#99 Let me bore you to sleep - Jason Newland (19th February 2019)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Let Me Bore You to Sleep. Oops, just playing around with something. Don't be alarmed, it's just a computer.

Oh, come on. Right. Oh, you're messing me about.

I want it to be fit screen, that's it. 99%. I want it to be 100%.

Anyway, doesn't matter. So, do you only listen to this or watch this where you can safely close your eyes, fall asleep, do whatever is necessary for you to be comfortable, really. And don't drive tractors.

Okay, I should reframe that. If you're a farmer, I don't mean never, I just don't drive tractors during the recording, when you're listening to it. Otherwise, you might end up plowing your neighbor's field.

And it's not a euphemism. I mean, literally, you could be plowing their field and doing all that work for nothing. If you fell asleep and you end up, all of the neighbors waking up.

So, I can't believe the whole of the country has been plowed. But who did it? And you'll be at home thinking, oh no, all that work I did. I'm not going to get paid.

If only I'd listened to Jason and just kept my eyes open. No, I'm not saying just don't play it unless you close your eyes. Also, same goes if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe.

So, this is, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think this is number 99. Which isn't bad, is it really? You think, I've probably been doing this for a year now. And if I remember correctly, I started these in February or March last year.

And now it's the 19th of February, 2019. And here I am, number 99. Oh, I can't stop but yawn.

These sessions make me yawn, they do. So, I kind of wanted the hundredth one to be special, but I don't really know how it could be. How could it be any more special than any of the others? They're all special in their own way.

That's what my mum used to say to me. We're all special in our own way. We've all got, we've all got our own little talents.

One day, Jason, you'll find out what yours is. It's like, thanks, mum. I'm 39.

So, yeah. So, here we are together, gathered together. And in a minute, I will stop yawning.

I can just get on with it. So, I don't know what the, I don't even know how many of these I was going to do when I first did it. It was just an idea.

Let me bore you to sleep because I realised that, I think what I did was I was trying to do a sleep session or a relaxation session or something like that. And I ended up just yabbering on about nothing for whatever time it was. And instead of deleting it, which is what I would normally do, I thought, oh, maybe I can use it.

Maybe if I give it the title, let me bore you to sleep, then it means I haven't wasted the last 50 minutes. And it went from there. And what's strange is they are becoming more popular over time.

The deep sleep whisper ones are still the most popular ones that I do. But the let me bore you to sleep have become more listened to, more downloaded than they were, which I'm not pleased about. Obviously, not wide awake about, but I'm pleased.

So, therefore, I will continue. If I was doing this and I got to 99 and I still only had like five people listening, then I wouldn't be doing them. But the viewership and audience has to grow.

Otherwise, there's no point. It can't sort of stay at the same. I mean, admittedly, I suppose if it stayed at the level it is now and it didn't grow or change, I'd have to continue because there's a lot of people that maybe are depending upon me producing new material.

But it's nice to see growth. It's nice to see progression, I think. And to know that what I'm doing is useful and reaching a wider audience.

So my request from you is to please share what I do on your Facebook page or your Instagram or wherever you socialize online. If you do like what I do, if you generally like what I do, please share my podcast, MP3s, my website or my YouTube channel, the videos, please share it. Be my promoter or, you know, if you do like what I do, because that'd be good.

I think that'd be really cool because I can't really afford to do adverts. I have done adverts in the past when I was, what year is it? Yeah, even going back to probably 2009, I think, maybe earlier, maybe 2008. I used to do Google ads for my website.

2009, 2010. In 2012, which was the height of my popularity regarding probably the website and the YouTube channel, because I'd been quite stable with the stuff that I'd done. I had a half a million views on my YouTube channel.

I'd had it for about 18 months. So I was quite pleased with how it was going. And so I was advertising the website as well, which again, yeah, probably also had links to the YouTube videos.

