Day 14, AD 10

This socketed bronze spear head from Luristan (modern day west-central Iran) dates from 800-600BC and is 14.4cm in length.

These were usually buried with their owners.  There are many thousands of them in circulation, and many thousands in the basements of museums across the planet.

It occurred to me, as I received it as a birthday present and mortality was at the forefront of my mind for some reason, that it will be around long after I am gone.

Out of all the things I have in my possession I get the feeling that the ones that will be around in hundreds or thousands of years time will be the ones that were around hundreds or thousands of years before me.  As well as this and a few other artefacts there will be fossils, rocks, and meteorite fragments, remaining stationary in time while leaving me behind.

Day 13, AD 9

You are unemployed and you are tipped off about a job with a decent amount of hours.  A friend of yours works there.  The job is that of a care assistant in a day centre to assist those with a variety of disabilities.  The job is not very well paid but as it does not require experience or apparently any special skills then there is a good chance of getting it.  You get the job.  It is about 10 miles out of the city and there are two buses to get there, unless you walk to the bus station in town and save a bus fare.  The pay is such that you are still entitled to a certain amount of housing benefit.  Claiming housing benefit requires turning up at the housing department, providing proof or earnings, and filling out forms.  The housing office is run by the council rather than the department social security.  Typically there will be a delay between the claim and receipt of the benefit, this can sometimes be months.  Landlords with many tenants in receipt of benefit will be used to this situation and may be forgiving of the delay as long as there is proof that the claim is in progress.  The landlord will ask about progress weekly or more often.

You will need to visit the housing benefit offices at least weekly, they will be open during the hours you are working, if your employer understands you may be able to alter your working hours to fit in a visit.  You may be working such hours that it is possible to make a brief visit in the morning or at the end of the day, however as there will be a queue there is no guarantee you will be seen in time.  There may also be particular members in the housing benefit team who understand your case better than others, they will not always be available, and if you get someone else then time is wasted repeating the background to the claim.  It may appear that this ought to be straightforward - does this number fall above/below this range, if so do this, etc. However, there will be ambiguities, and the overstretched housing benefit team will make mistakes, will misread payslips, will fill in the wrong form, will receive ambiguous or wrong information from the social security department, and will lose evidence.

Your take home pay after tax is not a great deal more than “the amount of money the law says you need to live on” which is what you would have received in benefit, excluding housing benefit.  Transport costs to work come out of this, and there are other benefits you are no longer entitled to now you are working.  You are very much worse off even before paying any rent, however you are making an effort to get out of unemployment.  Things will be worse for you but you are prepared to put up with it as you think your prospects may improve.

Meanwhile another vacancy has cropped up where you work and one of your housemates (you live in a shared house with a total of three occupants) has succeeded in getting the job.  The housing benefit of your housemate is resolved in a matter of a couple of weeks.  Your housing benefit has still not turned up, and this is some months later, your landlord is losing patience and has started eviction proceedings.  You have been making a token rent payment each week already, which has left you even further short of funds.  The housing benefit problems drag on and so the eviction proceedings make it to court.  A member of the housing benefit team is scheduled to be there to explain the position.  How this works out, given that housing benefit are in disarray over the problem, is never discovered as that member of the housing benefit team is on holiday and no one else has been appointed to cover for them.

The court determines that there should be a continuation of the token weekly payment as they have an understanding that the case is still being dealt with by the housing benefit team.  However they are more stringent on how the token payment should be made.  You will have to visit the Landlord to deliver the token payment in person, weekly, previously the landlord collected the payment.

You visit the landlord on the appointed day, this entails a round trip of a six mile mile walk, or two buses in each direction.  Your landlord isn’t in but another representative of his is available.  However the representative refuses to accept the payment saying that it will need paying directly to him.  This happens numerous times.  You are now in default of the agreement and the landlord can now pursue eviction proceedings.

Meanwhile your housemate’s rent is being paid to the same landlord, while doing the same job, and going through exactly the same claim process.

Your housing benefit team sympathise.  They are working on it.  You might wonder at this point, in what might be considered a coarse manner, “how fucking hard can this be”.

Time passes and the eviction order arrives, that’s it, you are out on the street.  You have a job, you have not done anything untoward to cause this but due to a combination of factors, lack of understanding, greed, corruption, and incompetence, you are in an unfortunate position.

The landlord is ecstatic.  He has removed a sitting tenant, and also offers the other two tenants a cash incentive to leave.  There is an offer of other accommodation for them, by moving on the sitting tenants he has changed which laws apply to the next set of tenants in that house and is able to extract more money and remove tenants more easily.  A win for him so he was happy to pay.

