Today I became an Alpaca Specialist

Most alpacas do not like being grabbed. No shit.

I have recently returned to an Arctic UK having been away diving around a small, tiny, sweaty island in the Caribbean. I went with the love of my life to follow his dream of becoming a diving instructor and mine of marrying him and having his diving instructor babies. Everything was going swimmingly, if you'll excuse the pun, until he told me that on second thoughts, he was backing out of the dream-plan. I spent six tense and melencholic months living with this man, who didn't want to be with me any longer. When I jetted away with wanton abandon on the crazy-dream-plan-trip, I was already seriously in debt, which meant that hell would have to freeze over... (which it is, right here, right now in Britain's Big Freeze, but at the time it was showing no signs of doing so...) before I could afford a ticket from a friendly airline to take me and my tearful episodes home. To deliver me back to my long suffering parents and the life in which I had already committed professional suicide. Yes I considered another type of suicide but I am no Jacques Cousteau wannabe and desceding into the deep dark blue never to resurface just didn't feel right.

So having arrived back in Britain just in time for one of the harshest winters in living history, my sturdy, reliable and loving friends have found me somewhere to live. A huge bedroom in a small house close to the centre of a small pictureque town in the South-ish of England. And a job which pays me reasonably well, to do things which also make me want to commit suicide most of the time. But none-the-less, while my dream-life-plan careens out of control I remain remarkably chipper about the whole damn mess, which of course I blame entirely on the Ex.

My new office is attached to a factory which manufactures plastic products for the agricultural industry and we sell them to farmers over the phone. My job requires me to perform what I would term extensive, hardcore data entry, interfacing with an unwieldy and inherantly flawed database, to sit still for hours at a time and possess the patience of the Virgin Mary. I think I have finally discovered, to my surprise, that these are my biggest weaknesses, which are not in fact related to chocolate or that I have an overwhelming urge to put cheese on all of my food.

In the Age of Austerity which we have discovered is our generation's latest curse, I am grateful to have a job at all. Although if you choose to follow my blog further, you will realise that I'm not so sure I should be. But for now it takes up a hefty percentage of my abnormally lean attention span.

Today my bosses have chosen to elevate me to the lofty excesses of Alpaca Specialist. So far it is nothing more than a crafty case of promotion by up-titling and requires no more of me than to simply hold the title. But if the prospect of being a so called Alpaca Specialist staves off the creeping dread that at nearly 30, I said nearly, I still have an unhealthy relationship with each alcohol, food and men. My relationship status has an automated function to spontaneously switch to 'it's complicated' whenever I encounter two or more of those things in the same room at the same time! And in addition to this, the one reliable salt-of-the-earth type person whom I contiunually ignore, degrade and genearlly turn my back on, is myself. So if specialising in alpacas can keep my mind off all that, just for a bit, in my search for life, the happiness and everything, then hand me my poncho and my pan pipes while I learn to spit up.
 
A little FYI
Wikipedia has this gem for us concerning physical contact with alpacas:
Most alpacas do not like being grabbed. Some alpacas tolerate being stroked or petted anywhere on their bodies, although many do not like their feet, lower legs, and especially their abdomen touched or handled.
We have so much in common already!