And so yeah, so it's all kind of, there are ways of doing it, but I just, it's very businessy. And I kind of like prefer someone just to take control of that side of things and just, you know, just get the audience. Instead, I've just done it the really the hard way, very long 13 year way.

And amongst those 13 years, I've continuously been deleting stuff, deleting channels, deleting or changing the website. I've changed it about 85 times in the last 13 years. So every time I change it, the links to the pages get deleted and they're no longer valid.

So it's weird really. So I got my little pad, a little electronic pad in front of me, which is a new thing that I've been doing. And it's not so much that I'm preparing what I'm going to say, but just so I've got an idea, you know, because the more regularly I make a recording, not these, not the let me bore you to sleep, but the deep sleep whisper or the short anxiety relief, which I've started or anxiety reduction.

So I did the fourth one today. I need to have a little bit more focus on what I'm doing. So I started to write down, you know, just literally before I start the session, write down roughly what I'm going to focus on and then sort of doodle a little bit while I'm talking a little bit just to sort of, okay, what can I say? What did I say? Just so I can kind of keep track of it.

And I thought I'd do that with this, but it's not working. This, this doesn't, uh, I suppose I could try, you know, but this is a very directionless recording. I think if I started trying to be, uh, cohesive and structured with these recordings, I think they would die out.

I don't think I could do it. I don't think, um, if I knew what I was going to talk about before I started, that'd be probably difficult. Um, I don't have a script.

I've never had a script. Uh, but I'm trying to, I'm trying to get a little bit more organized in certain aspects of what I do. But with the, with these ones, this is free form talking rubbish kind of, uh, although I can choose a subject and talk about it.

So for example, I had someone on Facebook asked me to talk about, cause I put a, I put a post on Facebook saying, what would you like me to talk about on my, let me bore you to sleep recordings? Is there anything you'd like me to talk about? So I had a couple of people. One person said, was three people, but one said, can you talk about what you would do if you won the lottery? No, not won the lottery. No, is it, if you were going to get a hundred thousand pound? Yeah.

Oh yeah. You get a hundred thousand pound, but you have to spend it in one week and have nothing to show for it. Um, but I'm just thinking afterwards, this right now, and said, otherwise you don't get anything.

The thing is, if someone's giving you a hundred thousand pound and you spend it on stuff and, and you haven't correctly spent it, you've not lost anything cause you still spent it, haven't you? Um, you can't take back the money. So yeah, that wouldn't work with it. Unless it was like a, a Brewster's millions, you know, with Richard Pryor where he had to spend, what did he have to spend? 20 million to get $200 million, something like that.

You have 30 days to spend, uh, you know, loads of money, but he couldn't have any, anything to show for it. And at the end of it, he'd get paid like 10 times the amount. And I think he did exactly what anyone else would do.

And he just took, he took the opportunity because let's face it, it'd be brilliant fun, wouldn't it? Can you imagine someone saying, Oh, there you go. There's 10 million. You've got to spend it in the next 30 days.

You can go anywhere in the world. You can do anything you want. But at the end of the 30 days, you've got to have no money in your pocket.

I'd, I'd take, I'd take the challenge. It'd be fun. I'm not sure if the, uh, the day after it ends would be very much fun, but maybe just saying, okay, well, I'll book a helicopter now to take me to wherever you want to go.

I think if you've got that kind of money and you have 30 days to spend it, you might as well decide what you want to do and spend the rest of your life doing. If you know what you want to do and then use that money to meet the people that can help you. So if you want to work in Facebook, for example, an actual dream to work in, in Silicon Valley in America, then you could use that money to woo, uh, Zuckerberg and like give him money.

It's not giving money, but it's all, can I take you for lunch and, you know, spend 40, 50, a hundred grand on lunch and take him out and say, look, I really love what you do. We love to work for you. Um, please give me the opportunity.

You can bombard him with flowers for 30 days. And at the end of it, you end up with no money, but you end up, might end up with a job, which will be a dream, the dream job for you. Maybe just as an example, or you could use that money.

