The re-education begins…
24 Feb 2009
The ‘Sieren & Rael’ rewrite is… going. Clearly not well enough to seduce me away from the procrastinatory evils of blogging, but going nonetheless. At this point in time I genuinely cannot tell whether it’s getting better, or being murdered outright. Writing blows sometimes.
I had literally too many choices for my Facebook status update last night. In the end, I settled for ‘Adele now knows how to use a crunchie bar as an educational anatomical tool’ which, in hindsight, may not have been such a brilliant idea – but it did amuse and was technically correct. If I have the pressing need to procrastinate later in the week, I will explain all.
But to matters at hand: I’m steam training towards (another) redundancy at History. I must be going to set a track record for the company. Though not ‘redundancy’ of the official kind with financial benefits, I should clarify – just the ‘ha ha, we never put you on a permanent contract again’ kind.
Fortunately though the British government has astonishingly come to the rescue by paying for me, a denizen with a central London address and higher education, to re-skill into what is generally regarded as a an industry staffed by people with lower levels of (formal) education.
Now I’m developing an opinion on that. Not that I argue the point, but I’m against the assumptions of the type of people who work in the fitness industry.
While I laughed as much as the next person at Brad Pitt’s hysterically brainless fitness instructor in the Coen Bros latest outing, ‘Burn After Reading’, in my (albeit limited) past experience – and certainly in light of the group I am being educated with – the fitness industry could be just as easily stereotyped as being full of highly intelligent and highly motivated individuals, many of who dropped out of school early to pursue an elite sports career, training as fitness and dance instructors while I was in my first of three years of packing shopping bags at Blackwood Foodland.
Thus while the most esteemed achievement of my early working life was earning the most cautions ever handed out for inefficiency in a supermarket – although let’s be fair, how could I help it if people chose to cue down at lonely old till 13, where I was sentenced to work out of earshot to the rest of the general population of the store, just because they wanted a chat and to hear the latest instalment of the soap opera of my teenage life? – these young people were out there changing the lives of their customers and clients.
But you shan’t catch this antipodean migrant complaining about the free education, and so it was that I ventured, awestruck, into the glossy cavernous space that is David Lloyd’s gym, Maidenhead. Oh, so this is what a posh gym is like then? I had always wondered. I crept wondrously past miles of exercise machines, through a bright and cheery café, stopped to ogle at the fluorescent lit swimming pool and into the classroom.
Before introductions were even finished, Salsa Teacher John and I were being threatened with separation. He was ‘lowering the tone’ and while I was encouraging him with my inability to keep a straight dial in the face of his constant innuendo. We did rather set the mood of the week. And that was only the first ten minutes of the first day…