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.
Tuesday, 25 March 2008
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You are not alone. Currently in the process of liquidating my second and last pension - so the workhouse beckons unless I can win lottery, discover wife is actually an heiress after all, or discover a gold mine at the bottom of the garden.
The cause of my fall from middle class respectibility was my graphics company going tits up in October last year. My wife and I had shoved in around 25 grand over the last two years of its life, and didn't draw a salary during that time in an effort to keep it going. When my accountant told me to give over and let it go, it was like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.
But my body started to fall to bits as a consequence. Hyper tension, high blood pressure, stomach ulcer.... I was signed off for 3 months... And then the letters came - bloody millions of them, official brown 'uns, final demand 'uns..... I did what ever self respecting head the ball does - hide them under lots of newspapers...
Hardest job of my life was to face up to them.
I am now a sole trader, graphics, copywriting, webbing, selling stuff on the internet. Anything and everything is being looked at. We are selling our house - a 5 bedder (just as the clever money is going into oil)- and hope to buy a wreck to do up. I want to move from West Lancashire to the middle of nowhere (thinking of Northumberland, North Yorks, North Lancs. I seek solitude - this 54 year old has decided he has had enough of nine to half past tenning at night - and wants to spend his remaning years with a bit of land and an English landscape that isn't blighted by the follies of our shit government.
I couldn't work for anyone - I know more than they ever will.... and I'm too used to telling people what to do.
All I know is that this part of my life promises to be more exciting than the 30 years of client obsessed drudgery that I have just endured....
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