I cannot believe how cold it was today! As an added bonus, it was absolutely piddling it down as I set off for the first day of my work placement. Consequently I arrived soaked through and freezing and dying for a cup of tea.

In the reception of the St Helens Star, I was met by Steve Leary and taken up to the news room - I don't think I can go up on my own as there are security measures that prevent the door from being opened from the outside. I have to wait for someone on the other side to let me through. I suppose this means I'll have to wait for Steve every morning, unless the receptionist gets to know my face and starts to let me through. We'll see. Either way, not a problem.

My first day was enlightening, let me tell you. Newspaper work is nothing like the normal writing that I do. When I work on my novel, or indeed when I write on this blog, it's very loose and all over the place. My blogs often border on the stream-of-consciousness kind of thing, and my novel... well, I don't even know. Stuff happens. I like it to have a natural, unpredictable flow, like life, but with some sense of direction.

Writing for a newspaper, however, is totally different. There are no 120,000 word behemoths here. You have to keep it simple. Most of the things I wrote today were between 100 and 300 words. I had to trim them extensively to remove redundant words. I had to try to be witty - and my wit is generally accidental. I say something smart, then realise afterwards. I had to keep to a strict structure.

( And so the tale of journalism and epicness continues... )

It's half-term... for everyone except us lot on the Prince's Trust. This means that there's been a bit of faffery with bus passes. The passes we have allow us to travel free but only on school days, between 6AM and 8PM - so for the week they've been rendered invalid. The thing is, I had no trouble using mine this morning, on either of the two buses I have to get. The only bus trouble I had was that the first was fifteen minutes late and the second was going from a different stop.

At the end of the day, we were given £10.80 to buy a week pass... except Arriva are adamant that one actually costs £16. Going home, I just spent £4 of what they'd given me because I couldn't afford the week pass. I hope that gets sorted tomorrow, because I remember how much I was spending before we got our bus passes. Two buses, there and back; it could have cost me up to £20 a week.

( CLICKY CLICKY! )

Today was my third day of work with the ExtraCare Charitable Trust shop in Earlestown. In a nutshell, it's a voluntary job as a shop assistant, and I get to do everything from sorting clothes, to steaming them to make them look presentable, to storing them, to sticking them on the shop floor, to running the till... and there's probably more that I can't remember.

It's my Monday, Wednesday and Friday thing. Nine to five - and I believe I'm the only person who stays until the very minute the shop closes, other than the manager and deputy manager - and I bloody love it.

The work? Knackering, both physically and mentally. Carrying stuff to and fro all day gives you one hell of a workout. You haul huge plastic binbags full of clothes out of the stock room into the sorting room, spend an hour on your feet going through everything, tagging and hanging what's worth selling and binning what isn't. Then you haul them all into the steamer/kitchen area and spend a further hour steaming all the creases out of everything. Then, you have to haul it all upstairs, usually making several trips, to the storage rooms on the second floor. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sound tiring to you? It bloody well is. And it's flipping fantastic.

You see, it keeps you on your feet. There's always something to do. You're always moving about, carrying things, so you get a bit of exercise. And it's a challenge to the mind in some ways because of the complex sorting and pricing systems they've got going there. With clothes, you have to scrutinise them carefully for the slightest blemish. Marked ones get 'ragged', but the charity still receives money for scrapped clothing (50p per kilo).

For good clothes, you need to find a size, figure out whether it's been 'rotated' (sent in from another shop who's failed to sell it), and write all this down, along with the sort code (there's a different number for ladies' tops, ladies' trousers, menswear, kids' clothes, books, etc). Then you have to remember which hanger to use, remember to put a size cube on the hanger and actually tag the item. There's a lot to memorise, and when the process becomes second nature, things can be forgotten.

It's the same with running the till. There's this huge process you have to go through, and if you make a mistake, the till screams - quite literally - at you. If you press the 'cash total' button too early, for instance, it beeps loudly. And the method's slightly different when people pay via. card. I learned this the hard way the other day when I inadvertently created an anomaly in the shop's books - which Dawn the manager had to rectify with a call to the Head Office. Er - oops. Sorry, Dawn!

There's always something to do. We get loads of bags of donations every day, so there's those to be sorted. If not, there's tidying to be done in the stock room, on the shop floor - anywhere in the shop, really! Or, if you're a nutter like me who loves making tea/coffee for people, there's that to be done.

So, it keeps me busy, it hones my organisational skills, keeps me mentally alert, teaches me to socialise... and then there's the 25% discount and first pickings of anything that comes into the shop! Huzzah!

Speaking of which, I brought three more lovely items home today, all clothing. Two tops and a hat.

( In which Kelza goes on a ramble about what we all know is the main reason why she loves her job... )

In a twist of fate most cruel, I posted a reply to a comment regarding anti-virus (in response to my entry about the recent ThinkPoint conundrum), and immediately afterwards, something popped up.

Damn you, ThinkPoint! Isn't it obvious that you aren't wanted, you pitiful, greasy little bastard? Get off my shiny new computer and perish in a thousand burning rubbish heaps! Then rub salt into your eyes whilst singing the French national anthem in Anglo-Norwegian! Then gamble away your life's savings (which you've no doubt pilfered off the good, honest and slightly more idiotic members of the Internet) betting on whether a guinea pig will explode on command! You are a pointless use of space! A waste of megabites! I detest you! Go away!

And choose somewhere quiet and remote to go away to. Like Svalbard, for example. No doubt they'll have use for you there.

So. To those of you who are slightly baffled by my sudden reversion to public blogging, I have decided to emerge from beneath my rock. It was difficult; with the weather being as it is I was frozen to the ground. I panicked for a bit, hoping my raw emotion would ionise the air or generate enough heat to set me free, but alas, no luck. I then made like an utter prat and used hot water. Which froze me even more.

Slightly defrosted a million years later, I realised what happened and bought without paying a crowbar from a passing lunatic, chiselled my legs free and then prised my arms off the ground, thus defying the laws of, frankly, everything and breaking reality as a result. My characters scoffed at me saying 'you're as bad as the rest of us!' and then I had them all perish in a fire. The fire was perfectly harmless, you understand, being made of words... to people, anyway. Huzzah!

I am now in the process of figuring out how to unperish all of my characters because without them, my career as a writer will go in the general direction of down the pan. And I hear the pan isn't a very nice place. Cholera, Mafia shootings and the like. It also vaguely resembles a toilet.

( There's a lion behind this cut. And it's hungry. Happily, it's a vegetarian. Unfortunately for you, you're a leek. Happily, it doesn't like leek. Unfortunately for you, it's got naff eyesight and it thinks you're a carrot. And it loves carrots. )