Why I Don't Contribute Anything to The Community Anymore.

Four years ago, when I was in lower sixth, the women in charge of us waddled in and announced to our assembled ranks that from that point onwards the last two periods of every Wednesday would be spent in what she termed "community service." You will notice that this post started with the words "when I was in lower sixth" and not with "when I was in Wormwood Scrubs" but this didn't seem to deter her. Community service we were told, with jowl-wobbling emphasis, was important to our development as socially responsible young women. To this day I am convinced that the school must have been getting something out of it. Terms like "personal development" "social responsibility" and even "young women" were all just things you said. They were very well in assemblies and the beige tundra that was PSHE, but they were airy and vague and you weren't meant to really assign concrete meaning to any of them. You definitely weren't meant to spend half a Wednesday cultivating them. And yet that's what they had decided to make us do. It's possible that there was money involved.

Naturally we spent a few days collectively laughing at the fact that the school was forcing us to become better people in a manner usually reserved for felons and when it became obvious that we had seen a double meaning in the phrase that she'd missed The Women in Charge subtly changed the term to "compulsory voluntary service."

If anything this was much funnier.

"Just off to do my compulsory voluntary service. No, there's no choice. No, well, I suppose I am technically volunteering myself, just under duress. Yeah I can check out any time I want but I can never leave."

A list of placements went up in the adjacent hall and there was a rush to secure something unobjectionable or, better yet, a sinecure; something that would involve almost no work. Generally people plumped for their old schools on the grounds of familiarity; and veterinary clinics were viciously fought over as they meant you got to spend your Wednesday hugging fuffy things that were too weak to protest.

I remember actually being pleased that I had got a place with a local voluntary organisation who I shall here call the UVS. The plan was I would go to them on Wednesday and from there they would drive me to a school for autistic children with whom we would paint pictures and cook. My mother often implied that I was autistic and I had recently seen Rain Man so I was convinced that I would enjoy the experience, or at least make a quick casino buck off of one of the children.

Two other girls were to join me, Kelly Poirot and Alicia Swellings (obviously those aren't their real names, or anybodies real names, but I'm told it's de rigour to allot fake names on the blogosphere.) Though you wouldn't guess it from the pseudonym I've alloted her, I liked Swellings a lot. I didn't know Poirot but it didn't matter because she was only there for about two weeks before she, in her great wisdom, fled. In her place was substituted Emma Wingham.

Emma had started her compulsory voluntary service at a vets, having braved the first wave at the signup sheet to get it. She turned up once. Rather than letting her hug things and tend to the wounded and easily healable the vet made her hold the leg of a rabbit while it was euthanised. It had twitched horribly under her hand. I remember thinking at the time "What? Why?" Not why had it twitched, but why hold it? What was the point? I had thought perhaps it had been a comfort thing, some loving contact for the rabbit as it shuffled off, but have since learnt that when you put an animal down it's knocked out almost immediatly, so that wouldn't make any sense. The only real explanation is that the vet was deeply bitter and wanted to make the new girl get to grips with the horrible realities of his job. Or possibly that the legs of euthanised rabbits sometimes come completely free from their morings unless held in place, flying off, and gruesomely hitting nurses in the face and knocking over scales and thermometers. "It's just one of those unseen chemical things. There's no stopping it. First it twitches then the muscles go taught, spasm, break, and under the pressure the whole leg just flies off...get the compulsory voluntary service girl in and make her hold it in place, would you?"

Either way Emma seemed glad to be joining us.

The first week we turned up at the UVS Poirot, Swellings and I had shopped for art and cooking supplies (I had picked up a pack of cards to begin training my miniature Raymond Babbit's with) and the second week we had sat in the UVS's office and eaten biscuits which was brilliant. Poirot at this point, with what we thought had been impatience but with what proved to be crystal-clear foresight had left. The third week we sat in the office and ate biscuits and Emma arrived and told us the rabbit thing and it was brilliant. The fourth week we sat in the office and flipped through catalogues and ate biscuits and talked about our plans for after uni and it was brilliant. By the fifth week we tentatively questioned the lack of children and art in our lives and they told us that there was probably never going to be any of either and that the whole thing had fallen through. They were searching for something for us to do but in the mean time we could just sit there and eat biscuits. The sixth week we sat and ate our biscuits with the cold and terrible knowledge that this was All There Was stretching out in front of us, hideously. We had secured a sinecure, almost no work at all, and rather than being wonderful and relaxing it was dreadfully, dreadfully boring and completely Kafka-esque. We would have left, and could have left if only it had been regular voluntary service, but of course it wasn't. Our community service had been revoked and we had instead been sentenced to A Stretch. By week 7 I started to be surprised that our weekly biscuit ration wasn't pushed through a hatch in the door.

