I - The Running Man

Quite honestly, I never thought i'd take a long break from my usual escapades of Script Fic writing to create a blog completely unlike me. For many viewers of my other blog, Metal Gear Mercenaries, it may be strange and a bit sad to see the true man behind the flak. But this is it: This is my blog.  This blog will, essentially, either detail the rise and rise of a young Smoggy, born into an unprivileged background with unremarkable family and an unremarkable life, to stardom, thus shattering the boundaries of social class and the North-South Divide...or it will detail the tragic fall of a young Smoggy who tried, as he may, to make something of his life, but found that all struggling gave him was a handful of bloody nails.

The decision to write this blog came a few months ago, when meeting my Careers Advisor. Y'see, there is only one entire reason behind this blog: I'm a graduate.

From North East England.

Combine those two things, and you have an entity that is generally reviled by England: A country of people whose aging population seem to believe that every graduate is a waste of space and money. A country that mistakingly believes people can still get a job by walking into an office, waving to the manager, and sitting down at your desk. A country that believes the young are worthless, shiftless bags of piss and wind, even though they take on zero-hours contracts and work ungodly hours, travelling by train and thus hemorrhaging their bank account, just for work. A country that thinks that the borders begin and end at the City of London, and that everything North of Watford is some kind of Mad Max wasteland inhabited by flat-cap wearing, ferret-walking, stotty-scoffing strangers who speak in t'funny accent, like, and fling razor-sharp boomerangs at t'pesky kids who are t'busy playing in t'garden!!

I have minimal work experience, thus singling me out as some kind of lazy bastard unworthy of basic life. To make matters even worse, I'm currently on Welfare, also marking me out for a swift ear bashing should any English person over the age of 40 see this blog. Even though I spend 7 days out of 7 searching for a job, and have trawled my local high street with enough CV's to have me arrested for deforesting the Amazon on more than one occasion, I am still some kind of horrible thing that should be shot for the sake of MOTHER ENGLAND.

The problem with me is that I don't have a driving licence. All I can do is catch trains for a job, and here's the second problem: Almost every job has London in mind. Y'see, for my usual viewers who are unaware of the situation in England, let me put it briefly:

The North is hard-hit by unemployment, is ravaged by austerity, and is seen as a nigh-on uncultural wasteland by Southerners with more teeth than brain cells.

The South is hard-hit by employment, barely tickled by austerity, and is seen as a cultural mecca by tourists with more teeth than brain cells.

The pattern is clear, yeah?

The North East currently suffers from a 10.4% unemployment rate, combined with 5.8% for the South East. During the past few months, the South East celebrated a 29,000 drop in unemployment, while the North West suffered a 13,000 person rise in unemployment. How can it be that several hundred miles separate a bastion of wealth from a bastion of poverty?

I don't know, but I am pretty goddamn certain it violate the basic rights of a man.

Now, my Careers Advisor advised me to kick up a blog, on the once-in-ten-quintillion occasion that it might be noticed. This ain't going to happen: Nobody will want to hire me based on my bitter ramblings. I created it to vent, to cry, to give a platform for me to both voice my worries, and to possibly look back at what was, undoubtedly, the darkest hour of my life. 

So hark, ladies and gentlemen, and behold a new entity on the Internet. A Smoggy on the Run: Will he achieve his ultimate goal of becoming a published author? Or will he fade into obscurity and die penniless and hopeless?

The best thing about this story is, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction.

I hope there's a twist somewhere that involves a robot unicorn, though.