Monday, July 09, 2012

Existential Crisis

I can't believe that the teenagers  and young people graduating in current times are leaving to the same (or worse) economic mess that I left college into.
I remember McMum sending me envelopes stuffed with press cuttings of jobs that I was hopelessly unqualified for. I was interviewed for a print technician's job at the London College of Printing, one of twenty interviewees from six hundred applicants. I didn't get the job.
A lifetime of surviving meant when the girls were young we lived on milk tokens and later free milk from the milkman (who later got sacked for delivering leftover milk to people that he felt deserved it).
My ex-partner and myself were not able to get a mortgage until we were 38 after multiple redundancies and seemingly endless spells of unemployment.
When he managed to get a proper job, I cried for an hour.
We watched some of our contemporaries sail past us, and others perish miserably. I started work full time when the girls were really really young, as I couldn't trust the working world any more to provide anything for us to survive on as a family.
Really, we survived on Hope. Is there enough of this to go round, this recession?

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