If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

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Friday Dec 05, 2008

Chinatown....

Sorry it's been a while – luckily I can blame it on my new job, which annoyingly means I have less time to volunteer, and the cold, which makes me type really slowly...!

As the weeks have gone by in Marie Curie I got to grips with the demon till and unleashed a plague of incorrect change and incoherent beepings upon the unsuspecting customers. Add to this the fact that the steamer, which we use to make sure everything is pressed and beautiful before it goes on the shop floor was making the lights fuse and the customers flee for daylight and an idea of the weekly mayhem starts to emerge!

Finally, just as things started to quiet down, I slid a box of patterned china plates off the desk.... Seeming to fall in slow motion, the fragmented pieces of white china covered in curling yellow daffodils cascaded to the floor in an avalanche and swept from the till to the window display at the far end of the shop. For a long moment everything was silent – customers turned round, I looked at the mess and the customers looked at me. I was totally frozen in embarrassed horror but just as I was wishing the floor would open and swallow me a voice behind me said, 'We'll have to think of a nickname for you now' and everybody started to laugh.

Suddenly there was a long queue at the till and everyone was sympathising and making jokes and teasing. The china was marked from a 30 piece set to a 22 and the day went on, broken plates being rapidly overshadowed by the memories of another volunteer who told us how when in her twenties, she and her friends had travelled across the country by train every time a ship came in and spent the day going about with the sailors!! Now in her seventies and dosed on steroids (or 'stair-rods' as one regular calls them), her tales of how her grandmother had greeted her boyfriends by looking at the label inside their coat had us all doubled up, helpless with laughter.

If you want to look at volunteering in a local Marie Curie shop in your area have a look at the website, which has vacancies for fundraising, admin and other kinds of volunteering too.

Posted by Olivia ( 3:00 PM )
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