Londoners Magazine

This week I am the object of my own derision.

Summertime is here and the living is indeed easy. Never have I so fulfilled my student potential by being a lazy, sozzled good for nothing. As the last of my loan drips out of my distressed and almost maxed out credit card, nothing is tickling my go-getter funny bone.

Day becomes night, Loose Women become Mad Men, yet Caomhan’s arse remains encumbered in its groove. It’s not like I have nothing to do. With debts to be cleared I should be banging down the door of potential employers. Yet the only thing I’ve been banging out is high scores on Guitar Hero.

In fairness, I have been nesting - feathering my home with empty pizza boxes, overturned bottles of beer and second hand smoke. But when the crumbled up Metro in the corner of the room is the only way I can tell what day it is, you have to question your methods. My feeling of self-worth isn’t helped by the daily phone calls from my concerned mother and her rousing rendition of Nat King Cole’s “The Party’s Over”.

But only a teacher could have considered the past year a party. A barrage of notes, quotes and scathing criticism is hurtling towards its inevitable end - the dole office. I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in Tesco. But a party it wasn’t.

You should try telling that to my mother though, a woman who considers cancer a growing pain and thinks her only child is scared of an honest days work. But it’s not the work that scares me. It’s finding it.

Jobs are like women. If they treat me right I’ll hang on for the long haul. So my experience of “pulling” jobs is a little rusty. I like to wine, dine and do the time before laying my cards on the table. So when an editor wants to know what exactly my intentions are with his or her publication I start to shake, flake and saturate. It’s like they can tell that all I want is get into her payroll.

It’s only been a week since my last failure with an editor and, in hindsight, I may not have been best suited to Paperclips Monthly, but I’m hoping my forthcoming brace of interviews go better. Otherwise it’s back to: “Would you like fries with that?”.