There might be someone that you're in love with and, or someone that you're already with, and you could get married. You can have the biggest wedding ever because a wedding's a useless waste of money, isn't it? So you could use, and there's nothing to show for it. So you can spend all that money on a wedding.

You can invite people and you can do the thing that, the annoying thing that no one really likes is when they get a wedding invitation. First of all, it's like, oh, not another wedding. That's another present I've got to buy.

And then they see that it's going to be in Spain. So, okay, so I've got a wedding, but now I'm going to have to travel to another country. So that's an extra few hundred quid and I've got to pay for a hotel.

It's like, okay, I thought the wedding was meant to be about you. It's now turned into about us. It's like not, not good.

One of my cousins got married in Switzerland. I don't think they had that many people turn up. It's just, it's like get married in a country where you're, unless you live, I suppose if you live in Switzerland, it's different.

But if your family live in Japan, perhaps you don't get married in India. You know, you might go to Japan and get married just so that the people that you want to go and see you can visit and travel. I love getting advice, wedding advice.

That could be my job. Like a wedding advisor. Get more balloons.

That could be my advice. Don't do it. So, yes, you could waste your money by getting married.

And then, so you can't buy a house. Imagine that. So you spent and had the most extraordinary, extravagant wedding with lakes of chocolate.

And, you know, if you've paid Ed Sheeran to come and play songs for you, or in fact, you might have just paid him just to stand there in his underpants and not play any music. But you paid him so much that he's willing to do it. And you just, you do all that and you go on a lovely, beautiful holiday to the most amazing holiday destination for your honeymoon.

But Bournemouth or, you know, Leeds or somewhere like that. And then you get back to your one bedroom flat, which before you had all this money was absolutely a wonderful place to live and you really enjoyed it. But now you've had all this luxury for 30 days.

And now you're back. Because you couldn't buy anything. Couldn't buy a new house, couldn't buy a new home, couldn't buy a new car.

Because then, you know, because you'd have something to show for the money. So, you know, you wasted it on a wedding. And now you're in that flat.

And you might not have been living together before. But now you're wedded. You're married.

You know, most people live together when they're married. In my knowledge base, unless someone sees themself as other than that, you know, they might, what's the right phrase? I forget. But they might, yeah.

I think my ideal situation is what Woody Allen did. I should rephrase that quickly and tell you exactly what I mean. So he married someone and he lived across the park, like in New York.

I don't know which park it is, but New York is a park. It might be called New York Park. But he lived in an apartment across the park from his wife, who'd also lived in an apartment.

And I'm making this little bit up here, but they could see each other. They could wave to each other. I don't know if that ever happened.

And I thought that would be quite a good scenario. Quite a nice scenario to not have to, again, this probably sounds bad, but not have to see the same person every day. That's how maybe I could reword it to not have to, would be nice to probably have a little break every now and then.

And then when you do see each other, it can be butterflies and the excitement, like the first time you met all over again. It could be, it could be brilliant. I always wondered what to do with my counselling skills, but I reckon marriage advisor, that could be my next step.

Because when I was a counsellor, because technically I am a counsellor, but I'm not, I'm qualified, but I don't do it anymore. I haven't done it for four years or however long. So I'm technically, I don't know, unemployed counsellor, or I don't know however you want to think of it.

And people used to ask me, do you specialise? Like what kind of counsellor? Do you mean what kind of counsellor? Counsellor. They don't realise that actually being, to train as a counsellor, that's, you can counsel anybody. I got a degree, three years full-time, university.

You can counsel anybody of any age. It's not really specialist. But then if you go and work in a hospice, or you go and work with people of elderly age, or work with young people, you can get extra training to, you know, if you're working with people with autism, special needs people, you know, in a hospice environment.

So you can get, or drug and alcohol dependency, you can get specialist training in that. Or if you work in that environment, that is something I guess you're specialising. So I could be a marriage guiding counsellor.

