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My Least Favourite Christmas Song

~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 1 Comment

The Twelve Days of Christmas is my least favourite Christmas song, mostly because it is very repetitive and, as a result, extremely catchy.

Every time I hear it being played, it manages to worm its way into my psyche, playing on repeat for hours, sometimes even days, in an incessant loop of festive merriment.

It is absolutely infuriating – nothing makes me feel more like the bastard child of Scrooge and the Grinch quite like listening to The Twelve Days of Christmas.

I also find the lyrics of The Twelve Days of Christmas absolutely ridiculous. 

As most of you probably know from having been subjected to the song every year, the Twelve Days of Christmas is about a person whose true love brings them a series of increasingly elaborate presents over the course of the twelve days.  

These gifts include seven swans-a-swimming, six geese-a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge that comes with its own complementary pear tree.

Now, I don’t know what was considered a normal Xmas pressie in the 18th century but if someone brought me an entire flock of wildfowl, I wouldn’t be inclined to write a jovial Christmas carol about them – I’d be questioning their mental stability.

I mean, after the delivery of the initial partridge, I would be pretty confused.

On Day 3, I would be getting pretty concerned.

By the time Day 4 rocked around, I’d be looking to report my them to the RSPB.

I also think the idea of giving someone six geese and seven swans as a gift is pretty far-fetched.

Considering geese and swans tend to get pissed off whenever you go even remotely near them, I doubt they would be cooperative if someone tried to turn them into a festive offering.

In fact, as far as I’m concerned, geese and swans would make a much better Halloween present because they are absolutely bloody terrifying.

Now, I’m aware that The Twelve Days of Christmas is a beloved Christmas carol that the majority of people enjoy singing every year.

Maybe I am just bitter as I haven’t got a true love who is willing to provide me with an entire aviary’s worth of birds for Christmas.

In fact, if I’m getting anything for Christmas, it’s more likely to be an unsolicited commentary on my love life from one of my elderly relatives…

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My Work Experience Experience.

~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 3 Comments

When I was 15 years old, I had to complete a week of work experience as part of my school’s ‘student enrichment’ programme.

Initially, the prospect of doing work experience excited me.

I was eager to temporarily escape the classroom and enter into professional environment for the first time.

I envisioned myself working for the local news station or a cool hipster tech company where employees sat in bean bags instead of desk chairs.

However, my enthusiasm reduced significantly when I was placed at my local Garden Centre.

My supervisor at the Garden Centre was a guy called Alan who was relatively new to the world of work himself.

Alan was seventeen years old, had zero managerial experience and had absolutely no idea what to do with me.

After giving me some brief instructions, he handed me a t-shirt with the words ‘You Plant A Question, We’ll Grow You An Answer’ printed on the back and then made himself scarce.

I went to the bathroom, changed into the shirt and walked back out onto the shop floor.

Before long, customers that had previously been ignoring me started approaching me and asking me questions, clearly assuming that I was now a font of horticultural knowledge.

This wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d known a single thing about plants.

However, the sum total of my gardening knowledge came from an episode of The Teletubbies I’d seen as a kid where I’d watched a man tend to his allotment through the telly in LaLa’s stomach.

As a result, I was completely unprepared to answer any of the customer’s questions.

For the first three days of my work experience, I stood awkwardly on the shop floor, dishing out dubious horticultural advice to a series of confused and dissatisfied customers.

Eventually, on Thursday, one of the managers on shift took pity on me and took me off the shop floor.

She handed me a batch of Yankee Candles that had just been delivered and asked me to arrange them into a display.

After three days of talking to customers, I relished the opportunity to do something vaguely creative so I sat happily in my own little world, experimenting with different colour arrangements and taking the lids off the candles to smell the different scents inside. 

However, after a couple of hours, I was approached by an old lady who had been browsing nearby. I braced myself, expecting her to ask me a question that I didn’t know the answer to.

I was relieved, therefore, when she asked me to help her retrieve a trowel from a high shelf. Finally, I thought. A task that is within my capabilities. I can actually be useful and help this old lady fulfill her trowel-based needs.

I picked up a step-ladder and placed it next to the shelf. However, as I climbed up the ladder, I suddenly felt a bit lightheaded.

All the candle sniffing had obviously gone to my head and I swayed slightly, causing the ladder to rock dangerously.

I waved my arms about, desperately attempting to restore my balance, but to no avail.

As a result, I tipped backwards and fell directly onto a nearby cactus.

To cut a long story short, I essentially flattened a cactus with my arse.

