Blogs: Richard's job log: 20

Richard currently works in a Birmingham law firm, after completing a contemporary history degree. He’s thinking about a paralegal career, but also has media ambitions.

After several, admittedly self-indulgent blogs, this month I was planning on resuming normal service. I was going to talk about looking for a new job and becoming a real person. All that jazz. I was going to open up the job market and have a root around. It was going to be cutting edge bloggery.

Then I realised it was nearly Christmas so I thought I would give all that real world business a miss and carry on writing about other stuff.

This time last year I wrote about the never ending menace of Christmas shoppers, lurching around like a ‘zombie hoard’. And, as I feared, they are back again on the streets of Birmingham city centre, as the Christmas market is in town.

Every year the good people of Frankfurt descend upon Birmingham, bringing with them sausages, strong beer and novelty woollen hats. People visit the city in their droves, spending millions of pounds. Christmas 2010 saw 3.1 million people attend the market.

Now I hate to bring the real world up (what with it being Christmas and everything) but surely this is the way forward, economically speaking. In every town and city throughout the land we should erect foreign markets. What I’m proposing is year-round festivals of beer, meat and spending. I’m not sure George Osborne has thought of this idea (in fairness, he probably spends a significant amount of time sobbing in a darkened room, so you can’t really blame him). Anyway, you can have this one George, it’s on me.

It would definitely work as well. Take the 2 million people unemployed, pop a Christmas/Valentine’s/St Patrick’s/St George’s Day hat on them and get them to sell seasonal knick-knacks to revellers. If the Christmas market is anything to go by, people will gobble this stuff up. New jobs created? Check. More money in the economy? Check. More woollen hats sold? Check.

So anyway, the streets are rather busy in the second city and, while I do love a sausage and a pint in the cold, I simply cannot wait for it to be Christmas. This will be my first Christmas as a married man in fact, and we will hopefully make the most of it. After all, this time next year we will either be facing the end of the world or we, as a nation, will be so poor we’ll be eating roast squirrel for Christmas dinner. Neither of those options sounds particularly appealing if I’m honest.

I promise that I will write about jobs and becoming a real person next month, but in the meantime, who is having a Christmas sausage?