Guidant? Guidance? I don't know. Sometimes it's hard to, I found it sometimes quite difficult to separate being a counsellor from being a human being. Because you've got the, you know, like the human mind, which likes to overreact to things.

I suppose like the tabloid newspaper brain, that kind of over-exaggerating certain facts in order to make things fantastical, you know. And chaotic. There's a very kind of chaoticness to that as well, I think.

And gossipy, and you know, kind of. So as a human being, I think we've all kind of got that within us. It's just standard.

I think we kind of seem to be born into it, or born with that ability to find other people's misery interesting for some reason. I don't so much, but sometimes I do. So I think it's not so much that I don't find other people's misery interesting, I just don't find other people interesting.

So that's probably my... Someone said to me the other day, they said, well that's... He said, how can you devote your life and all your energy and time to helping people, yet not be interested in people? But not particularly like people, not be interested in them, or... He said to me, that's a contradiction. I said, yeah, but I can't help that. I can't help that I have zero interest in other people, pretty much.

I've got a very, very... I've got a very huge lack of interest in humans. But I'll be honest, I'm now at an age where I can be honest. It's always been the same.

My whole life, I've always... I just hit the microphone, sorry. My whole life, I've always been the same, since I was a kid. It's... But I care about people, to an extent.

If someone fell over, I'll be the first person there to help, if I can. Unless, of course, I'm further away, then I can't be, can I? But I remember a couple of times, it was a really windy day, and this woman was rolling... It's going to sound really bad, so I'm trying not to laugh. She wasn't hurt.

Thank you. Sorry. It was at the bus station, and I was just walking towards the bus station, and this woman, you couldn't even see it was a woman, to be fair, because of the distance.

It was that kind of wind where the paper was just blown everywhere. She was rolling around on the floor, being blown around, and people were just walking past. That's why I thought, are my eyes... Am I seeing right? Because I wouldn't walk past someone like that.

It's just, why would anyone? But people were just ignoring her, so I went over, I helped her, and as soon as I walked over and helped her, other people came, and I helped her up, and she was okay, I think. I don't know if she was... She might have been injured. I don't remember.

Oh yeah, what I did, I took her to the bus, because I had this... A part of the bus station had a bus... It was like a hut, like a porter cabin thing. If you've ever been on a building site, it's the place you go to to go to the toilet. It's that kind of thing, but they sat in there and helped customers with their bus inquiries.

And directions as well, I imagine, probably. So yeah, I just took her over, and they... I think they might have called an ambulance for her or something, but I just couldn't believe it. It was just funny to watch.

I had no idea that a human being was connected to this at all until I got closer, because it just looked like there was a... See, if you're not in England, you won't probably understand, might not understand this, but a Guy Fawkes. A Guy Fawkes is a... It's kind of like a... I suppose the closest thing would be a scarecrow kind of thing. You'd have a... It's like a human-shaped mapley thing, but it's usually done with paper inside rather than straw.

And you put it on top of the bonfire, and you set it on light on November the 5th every year to celebrate a failed terrorist attack back in 1600s or whatever. So it looked like that. It looked like someone had just made somebody made of paper, because of the way it was blown around, or the way she was blown around.

It was because I was just walking normally, and I'm heavier now than I was then, but the wind didn't seem that strong. But maybe she was just... I don't know, maybe she had helium inside her. Maybe she'd been sucking on some... Like a helium balloon, and swallowed a helium balloon.

So my description there was an example of me being compassionate. And I just realized that it hasn't come across as possibly as compassionate as what it was going to be. So I just hope that you're asleep by now, so I can just move across from that.

And so I've seen a few people fall over. I'm sure we all have over the years. And there is this... It's outside the Tesco where I lived.

I didn't live in Tesco, but Tesco is a... It's a supermarket in England. It might be in other countries, I don't know. But there's... They have little stores, like little versions of the superstore.

