“I sell my most loved possessions for £50 so I don’t overdose on value beans next month”.

Another one of those shops full of shitey tat and dead grandmothers’ old desks has opened across from the office. It used to be a tattooist with a sign designed by someone with an overfamiliarity with Microsoft Word fonts but their window kept being smashed in by someone with a hammer.

It's a mystery.

 Now there’s just a fuck off big smashed bit in the glass and a Victorian sewing machine behind it with a dirty orange looking bloke standing about outside smoking tab-ends. The street the Workplace Of Which I Must Not Speak stands on seems to be sustained solely by these assorted crap-hawking bastards buying impoverished people’s possessions for fuck all and selling it on with a thirty quid mark-up. Scarbados is pockmarked with them and their diabolical cousins the Cash For Crushed Hopes and Dreams a.k.a Single Mother’s Ruin.

 Cash-Converters is probably the less seedy of these, in the same way that the lead singer of Babyshambles is probably the less out of his miniscule mind on skag compared to that white-bread twenty-something OD casualty from Glee, or perhaps more accurately, Glum. Walking into Cash-Con is the spiritual equivalent of that from the beginning of 1984 where Winston Smith walks out of a ‘vile’ wind straight into Josef Fritzl’s own tower-block concrete hell-hole of peeling Big Brother posters and hideously repressed couples with dusts in their creased bits. Yes, it does look a bit flash when you go through the door, shiny tv screens, iPhones, electric guitars, LED screen titanium sex-aids (no) – everything is bright coloured red and yellow posters and the staff look about 75% less willing to kill themselves then the ones in McDonald’s. But then you go up to the counter and try and sell something and instantly you are aware that the people behind the counter, the people behind you in the queue, the small child uncertain of your gender because women generally don’t have buzzcuts with wobbly tramlines, anyone who saw you walk in – They Are All Judging You.

 Wait a minute, you may plead, I’m just selling my Kindle because I have the app on my iPhone and now I can spend 10 minutes on the toilet at work reading Game of Thrones without having to smuggle a notebook-sized e-book into the ladies. Besides, one of my rats has urinated on the back of it and I just don’t need it lying on the windowsill. I don’t even take drugs, I have paid my rent and council tax and I don’t need to buy milk formula because I don’t actually have any children. I literally just want a twenty quid in my pocket for some Ross Kemp documentary or a quarter of a pizza from Dominos. I am here of my own free will. Dictum meum pactum, your honour.

 The sales assistant glances down at your sweaty hands laid out on their counter and asks a series of rapidfire questions you answer in an fake off-handed manner to conceal your growing paranoia that they think you have bought it under the table from some bloke in the Golden Last and are going to be led out by a PSCO. They crash about on the keyboard for a bit and then offer you about enough change to buy a black coffee at which point you make some flimsy noise of protest and are then offered what someone else in Basingstoke is asking for theirs on Ebay.

 At this point people in the queue are muttering stuff like ‘fuck’s sake’ and staring murderously at other staff members who have the gall not to be on the tills right fucking now and you are beginning to wish that you had just offered it to someone at work for a fiver and continued on unburdened by shame, even without pizza money.

Not fucking worth it.

   After the item has been turned upside down and peered at and various menu screens have been flicked past and money paper is finally presented, you are encouraged to enjoy the rest of your day. You then exit into the outside world of people whizzing past in their cars that they can afford because they are adults with grown-up jobs and budgets and savings and wander on, Kindle-less, deciding what to spend your £13 bastard pounds on and settle for a can of diet coke and an I newspaper (20p).

 I have had enough of standing around in second-hand shops smelling of fag-ash and some hand-rubbing con-artist telling me my electronic goods are worth less than my Doc Martens. I have had enough of turning up to work at the end of the month with a tin of value ravioli and value bread, neither of which I like, and pretending that I have actually chosen to eat it for lunch. I thought when I stopped inflating my liver like a balloon with Fosters and making my gums physically shrink away from my teeth with Stella that I would suddenly have disposable cash and finally be able to own more than 5 pairs of trousers. Thus far this is not the case and I really need some new cargo shorts.

This is it. It is Time To My Shit Together And Stopping Pissing Away My Money, aka Operation At Least Pretend To Be An Adult, For Fuck’s Sake.

It would be nice to be able to afford Grand Theft Auto 5 AND a birthday present for my sister.