It felt as if someone had slammed by entire body in a car door.

I've been putting it off long enough, but no more. I couldn't let my blogginglessness get to two months. It would have been too much. And so I'm reviving it now so that it's not some lifeless limb of a link tacked onto my website.

So, I finished the course and am really happy with the results, and now looking for a job to tide me over while I carry on writing.

Two things I've learnt while job-hunting in Cornwall: there are a lot of openings for 'personal care', and having studied an MA for the past year is the equivalent of being in a coma if you're approaching an employment agencies.

I trudged around Truro the other week and dropped my CV into places, telling them I was looking for part-time/full-time/temporary/permanent work, and two of them said,

'You're going to find it hard in Cornwall as you've been out of work for a year.'

'But I've been studying. It's not like I've been out of work for years.'

'We'll keep you on file.'

Excellent. Anyway, that was only two of a possible six, so I'm not completely disheartened. Yet.

Employment agencies are funny old places though. I went into one and had to do all these tests, one of which was typing to see your accuracy and speed. They give you a document to onto the machine and you have five minutes to get as far as you can.

Now, I don't have a recruitment background, but if I had the choice of what to give people to copy, it wouldn't be something that begins along the lines of, 'In this modern, fast moving world, it's extremely difficult to find long-lasting employment.'

Talk about kicking you while you're down. Anyway, I got an average speed of 55 words per minutes and humiliated myself again by not knowing (or caring a great deal) what 'mail-merging' is.

So, that's how I've been spending the last few weeks: filling in applications, looking for jobs, and getting some more writing done. I'm on chapter seven now, but have made a lot of revisions to the work I handed in, mainly changing it to present tense and introducing a third character in the second chapter as opposed to the first.

Oh, and how could I have forgotten. I was a life-model about two weeks ago. A friend of Kath's runs an adult (not as in Adult Channel) art class and needed a male nude. Why not? I thought, and said I'd do it.

And it was actually fine. Once the towel was off, I was fine. I guess I was nervous before, but it was kind of like getting into the sea or something. The build up is worse than the actual doing it. What did I learn from this naked session? Well, mainly that if you've been in a certain position for half an hour, sompletely still, it's not a good idea to up right away really quickly. It felt as if someone had slammed by entire body in a car door. Horrible.

Anyway, that's it for now. I think, like withthe life-modelling, I need to warm up to get back into blogging again. I think this was enough to get started again.

xx