School's Out!

I’m not sure there are many better feelings than getting back home at the end of the summer half with ten lazy weeks of holiday to look forward to. Ten weeks in which to sunbathe, watch TV, play tennis, drink Pimms and chase girls. In other words, do nothing at all involving writing or studying. Bliss!

Last September feels like a lifetime ago, and although I'm not one for reviewing my life I’d say that C block has been a mixed bag. The ups have included:

• Doing well in work and decently in exams

• Scoring over 40 points in the Field Game season

• Hitting my first ever six in house cricket

• Humiliating  Runty on multiple occasions.

Whereas the downs have included:

• Not being made house captain (I’m still recovering)

• Failing to make any progress with the Princess (and witnessing her get with Tonbridge Boy in front of my face)

• Following through on a silent one in first div one time. That was a long wait for chambers.

Naturally the euphoria of breaking up wears  off pretty quickly. At the moment I’m still content  to wake up at 11:30  and settle down for a Game of Thrones session, but how long this can go one for I cannot say. The truth is that an empty summer soon becomes a borefest.

The easiest way to escape the tedium is to go on holiday. The most cliché UK destination for lads my age is definitely Cornwall. This was where some of my friends went last year after their GCSE results, since it's apparently a tradition for toffs to go down there and engage in drunken behaviour each summer. The stories I’ve heard from people who've been there have been unfailingly tragic, namely boys getting tipsy on Strongbow, hitting unsuccessfully on any girl they can find and then decorating the beach with their vomit.

If you venture outside the UK then basically anywhere is an acceptable destination. There's always one person who comes back in September telling everyone about what a great time he had in St Tropez, Cannes, Monaco etc, but such individuals are generally horrifically insecure and no-one is bothered if you ended up in Brittany or Benidorm.

Besides holidaying there are plenty of social events. Often sport-based, one of these is happening right now: Wimbledon. Already I’ve been amazed at the number of people who seem to have gained access Centre Court and put up photos on Facebook to prove it. I thought these tickets were like gold dust, only obtainable if you knew the right people or have huge amounts of cash. Hmm.

Then there is the Ashes the summer, the start of the football season in August, and a number of lame polo events which exist purely as an excuse to dress up and get tipsy. For the non-sporty there is also the fringe festival in Edinburgh (to which Eton regularly sends boys to perform) and all kinds of music festivals, like Reading and Leeds.

As things stand currently I am hoping to go to one of the Ashes tests for a couple of days (dependent on the generosity of a friend) and spend a week in August in a certain Mediterranean country with my family. It’s better than nothing, but not exactly a calendar bursting to the brim.

That is why I have applied this week for a part-time job in a sandwich shop near my house. Yes, a job! My summer may consist of some hard graft. I must admit though that it wasn’t me who came up with the idea (I am far too idle to actually want to spread butter every day) - instead it was my mum who threatened to withdraw any cash or favours if I didn’t get out of the house and do something useful. Faced with the prospect of being penniless, and realising too that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to put on my UCAS application, I complied.

So it was that I wrote my first ever CV this Monday. Truth be told I was rather pleased with it once I’d finished it, but that was before I showed it to my dad who burst out laughing the second he saw it. Apparently it was among the worst he had ever seen. Upset, I asked him why, and he explained that a CV is not so much about what you have achieved in life, but about how you lay these achievements out on a page. In other words, it’s all about the style, not the substance. If you don’t have much proficiency with Microsoft Word then you’re not going to get far in life it appears. With this valuable life lesson under my belt I then spent the next four hours engaged in the most superficial activity of making sure my fonts and sub-headings were tiptop.

Why exactly I needed to provide a CV for a job that involved no mental effort I couldn’t work out. How hard would the work actually be? Surely the fact that I got a GCSE in Latin was completely irrelevant. It crossed my mind to actually express these thoughts to the shop when I went to down to hand in my application. I was stopped, however, by the employee who greeted me on the other side of the counter – namely one of the most attractive girls I have ever encountered. Blonde, green eyes and with a friendly smile, she was smoking hot. Not only that, she was almost disarmingly friendly and down to earth. Immediately I forgot all about my CV-related rant and did my best to appear cool, explaining I was here for the job and did she mind handing in my application to the manager if possible.

She didn’t mind in the slightest. Indeed, she thanked me for my interest and took my CV and gave it a brief look over. The first thing she commented upon was the attractive layout of the page (thanks dad), followed by my ‘impressive’ GCSE results. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not that intelligent, really.’ She was having none of it though, and I reckoned I was definitely rating my chances with her. But then came the killer question:

‘It says here you go to Eton College?’

‘Err, yes I do,’ I said turning red. Dammit, why hadn’t I just put ‘secondary school’!

‘Is it near here?’

‘What, Eton? No, not really, it’s next to London’

‘Ok, it’s just I’ve never heard of it before,’ she said, smiling apologetically at me.

Never heard of Eton? I felt like I was in dreamland - not only was she a worldie but she knew nothing about my school!

The only thing I want now is to actually get the silly job. Who would have guessed that a week ago? Maybe work does pay after all.