Self Drive Camping - Diary of a Courier part 4

Part 4 - 02/11/2004

It’s 6:30pm… the last of your arrivals have just been happily shown into their accommodation... much like every other day you’ve now got the evening free to enjoy yourself. But how should you entertain yourself? Do you:

A) Decide to go and do some customer visits. It’s been a gorgeously hot day and you’ve seen plenty of your families stocking up on food for the BBQ. So once you’ve smelt the cooking of meat and heard the popping of wine corks you hop on your bike and make sure that the customer is enjoying their stay… if they want to give you a glass of red and a burger, well that’s just a happy coincidence.
B) Head to the campsite shop, stock up on beer and prepare for a big one. You can always go on to a dodgy French club once you’re suitably drunk. Once at the club, ignore the ‘eight hours before work’ drinking ban and enjoy some cheesy Europop before waking up the entire campsite on your return at half past four.
C) Decide to have a quiet one with the other couriers. Joke about no-one remembering what stairs or carpets are, debate which cleaning product is best at removing those stubborn stains, and then indulge in some gentle xenophobia when all the different nationalities mock each other.

Answers on a postcard to the usual address…

If you’ve ever wondered what couriers get up to when they are off duty, then permutations of all three sums it up pretty well. Consider this fact… I’m not a heavy drinker. Back home I get slightly drunk when I’m out with my friends at weekends, but other than that will hardly touch a drop… on the campsite I drank everyday! Admittedly sometimes it would just be a couple of stubbies or a glass of wine with dinner, but everyday drink past my lips. This was due in part to the fact that it was a holiday job. You’re on a campsite, with great weather, why not have fun and drink? But it was also equally due to the pressure of living life as intensely as we did… so where else to take this article than down the reality TV road – Welcome to the Big Courier Campsite!!!

(In the infamous Geordie Big Brother accent): “It’s day 36 on the Big Courier Campsite and there has been a clear division between the two groups… tensions are high as the fall out from Courier Christmas kicks in, Steve (we’ll pretend that’s my name) enters the diary tent.”

“Well what can I say about last night? It started off all peacefully as we made party hats in the colours of our respective companies; I went off to an empty mobile to prepare the roast dinner expecting to be joined by the other couriers soon. After only a couple turned up to help cook, the others arrived (many in a state of drunkenness) hurled abuse at each other, had a water and food fight and threatened to pour red wine over me.

“All in all it was a great night, and now virtually no-one’s talking to each other. The new courier Briony has arrived to all of this and must be wondering what she’s got herself into.”

That wasn’t a dramatisation, it really happened. The fight in this year’s Big Brother was nothing compared to the problems we had at the start of the season.

You see while we had lots of great times together it wasn’t all sweetness and roses for us season workers. At one point there was a distinct us against them feel amongst the two groups that appeared. It wasn’t a nice place to be. But there was a reason behind this, when you go to your job if work with people who you don’t click with, you might get annoyed by them and even have arguments, but then come 5pm you head home and forget all about the trials of that day. For us there was no escape. If you didn’t like someone you never got the chance to fully get away from them… a small quirk that slightly irritated you at first would become the single most annoying characteristic ever seen! And you hated them for it.

Plus while at home there are soaps (and reality shows) to take your mind off things we had none of that… so our day to day lives – as intense as it was – became our reality show.

This analogy is perhaps most apt as you had over 20 completely different types of people forced together. Some left as expected during the season, some arrived and proceeded to mix it up; there were even the surprise departures (such as one courier ‘doing one’ at half-four in the morning when we got home from a night out, many tears followed). Plus there was also love, romantic trysts, rendezvous in tents, couples breaking up and anything else you’d expect to see in a top quality reality show. We all said that we could now understand some of the pressure that hits Big Brother contestants when you can’t escape each other.

But don’t get me wrong, this was not always a bad thing as it made for some exciting times and the sheer intensity of our surroundings meant that you formed some close bonds very quickly. You were a family and so with that came good and bad times, but above all we got through it and survived. It was intense, often scarily so, but it was worth every minute of it.

I’ve realised I’ve gone off the designated topic of how we entertained ourselves, but I hope you found the insight into the intensity of our surrounding interesting. Next time I’ll try to let you know how we kept ourselves entertained and whether customers lived up to my expectations, but we’ll see where my memories take me.

Until then to add to the soundtrack of the summer I shall leave you with The Pogues/Butterfly and the track Dirty old Town.

Any feedback please send to cyhsyf@soon.com

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