Peas still worked despite the action being moved from nineteenth
century Moscow to a kitchen garden in Basingstoke, but Crime and
Punishlentils seemed to revolve more around the trial and imprisonment
of a certain bean-based dinosaur than Rex was comfortable with.
After several weeks of apathy and boredom, I prepared my CV and
sent out some job applications. I’d had a few offers from family
members. My mother’s brother, Uncle Gibbous, owned a toffee
factory, but it didn’t feel like something I could really get stuck into.
Likewise my Aunt June’s waterslide company just felt like a slippery
slope towards a pool of boredom. After two weeks of sending out my
CV, Ollie called and said that he was now working with a
homelessness charity. I told him I was still sending out applications,
and he told me not to worry, that a job was right around the corner. I
hoped not. Right around the corner was Auntie Oona‘s road sign
company and all I could see there were dead ends.
And so it was that I found myself working as what the French would
call ‘an administrator at a language school in central London’, if they
were speaking English. It was not what I had imagined myself doing,
but it was slightly better than staying in my apartment braiding my
eyebrows. I was basically helping students to access the right
departments, wording documents for distribution and showing people
where to find the powerpoints. It was hardly fulfilling, but the speed
with which I started to excel did improve my outlook. I always say that
the hardest thing in the world is a diamond.
After a while I got promoted to salesperson. Was it a blessing? I
couldn’t say, but what came with being a travelling salesperson was
the freedom to leave my desk and go out into the field. I never thought
in all my years that I was going to sell language training in a field, but
there I was. Eventually, I decided to try it in a town, and things started
to take off. It’s like I always say, cows aren’t interested in furthering
their careers through the attainment of language skills. They literally
only care about grass.
All the while I missed Korea. I pined to go back to the country of so
many happy memories and mouth-watering feasts. I also missed Ollie