(no subject)
When I lived in Galway back in 2008 or whenever it was, I briefly worked a terrible job as a door-to-door make-up salesman. You'll be glad to know I was rubbish at it. Going to work was in the first instance going to a small office in the town centre. We would run over responses to all the things people were most liable to say on realising we were selling them make-up. E.g., "I have some", "What about your sister?" sort of thing. Then we listened to some Energising Music, and split up into groups, each a car driver and three or four passengers, to sell make-up in towns throughout Connaught. These car journeys were pretty miserable: the local equivalent of 2FM was blaring, and my colleagues ranged from forgettable to hateful. But I'd found a small library's worth of old pocket-sized hardbacks of classic literature in my parents' house, and I remember spending so much time curled up at the edge of the back seat reading Oliver Twist or Crime and Punishment or whatever, books which blew me away at the time and are still strong with me now. The result of this is that in fact I don't remember these journeys as particularly miserable; indeed, the memory of reading those books is particularly fond to me, and peculiarly strong. Funny that.