Just in case you have never fallen off a ladder onto a cactus before, let me tell you, it is a pretty painful experience.

After I had gotten over the initial shock of the impact, I tentatively raised myself to my feet and, for a few moments, stared blankly at the plant that I had obliterated with my butt cheeks.

I wasn’t sure what to do about the state of the cactus or, for that matter, my arse.

I remembered the adverts that I’d seen on TV offering compensation for people who had had an accident at work but I’d never seen one featuring someone falling onto a cactus. I wasn’t sure if it even counted as an ‘accident at work’ but I reckoned it would be worth looking into.

At the very least, I thought I should probably report the incident to my supervisor so I handed the trowel to the old lady and went looking for Alan.

When I found him, I was still slightly traumatised by the incident. My brain wasn’t functioning properly and I couldn’t think clearly about what I was saying.

As a result, I ran up to him and the words, ‘Alan, I’ve got some pricks in my bum!’ just fell out of my mouth.

Alan was, understandably, quite taken back.

Alan gasped and looked quite worried.

I was initially quite touched by this. I thought that maybe I had underestimated him as a manager. It seemed that he really cared about my wellbeing after all…

Despite my unfortunate encounter with the cactus (RIP), I managed to get through the rest of my work experience unscathed.

The following week, me and the rest of my year group returned to school where we were asked to write a reflection about our experience in the world of work.

Needless to say, mine turned out a bit different to most other peoples’.

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Things My Parents Argue About Now That They’re Retired

~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 1 Comment

Like every couple who have been together for a significant amount of time, my parents are prone to the occasional argument.

I don’t think that this is particularly their fault. They have been together for thirty years now and being with same person for three decades has its challenges.

In addition, two years ago, my mum joined my dad in the realms of retirement and, as a result, the two of them have been spending more time at home together than they did previously.

Before they both retired, they spent long hours apart working shifts which provided them with a healthy break from each other. As the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder but presence does a frictionless relationship squander (not sure that this is an actual saying, not even sure that frictionless is a word tbh..)

Like most people, my parent’s never fight about the actual emotional tensions in their relationship.

Instead, they tend to use everyday items and mundane issues as proxies for the underlying problems that they are attempting to address. For example, they recently had an argument over a jar of jam which they insisted was ‘about the jam and nothing but the jam’. However, I personally think it was about my Dad’s percieved lack of emotional transparency.

Like most couples who have enjoyed many years of marriage, my parents have an unparalleled ability to create an argument out of just about anything, including the process of arguing itself. One of their favourite arguments is the ‘We’re Not Having an Argument’ argument in which each of them tries to convince the other that they are not pissed off whilst progressively becoming increasingly pissed off.

This argument, which sometimes feels like an infinite loop of disagreement, can basically be summed up as the following.

The pandemic has also put a lot of additional tension on my parent’s relationship.

Being together for thirty years is challenging.

Being together for thirty years and then retiring and living together in the same house is even more challenging.

Being together for thirty years, retiring and living together in the same house WITH NO FORM OF ESCAPE is another thing altogether.

I first realised that my parent’s relationship was suffering from pandemic pressure a few months ago when they had a full-on meltdown argument over a towel.

The argument started when my dad made the grave mistake of disrupting a towel washing system that my mum had put into place during the first lockdown.

Now I’m not entirely sure of the intricate details of my mum’s towel washing system (something to do with keeping light and dark towels separate) but I assume she made it in an attempt to create some sort of order for herself in the middle of the coronavirus chaos.

Therefore, when my dad tampered with the system, he was messing with one of the things that was helping my mum cling to some semblance of control; this is the only thing I can think of to explain the ferocity of her reaction.

My dad bore the brunt of my mum’s towel-fuelled wrath for around fifteen minutes, making several further impassioned comparisons between her domestic activities and Orwell’s 1984 in the meantime.

The argument eventually climaxed when my dad stormed out of the house in order to get some ‘freedom from oppression’ time and threatened that he might not come back. However, his rebellious resolve didn’t last long as, ten minutes later, he returned home because he needed a wee.

Now, I don’t want you to get the impression that my parents have an awful relationship; they don’t. Obviously, things have been very stressful and uncertain over the last year and a half and this manifests itself in tension and outbursts of rage over insignificant things.

I’ve heard that it is important to look for small blessings in times of hardship and, as far as my parent’s relationship is concerned, I guess one of the small blessings is they haven’t been going on as many car journeys together as they would have done in the before times.

