take a taxi. In fact she told me to take a taxi and that she was sure the manager would reimburse it. At her old firm, they took the view that they were liable for staff getting mugged whilst walking to and from client premises, and that they would rather repay people the extra few quid for a taxi than have them become a victim of crime. She reckoned this particular manager we were working for would think the same, and possibly she would – I don’t know her so I couldn’t comment. But this girl annoyed me because she went on for half an hour about how dangerous it was for me to me wandering around an area like this in the dark carrying a laptop

Yes, I know it’s hardly ideal. I look about sixteen and it’s blatantly obvious that there’s a computer in my bag. I’m scared of the dark too, and I actually have quite a horror of industrial estates. But how I get to and from work is my business and when I’ve psyched myself up to be able to cope with it, it doesn’t really help if other people make an unnecessarily big deal out of it and harp on about how *they* wouldn’t even walk around here on their own at lunchtime in case they got murdered.

Sometimes people with cars can be so terribly snobby and get the whole concept of walking totally out of proportion. It’s less than a mile, it’s not that big a deal, and no I don’t want to go to all the hassle of getting cash out of cashpoint, finding a local taxi number, waiting around for them to pick me up, wondering if they’re a weirdo who might abduct me, collecting the taxi receipts and begging a manager to reimburse me. Yes, I might get the money back but that manager will remember and perhaps not want to book me on her jobs again because I’ve caused a problem, and next year when it comes to my annual appraisal there’ll be a comment about me causing disruption and not having a proper regard for the budget. I can do without more black marks to my name. The whole problem will be solved during the year when I learn to drive. In the meantime, I intend to continue to take my chances walking through industrial estates the length and breadth of the country But I am very grateful to the random lady who gave me a lift, and it is noticeable that the colleague who objected so much to my walking drove off at half five without so much as a backward glance, never mind offering to take me to the station herself