Originally Published: 14 September 2016
I left Rome! I did it, I bloody went and did it. No no, calm your screams, your cries of 'why' and 'woe' and 'who gives a damn'. It was time. Two years in, two wonderful magical years of working, living, loving and getting myself up to a nice rotund 14 and a half stone (92 kg, 203lbs, thank you cheap pizza and wine). I decided it was time to leave Rome's shimmering shores and, like the great Julius Caesar before me, head back for the coast of Britannia. The reasons for the move were many and complex, but I'm bored so I'll list them out to you:
1. The lease had run out on my apartment
2. I was just so damn tired of the sun
3. I missed my old English friends
4. My apartment didn't have any central heating and winter was coming
5. I was only earning 1,000 Euros a month
6. A THOUSAND FUCKING EUROS A MONTH! COME ON I'VE BEEN WORKING FOR YOU BASTARDS FOR TWO YEARS, YOU'RE A GODDAMN INTERNATIONAL LAW FIRM GIVE ME SOME DAMN CASH!
7. I had given up coffee
Ahem. SO yes, it was a teary and bleary eyed farewell to the eternal city, my friends threw me a wonderful party to say goodbye and then there I was, standing on the doorstep of my parent's house, large suitcases stacked on my back teetering skywards, and a gruff yet not unaffectionate look on my father's face. I was back, I had come full circle, and if anyone has read my very first blog post you can probably understand that as I stood there I was suddenly rather perplexed as to what I was doing... I had escaped home! I had begun my adulthood, why the hell was I back?
The simple answer is that I was a little naive in believing that once I got back to Blighty I'd be able to simply walk into any high end job thanks to my perceived bank of experience from my time in Rome, surely someone with my new background would find it easy to land a nice cushy city job right? Right? Not right. Two months later I was still sitting on my parent's sofa, puffing and panting my enormous gelatinous self through another bag of crisps, desperately refreshing my emails hoping for at least one of the 100 applications I had made to come back with a 'yes', a 'no', a 'maybe' or an 'I don't know' (a 'can you repeat that question?' would have been appreciated too). This was around about the time my Father looked down upon his sweating, seething pile of a son and decided he didn't want to have to look at that anymore and threw me out the house, where I landed unceremoniously onto the seat of a tractor, and thus FARMman was born.
Trundling up and down the fields on my 1960s Massey Ferguson 240 plus bird seed spreader attachment gave me a lot of time to think. It also gave me a lot of time to loudly sing along to Taylor Swift songs but really it was the thinking part that was important. Here I was back in my parent's house with the same old terrible routine of pub-eat-drink-sleep-repeat that i wrote about in my first blog post, no-one was answering my applications, I was fat and the age old method of 'plug Daddy's contacts until their ears are raw' had come up short. So FARMman had to turn up the heat, and take a long hard look at himself.
The conversation went something like "Really FARMman? Are you really looking for a new job as hard as you can? I mean Really? Is this honestly the best you can do, up there on your tiny tractor?" the short answer, quite obviously, was "no". The long answer, to use a time old cliche, was "fuck no".
So clearly things had to change and so I gave my self a time limit, if I didn't have a job by October then I would do something really stupid. And I'm talking colossally stupid. If you've ever met me you will understand just how mind bogglingly, unsuitably stupid this decision was. If I hadn't got a job by October then I would join the RAF. Yup. FARMman would become PLANEman, scourge of the skies. This of course meant a few things, namely losing weight, getting some discipline and for God's sake getting a job before then to avoid having to actually go through with it!
So in between driving tractors and chopping wood (eyyyy), I began running and going to the gym, an alien place to me. As far as I can tell it's most often used by young men to admire their slightly doughy physiques in the mirror and for young women to spend their time desperately trying to avoid these doughy young men, a workout in itself I suppose. It's alarming what motivation you can get from physical exercise, as someone who had never done this before, ever, it was an alien and not altogether unpleasant activity. Armed with this fresh bout of motivation and the fact that my parents now met me at the door each day angrily tapping their feet on the floor with crossed arms and crosser faces, I began to explore new avenues of getting employed. I went to companies in person, I pestered old school friends' parents, I even went on LinkedIn (I know, the horror). Finally, and with the ever looming threat of October and death by anti-aircraft fire encroaching on me, I found, through a friend of a friend of a friend, a job somewhere that was willing to give me an interview. This wasn't new, it was my 23rd interview, the difference here was that the company was Italian.
Yes, just when I thought I had escaped them, 'le persone belle' dragged me back, after an interview that lasted for three whole hours worth of banter and professionalism and avoiding showing quite how much of my Italian I had forgotten, I finally got that call: "Mr. Butler we are pleased to say...." I screamed triumphantly, loudly and fully at the top of my lungs so I missed the rest of what she said, perhaps she never actually offered me the job, but I've been here a while now so it's going to be really awkward if that's the case. RAF successfully avoided, parents successfully placated and belly... still needs a little work but you can't win them all at once.
And there you have it, I'm no longer a Roman, I am now the boring Banker Wanker city boy that I so dreaded becoming all those years ago. It's nowhere near as miserable as you'd expect, and it now gives me leave to start the next chapter of my life, I've said goodbye to sunshine, the colourfully tan painted buildings and more colourfully tanned people, and now I have moved to the hulking grey, lumbering, ever present monstrosity of fast paced walking and iron clad buildings that is...
London.
And thus FARMman becomes CITYman