this is what happened

So it's been about four weeks since last we spoke.

Since then, I've done three weeks as a pavement fundraiser. They call us 'chuggers' - charity muggers. I tell a man in Bristol that I prefer to think of it as romancing rather than mugging - making us 'chancers' I suppose.

Bugger me it's hard work.

Consider leaving the house at 7:30am, driving for a couple of hours to wherever it is you're supposed to be, stopping for a cuppa and then spending the next 10 hours pounding the pavements, with no lunch break and all the vitriol the British public can throw at you (and believe me, there's a lot of it).

Consider losing any kind of faith in humanity by your first fag break. Consider hating people so much that sometimes you forget how to speak.

Consider old men grabbing you by the ID badge and groping you. Consider being told to 'fuck off and die'. Consider being told that children with learning disabilities should be drowned at birth.

Consider working yourself into the ground, six days a week, for £212 because you can't meet target on account of people already giving two quid a month to cancer research so, no thank you!, they're sorted as far as far as charity goes.

Consider smiling next time you see a chugger.

Then again, consider this.

Waking up at 7am with a glorious hangover, in a house full of people you didn't know a week ago, people who are now your closest friends.

Squeezing into a Skoda Fabia which you are definitely, absolutely, under NO circumstances allowed to smoke in, sparking up and putting on some 'motivational music' - think, Tina Turner, Mungo Jerry, Rage Against the Machine, Cotton Eyed Joe.

Ordering your double espresso with cream and a bacon bap, sitting on the pavement for breakfast.

A homeless man buying you an ice cream because he feels bad that no one will stop and talk to you.

A passing busker giving you a musical accompaniment - Mencap, with chips and with salad it's Mencap, even Buckingham Palace have Mencap...

A student signing up to give £20 a month, following a screaming argument with his mother in which she insists he can't afford it and he insists that yes he bloody can.

A guy with learning disability coming to give you a hug because Mencap helped him find a job as a gardener and he's so much happier now.

Getting home, smoking fatty-bombatties in the back garden, going for a swim in the accomodation pool, sitting in front of log-fires, in pubs in Weston-Super-Mare, talking to Welshmen, Australians, South Africans, Russians, Geordies, Americans about life and charity and how every fucker who's too rich to give to charity fades to grey when a biker the size of a house tells his mates off for using the word spastic and signs up for more than he can afford.

You love people; you hate people.

*****

There's too much to tell you. I've got time off at the moment for exhaustion and fainting in the street. At the moment I'm not especially good at this job but I will be, because they would be the hardest, most mindblowing three weeks of my life and, basically, I'm a glutton for punishment.

Come on general public, make my day.