wanking for coins
I spent one summer on a work experience placement in one of the most ill-conceived tourist attractions in history – Dover’s White Cliffs Experience, a ridiculous white elephant that told the tale of the town’s rich history in a completely boring and pointless way.

There are, essentially, two interesting things about Dover – a) the castle, and b) the white cliffs. The White Cliffs Experience provided neither – to see them you had to go to a) the castle or b) the cliffs. As a result, there was nothing in the attraction that anyone would actually want to see, although there was an extremely annoying mechanical puppet show. Imagine how crappy the tourist attractions the Simpsons sometimes visit are; this place was exactly like that.

(Sidenote – if that wasn’t bad enough, when preparing the foundations for building, they discovered the remains of an actual Roman temple. Obviously this is a significant discovery that would need to be investigated, stalling construction… so they just didn’t tell anyone and built as planned anyway. As a result, half of this ancient temple was buried for no reason other than to build a terrible tourist attraction that no-one visited and lost vast sums of money. It was shut down a few years ago and turned into a library. But I digress.)

Anyway, my job from Monday to Friday was to be a tour guide and general dogsbody, man the till, move people through the awful exhibits and then listen to their complaints when they realized the tour didn’t include seeing a) the castle (“The castle’s actually that castle-y looking thing on the hill behind you, sir,”) and b) the cliffs (“They’re on the coast, madam.”) All fairly routine and generally acceptable.

Unfortunately, in a part that definitely wasn’t in the job description, on alternate Sundays I had to dress up as a Roman centurion and make coins for children.

That doesn't sound too bad, but although one might expect the costume for such a role to involve armour, a helmet, etc, budget constraints meant no such niceties were purchased. Instead, the coinmaker wore a “tunic” (actually an old sack), set off nicely by a “belt” (a piece of rope). Furthermore, as a rather lanky lad of six foot, this tunic left a lot less to the imagination than it might have, barely covering my genitals.

So – being a fairly self-effacing chap at the time - I essentially spent my Sundays in a state of abject humiliation, showing off a fair amount of leg while I attempted to convince small children to get their parents to part with a quid in return for watching me make a cheap coin out of tin for them by hitting a mould with a hammer, all for GBP 3.60 an hour. (And yes - the kids weren’t allowed to make the coin themselves. Health and Safety, obviously.)

In short, it sucked. One afternoon in particular sticks in the memory – I managed to convince a couple of pretty teenage girls to let me make a coin for them, which I made and presented. They looked at it, then at me, then one said, “Aren’t you just really embarrassed doing this?” And then they walked off.

Yes, I was.

Length? Just about covered by the tunic.
(silencer, Thu 10 May 2007, 20:12, Reply)