So the big superstore... The supermarket's massive. And then they've got the little ones, which are just bigger than an average corner shop. Probably twice the size, perhaps, of an average corner shop.

About the same size as an average small co-op. Again, that might not mean anything to you if you don't know what a co-op is. I used to work in a co-op back in April 1997.

No, 1998. I worked there. It's quite weird, because I remember the... I don't know if it's the person that gave me the job, but the area manager was called Mr. Cook.

And he was this little man. And he might have been the same height as me, or even taller. But you know, some people look little.

He just looked little. Again, he might have been taller than me, or the same height. But he just... I don't know, something about him that just seemed short.

Which was... It didn't matter, but he was not the most friendly person that I've ever met. He took his job very seriously, which is fair enough. I mean, it's, you know, you don't get to become an area manager unless you do the job properly, I imagine.

Kind of. But he was... The people that worked there had a little bit of fear towards him. And, I don't know, Cookies come in.

Cookies come in, I'll be saying, yeah, brilliant. I could do a little snack. And I said, no, Mr. Cook.

So, oh, okay. I'll just call him Mr. Cook then. I was all excited.

I put the kettle on and everything. You know, I like cookies. And they said, yeah, we do still have cookies as well.

The bakery, they delivered. You unpacked the bakery delivery. You do it every morning.

That's why you get here at half an hour before we open the doors. You unpack all the bread, the cookies, the cakes. I said, yeah, I know, but it seemed like it was quite a good little pun.

What do you mean pun? I said, well, because I'm doing this recording, you know, it's doing one of my let me bore you to sleep sessions. And it's going to be in 30, about 31 years time I'll be doing this. And I just, I thought it'd be a nice little pun.

What I'll be doing with the recordings, I'll be just telling random stories about the past, making a bit of stuff up, telling some truths, you know, not confessional. There'll be no point where you hear, I've sinned. Please forgive me.

Because I guess that's a different place to do that. But this is more, that's why. So that's why I did the cookie kind of joke.

It was not funny though, was it? I know it's there, but you gotta be there. In the future, things are different. What, you mean that they like stuff that isn't funny? Well, no, this isn't about being funny.

This is just about, and I don't know what it's about anymore. It's about just talking. And it's more than, because I call it let me bore you to sleep, as I told you.

And it started off being me boring you to sleep. Well, I can see how you would, you are quite boring. Thank you.

And you can, it's kind of grown into something else. And some of the feedback I get is that people like to listen because it's a distraction. Why did you say distraction with that high pitched bit? I said, I don't know.

I wasn't planning that. It just happened. It's like my voice is de-breaking.

I'm going to go back to having a high pitched voice again, which won't sound very good on these recordings. And so, yeah, they kind of changed, developed, grown into something that I didn't really, still not really sure what. There's more than just being bored by me to go to sleep.

So those that are up for being bored, I think I produce the goods because nothing I say is going to be of any interest to anyone, least of all to me. But actually that's not true because when I know from experience, when I tell people stuff about my life that's interesting to me, their eyes glaze over. My life is not interesting to other people and what I do, things that interest me don't seem to interest other people.

And I realised also, it's also the thing, if you mention hypnosis to people, straight away, especially if they don't know you, straight away they're sometimes, like in person I mean, sometimes a little bit on guard. They're wondering like, oh no, he's looking into my eyes and he's talking, what's he doing? Like I'm doing something unusual, which I'm not. You know, I just, what you're doing, you're trying to do something, you're looking into my eyes, I think you're trying to hypnotise me.

So I'm not, I just want to know, can I borrow some toilet paper because I've run out and I need to go to the toilet. Have you got a spare roll? I'm not trying to hypnotise you. It's, that wasn't in the shop because they don't just give you toilet paper.

