The Manor Royal BID people are holding a ‘careers expo’ in April. It is at the Arora hotel from 3pm to 8pm on April 4th and there are so many reasons why this is a good thing.

Generally, having more people work locally just makes a town work better. It really is a ridiculous situation when half the people in town are commuting out, jamming up motorways and rail lines while traffic in the other direction is jammed up with people from elsewhere commuting in to do the local jobs. I know it all sounds a bit Royston Vasey, but local people doing local jobs just works better for the community as a whole.

Not only that, but it works a lot better for the individuals as well – and motivations are always more about “what is in it for me” than “what is in it for society”. I used to commute to London and on a very good day I would spend 2 hours travelling there and back. Since then I understand that very good days are even more rare than they used to be and life is hell for train commuters now. It used to be that I would get to the station at 0700 and return about 1800 on a good day – leaving work on time, no delays or cancellations,  and making all the connections.

After transferring to work on Manor Royal I no longer needed to rely on the trains, which was like getting a pay rise of thousands of pounds. I started cycling to work, which meant we did not need a second car and was probably good for me. I wasn’t forking out for snacks and meals at London cafes. I worked out that I could have dropped my salary by £5K and still been better off financially.

Since then I moved within town to be even closer to work – a few hundred metres instead of 5 miles. That is a bit extreme but it means that not only can I walk to work but I can even pop home at lunchtime. I now have a much smaller carbon footprint, contribute nothing to congestion, have more money to spend, less stress, and can spend more time with family or hobbies. I can even make plans for evenings and guarantee I will not end up stranded at Clapham Junction when I am supposed to be somewhere else.

This careers expo will be useful for anybody working locally who fancies upgrading their job, and there is nothing wrong with that, but anybody who is currently wasting hours every day commuting to London, Brighton, Croydon, or elsewhere could find that working locally is a life-changing experience.

Of course the irony is that a lot of London commuters might find that Southern Railways will render them unable to get back to Crawley by 8pm. Might be a good day for a sickie 🙂