A Day in the Life of Me ...

Written to the style of the feature in the Sunday Times newspaper. This was another assignment for my university course, limited to 700 words.

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A Day in the Life: James Hartnett

The 18 year old Londoner currently works temporarily as a waiter whilst preparing himself for a Journalism course at Bournemouth University. He lives in Highams Park, on the border between London and Essex with his mother Sue, stepfather Charlie and sister Hannah.

I never have a set time to wake up in the mornings. Depending on when I book myself in for work will determine when I wake up. I’ve woken up anywhere between 4am and 11am for work, since there’s no concrete time to any of my shifts. I hate alarms, but the intro to Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Truly’ is soothing and melodic, and gets me up in a far better mood than anything else. Find another teenager that’ll admit that!

Breakfast usually consists of a bowl of cereal, Special K or Cheerios with skimmed milk – I can’t stand semi-skimmed, too fatty for me! This is the most important meal in my day, and working in the food industry like I do always makes me hungry so it’s vital I get to work with a full stomach. A quick shower and a few minutes in front of the mirror is all I need to be ready to leave – the way I see it the faster it takes to get ready, the more sleep I can get, and I need all I can get since my shifts can be pretty gruelling sometimes.

The train always takes ages. It takes 1 hour 45mins to get to work on a good day, since Wembley is the complete opposite side of London to me. Thankfully I’ve only ever forgotten my iPod once, and I can easily tune into a playlist and drift into daydream before I get to work. Sometimes I’ll pump out a drum and bass playlist, yet I feel like I should be embarrassed to say the golden oldies usually do it for me in the morning to gear me slowly into action.

I’ve had shifts that last 4 hours (which are a complete waste of time since it takes almost that long to travel there and back) whilst I’ve also had anything up to 14 hour shifts. A few times I’ve ended up having to get night buses home after work from central London since my overground trains stop at around 1:30am, and an already exhaustive journey can take up to 4 hours to complete on busses crammed with tramps, drunks or clubbers.

If I work at a retail booth – the fancy wording for ‘snack bar’ – I’ll stand happily at the same till for hours on end bantering with the customers. The bars usually smell of grease though, it’s easy to mistake these ‘booths’ for McDonalds. Custom can get quite annoying sometimes, less because the work is harder but more because the more customers eat, the less is left over for us at the end to gobble up!

I haven’t worked at a retail booth for a while now though since I usually end up in any of the thousands of restaurants Wembley have. The food is always way over-priced – I’ve heard 3 course meals can cost anything from £20 to £120 for microwavable mash, frozen sausages and a few petit pois. The up side to the restaurants though is the leftover food, though the tips also come in handy too!

If I’ve got enough time after work, I’ll visit my girlfriend for a few hours to de-stress with her, either putting my feet up in front of the telly or just having a chat. A shameful rant about an inevitable incompetent co-worker is always never far away either though! She’ll always listen to what I have to say, and whenever I leave her I feel much more at ease than I did when I arrived.

Typically I’ll get home about midnight, which leaves enough time for a cheeky raid of the fridge, before the whole cycle commences again in just a few hours time. After only a few days of this, my bed has never seemed more comfortable when I crawl into it after a long shift. Lionel, it’s almost your time to shine again…