That's one of the hard sides of being in a shop, working in a business situation, is you can't just give stuff away. I used to, I used to work in a pub and I don't know if you can even imagine this, if you're, if you're under the age of 50 or 40, this might be completely out of, out of your imagination because when I was in a pub, when I first started in a pub, I had to add up everything. I literally had to add up everything that I was, that I was serving the customer and put it in as a full amount into the till because the other people were also using the same till and they couldn't wait around for it to be added all up.

So I had to add it up in my head. So four cranberries, blah, blah, 15 pints of lager and I think it turned into a, into some kind of a game for the people that visited, you know, the customers because they knew that I kept getting it wrong. But they shot themselves in the foot though because as humans sometimes do, they mess things up for themselves by being extra greedy.

So I used to charge less than I should have done for, let's say for a customer come in, they'd have five pints of lager. At that time it was probably less than a pound a pint I reckon back then. So let's say it was a pound.

It would have been less than that probably. So that's five pound. So I'd charge them three pound 30 because that's how I added it up in my head.

So they'd charge, so they'd give me a five pound note. I'd give me, I'd give them back one pound 70 and they'd be going back to their table laughing and happy and like probably making fun of me and whatever. And then later on, maybe the same day, maybe a different day, they'd come in and they'd ask for the same thing, five pints of lager, which should be five pound.

Last time I charged less, but this time I add it up differently. I say, it's going to be four pound 10 please. It's still 90 pence less than it should be.

What happened now is you wouldn't even believe it. They would complain to the manager and say, he charged us three pound 30 last time for five. Now he's charging us four pound 10.

And the manager would say, well, the real price is five pound. And the customer's argument meant nothing because basically I was in error and I was charging the wrong amount. So these customers, apart from getting me in trouble, well, I got myself in trouble, but they lost out because if they'd have kept quiet, they could have ended up having those really cheap drinks.

But the greed, it was the greed in them, very greedy. So I think part of it for me was the having to add up stuff on the spot. And I've had a few jobs in bars over the years.

So it's not, you know, that was my first and I absolutely didn't like it at all. And I didn't, I thought that it'd be social and I'd meet people and they'd like me or maybe maybe meet a girl or whatever, you know, but nothing like that happened. It was, I basically picked the worst bar, the worst pub in the town.

It was a dive, absolute dive. All the rough went in there. It was, it wasn't a place, I think about five women went in there and it was mainly just men, builders and, you know, and other people, and other people that were there all day because they didn't have anything else to do.

And yeah, so it wasn't very much fun for me. And there was a lot of people trying to be aggressive and that's another thing. I can't be, I don't like being around people that are drinking or drunk.

And, but then I got, I got a job in Butlins as a bar, bar person. Quite a few years later. So that was in 98.

And then I got a job, not 98, 88. I got a job in a pub in 1995. It was in a bar in, in Butlins.

Well, there's a few different bars. I just can't wait to whichever one they wanted me to work in. And it was the busiest, I don't think anyone will ever in the world work in a busier pub, a busier bar than Butlins.

The amount of people, so many people nonstop, you know, thousands and thousands of people nonstop. I would have took, luckily we had decent tills at that point. I was still making errors and stuff, but it was a case of putting, you know, you had your till and you put in what you wanted for each, you know, for each person.

So it's a lot easier. And I did alright. I was there for a while.

Didn't enjoy it, but I enjoyed parts of it. But I'm better with things when they're just, I think it's something about serving people drinks off the top shelf, you know, with the whole, uh, the liquors, the whiskers, not the whiskers, the whiskers, the liquors. I think they're cats when I said liquors.

Uh, the, you know, like vodka, brandy and all that stuff. And just, just, yeah, just like, oh, just wine. Wine's another one.

Can't you just have lager? Just have lager. In fact, have a bottle, a bottle of lager. That should all, all should be served in a pub or in a bar.

It's just lager. Everyone would get served quicker or have the wine on a tap the same as the lager is. None of this bottle opening, none of this stuff, just on a tap, in a glass.

