Don’t waste £2.50 buying a coffee in a coffee shop though. And don’t go to the newsagent and buy a Coke for £1 and have to drink it on a bench or loitering on a street corner. The best place to have a rest when you’re out for the day is in a pub.

Daytime pubs are shady havens with plentiful seating. They’re full of old men and other dossers. The bar-staff are underworked, so you’ll get served quickly. You can have a seat – you can have your pick of the seats.

But don’t buy beer – ask for a soft drink, or better yet, a pint of soda water or squash. Most pubs have blackcurrant, orange squash etc. and they won’t charge you more than 50p for a nice icy pint glass of the same.

You can sit at your leisure and have a cool refreshing drink, very cheaply, in comfortable surroundings. Win!

That feels slightly better.

The lack of feedback or response on the things I do do (application-wise) means I don’t get the sense of progress or achievement that used to make me feel valued when I was in work. I also don’t have a barometer of the quality of what I produce, which seems to promote low confidence.

I think I should be trying to enjoy the upsides of being unemployed, especially given that we are having quite nice summer weather.

I am thinking of doing my job applications and articles in the mornings, and then giving myself time out from stressing about my worth as a company asset, the employer-attractionness of my (other) blog (which is related to my field), and loathesome “networking” activities etc., during the rest of the day and at weekends.

So I say, anyway.

What I will probably keep doing is to maintain a low level of anxiety and self reproach at all times, which occasionally erupts into a bout of applications, providing temporary relief.

I’ve started to feel like I’m invisible and inaudible. My applications may as well be written in hieroglyphics for all the mleeaning they seem to impart to the people I am sending them to. I feel like i’m mining for nuggets of employment in a sheer face of granite, using only a toothpick as my tool.

Life would be so much sweeter if there were a culture of actually replying to applicants meaningfully.
If someone could just spare a moment to write to me saying “you left a typo in” or “your cover letter was stuffy and boring” or “you should have talked more about x y or z”, it would help so much.

As it is, I feel baffled. The applications that have generated interest (though ultimately come to nothing, hence me writing this) are never the ones I expect. The ones I make an effort on seem to sink into an opaque pool of silence.
Meanwhile I’m slowly  lacking more and more in confidence, and wondering if I shouldn’t just get a job washing dishes or flipping burgers and have done with it.

Maybe it’s like the 7 stages of grief. However-many-stages of Dole.
This stage I am in now is alienation. It’s where the people who have jobs start to look like a different species. Remember at primary school, how fundamentally and incontrovertibly different the older kids were? How advanced, how intimidating and how sophisticated? It was either Roald Dahl or Steven Fry (I am sorry, I forget which) who said something like “even when I am sitting in my rocking chair with my pipe in old age, I will never achieve the older-ness of those senior boys.”

It’s like that, except that the “older” ones are the people who have jobs – important, meaningful and enjoyable (sometimes) jobs.

I don’t have a job now, but there was a time when I did, and it’s starting to feel more and more strange to me.

I read the Twitters and Facebooks of these job-havers, and hear their daily thoughts and feelings, hear their interactions and wonder how on earth they do it, eddying about up there in their airborne job-world, while I plod along below through my dole-life.

Once I had queued, I reached the desk and was given a ticket with a number and told to wait again. A new, more remote sort of queueing. I was glad to be away from the couple, although I could still hear them, as could most of the people there. “What kind of mother gives her 5-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER co-CAINE?!?” the boy was yelling.

I read quite a bit of my book. I was called to the desk and  gave over my tenancy agreement to be photocopied – proof that I am who I say I am and all the rest of it I guess.

I asked why it hadn’t been demanded at inital application, and why they’d had to write to me and ask me to come in and queue.

“Oh, it’s because of them down the road” [jerking thumb in direction of the Job Centre]. “They handle the initial claim and they don’t do it right.”

“Well it was done with a central office over the phone” I said.

“There you are you see. It’s because you did it over the phone.”

“I was told to do it over the phone. I wasn’t given another option but to do it over the phone.”

“Yeah. It’s them down the road. Not our fault you see.”

