Friday

I rang Haringey Council up today to ask if I simply needed to nip into the nearest Job Centre to apply for a jobseekers allowance - the man on the other end of the phone answered rather rudely that, yes, I did. One hour and four pounds on bus fare later I arrived home having been told that I had to call an 0800 number to apply over the phone. Four pounds, you realise, could've brought me a weeks worth of food. I'm considering complaining about how ironic it is that they are there to help you through times of need but instead purposefully forfeit your vulnerable budget to the evils of living in the capital. Am considering writing a Down and Out in Paris and London-type novel to off-load my woes of poverty onto the rest of the world and get paid for it. 

I also received a phone-call from my dear friend in Wantage and we had a rather long conversation planning what we would have for dinner if he were to come and visit this saturday. Carbonara seems to be on the cards and, after momentarily panicking about whether I have enough cheese to avoid a wall-paper-paste situation, we salivated over the thought of the dish for a good ten minutes. This is what life has been reduced to; two twenty-three year olds becoming worryingly excited over cheese sauce and bacon. We might have to skip on the cream unless I can convince him to buy some as payment for a sofa for the night. 

Four days later and I'm in the job centre in front of my interviewer; a smartly dressed Indian woman with excesses of lip gloss on who keeps muttering things into her computer. She suddenly points at me wide eyed, making me jump, and asks if I'm under twenty five. I nod hesitantly, at which point she whips her monitor around to face my side of the desk and fills out a referral form to the Prince's Trust. She got very excited about this and asked me if I'd put her in one of my films. A mad man came in and started insulting one of the staff in the booth next to us and at that point and she flattened down onto the desk with the smoothness of a contract killer on a tricky assignment (I felt compelled to do the same) and at the end of each of his sentences rolls her eyes at me and sniggers like a teenager. We listened for about five minutes until he left and so she handed me some papers and told me if my claim gets rejected to sign on in two weeks regardless. She gave me a little wink and said it was a gift from her. My faith is restored in the council - perhaps they do have my interests at heart after all.

Friday

To celebrate the new year I have not only given up smoking and been rewarded with a bout of asthma attacks, but have also realised I have an authority complex as I go into 2009 still pretty much unemployed and living on beans on toast. The Christmas cake will hold out over the weekend I think, but I'll need to come up with something else to satisfy my alcohol and tobacco cravings until I, A: decide to sell all my stuff and escape to my friends new house in the North of Thailand, or B: become a life model and take up other such random ways to pay the rent like looking after brats in Belsize Park two days a week, or take out a loan and learn how to do spread betting... the possibilities are endless. 

As a mantra I keep telling myself that Shakespeare didn't find success until he was twenty-four, but then wondering if I'm confusing this fact with Quentin Tarantino's first film. Or was it Stanley Kubrick? Wikipedia is supposedly too unreliable to tell me truthfully so I'll assume it was all three, which means I have six months to go. 

Shakespeare apparently wasn't particularly prolific for a playwright of his time (or so says Bill Bryson... guess what I got for Christmas) and stole a lot of his poetry from Ovid, or whatever his name was. Not that I'm slagging off Shakespeare, but I can't help remembering my distraction when I went to see 'As you like it' at The Minack Theatre. The sun was setting and there were frolicking dolphins on the horizon, both holding much more appeal than mistaken identities and barely audible delivery. And then there was the Elephant Hawk moth that appeared in front of me because it was attracted to the light under my seat and prompted one of the more frightening of my various near death experiences. Rowena Cade should really have thought about the potentially life-threatening surrounding wildlife before letting her successors rip us off with a non-distracting adaptation of one of Shakepeare's less-than-gripping plays. It really was a beautiful theatre however and feel I must be brave, face the music, and go back there one day.

Anyway, thanks to the wonderful Roald Dahl, I've been inspired to write a collection of short stories in the same vein as my short film The Spy - i.e dark and disturbing. Already, last night, I had a wonderfully strange dream about a house that I broke into and couldn't escape and then realised I would be trapped there forever. I did read the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper before I left for Christmas however, and so better keep reading to check I'm not ripping it off. 

Authority complexes aside, I sent my CV to a smattering of Waterstones branches in Central London and got a rather shirty reply from one of the managers stating I should check the website for vacancies, evidently not aware that the website tells you to CONTACT THE BRANCH DIRECTLY. Some people.