You on the other hand are in a bit of a quandary.  You visit the housing benefit office and in some bizarre act of competence they have resolved the problem.  They have determined what housing benefit you are entitled to and they give you a cheque to cover the period until the day of eviction.  They suggest you look for somewhere else to live.

A week of sleeping on someone’s floor later you locate another landlord.  You will now have to go through the process of claiming housing benefit again.

Day 12, AD 8

So last night I was inhabiting an imagined 1 metre diameter rectilinear space with the alphabet distributed around the internal walls.  My task was to spell out a word using different parts of my anatomy and using an emotion or feeling related to the word I had chosen.  This was all part of some warm-up games to get things flowing in our improvised comedy group.

My word was 'Cats'.  My feeling was 'relaxed'.

The parts of my anatomy were my right hand, my left elbow, the back of my head, and the big toe on my left foot.

Here is a picture of a typical cat.  This one is Maltese and relaxing on a bench in San Anton Gardens, the location of the Presidential Palace.

Day 11, AD 7

Being unemployed for any length of time is a demoralising experience for anyone, for those that don’t have much to start with it is another thing altogether.

I am not talking about those whose experience of unemployment is the relatively short period they spent between graduation and getting a foot on the career ladder.  Neither am I talking about those that have had a pretty decent career and have support structures in place to help them manage such as a partner in full time work, savings, a house, and transport.  I’m referring to those that don’t have those sort of benefits.

Let’s say you’ve ended up in a bedsit at 18/19 years old.  You have a couple of drawers full of clothing and what you stand up in.  There’s no heating other than a 2 bar electric fire.  The bedsit is damp, there won’t be any double glazing.  There’s an electricity coin meter that is set at the highest legal rate the landlord is allowed to recharge electricity at, unless of course it has been accidentally set at a higher rate.  There is no hot water other than that which you boil yourself.  There may be hot water in the communal bathrooms but that’s only on for an hour in the morning and as there are at least 6 other occupants of the bedsits the chances of getting any hot water are slim.  There are two bathrooms.

The benefits you receive will be “the amount of money the law says you need to live on”, a phrase you will become familiar with.  The calculation used to determine the benefit rate of how much the generic human needs to live on is unknown, at least it certainly isn’t public.  This amount will include, as long as you claim for it, housing benefit.

Housing benefit will pay a proportion of your rent and you will have to provide the rest from your other benefit.  It was once possible to get an additional pound or so a week towards washing of clothing/bedding.  This is typical of other allowances, they are hidden and it is up to you to discover them.  Eligibility for ‘washing allowance’ depended on there not being a washing machine available and that you share a bathroom with others therefore preventing you from using the bath for cleaning clothing.  If not sharing a bathroom you are expected to use the bath for all clothes/bedding washing.  A visit to the laundrette will only happen under extreme circumstances.

As clothing, footwear, and bedding all wear out you will struggle to replace them unless you can find things in charity shops and bargain outlets.  You will have to spend as little as possible on clothing as the cost of electricity and food will be the priorities.  You’ll wear multiple layers to keep out the cold to save money on fuel.  You won’t be catching the bus into town unless the distance is huge and you are under time constraint.  Holes in your shoes won’t bother you after a while, socks will wear out faster.

If you have any items of value you will sell them, unless they are nicked first.

It’s your choice what you spend your benefit on, you might be able to get an endless and extortionate credit agreement for a massive TV, or booze and drugs to relieve the monotony.  It’s up to you, but you’ll have to give up something else.  The money will all be gone in a matter of days, and then there’s the long wait for the next payment.

Those with limited world and life experience will inevitably look downward and blame those in this position for their predicament, whereas looking up at those in positions of power, where the actual responsibility lies, happens very little.

Day 10, actual day (AD) 6

Here's a couple of pictures of/from Hyde Park flats.  These are from a recce done prior to going B&W, although all those ones have since gone missing.

Top floor, well, most accessible top floor that didn't require climbing gear.

View across the canal basin, markets, and city.  The hole in the road is just visible.


I knew quite a few people that lived up here.  It was a right old trek to get to, I always considered it to be some sort of fortress.

Pictures taken while the flats were empty just prior to demolition, 1988 ish.  This was one of the few times I didn't hear a door being kicked in.

Day 9

The unemployed. What an idle, feckless bunch of wasters, scroungers and spongers they are.  Sitting at home, smoking fags, drinking booze, and watching sky sports infinity plus gold on 10 foot diameter plasmas, all provided by us the hard working and gullible taxpayers.

