26.01.26 (originally written on 28.07.25)

“Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me. I hate to tell you, Mister, but only dead men are free.”

Bob Dylan, 2020

This is the first in what, I can only hope, will be a short series. Better still, this will be a mere one-off special, soon to be forgotten about and left to rot in the annals of my no doubt fruitful career doing whatever it is that I end up doing. If, however, that is not the case – Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

So, before we begin, I’ll toss in a disclaimer. If your temple vein pulsates at the thought of hearing the thoughts and meanderings of a recent graduate on the doss, the following piece will likely not be your cup of tea. However, if this topic does, in fact, find itself comfortably nestled right up your proverbial alley, please do sit back and enjoy.

Now to begin, there’s a witty angle to all of this, and then there’s a more somber one. We’ll get to both.

How, I hear you ask, did I end up here? Less than a month ago, I graduated from Durham University. Having been unsuccessful in securing a graduate job (you know, an actual salaried one), I quietly decided I would take some time to get myself stable again, and spend as much time as I could writing and developing the skills I would take out into the job market in due course. In short, I figured I was going to have to take a step backward before I could take a step forward.

“Watch out world, I’m a man at ease, free to do whatever when I want. Lonely heathland here I come, deathless useless bracken underfoot.”

Nigel Blackwell, 1993

My first appointment at the Jobcentre left me with a lot to say, and yet really nothing at all. I felt strikingly out of place wearing a tie, though I’m somehow sure I’m not the first and won’t be the last. In retrospect, I think that by wearing such an item I was trying to develop some sort of ironic distance between my ego and the situation it had found itself in. My tie would thus form a monkey fist around my bleeding heart.

Overall, my main takeaway (don’t worry Mr Daily Mail, not that type of takeaway) from the whole experience so far has been just how paternalistic it has felt. I mean this in neither a strictly positive, nor negative, sense of the word – it has felt paternalistic, with every common ramification of that feeling in close tow. In one sense, it felt safe, as if nothing could truly touch me, as the state will always protect me, and they will give me my money and my food and my shelter, and I can rest knowing that no harm can, or will, ever touch me from within the confines of their comfortable embrace. On the other hand, it felt cold and impersonal, as if I was simply passing through the aged bowels of a system far beyond its prime, deep in the guts of a body that obfuscates real human understanding (wherever I got that notion from, perhaps my mother). A place where no one looks you in the eye, no one but yourself.

How anyone could live in this state of being for any serious extent of time, without the experience imprinting quite markedly upon their psyche, escapes me. I stress that this comment is in no way a criticism of said person, or of their situation or decision, more an idle observation on the nature of Swindon’s Jobcentre Plus, and, more specifically, its impact on what a more optimistic writer than I might term – the human spirit. But then again, what do I know, it’s only week two.

On another note, as I have informed my assigned Jobcentre work coach that I am facing homelessness, they have suspended my commitment to spend 35 hours per week searching for gainful employment for four weeks. That is to offer me some time to get my housing affairs in order.

Nevertheless, my valiant conquest of the Swindon job market continues. I have now spent four consecutive days handing out printed copies of my CV’s to businesses across the town. Unfortunately for me, this practice begins with either my parting of five square Great British pounds (for foreign readers, equate this to a pound of flesh) in return for a day-rider bus ticket, or with my walking the five miles into the town centre. There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile, he found a crooked sixpence and pocketed it.

As of yet, I have been reticent to tell my friends and family that I am claiming Universal Credit, for no other reason than a fear of the judgement associated with such a choice. After 18 years of state-funded education, I now settle into a few more of state-funded relaxation, with generous side helpings of state-funded indignation and state-funded resignation.

I can only hope that my time spent suckling on the unwilling teat of the state is short, and that I will soon find work once more. However, at the time of writing this my hope resonates off the walls of my skull with a futile ring. Until then, I will be living on ∼£70 per week, making up the rest with the scattered remnants of my student loan, a bit like George Orwell, or Ratatouille (I’ve never seen the film).

Godspeed, readers. For both my sake and yours.

Postscript: The initial intention for this series was for it to be written out in real time, as the weeks passed into months. However, owing to my usual, rather non-committal, form of commitment, this didn’t end up happening. As such, entries in Despatches will take a more fluxed approach to their narrative chronology, with some (like this one) having been written at the time of their setting, and others (like the next) resembling more written recollections of my own days of speed and slow time Mondays. The Confessions of a Swindonian Dole Eater, if you will.