Update

Well I've been back in the UK for about 2 weeks now, and what a 2 weeks it's been!

I've been to London, York and Folkestone.  I've applied for hundreds of jobs (certainly feels that way anyway).  I've swallowed my pride and signed onto job-seekers.  This means I have the joy of visiting the soul destroying building they refer to as the "Job-Centre".  All those stereotypes about the majority of people on the dole?  They're not exaggerated...

Don't get me wrong, some people there are hard working people who have fallen on hard times.  Like me.  Unfortunately we're in the minority.  Within minutes I find myself choking on the stench of stale cigarettes, my heart rate is through the roof from stress just from being there...and then there's the people.  If you ever wanted to find the meeting place of the world's ugliest people, just come on down to my local job-centre.  I'm not saying I'm a glamorous model, not by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I have all my teeth.

Anyway!  Moving on from my mini bitch-fest.  My blog is a happy place, sadly it's being tainted by the job-centre which is most definitely NOT a happy place.

I'd love to say that I've been travelling about and exploring my home country for pleasure.  I suppose I could say it.  But it'd be a lie and as an unforgettable professor once said - we must not tell lies!

Nope, it's not been anything so fun as that.  Instead, I've been dragging myself to various interviews.  First I went to London to sign up with an agency who seem confident they can find work for me in schools.  The woman was very nice and positive.  I left feeling good about my prospects - always a pleasant feeling.  I didn't spend long in London at all.  I was in and out of the Big City within 4 hours!

Next up was an interview at a boarding school near York (through this agency).  I was collected from the train-station by a chatty woman in a huge mini-bus.  All that bus from little me?  We drove up through the gates into "one of" their car-parks and parked up with the rest of the buses.  If any collection of buses deserved the term "fleet", theirs definitely did!

You may think it's a little sad, that I was this impressed with a car-park.  To be honest, you'd probably be right.  However, it did set a certain precedent for the rest of the school.  Based on this first impression (in a car-park), I expected it to be a grand, sprawling, high class school.

That didn't even begin to cover it.

This place was huge.  It was gorgeous.  It was the epitome of the "lifestyles of the rich and famous".

On my previous wage (as an admin assistant), it would take me 2 and a half years to simply earn the amount of money that these parents spend on one year's school fee.

The pool (for student use only) was possibly the most beautiful pool I've ever seen.  The school has stables to house your pony, or you may borrow a school horse.  There were multiple sports fields, both grass and astro-turf.  There were so many things for these children to do that they didn't do any of them.

To say I was over-whelmed would be an understatement.

It was amazing and everyone was very friendly.  It would be a pleasure to work at a place like that, especially since it's only an hour away from home.  Being able to easily see my family during time off seems rather appealing!  I was supposed to have heard back from them (via the agency) by Tuesday.  It's now Wednesday and I'm still waiting, but so it goes.  Que sera, sera!

Yesterday was a travel-filled day.  I was at the station just after 11am and on my train by 11.45am.  I had to change in London to get to Folkestone, which meant changing stations.  It wasn't too bad though, only Kings Cross to St Pancras.  Soon I was on the Javelin, a high-speed train, watching the south of England zoom by.

Weather-wise it was a miserable day.  I'm pretty sure there was one rain-cloud that covered the entire of the UK!  Luckily I caught a break in the rain at Folkestone and decided to walk to the school.  It was only 10 minutes away (15 after I got a little lost), and I was almost an hour early.  Following the directions on my not-so-trusty phone, I picked my way across pavements and roads, dodging puddles as wide as cars.  I almost got run over more than once as I was mincing about, trying not to get my shoes wet!

I finally found the right street - hurray!  Now to find the right building...not so simple.  I ended up walking past, looking more than a little lost.  Luckily, one of the staff members was watching out for me and came running to my rescue.  Apparently he remembered how difficult it was to find when he first went there.

I was given the grand tour of the school and its three (relatively small) Edwardian buildings.  It was the absolute polar opposite of the other school.  This school is in it's early development stages (read: it doesn't even have "school" status yet).  They've been an established English Language School for several years and is one of several English language schools run by one company.  They're now branching out and are becoming a boarding school, to add to their many "hats".  They will still run as an intensive school for adults and juniors (14-17 year olds), but the boarding school will be alongside that and will offer the whole GCSE and A Level curriculum.

The man who showed me around was very enthusiastic about the entire project.  He gushed a lot about "how often do you get to be part of starting up a school?" and I have to admit, his excitement was contagious.  He told me that the man in charge of the overall business has never shut down a school and he has high hopes for this one.  They have a school in Oxford which is their model for this school, but I was told with bundles of confidence "we're going to do it better!".  Well, who am I to argue with that?

The school was in a bit of uproar, as the brother of the Big Boss Man was visiting and had brought a new agent with him.  This meant that not only did they have to impress Big Boss Man's brother, but his also guest (who would be responsible for bringing more pupils to them).  The headmistress was entirely caught up with her esteemed guests, and I was left to chat with my tour guide.  We nattered away about summer camp, my teaching aspirations, the summer school he works at, and just about everything in between.  We swapped stories of challenging behaviours and giggled over some of the more bizarre experiences we'd had.

After a while, the "other, nicer meeting room" was available, so I was moved into there.  I sat down as he cleared away mugs, expecting that I'd be interviewed by the headmistress or someone similar.  Imagine my surprise when he sits down and announces that he will be interviewing me!  I think it was to my advantage that I didn't know this earlier though, since I'm pretty hopeless at interviews.  At least this way I was able to put forward a good impression before I turned into a babbling buffoon...!

