When I moved out of London, my plan was to write a book. Instead, I ended up working in a chicken shop, watching drugs tear through a working-class town – and my own life
A man walks into a chicken shop. This sounds like the beginning of a joke. Perhaps it is. For 18 months, I have worked in a chicken shop, and some days my situation feels like a punchline. In 2015, I quit my job at a property magazine in London and moved to Aberdeen, with two suitcases and a grand plan to write a book about the oil industry. Two years later, I washed up in a northern refinery town, with no money and an unfinished manuscript. I learned my scale. I got a job frying things.
Anyway, a man walks into a chicken shop, this chicken shop that I work in, and pulls his top up, for the benefit of the paying customers. He has a knife wound in his chest. It looks fresh. The beads of blood along the gash have barely coagulated.