The car is probably one of the worst places to have a squabbling match as it physically impossible to take a time out unless you do a Ladybird and lob yourself into the road. Therefore, any argument that my parents enter into the car tends to escalate and become quite heated.

Obviously having an impassioned argument isn’t one of the things that driving instructors tend to focus on when teaching people to drive safely.

Maybe then, it is a small solace that my parents have been stuck in the house together because at least then I don’t have to worry about them inadvertently crashing because they’ve been fighting about towels.

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My D of E Experience – Part 2: Mountain Rescue Edition

~ Joanne Sarginson ~ Leave a comment

Before you go on a DofE expedition, one of the key skills you have to learn is map-reading.

Learning how to map read is important because you are not allowed access to your smart phone during the expedition and if you get lost you can’t just Google Maps your way out of the situation.

In my opinion, giving a teenager a map and expecting them to know which direction to go in is a dubious concept. I didn’t even know who I was back then, let alone where I was going.

Despite this, I somehow managed to make it through my Bronze expedition without getting lost.

My Silver practice expedition, however, was a different story.

On the trip, I was in a group with three other girls; Emma, Anita and Nashwa.

The first two days of the expedition had gone quite well. We had not been chased by cows or any other types of agricultural livestock and I had only fallen head first into a bog once.

However, on the penultimate day, we were walking down a steep hill into a valley and, when we reached the bottom, it dawned upon us that we had absolutely no clue where we were.

We had been concentrating so hard on not decking it and sliding down the hill on our backsides, that we hadn’t really been concentrating on where we were going.

Now, the smartest thing to do at this point would have been to retrace our steps, walk back up the hill and try to get our bearings from a higher vantage point. But we’d already walked up several hills that day and, quite frankly, couldn’t be arsed walking back up another one.

We knew that when we had started descending, we had been going in the right direction so we assumed that if we carried on walking in that direction, we would eventually arrive somewhere vaguely near the campsite.

After around two hours of walking, the sky was getting a bit murky and we were becoming increasingly concerned. We were in a pretty remote area and hadn’t seen a road or village for several hours and there was nobody we could see to ask for help or directions.  

At the beginning of the expedition, we had been given an old brick phone to use in emergencies so we rang one of the teachers and told her that we were lost. She then replied with what remains to this day one of the most useless responses I have ever received:

Considering that the very nature of being lost means you tend to have no idea where you are, this question was pretty hard to answer.

We tried to describe our surroundings on the off-chance that this would help her to pinpoint our location.

However, it turned out that finding a location in the Peak District on the basis of that it had some trees and some grass was the equivalent of finding a specific place in the city with some cars, a lot of concrete and a few mad-looking pigeons.

Eventually, we gave our teacher the coordinates of our last checkpoint and she told us to stay where we were and set up camp.

She reassured us that we couldn’t have gone that far and told us that some of the expedition leaders had set out to look for us so we would probably be found by the end of the day.

Feeling somewhat reassured, we set up one of our tents and tried our best to relax and get some sleep.

However, when we woke up the next morning, we still hadn’t been found.

To make things worse, a thick layer of cloud had come down into the valley, restricting visibility and, for some reason, we no longer had any signal on our phone.

Logically, we should have known that teachers had a safeguarding responsibility not to leave any students stranded in some random remote area of the Lake District and remained calm.

However, as we were four teenagers, we immediately over-dramaticised the whole situation and freaked out.

After several minutes of catastrophising, we exhausted ourselves and stood looking at the cloud that created a slightly ethereal atmosphere around us.

‘Maybe we’ve died and gone to heaven,’ Emma said quietly.

‘No if this was heaven then there wouldn’t be so much sheep poo everywhere,’ I replied, more to reassure myself than anything else.

After a while, the cloud transformed into a fine drizzle and we decided to pack up our tent and gear and start walking in order to warm ourselves up.  

We set our compasses in the general direction we were supposed to be heading in but, other than that, we had absolutely no idea where we were going.

To make things worse, around twenty minutes into the walk we came across a sheep skull lying on a rock in a small stream. Of course, our brains immediately rocketed into over-analytic panic.  

After we had been walking for what seemed like an age, we finally came across a sheep shed which was extremely exciting as it was the first thing we had seen in over 24 hours that remotely resembled civilisation.

We rushed inside, relieved to have found some shelter from the rain that was slowly soaking through our waterproofs.

Once inside, we unpacked our rucksacks and got into our sleeping bags.