I lost my temper very slightly and said that they ought to communicate with “them down the road” to give people a better service, because after putting in my claim several weeks ago I’d already paid 2 months’ rent and a month’s council tax out of my nonexistent income and I was getting pretty strapped.

“Well it’ll all be backdated.”

“Sure, but that’s not much good to me now. How do you think people manage who DON’T have money in the bank or are able to borrow it?”

I know the answer – they get evicted. I was given an extra copy of my receipt to show to my landlady in case I was late with the rent.

Last night I “powered” through the WOW! Weight Off Workout with Vicky Entwistle. She is better known as Janice Battersby from Coronation Street. Her workout is quite good for “real women” like myself – Vicky is in her forties and prior to her transformation had a sort of matronly shape, so you get to think that if she can do it, certainly most of us can. Her introductory message and her comments during the workout are of basically that gist. “I’m never going to look like a supermodel”, she says, “but just look at the improvement I have made”. She is joined by her trainer Richard Callender, who is equally personable.

I now need to find a bit of money for a floor mat if I want to do it again though, because the stretches are murder on the knees otherwise.

Today’s fun was Davina’s Super Body Workout. Davina McCall is a bit annoying, but the workout isn’t. Her two trainers work alongside her and the female instructor Niki Wybrow leads the workout very clearly and pleasantly. You can choose which level of torment you prefer by following the movements of one of the three – Niki’s is the lowest impact, Davina’s is higher.

Anyway so. Exercise at home might be a good addition to your dole-day. If cost is a worry – I got these two, plus Angela Griffith’s Dance Mix workout and Rosemary Conley’s Salsacise Boxset (though that title already makes me crave tortilla chips and dip) for £3.99 each at Borders, so do shop around for them. You can also find very cheap VHS workouts from latter-day celebrity presenters in your local charity shop. The faces might be out of vogue but the exercises probably won’t be much different.

I’m all sweaty now. Gosh!

I called up. Why £36? What does this mean? Is this all I am entitled to, after whatever baffling sanctions have been applied?

Apparently this payment is a week’s dole minus 3 working days’ money. They don’t pay you anything for the first three days of your claim. Why? “It’s the law”. So for 3 days I have no needs, do I? I have no need of food, water or shelter, I don’t exist, have been paralysed in an administrative statis decreed by the government.
Well, whatever. It’s through. Money will now continue to arrive in my bank account 2 weeks in arrears.

Housing benefit, that’s a different story. I called them up, and was told they have sent me a letter requesting proof of my tenancy and rent amount before they can do anything.

WHY do they not ask for these things when the claim is made? Lord knows it would not have been a problem. These after-the-fact missives requesting random scraps of information, sent by post and always second-class mail. They lead me to no other conclusion that the state is stalling on having to pay me the benefits to which the law says I am entitled. And in order to stall, they’re wasting man-hours and postage costs with this bureaucracy. It doesn’t seem much if it’s just me, but imagine all the thousands of dole-people going through this process. It’s costing a lot of money, to make people worry and scrimp and borrow and wait.

Dear Sir/Madam,
I have a few comments to make on your site, having tried to use it for job searching.

********
Lulz.

I haven’t gotten dressed in a couple of days. Is that worrying? I’m not worried. Sooner or later I’ll get tired of not being dressed, and my inner love of balance will propel me into an active state. That’s what I’m figuring anyway. It does people good to let themselves free-fall into slobbery sometimes. Reassuring to be re-aquainted with the inner balances that will govern our activity when all external pressure is removed. And who knows when I’ll get the chance to do that again once I am returned to the workforce.

Earlier I washed up all my tea-mugs and toast-plates from the last 2 days – laziness only goes so far. I found some eggs in the kitchen that were out of date and remembered something I used to do at university to relieve stress.

I took the old eggs into the back garden and threw each one with maximum force against the back wall. Each egg representing in my mind some force or person who had brought me trouble. Each one shattered against the bricks, leaving a drippy yellow smash-mark stuck with bits of shell. I recommend this method of catharsis.