There must be an appropriate and common sense solution.  Isn’t it time we brought back the treadmill, at least then we could have them doing something useful, such as generating power to charge the mobile phones and iPads of the industrious as we go about earning the keep for the shiftless and work-shy.  They would be allowed out once every couple of hours to recuperate and to update their CV and apply for jobs.  They would even be entitled to spend the generously provided allowance from a State sponsored debit card on any of the luxury goods available in the privately owned and government regulated benefit outlets.

The clothing these people wear is a disgrace, if they gave up eating luxury food they could easily afford a respectable pair of trousers or a skirt rather than the vulgar and cheap ‘sportswear’ they tend to display.  How do they expect to gain decent employment if they don’t prioritise.  It only takes a modicum of effort to determine how to make cost effective and nutritious food, a bag of rice could easily provide a family with enough nourishment for a week when considered properly.  If it’s good enough for overseas aid then it is possible here, we could in fact redirect the aid and make significant savings.  Food banks really are making the irresponsible even more lazy and are a true abomination.  A nutritious range of appropriate and value foodstuffs and utility wear will be made available at the regulated outlets.

If these lead-swingers and skivers continue to be recalcitrant and don’t conform to the universally agreed rules of behaviour then they will be aware of the sanctions.  One of these will be the use of organs they are not making optimum value of available for donation.  We would need to be sure that they hadn’t abused any particular organ scheduled for sanction, obviously.  If they live a lifestyle that contravenes the entitlement rules then they will be scheduled for additional tasks, something improving and designed to help them take their mind away from the negative attractions they seek.  Sewer cleaning for those that don’t eat a diet rich in fibre, for example.

Those that refuse to participate in the laws of the country by refusing to give up whichever vice is damaging their organs will then be humanely treated to a dignified exit to provide sustenance for those on the next rung on the ladder.  It may seem abhorrent to some but we have to put aside our wooly attitudes in times of crisis, and it will be an informed choice that those in that position have made for themselves.

While in receipt of such State largesse it shouldn’t be forgotten by those that are in work and on benefits that they clearly should have tried or worked harder.  It is common sense.  They have not shown a level of personal responsibility, application or rigour required of an individual to make a decent fist of austerity Britain.  They should be reminded that it is decent folk providing their bonuses, when really it should be off their own back where a proper amount of labour is required.  What sort of an education system is it that gives them such an air of entitlement.

Obviously there are problems and hindrances, the petty bureaucracies of the EU, the human rights act, and our antiquated legal system all provide blockers to the level of common sense that would be achieved by a free market method of governing at such a basic level.

Given the harsh nature of our times then tough measures have to be taken. These are very realistic measures and I am sure my proposals will be greeted with understanding by the sensible majority.

Day 8

I nicked Wheels of Fire off Dad when I was 8.

I loved the guitar, but man the bassist and singer was excellent.

Here's to Jack Bruce.

Day 7, actual day 5

Met up with a mate for lunch.  We went to the Blue Moon Cafe, I'm a bit partial to it, he'd not been before and had had never got around to it.  He enjoyed it.  We moved on to a coffee place and he bought me a birthday coffee, we talked about music, work, and architecture.  Once we'd finished our drinks we mooched around town, looking at buildings, standing and pointing, giving our development ideas an airing.  We are experts in these areas and it was a pleasant way to pass an afternoon.

Down the Moor we went in to the new market building, neither of us had been in before.  I mentioned going to the old market as a kid with my mum and having a tray of cockles from the fish market, he said he did the same with his dad, he'd also have tripe.  I only ever had tripe twice, in The Blake, on the same day, it was so unpleasant I had a second piece just to be sure.  Not so much unpleasant as tasteless and rubbery, which might be synonymous.  I won't be buying tripe but there were plenty of other things I will return for.

Back mooching around we muttered about the dearth of adventure in the modern architecture of the city, on the whole it's mediocre and clichéd construction passed off as grand design and innovation.  As we are experts in these areas it was a pleasant way to pass an afternoon.

Day 6, actual day 4

A hack joke we've all heard a heard a thousand times, but here it is.  I went to water a plant on the front bedroom window ledge (that isn't the hack bit).  I could see a man slowly walking down the pavement past the house, he was faffing with an electronic device.  A meter reader.  I went downstairs to the front door and there was the card, "we called today but you were out", etc, etc.

Now, why is it that they knock at a frequency outside that of human hearing, with all the strength and power of an injured ant worried that it might be causing a disturbance?

Insert the name of your favoured delivery company in the above.

There isn't actually a joke above, or anywhere else.

Day 5, actual day 3

Kelvin Flats.  Was going to say that we moved on when it was first built and that during demolition I climbed over the fence and was the last person to go in our old flat.  But I'm not, so bollocks to that.

