lets go back 20, aged 24

I returned to work after a few months of doing very little and staying at home studying my many correspondence courses including agriculture and counselling, the problem with correspondence courses was that I couldn’t always afford the postage and so I shouldn’t really have been doing the courses, but I was desperate to make up for the deficits in my education and desperate to do better in life than labouring with a team of uneducated and sexist men, apart from that I was hurting or going to MIND and L, and when I returned to work it was to the news that the project had lost its funding and were going to have to drastically restructure in a vain hope of surviving, they were turning it into a kind of very basic skills college and making the team into basic level Horticultural trainees, and were going to have to let some of the team leave.

 I looked at the team, much as they had hurt me I knew some of them needed the supportive environment that was doing nothing for me but damage, I stood up, feeling very unreal and wondering what on earth my future was I said, 'I am resigning, what you are restructuring into is not suitable for me and these guys need to be here, I don’t'.

 Having said that I walked out, to complete silence, and stood by the gatepost where I used to wait for my employment officer, and then got on my bike and drove away. I did not know at the time that my time there had psychologically damaged me very badly and made me swear and say bad things much too readily which shocked the hypochondriac couple, especially when I told them the dirty things that were said at work, I shouldn’t have done, I was being childlike and childish, but the fact that they always wanted to know and laughed and seemed to find the things funny encouraged me.  I recall the place with horror and also relief that I did walk out. Several times since then I saw one of the supervisors and he offered to give me a reference if I ever needed it, and several times I saw the happy sex offender and he told me of his happy life with his new wife.
(I am glad he became an honest man, but his boast about his sex offences horrified me).
As far as I know, the restructure never came to much.

I bought my landlord’s old car from him for £200, insured it cheaply with Tesco and learned to drive, with his help, I drove round and round town with my landlord snoozing in the passenger seat, sometimes he woke and told me stories, one was about when he was on a tropical island with some other men and some native girls, the girls ran naked into the water and the men were going to follow but one of the girls shouted out ‘no, you dingle-dangle, barracuda he whoof!’ which was kind of funny, he told me a ruder one than that and I won’t repeat it, but really he was well-behaved and just liked company and something to do.

 I passed my test, JM did help in the build up to the test by also coming out with me and also arranging two pre-test lessons with a good instructor. I think if I had not had my own car and learned it inside out and been so used to actually driving it and not being instructed all the time, I would not have had the confidence to pass the test. My first Car was a red Peugeot 205, it was the car I had always wanted, my second car was an Austin Metro that was faulty from the start and lasted a few months, the third car was a Peugeot 106 that the Hypochondriac couple helped me to get finance for, which eventually left me in huge money problems, that car lasted all the way to my second year in Jersey where I crashed when under horrific stress from the abuse and the after-effects of being slandered and shunned in the island and brutalized by police, and the Rover Metro that followed ended up beyond repair when the church hounded me into a breakdown and from my home last year. (This was written in 2011).
 4 cars.

 Back to the story: I was now free completely of the supported employment schemes, I still had freelance gardening both in my town and more than a weekendfull in the L. Benefice and my friend’s garden in Winchester as she had just had a major operation, and I wondered if I could build on this and make a business, of it, I also had work for JM’s niece, I will explain that in a minute.
So here I was with some work but not a full time job, JM asked me if I wanted to clean for S. school, I said yes, she arranged the job for me, I had to do an enhanced CRB check and not knowing what it entailed I was worried that it would show up all my family’s crazy activities including when they made me talk to the police, but it showed nothing, I had a clean record.

Just before I left my bedsit, I had fallen out with my parents, I had kept in touch with them and been to see them sometimes even though JM said it had a bad effect on me, but anyway I was on the phone to my dad and he was going on about spirits and things and I had never been able to completely escape this spirits and demons thing, but I decided I couldn’t cope with it and told him I didn’t believe him, and he got upset, he told me that the church were brainwashing me and that I should go near them, and I told him they were not and that he had brainwashed me, anyway, we had a row, fell out, and I was alone without anyone to keep me safe from wicked spirits for some time. But it was at this time I started watching ‘Buffy the Vampire slayer’ and stopped being scared of the dark and the ‘spirits’ hiding in it’ for the first time, my sleeptime anxiety eased.