Adventures in Greenock.

Yes, I'm jobless again. Disaster! Managed the training ok, no problem, because basically the hours of the training were odd - one day I started at 3, another day started at 5 - I thought, ha, to judge by the bus timetables, I'd be able to get too and from the city centre where the work bus departed for the standard shifts without any problem. Fat chance. Yesterday was the first day that I actually had to put this in to practise - and no one had mentioned that this bus took about one and three quarter hours to get to Greenock in the first place. It's only 20 odd miles away, and if you went there directly, you could do it in about an hour, perhaps less if there's no work going on on the motorway. But of course, there never is a time without some kind of work going on on a motorway, nor without an accident , or torrential rain to slow everything down, so it never does take the time that it's supposed to.

Anyhow yesterday, I needed to be in George Square for twenty to seven. To manage this, I'd looked at the bus timetable and found there were two buses - one at 5.48, and the next at 6.19. Its not a long journey, and I figured that the 6.19 would get me there in plenty of time, particularly as it was that early and there's not much traffic around at that time. So I got up at 5.30, which was pretty earth shattering - I'll get into that later! - and eventually staggered off to the bus stop, and made it there for about ten past 6. That seems to me to be early enough to catch a bus that's shot through because there's no one getting on (there's a nasty tendency of bus drivers to speed up along their routes because of this!), and having got there, I settled in to wait. And wait, and yes, bloody wait. 6.19 came and went as a distant memory, and by 25 past, I was getting frightened. I had 15, possibly 20 minutes to make it into town, assuming the work bus hung around for 10 minutes or so for people to turn up. I can't speak for others, but I get a real fear when things don't run according to my plans, it's not that I'm inflexible, but I actually get panicky when things start to come apart. Once something has actually come apart at the seams I can calm down, and pick up the pieces etc, but whilst it's in the process of happening, I get this old feeling of cold terror, of people rushing around and saying "Where is she? I Knew this would happen, she's unreliable, she's useless" and all that kind of thing. Rationally I know it's not likely to happen, but nevertheless, that's the feeling that I get when it's all going pear shaped. So when I saw a taxi, I grabbed it, and needless to say I was there on time to get on the work bus. But I was feeling uneasy, and thinking to myself, just how often is this going to happen, and given that when I arrive back from a late shift at midnight plus I have no option to be taking a taxi, just how many days am I going to have to take one, and shell out vast sums of money to get from a relatively simple A to B. There's not a lot of point in working if 3/4 of the money you earn goes on getting to the job.

On top of this are the treks around Glasgow. Yes it's nice, it's very interesting, to see places I haven't seen before - for example on one day we went past Bellahouston Park, which was very interesting. There's a big athletics club there, and something I simply have to go and investigate properly, the "Palace of Art". I've never seen an art gallery set in a park before, and I'm curious about it. On a couple of occasions we made it as far as the Rangers Stadium - I've been there before, but there's been a lot of redevelopment in the area, and it's changed a lot. In fact I'm sure that at one point a decade or so ago, I went to look at a flat in the area. But whilst I love the beautiful game, I've never been too sure of living next door to one of the biggest stadiums in the country. The key point here though is that whilst it's interesting to see these places, it's not something I want to do on a daily basis, adding quarter hours to my trips to and from work. For every one of these pick up points, it means coming off the motorway, and this adds just so much time to the journey that at the end of the day, an eight hour working day has turned into a twelve and a half hour working day. I've worked odd and long hours for a long time now, but I'm getting on, and I'm just not as up to it as I used to be, even ten years ago. It's a crying shame, because I met some great people, really nice, and the work was brilliant. I could do it blindfolded - well perhaps not quite, but I could do it backwards, and if it had only been based in Glasgow, or they had been more flexible. I asked them if they were prepared to let me do it part time, but no dice, I asked if there was any other way I could get there. There's a train, but it takes about as long as the bus, and you're then a ways away from the centre where we were working.

So in the end, I decided I just couldn't do this. I was absolutely exhausted, not by the work, but by the endless travelling. I did take some great photo's along the journey - check them out, Scottish landscape is fabulous, but I'm back to square one jobwise. Oh hell.