My last day at work today before I return to my natural habit, the railway.
Some of the more advanced culinary techniques demanded in the role are beyond me. The other day it took me seven eggs to crack one without breaking the yolk.
My slovenly bosses have been easy-going and sweary, addressing me as "babs" and "love". My colleague made koftas yesterday -- basically long lamb sausages, skewered. A customer remarked on their similarity to a turd, whilst another, hearing him, said "I'm not eating that shit."
I am itching to leave now though. I regularly work an eleven-hour shift, and once a month or so, I'm there from seven till nine. In eighteen months I've had one break of twenty minutes. I am fed up with cleaning the place, only to come in and see the manager and her husband have fucked it all up again, yellowing grease all over the cooker rings, knives laying unwashed on a jumble sale of cross-contaminated chopping boards, the sink spattered with the ingredients for Vegetable Surprise, and a permanent lining of scum on the dishwashing machine. And making endless fucking cheeseburger and chips. "Cheeseburger and chips." How I resent that phrase now..
Soon, I will be pushing my trolley through the train as we trundle along past Tenby and Carmarthen. Bit of flirting with dolled-up middle-aged women on their way to a night out, bit of banter with rugby lads. There will be times when I'm looking out of the window upon the comely contours of Wales. One is encouraged to learn some Welsh, a task I relish taking on. My other two (very ropey) languages are both Romance, so it will be good to wrestle with a bit of Brythonic.
Me and Trina spent the week before last on Brač, the largest island in the Adriatic. I enjoyed myself, although I didn't quite realise what a poolside holiday with DJs meant. It seemed to involve sitting by the side of a pool and listening to music being played by DJs.
I found the glare of the white stone and the water a bit intense, to the same degree that I didn't feel comfortable being the only person poolside dressed in long trousers, leather shoes and a long-sleeved shirt, being too timid to expose my pasty Lancastrian figure, and lacking any covering for my manly area other than my Ethel Austin pants.
The music veered between a superior school disco and, occasionally, top drawer Soulful House, including an all-too short half an hour of early House and New York Garage. There was a bit of unpleasantness one evening when someone went over to four local girls, late teens or early twenties, jabbing at her armband which showed she'd paid for the event and clearly asking that they exit the dancefloor. FFS, they live on an island of thirteen thousand people. Let them have a night out.
They went and sat in the bar and I rushed out to ask them back in as my guests; obviously they didn't fancy doing so. Interesting that she didn't say a word to the beefy Argentinian rugby lads who'd been in there most of the week without wristbands, but maybe it's easier to pick on young girls.
What I most enjoyed though, was a week with Trina. Apart from her snoring, which led me to sleep on the balcony from Monday onwards, she was funny and, at last, has ring-fenced her unrequited love for me. She was full of deliberate malapropisms and was cracking open the wine at a decent hour of the late morning.
We had a day at hers afterwards before I came back to Bristol. In Wethers, she went off to the loo, so I seized the chance to make a quick phone call to Mel. She came back to the table so I wrapped it up.
"Who was that you were talking to?" "Mel." "Oh, it sounded like you were talking to someone you didn't know very well."
"I'm trying to not hurt you my love," I didn't say.
