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.