Oh, what a giveaway.


Hedge trimming is much about as hard as I was expecting, quite heavy work with a petrol trimmer.  And what a fine collection of multi-legged creatures ended up living in my shirt.

Wasn't expecting that.

Michael Palin at The Crucible, he did very nearly three hours.  Approaching Ken Dodd proportions.  VG & VFM.

Day 4, actual day 2

A good sharp cooking implement.

Why would anyone want anything else.

I use it.

Made from razor steel.

Kitchen knife, hand made by Stuart Mitchell using SF100 grade Stainless Steel. SF100 grade Stainless is usually used for manufacturing razors, scalpels and other surgical instruments and has this composition - CARBON - 0.60% - 0.70% SILICON - 0.50% MAX. MANGANESE - 0.50% - 1.00% CHROMIUM - 12.00% - 13.50% SULPHUR - 0.025% MAX. PHOSPHORUS - 0.03% MAX. The presentation box contains this note - "This Centennial Knife has been manufactured to celebrate 100 years of Stainless Steel - an invention that was born in Sheffield and rapidly spread worldwide. The original Stainless Steel knives were crafted by Ernest Stuart 100 years ago for R.F. Mosley & Co. of Portland Works, Randall Street, Sheffield. They were made from an experimental block of steel provided by Harry Brearley of Brown-Firth who invented what is universally known as Stainless Steel in August 1913. This celebration Stainless Steel kitchen knife has been crafted and produced by Stuart Mitchell in his workshop at Portland Works in 2013. It has been made using Sheffield Stainless Steel donated by Brinsworth Strip Mills/TATA specifically for this project. This is a Limited Edition of 100 numbered knives. It has been designed and made to be used. It will last a lifetime...."

Day 3, actual day 1 of holiday

How the capitalist system mangles language in an effort to create more $$$.

Profit!

Bought some ear plugs.

2 pack foam ear plugs.

Now that to me says it’s a 2 pack of foam ear plugs as, unless I’m mistaken, ear plugs come in pairs.

Most of us have two ears and would use two at a time, therefore a pack of earplugs equates to two earplugs, hence the plural, earplugs.

Not earplug.

When a packet is labelled '2 pack foam ear plugs' it conjures up an image of there being 2 sets of earplugs. A set being enough for one human being, and there being a second set for another human being. Or, for the first one of those two beings to use as a new set in the event that the first set become ineffective, or for spares in case one of the current plugs drops out and into a drain, or a slugs nest.

2 pack.

The only time that 2 pack equates to a single entity is when referring to the deceased rap/hiphop artist of similar name.

2 pack. 2 Pac. Tupac.

This pack contained one pair of ear plugs.

Surely that’s - 1 pack.

For goodness sake.

1 pack.

Now what sort of name is that for a rap, stroke, hiphop artiste?

This is quite clearly a capitalist ploy to mislead, inconvenience the customer, and make an absolute shedload of cash on repeated purchase of these £1.99 earplugs.

They’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

And on that day I’ll be wearing ear defenders.

Not ear plugs.

Day 2

1984 was mentioned on QI.

Apparently most people that claim to have read it haven't read it.

I haven't read it.

That doesn't mean I've read it.

No reverse bluff going on here.

I'm currently reading -
George Orwell
Essays
Penguin Modern Classics
New Edition
29 June 2000

I've read almost all his other books, the exceptions being A Clergyman's Daughter, and 1984.

There are some essays in this collection that I haven't come across before.

It's almost 30 years since I read the rest of his works, over a period of a year or two.  That was interspersed between pretty much all the Hunter S Thompson writing available at the time, and a mass of other stuff, some trashy, some high-falutin'.

But I've not read 1984.

Perhaps that should be remedied.

Day 1

Here's to this.

Apparently on this day in 1860 the Second Opium War finally ended, and in 1964 on this day the New York World's Fair closed for its first season after a six month run.

Perhaps a secret deal has occurred somewhere today to legalise the trade of some narcotic substance, and maybe there's been an event where the noble objective of achieving Peace Through Understanding has been taking place as was the aim of that World Fair.

If either of those things have happened they've passed me by.

It's more likely that mafia, extremist, fundamentalist activity has been taking place where funds have been raised by the trade in narcotics with the aim of destabilising governments and generally causing a fuss.  Whereas our government is in the process of yet another mission to achieve Peace Through Bombing the Shit out of People.

Today I've refrained from consuming heroin derivatives and from being a club wielding chest-beater, which might be considered an achievement in some quarters.

I have however been to the shop and bought groceries, and also supplies for the birds.

My world-view is not always so narrowly defined as by my activity over the last 16 hours.