As it was the last day of our expedition, we were running low on supplies. In terms of food, we had half a packet of Tangfastics, a Cuppa Soup and two special K bars between us.

Assuming we were miles from civilisation, we immediately put a rationing system into place, reasoning that if we all limited ourselves to one Tangfastic a day, we would maybe be able to last for a week before we starved to death.

Although it was nice to be out of the rain, the fact that we were no longer walking gave our minds space to ruminate and it wasn’t long before our thoughts started to spiral.

We continued on this train for several minutes, digging ourselves deeper into a pit of hyperbolic despair until:

We all fell silent, somewhat consoled by this thought.

We had been sitting in the shed for around 30 minutes when Nashwa noticed that a bar of signal had returned to the phone and we briefly considered calling our mums with our last words.

Then, worried that this oasis of signal would be temporary state of affairs, we thought it was best to try and call for help. We decided to bypass ringing the teachers and go straight for the big guns and call Mountain Rescue.

When Mountain Rescue picked up the phone, it turned out that they were already looking for us. They’d been contacted by our teachers and had already been out searching for several hours.  

Once we hung up the phone, we were beside ourselves with relief and excitement. Everything was fine! The teachers hadn’t left us for dead and Mountain Rescue were out looking for us! We were saved!

Then a disturbing thought started to dawn on us. If Mountain Rescue had been out looking for us for hours, why hadn’t they found us yet? Were we so lost that we couldn’t be found even by Mountain Rescue? Had we accidentally walked through a wardrobe and had ended in some Narnia-like alternate universe?

Over the course of the next hour, Nashwa called Mountain Rescue several times for reassurance. Eventually, it got to the point where the operator didn’t even bother asking who was on the end of the line and just simply said the words ‘Is this Nashwa again?’ whenever he picked up the phone.

Around two hours after our initial phone call, we heard the sound of an engine. Assuming that Mountain Rescue had finally arrived to rescue us, we ran estatically out of the shed, unaware that the person who was approaching the shed was in fact just a farmer on a quadbike.

Imagine if you will, that you are a farmer going about his business in the peace and quiet of the English countryside when suddenly four semi-traumatised girls gone feral burst out of your shed manically blowing their whistles and yelling ‘Mountain Rescue’ at you.

Needless to say, the poor farmer dude crapped himself.

‘It’s me, Nashwa!’ Nashwa yelled in his face, obviously still convinced that he was part of the search team. We all waited for him to react but he just started at us, completely bewildered.

‘It’s Nashwa,’ Emma shouted, pointing at Nashwa only to be met with more confused silence.

‘Nashwa,’ I added unhelpfully.

A pause.

‘Wait are you not Mountain Rescue?’ Anita asked.

‘No. I’m just a farmer. I live in the house just down there.’

We stared at him disbelievingly. ‘There’s a house here?’

‘Yes, it’s only a two minute walk away. You’ll be able to see it when the cloud lifts.’

We stared at him and then we stared at each other, trying to process the fact that we had been sitting in a cold windswept shed for hours, convinced that we were miles from civilisation and beyond hope of rescue when, in fact, civilisation had only been 500 metres away all along.

I reckon that the Duke of Edinburgh would have been proud of us…

To read Part 1 of my DofE experience, click here. If you enjoyed this post, feel free to visit the ‘All Blog Posts’ tab at the top of the page for more. For more blog posts and drawings, you can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook .

My D of E Experience

~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 2 Comments

A couple of days after Prince Philip died, I received an email from the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award asking me to contribute any memories I had of completing the award to an online forum.

Thinking back, the expeditions immediately stood out to me as the most memorable part of my D of E experience.

For those who don’t know, the D of E is an award created by Prince Philip and is designed to help young people develop skills that will benefit them in their adult life.

As part of completing each level of the award (Bronze, Silver and Gold), participants are required to go on an expedition.

This expedition takes the form of a multi-day hike and is designed to help participants develop resilience and self-reliance by taking them out of their comfort zone.

During the day, you walk through the countryside in a group of 4-6 people, carrying your cooking and sleeping equipment with you, and, at night, you set up your tents and camp.

Now, this may sound like quite a fun experience; an opportunity to make new friends and immerse yourself in nature. And it could well be if it weren’t for the fact that the majority of D of E expeditions are conducted in some of the wettest, most windswept locations in the UK, such as the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands.

Camping in the Lake District is less about roasting marshmallows under the stars and more about trying desperately to get your tiny stove to light under a massive pissing rain cloud.