Overall I felt the interview went quite well.  I don't think I rambled too much, some of my answers even made sense!  I just have to wait until next week now to find out.  I think I would greatly enjoy working at this school.  It would be an interesting challenge, and one I will probably never get the opportunity to repeat.  If only it wasn't so far away from home...

That brings me back up to date on my travels, but not even close to everything else I've been up to.

Since I came back, I've been re-writing my dad's website (which will go live as soon as the web-designer gets back off holiday) and running social media profiles for multiple businesses.  The most exciting venture I'm involved in (no disrespect to any of the others) is Ink Pantry Publishing.

Ink Pantry is run by a group of students (myself included) from the Open University's Creative Writing course.  We're working to publish a commemorative anthology of work from the course, and to date we've received 125 submissions.  With another 4 days to go that's spectacular!  We're currently debating titles for the anthology and trying desperately to rein ourselves in from picking images for the cover.  As tempting as it is, it's a bit difficult to chose a picture when we don't have a theme...ah well!  My dad has offered his services as a professional photographer...once we chose a title.

My role at Ink Pantry is to run their blog (whether that's writing posts or co-ordinating the publication of what other people write), their Pinterest and their Google+.  These appear to be the social rejects of our online presence as I largely end up talking to myself, but it keeps me amused!  The blog is far more popular, having generated a lot of interest on Facebook and Twitter.  We have a long list of ideas for posts, as well as several people lined up for interviews.  Upcoming interviews include published writers, illustrators, photographers and OU tutors.  We aim to provide updates on our progress, as well as topics we feel our community of followers will find interesting - so far we've written about book design and writing for the internet.  If there's anything people want to hear about, please drop us a line and I'll get it sorted!

Anyway, that's my marketing bit over and done with (for now).

Later this week I'll be attending a charity event for the Victoria Cross where Chris Ryan (SAS hero turned author) will be talking about his adventures.  Steve Oatway Photography are the official event photographers and we're very excited.  It's going to be very interesting and a whole lot of fun!

Next week I'll be heading over to York with dad.  He's decided he wants to take a day off to take some photos for fun.  Not for a client, not for promotional material, just for fun.  He has no agenda, no plan, just a camera and the whole of York to play with.  I'll be tagging along and will hopefully be writing a travel-related blog post about it soon after.  It's all well and good being a travel writer when you're a tourist abroad, but the real trick is viewing your home from a tourist's perspective too.

I think that's the main things I've been up to since I got home.  The rest of my time has been filled with settling back in, playing with my siblings and catching up with my family.  Not a bad way to spend my time at all!

All the best,
Charlotte

Tuesday, Blood Tuesday

I keep promising myself that I'll catch up with this blog, but life continues to race away from me! I arrived back in the UK yesterday afternoon after a crazy long journey (1 mini-van, 1 bus, 2 planes, 1 car and a whole lot of waiting around). I've been working at a family resort on Lake Champlain, Vermont for 3 weeks which has been good fun but I'm glad to be home. I seem to have escaped jet lag, but am quite sleep deprived all the same.

I decided that I'd get straight into the swing of things by jumping back into my English life with two feet. This meant that I was up and raring to go today at 7.30am (ok, I was awake...mostly). I took my little brother to school this morning, then headed over to my dad's photography gallery, Steve Oatway Photography, to assist on a photo-shoot. The client is Adele Carrington, an author who needs images to use for the book cover and as marketing material. To be honest, the thought of getting to meet an actual author who was publishing an actual book is the only thing that dragged me out of bed this morning!

We were told that the book is about a female vampire, and the image that Adele wanted involved a lot of fake blood and a white background. She would provide the vampire and the blood if we could provide the set.

Mum and I went to Tesco last night to buy a cheap king-size mattress sheet (background) and a kid's paddling pool (to catch the blood...). Fairly innocuous purchases, put to a slightly disturbing task!

After a few false starts, we were able to hang the background onto the crumbling brick wall (picture hooks – a photographer's best friend!). Our photography assistant, Lana, seemed to have a lot of fun decorating the set, though she complained that the blood was sticky and cold!

Just as we were finishing up, in walked Adele with her vampire, who was looking remarkably normal in jeans and a black top. No fangs or gothic dresses to be seen anywhere. Adele later explained that she didn't want to pander to stereotypes, and she had purposefully created a “Romany gypsy vampire” to escape the Hollywood clichés.

We all had a lot of fun on the set, especially giggling over the faces the vampire (Tina, a friend of Adele's) made as she was gradually covered in more and more fake blood. Apparently some of it was peanut butter, and she was quite put out that it was crunchy. I guess smooth peanut butter would have been more acceptable?!

There were several costume changes, liberal amounts of fake blood and a whole lot of laughs. Tina was a great sport and agreed to try almost all suggestions, most of which involved spreading blood across her face and hands! She drew the line at getting any in her hair (thus rejecting the idea of “let's just pour the jar over her head”) since she had a “very important, serious meeting to go to after this!”.

I was sent to the shop to buy some baby wipes (what better way to clean up blood?!) while everyone else had a coffee break.

On my way back, I paused outside our gate to see what it must look like to a passer-by. It was looked amusingly strange, but I suppose it could be worse, right? Somehow...? Though to be honest, I'm more concerned by what the black bin bag full of bloodied sheets and a paddling pool will look like to the bin men...!

In between shots I amused myself by taking some photos of the detail, such as of the vampire's blood-spattered diary and the mason jars full of blood!

All in all, this was a highly entertaining re-introduction into life in England as a photographer's daughter and some time gallery manager. If anyone reading this decides they need photos of vampires, please get in touch – we'd love to repeat this bizarre experience! Any challenge is welcome here.

I can't wait to see what will be thrown my way next, especially if all my upcoming projects involve this much fun.

All the best,

Charlotte