‘Gee, how I would love to be living in Warminster right now. You seem to be getting all the kicks and high jinks in life’
– Schoolgirl from Kansas (as quoted in The Warminster Mystery by Arthur Shuttlewood, 1967, an account of UFO sightings in and around Warminster in 1965)

This is my last week in Warminster, Wiltshire, ‘the worst place in England to live’ (someone said to me). A bit harsh perhaps, but it has been a bleak experience.

1. Splitting up with my family
It just didn’t work out.

2. Burning the living room
Okay, that's an exaggeration; we had the log fire blazing with some cardboard lying quite near it (my fault). The cardboard caught on fire. I threw a bucket of water over it and black ash liquid seeped into the carpet. Don't tell the landlord.

3. Getting off on the wrong request-only train station in the middle of nowhere
I’d only just moved to Wiltshire and started an evening college course (screen printing); on the train back at night I had on my iPod and didn’t hear the announcement that the train was stopping at a request stop, Dilton Marsh, quite a few miles from Warminster. I dashed out of the train. By the time I realised my mistake the train had gone. I looked around. There was nothing and no one. I phoned home. Mel was going to have to wake up Martha and pick me up by car. She phoned back two minutes later saying Martha had been sick everywhere and wouldn’t be able to pick me up. I wondered around a while. I eventually found a cab.

4. Being chased out of ‘friendly local’ pub by a group of stoned skinheads
I’ve mentioned this previously (fourth paragraph down).

5. Being rejected from a local factory job
This involved having to don an apron, net hat and wellington boots then being shown around a prawn-packing factory followed by a twenty-minute maths test. Which I failed. We were allowed to use calculators but it took me about ten minutes to find the calculator on my phone. Even then the questions were harder than GCSE maths and I didn’t get very far. (In my defence, all the factory jobs eventually went to Poles in a Polish job agency.)

6. Nothing to do at all
Eh, in my day you made your own entertainment. Whatever. It’s like a soulless wasteland. Anyone for skittles?

7. Ex-in-laws threatening to move to Warminster
Perhaps the final straw/nail in coffin etc.

8. Living in a draughty, falling apart, rat-infested house for three years with an apathetic landlord

9. Not knowing anyone for a 100-mile radius
Thank heavens for broadband.

10. Never having seen a UFO or an alien
Everyone else here tends to see them. A friend thinks the whole town consists of aliens. And that’s being charitable.

*Apart from moving here.

UPDATE -- UPDATE -- UPDATE
Due to overwhelming public demand, here’s a few extras we remembered whilst clearing the house out:

• We locked ourselves out of the house on our first night.
• Mel’s best friend bought her (rescue home) dog over to visit. It shat diarrhea all over our bedroom.
• We had a plague of ants for about a week.
• In the early days, Mel was always tripping over in the house. And breaking things.
• Finally, as recently as last week I almost set the dining table on fire. With a bunch of candles on a tin tray. We forgot about them and the candles burnt through the tray, melted the varnish on the table and was very close to catching on fire.