As a result of the weather, you tend to spend the majority of your time on a D of E expedition in a state of perpetual dampness.

It is virtually impossible to keep all your stuff dry.

Even if you don’t have the misfortune of full-on falling into a river, the rain find will most likely find a way of seeping into your backpack, even if you’ve triple lined it with bin bags.  

Setting up a tent in the rain without getting the inner lining wet is also extremely tricky.

If it happens to be windy as well, the canvas will flap about all over the place, sometimes attempting to fly away from you, sometimes blowing directly into you and smothering you whilst you walk around like some soggy tent zombie trying to free yourself.

Of course, trying to build a tent in freezing cold sideways rain is far from ideal. However, pointing this out to your expedition supervisor is basically an exercise in futility.

If you do happen to complain about the situation to a teacher, they will most likely look down at you from the warmth of their heated minibus and say something along the lines of:

After this, they will probably leave you to your own devices, saying that they’re going to get an ‘early night’ which, for those uninitiated with the D of E, is teacher code for ‘going down the pub’.

Because of the high levels of rain, the ground that you walk on during a D of E expedition tends to be quite soggy and uneven.

Occasionally, you get the luxury of walking along a well-defined path but more often you end up having to navigate open fields, rocky hillsides and full-on bogs.

In addition, to this you are also carrying a heavy backpack with all your stuff in which really messes with your centre of gravity.

I discovered this on my very first Bronze practice expedition when my group were walking across a boggy field.

Around a quarter of the way across the field, I put my foot down, assuming that the ground below it was solid, only to feel my leg suddenly sink into a concealed pool of muddy water.

I pitched forward and landed face first in the bog.

Under normal circumstances, I would have been able to get back up again quite easily.

However, because I had all my belongings for the weekend strapped to my back, I found myself pinned down with my cheek pressed into the bog, unable to move.

In a dubious display of D of E team-working spirit, the rest of my group laughed hysterically at me for at least a minute before helping me up.

The fact that the majority of D of E expeditions are based in the British countryside also means that participants tend to come face to face with some of the UK’s most dangerous animals, including sheep, horses, midges and, the most fearsome of all, cows.  

Before starting my D of E, I was not particularly afraid of cows. However, before starting our Bronze expedition, we were all given a lecture on the dangers of cows by a gruff CCF man who was supervising our trip.

At this point, some of the boys burst into laughter. Meanwhile, I was sat a few metres away, imagining a cow moving in for the kill whilst the Jaws music played ominously in the background.

Two days later, I encountered some cows in the flesh. They were standing in a field that my group needed to walk across to stay on route. We decided to walk around the edge of the field in order to keep distance between us and the cows.

Initially, this tactic worked quite well. The cows barely noticed our presence until one of the straps on my backpack became snagged on a tree branch.

I reached around and tugged at the strap in order to release it. When it came loose, the tree branch snapped backwards loudly, drawing the attention of the cow closest to me in my direction.

I turned around the cow’s gaze met mine.

I’m not sure if my life flashed before my eyes but, if it did, I was too scared to notice.

There I was, participating in an award that was supposed to help me develop skills that would set me up for the rest of my life and now it seemed the rest of my life was going to be non-existent because I was going to get sat on by a cow.

The last thing I was going to see before I died was a cow’s arse.

Needless to say, I panicked. I tried to throw myself over the stone wall that lined the field but the weight of the bag on my back meant that I did not get as much height as I had originally intended.

As a result, I ended up doing some weird chest bump with the wall before falling backwards onto my backpack. After spending a few moments waving my limbs about like some sort of upended tortoise, I managed to roll over and get back on my feet.  

The cow watched all of this nonchalantly and then, obviously deciding that I was too much of an idiot to be a threat, it went back to chewing grass whilst I hurried to catch up with the rest of the group.

That night I lay wide-eyed in my tent, hyper-alert to every noise that sounded outside the tent, convinced Cowzilla was out on the prowl.

Contrary to expectations, coming face to face with a cow was not the scariest experience I endured on my D of E award.

Instead, this award goes to an incident involving a bit of dodgy map reading and an encounter with Mountain Rescue. But that’s a story for another time… (and by ‘another time’, I mean whenever I get round to writing a post about it).

I’m not sure exactly what I was supposed to take away from my Duke of Edinburgh expeditions. I think Prince Philip intended for young people to develop as people by taking part in them and, if developing a lifelong phobia of cows counts as character growth, I guess it’s mission accomplished.

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to check out some of my other posts. For more blog posts and drawings, you can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook .