How Much Lower Can One Possibly Go (II) ?

I've found work at last. In desperation, being very reluctant to claim benefits, not least because I am still trying to sort out the mess left by last year's claim for six days' Job Seekers' Allowance, I signed on last Thursday with a temporary employment agency and today they've given me some temporary work: A few days cleaning at a local holiday camp.

I'm fifty two, with almost twenty years experience in graphics and allied trades, including four years at art college, and a good degree in Mediaeval English and History, gained in difficult circumstances as a mature student following the loss of business, wife, daughter, car, home etc, yet I seem to be incapable of finding any economic role for myself other than that of temporary menial worker. Unfortunately I need the money. so I have no choice; needs must.

It's undoubtedly 'character building' but I thought that was finished fifteen years ago, after the last round.

How Much Lower Can One Possibly Go?

I think it's reasonable to say that I'm almost 'on my uppers' and feeling very 'down'. I have no job and am very nearly out (as in absolutely out) of money. I blame no one but myself but I'm in a slough from which it is proving difficult to extricate myself. I put up with such privations at various times in my twenties, thirties and forties because I believed that eventually (i.e. by this time) I would reap the rewards but now I'm fifty two and I've realised that this is probably how it will be for the rest of my life, with the added irritation of increasing official and commercial demands on my limited earnings and increasing restrictiuons on my rights and liberties. As unappealing as it is, I fear that my life will become even more difficult.

I am typing this on Angela's PC as I prepare to spend a night sleeping on her office floor, in Alnwick. I have just had to sit in the dark of her outside WC (personal convenience being, apparently, an irrelevance in a commercial property), the cistern of which must be filled manually using the stop cock on the supply pipe. It may seem an odd thing to choose to do but I'm almost a beggar so my options are rather limited and, lacking capital, I know of no other way to be available for work in Northumberland, which is where I am determined to live again, despite rapidly escalating property rents and apparently declining employment opportunities.

I 'phoned an agency about a vacancy advertised on the Jobcentre Plus web site within an hour of arriving here and spoke, as is usual these days, to an ill-mannered, barely intelligible lout who may or may not have promised to pass on the message to the person I wished to speak to, who was not, as is also usual these days, at his desk. No one has returned my call, as is usual these days.

Tomorrow I shall 'phone round the Newcastle based agencies and try to arrange some interviews. I doubt that it will be easy.

Lightning Striking Twice?

I'm off to Northumberland tomorrow, hoping that I can find work there. Unbelievably I've just done something to my ankle and foot, on the stairs, as I carried some boxes of surplus kit down to load into the car. In late January of last year I managed to slip in the bath and break some ribs during the process of moving my things out of Berwick. My ankle is swollen but isn't broken and doesn't appear to be sprained but my foot is very sore in that now familiar broken bone way and if I catch my it on something, like the leg of the table on which the PC sits, or twist it inadvertently, it complains in much the same way as my wrist did when I broke it.

If things have not improved in the morning I shall seek medical advice but the last time I presented myself at a hospital (Berwick Infirmary) with a suspected fracture I was peremptorily told, by an officious and sour-faced Jockette, to see my GP, which consultation took a fortnight to arrange and a further fortnight to occur.

Still Idle

This is my eighth week without an income and things are becoming a little tight. had I not given up alcohol for lent, amongst a number of other things, I should have run out of money by now.