Sounds like me a while ago, luckily got back into a firm who make teak boat decking for super yachts, which i got fired from when i was 16 after 8 months of working 12 hour days but being a little sh*t, luckily both my brothers work there so they managed to get me back in, so landed on my feet and proved i've grown up since then, moneys good if you work for it regular pay rises and such was bumped up 200 a month after 3 months, awaiting the next one now...
Also going to apply for the RAF but with the current state of things dunno how that will pan out.
Best thing to do mate is take what you can get, write up your CV properly (take expert advice if needed) as a well written CV can basically get you a job even if somebody else who would technically be better in that role but have a less appealing CV, and you can...stretch the truth on a CV, i know somebody who blagged their way straight from school into being basicly a scientist for weetabix, testing this and that on 10 pounds an hour starting wage, not bad.
If theres anything your interested in then do that in your spare time, you might not have a piece of paper from a college or uni to say you can do it, but if you can prove to a company you know whats what and your highly interested and knowledgeable about it i'm sure they'd consider you.
Example for me is i'd love to live in Japan, so going there next year (have a weeks free stay sorted
hit the jack pot) and when i move into my own place in Jan im going to cover my house in Hiragana with the meanings, so i see it on a daily basis, then go from there to learn the language, learning it from Romanji along the way, so once i'm good enough to acquire a job over there thats where the real learning will start might be in a crap English teaching job but living there would help me get fluent then i can go into translation type jobs.
Just gotta get your finger in as many pies as possible something will come up.
About the vet thing, noble job when i was younger thats what i wanted to be, but i think vets are up there with jobs which can result in depression, for obvious reasons, so you'd need to be prepared for having to do certain things, not a put off but its not a happy happy i work with animals job all the time. Theres obviously the bad side of it.
