Don’t you know it, old Shauny went and got himself a job, across the city, on the river, in Cabarita and fuck all if it doesn’t start at 7.30 in the morning which sees me writing this on the train at 6am with the song ‘9 to 5’ buzzing around my head, like, I wish!

Sure was a shock to get a phone call at 4.30pm yesterday and realise just over 12 hours later I’d have to get up and go to work. On the day our tea chests are supposed to be delivered too.

It’s just packing work, pharmaceuticals and maybe only for today and tomorrow but with the possibility of being kept on if they like me (ha ha!). Guess I’ll have to pack those boxes with more than just skill and dexterity but also with some style and flair! (Man, that alarm woke me up during some wild dreams)

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Well, that’s the morning gone and it’s gone ok. People are friendly and helpful but I won’t talk about the work ok, cos work isn’t what’s important but people are.

I’m working with three ladies (I call ’em ladies cos they’re older than me!) on a production line in a room of about six lines. It’s noisy and I don’t understand what people say. Everyone else is used to it or second guesses what’s being said. Everyone is pretty cool though and because I didn’t know what to do yet I’d spend time just sitting around waiting for instructions.

I met some of the other workers in the canteen. A guy from Dublin who married an Aussie girl and loves it here. A guy from Edinburgh who seems to have done the same and also talked to an Aussie who told me he’s travelled Europe and has relatives in southern Italy and was surprised at my query about Mafia presence there, saying it’s not visible to yer average person living there.

It’s cool that people are friendly and talkative and I tried explaining that to them, that people are a bit more wary in the U.K. (maybe half trying to explain my difficulty in meeting new people and being open, honest and forward with strangers, I think the more I practice being like that or around people like that, the more it will rub off on me – an old Fusion lyric sits in my head at that thought ‘Take a little bit of everything you see/Roll it into one, into something you can be’)