Don't Marry Thomas Clark Read Online Free PDF

seem to spend all our time running from one recruitment agency to another, and we’ve got no prospects. Three graduates, chucked out on the street by globalization, without so much as a clue as to what we could have done to offend it. And I’m even a fan of it, for God’s sake!
    I’d almost found something. It lasted about ten days: just the time from when I got the call confirming the start of the research program until the time when it was postponed to an unspecified date. It was a six-year project to be carried out at Oxford, where I was doing my masters. Everything was ready: documents, equipment, European funding. The only thing missing was my signature on the contract. But it all went up in smoke before I even managed to find a decent suit for the meeting.
    The reasons they gave me? Overstaffing, insufficient funds, new priorities, change of direction.
    The real reasons: thanks to my bloody abominable luck, Andrea Holden, beloved daughter of well-known MP Gregory Holden, had just graduated in Sociology with a thesis on the impact of permanent make-up upon mass communication media. The ink wasn’t dry on it before Daddy Dearest had organized for the darling creature a series of European conferences on the importance of the image in Western countries. I’d made a bitchy comment on the fact less than two weeks before when I’d come across it on one of the university blogs, but I’d decided to ignore it, not imagining that it would concern me directly. And to think that I’d actually felt a bit sympathetic for Gregory Holden at the idea of an intelligent person like that desperately attempting the impossible: to save a daughter as useless as his from poverty and disgrace. Come on, who wouldn’t have done the same? Put your hand on your conscience and ask yourself if you wouldn’t have tried everything possible to improve your offspring’s CV by pulling a few string to get her into some conferences of international importance?
    Of course, going from that to finding her a job for the next six years using my research funds… Just long enough for her to hook up with some brilliant professor of noble birth. The sad reality is that not only had she nicked my job, she’d also pinched my hypothetical husband, the thieving cow!
    Months later I found out I’d been wrong about that too: the aim was not to give her time to set herself up. No, it was nothing to do with a six-month contract – it was a permanent teaching position, with my researcher’s job as the sweetener. Dear Old Daddy didn’t want to find her a husband to try and breed out the genetic errors in his grandchildren, but to make sure that his beloved birdbrain of a daughter was tasked with the preparation of thousands of students – malleable, fee-paying clay, by definition – in order to reduce our cultural elite to the level of stupidity of those, like her, who need Wikipedia to get ahead in life. It was a diabolical plot to dumb down cultural standards and boost the employment figures. I was witnessing the national redistribution of IQs and could do nothing about it!
    But that’s an old story. It’s water under the bridge at this point. I don’t even think about it any more. See the miracles a couple of bottles of vodka and a box of Valium a week can perform?!
    I had no choice – I resigned, packed my bags, left the university and went home. For a while, I lived with my folks in Cork, then I found a job as a part-time secretary in London and I moved back over. Since then I’ve been collecting ex-jobs, ex-boyfriends and ex-flats, I live off pizza and I’m attending a course in aromatherapy to try and keep the stress under control. It’s not much use, but gazing at my aromatherapy teacher’s firm bum is the closest I get to a state of profound well-being in this grim age of Facebook, Skype and that bloody Candy Crush. Stupid bloody game! Two weeks and I’m