onlineFOCUS – News and Stuff For Rochford District since 2003

Congrats to Southend blogger Jack Monroe, who has a new job and a new career – as trainee reporter with the Echo:

It’s been a long journey of job applications – over 300 saved in a folder in my email inbox marked Jobs Applied For, and many more CVs dropped in along the High Street, adverts answered in shop windows and newspapers, and a few jobs picked up and not worked out along the way. I remember the day the advert appeared in the back of the Echo for trainee reporters. I didn’t see it myself, but that morning I learned which of my friends read the Echo on their lunch break, as a slew of text messages, emails and phonecalls ensued telling me that there was an advert in the newspaper that I write a weekly column for, looking for trainee news reporters….

….I wrote back in July, before the Big Open House Sale:

“This morning, small boy had one of the last Weetabix, mashed with water, with a glass of tap water to wash it down with. ‘Where’s Mummys breakfast?’ he asks, big blue eyes and two year old concern. I tell him I’m not hungry, but the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar. But these are the things that we do…. Poverty isn’t just having no heating, or not quite enough food, or unplugging your fridge and turning your hot water off. Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one weetabix and says ‘more mummy, bread and jam please mummy’ as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam.”

After over a year of this, of learning how to live on a food budget of £10 a week or less, I’m finally going to have a regular salary again, a desk with a mug on it, and hopefully I’ll never have to tell Small Boy that there is no bread or jam again.

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