There you go. Bye. No queuing.

That way you haven't got people standing in the back, waving a 10 pound note as if they want me to do a lap dance. Can't do a, can't do a dance right now, mate. I'm busy and working.

Come and see me in 20 minutes when the show starts. So yeah, it's, it's, uh, that was an okay job. I got, I did work in another bar in a club and I didn't officially work in the bar, but I used to help out when it was busy.

And, uh, so I would take drinks to people's tables. I'd also, uh, I'd go to one part of the bar and say, if you want pints of lager, come and see me. And someone would come and say, well, I need some wines.

Isn't it? I'm just doing pints because it was easier to add up. It's easier to work it out. And I was pouring the pints there and that's all I was doing.

And just get rid of people, get them done and sorted. And not everybody liked my way of doing things. But I found it easier for me and I was just helping out.

So if you're the one helping out, then you kind of decide what you do, don't you? In a sense, it's like, if you do voluntary work, you go into a voluntary workplace and they start to tell you what to do and start bossing you around and getting you to do horrible jobs. Like, no, I don't think you understand the concept of this voluntary work. It's what it means is I come along, I get paid and I do what I want to do.

Yeah. Controversial. So I actually got a job in a bar when I was at university.

I lived across the road from a pub. I used to go in there. And when I say live across the road, I mean literally a 20 second walk from my house to where the pub was.

And my landlord, he actually once got a taxi home from the pub. It was like a legend, legendary story. He was so drunk, he had to get a taxi home and lived across the road.

But I was at university and I didn't have a job at the time. I was just, you know, I was in there talking and the bar manager or the owner actually of the place said to me, do you want a job here? I said, I don't know. He said, I think he said, can you pour a pint? And I said, yeah, but isn't that your job? You know, what's the point of me paying you money if I've got to pour my own pints? And he said, no, no, no, don't be like that.

And he said, so he called me across, I went across the bar, not like Starsky and Hutch when we're going back, but not, but, you know, I went through the hatch, not the hutch, the hatch, and I did a, poured a pint. I poured thousands of pints over the years. And, you know, I know how to, I know how to give good head, you know, that's all I'm saying.

There's some special techniques you can have to do that, but I know how to pour a pint. And he was impressed and he said, well, you can start tomorrow. And this was on Saturday evening, I think, or Saturday afternoon.

He said, you can come in for trial on Sunday, if you want. Sunday, cause that's the busiest time of the year, of the year, of the week for them. Cause they had, I used to cook meals, roast dinners and stuff.

So it was very busy. And they had two bars within the pub. So it was the, the saloon and the other part with the pool table and the younger, younger people.

And so I, you know, I said, cool. And Sunday came and I looked at my clock and what I did is I phoned in ill. I did.

It was my first day. It was a trial. It wasn't even like a proper, a proper job yet, but it was a trial and my first shift and I phoned in ill.

So I can't, I'm too, I'm unwell. Now you should have seen the look on their faces on the barman, you know, the landlord's face of the pub that evening when I walked in, said, you know, so can I have a pint, please? And they, him and my landlord, like of where I lived, they just were just in shock that I could be that brazen to phone in ill, leave them short of staff on the busiest day of the week and then walk in in the evening and order, order a drink. And I said, oh, sorry about that.

And I think we all, I ordered a kebab. So yeah, that's the end of that story. It ended with a kebab.

But what was I to do? It's, you know, that was the last, I just couldn't face it. I couldn't face it. I just couldn't, yeah, I didn't, I don't know.

I think I'd have been all right because it's, I think because it's a small pub, everyone in there generally seemed quite friendly and, you know, it was an okay place and everyone knew my landlord and my landlady. So they were kind of fairly friendly to me as well. So, you know, it's, I'd have been all right there, but I just, I couldn't get out of bed.

And he didn't offer me another shift either. So I never got a chance to show, show off my bar skills. Obviously he didn't believe in second chances.

