I have no idea why it took this long - I’m just a very lazy person who procrastinates like mad and hates change. My excuse, however, is I went to uni and had no time to sort it out. In truth, it had already looked like a prison cell for nearly a year prior to that…

In tidying my room, I found allsorts:

• Letters me and my ex had sent over two years ago after we broke up, trying to sort things out without seeing each other. Was doomed from the beginning of the end, but we were both stubborn people, so it was weird and sad reading a couple back. There’s some letters from exes you should keep (actual early love letters, and ones including their bank account details, for example) and others you shouldn’t. So now they’re outside my house along with the rest of the stuff in a rubbish bag, waiting to be collected by the dustmen.
• All sorts of uni application stuff from Westminster and Bournemouth, including a script I thought I’d long lost. So that was a happy find. It was the first script I wrote and though it’s goddamn awful and only 16 pages long, it’s well worth holding onto.
• Little bits and bobs I thought were important but turned out to have no use - BB bullets and no gun, crappy plastic theatre binoculars, random keys with no locks, padlocks with no keys, etc. I am the biggest hoarder of stuff there is.
• And finally… The thing that made me realise how long it was since I last had a proper clear-out of my room, hidden deep under my bed: An Evening Standard magazine from… January 2006!

God, I need to tidy more.

Having said that, all of the hoardings and pointless pieces of paper are gone, leaving me with one shelf of books, one shelf of random, sentimental things worth keeping and another shelf of important things needing keeping. A Megatrain advertisement poster is up on the wall (gotta love the Megajourneys!) and my desk finally has my Mac Mini on top of it. It’s starting to feel habitable.

Now all I need is a bean bag and an oven…

I’m one of those guys and all I do is temp in a traffic survey company. The other day in London, my sole responsibility was to take the number plates and classes of vehicles (as well as the times it arrived and departed and the amount of passengers in each) that stopped in various coach lay-bys around the Embankment area.

It was hilarious how many coach drivers popped out of their coaches and formed a queue at the parking ticket machines, trying to avoid a fine I couldn’t have given them even if I wanted to. And how many people loitering in cars waiting to pick people up suddenly left the coach-only bays altogether.

It’s also amazing how reluctant people are to help you (a coach driver simply refused to tell me how many passengers got off, claiming people like me - I’m a traffic warden now, apparently, despite wearing jeans and a t-shirt under said yellow jacket - made his job hell) yet demand help from you (over 10 tourists - and even one coach driver - asked for directions to places and when I couldn’t help through not knowing or trying to log data, more than half turned into complete arseholes as if I’m meant to have The Knowledge).

We have enough to contend with - the pickup truck my group took with us ended up with a flat battery and three of us had to push-start it from the London Eye to Waterloo Bridge. As much as you may look official, try waving down London traffic on a Saturday night for a jump-start and you may as well be an inch tall.

So next time you see a guy in a yellow jacket, logging data about traffic, ignore him when they’re doing their job and be polite if they need a bit of help, as that’s what we do for you. He has no power over you and is actually trying to help someone help you (the client for this particular survey was the Transport Planning Practice, who simply want the data in order to make London’s roads and parking spaces more effective for all types of vehicles).

Just because we won’t use the number plates for anything more than checking to see if it’s the same coach returning later in the day in the actual survey doesn’t mean we can’t report abusive drivers to the police in our own free time…