It's shocks me that I only had to spend two hours sitting in my UVS cell a week because it feels as if whole portions of my life drained slowly from me in that room. I was genuinely fond of Swellings and Wingham, they were, and are, both funny and interesting, full of stories and post-sixth form plans, but some how we managed to get all of that out the way in the first few weeks and were just left knowing everything about each other and trapped in a room.

For a while we tried to buoy our spirits up in the manner of all POWs, trapped mountaineers and caged animals, by setting ourselves simple tasks. We found an empty biscuit tin full of stuffing and scrap material in a corner and from it we fashioned Cecil, a snail/bear creature made of purple silk and stuffed with felt. We sat him in a plant pot on the desk and he stared at us pityingly with his drawing pin eyes. The next week we made him a tag that read "Hello my name is Cecil. I am 8. Please love me." and I toyed with the idea of creating one for myself which would read "Hello my name is Anna. I am 18. Please kill me." Then, at least, at the end each interminable stretch, when I staggered out into the real world with my now cold dead eyes and completely useless boredom-wracked brain, kindly passers-by would know what to do.

In many ways the time there was not wasted as I now have a detailed gauge of how much boredom I can withstand, and the ways in which I withstand it. Some days I would really go to town on the biscuits, or play an internet game called Dino Run for hours on end. Some days I would just lie back on my swivelly chair and groan for minutes at a time. I think Emma joined me in this. Swellings was probably the best at bearing up, I only remember her joining the groan chorus once or twice, when it's despairing force became too irresistible. We youtubed "ghost videos" regularly, and for a while we had a good thing going where we would walk the short distance to the kitchen and prepare squash and tea for ourselves, though this had to end when someone casually mentioned that there was legionnaires disease in the pipes. The up-side to this was that the remainder of that particular stretch positively flew by as I dwelt upon my imminent death.

There was another thing that provided occasional relief, though it was basically relief traded for concern, and that was Phil. Hamster-like and jovial, it should be stated early on that Phil was very nice, but like all overbearingly nice people you had to wonder whether he was fully developed in mind. He was perfectly able to function but just child-like and odd. He was also the person who was supposed to be organising an alternative placement for us, and had so far failed to do so. He would float in and out of the office when our groaning got too loud. Almost everything Phil said was amusing in some way, and the degree to which he was open about his life with us was both wonderful and terrifying. He showed us a love letter and poems he had penned, I say penned, typed, and while it feels wrong to divulge any real details as to their disturbingly candid contents, I will say that the font he had gone with throughout was Comic Sans. I'm not prissy about fonts but the fact that a love letter had been typed? And like that? It's just plain wrong on so many levels, and in an odd way tells you all you need to know about him.

Clearly the week that we read the letter and poems wasn't boring, but it was both horribly voyeuristic and distressing to all sensibilities. Somehow this wasn't an improvement.

Eventually, three weeks before the year ended Phil found us a placement at a local junior school, and for those three weeks we ran an art club. This was, some one remembered, what we should have been doing from the start. These children, though, were the slow and shy ones and there was no way I was going to be able to teach any of them to count cards. It was all I could do to teach them to fashion glove puppets from old socks. While the art club had nothing on the hours spent at the UVS in terms of private grimness it did present it's own uniquely depressing moments; the fact that one child, when Swellings asked what he had got for Christmas, said that he and his mother hadn't had Christmas, only birthdays that year because money was low, and the fact that all the children's glove puppets were dreadful, are just two examples of such.

We left after our three weeks because Compulsory Voluntary Service ended with the run up to exams. We probably could have kept on there but, as that would have counted as genuine volunteering, none of us went for it.

So there it is. The lengthy wordiness above being the explanation of the short title above that. I don't contribute anything to my community anymore because sitting in a office cum cell with two friends and one lovelorn mentalist, with nothing to do, nearly destroyed my brain as well as nearly giving me Legionnaires; because one sock-puppet does not a Christmas make; and because while community service does mean that you may get to hug a fluffy thing that is too weak to protest, when you pan out you invariably find that the fluffy thing is the leg of a dying rabbit and you are only hugging it to stop it flying off and wrecking terrible veterinary havoc.