So this Tesco, what I was going to talk about was this lady, she fell over outside Tesco's and, cause I was talking about not really, you know, being a really caring about people and stuff really. But in the moment I do, and this woman, she was laying down on the floor. She was with her husband, they were both elderly.

He was probably, they're probably both in their sort of 70s, 80s, probably 80s I'd say. She was lying there, it was cold and people just walking past. Of course, some people stopped and, and I was going to say her husband just spat at them, but he didn't, that's just made up.

And, but what I thought, it dawned on me that actually for her, because she was embarrassed, she was cold. One of the shops had a blanket and they put it over her and put a pillow under her head. But what she didn't have, the one thing she, no one could offer her was her perspective.

She was lying on a cold pavement and everyone else was standing up. So what I did is I lied down next to her. I didn't cuddle up to her or anything like that, because that would have been inappropriate.

But I laid down next to her and I might have held her hand, I'm not sure. But I just started talking to her. I already, I talked to her before, I didn't just walk up and lay down, because that would have been a bit weird, but I'd already been talking to her for a few minutes.

And I waited with her until the ambulance got there. So I think she'd broken her ankle or something. And I just talked to her, made her laugh.

And it meant that she wasn't alone. I know to a degree she had her husband there, so she probably didn't feel alone, but she didn't feel alone as in she wasn't the only person laying down on the pavement. People were no longer just looking at her, especially as I had no trousers on.

No, I did have trousers on, I made that up. So there's something in there within me that cares in the moment. But do I care what she's doing now? No, I don't.

I wish I were, I hope she's fine. But I don't, I'm not thinking about her. So I suppose I'm kind of, maybe I'm just the same as everybody else.

Everyone feels that way. But it's just, I think it's nice to be there when people need it. Like proper need it.

Not just, I think if you're there all the time, people need it all the time. When actually I don't think many of us need anything all the time. We're so much stronger than we realize.

So much more able to deal with stuff than perhaps we give ourselves credit for. I mean, you're amazing people. You really are.

I don't have to be in your life to know that. This whole world is full of amazing people and a few knobheads. Let's be honest, there are a few out there that are just complete knobs, but they're not the majority.

The majority of people have got great qualities and they're doing the best that they can. And I think the one thing that maybe the majority of people perhaps share is that feeling that they're underappreciated or that they're not being appreciated at all, perhaps. So how can we change that? Perhaps what we need to do is appreciate ourselves.

Because let's face it, if you're, let's say you're an ambulance driver, a paramedic, you save someone's life, you move on to do the next call, call out. You have to go and see someone else and you help them and you help someone else. And eventually you go home and your shift is over and you get on with your life and you do what everyone else does.

Maybe you creosote the fence and maybe you collect stamps. Maybe you've got a hobby, you've got children, you take your children to ballet and whatever is going on in your life. It's up to you to realize that you're appreciated and to realize that because you may not hear it enough.

And maybe you hear it so much that you don't notice it anymore. Maybe you hear people say thank you so much that you don't hear it. Perhaps you could start hearing it again, realizing that it isn't the same as a customer buying something from a shop.

You know, if you buy something from a shop, say some underwear or some tampons or whatever you buy and you go to the shop counter, you pay for it and they say thank you. You know thank you is meaningless. It doesn't mean anything.

It's not their money. You're not giving them any money, they're just working there. But it's just common courtesy, it's decency and it's a social thing that we do.

And it's what their employee would want them to do as well, or employer rather. But when someone says thank you for saving my child's life, or thank you for saving my life, thank you for resuscitating me or my friend or my wife, it's not the same thing as just a standard social thank you. It's important and it's meaningful.

And just because you may hear it lots of times, doesn't diminish the energy and the importance of that thank you so that you can appreciate yourself more. I'm going to go. So thank you for listening.

Hopefully you fell asleep through boredom. If you didn't, then yeah, oh well. Speak to you later.

Bye.