19.02.26

“The white-hot reaction of a sensitive, observant, compassionate young man to poverty.”

Dervla Murphy, 1989

Okay, let me get my story straight. By about week 6 I had arranged a room to rent. In doing so, I was able to negate much of my immediate stress, and thus really settle into the boredom, and coming solitude, that would define the rest of my 2025.

In the midst of this mist, I successfully applied for a position as a teaching assistant. By successfully, I mean I was actually offered gainful employment, which I subsequently accepted. Fear not, however, this did not mark an end to my subsidised existence, which would eventually amount to 40 178 days. War would be over by Christmas, they said.

Before being sent out on active duty, the employment agency who had offered me this work first needed to complete a series of compliance checks, a practice which I support in totality. The sticking point for me came not during the in-person training day, during which one future colleague remarked that my dress sense resembled John Pertwee (a reference, I can only hope, to the Third Doctor, and not to Worzel Gummidge), but during the processing of my Enhanced DBS check. Essentially, there were, and likely still are, nationwide delays in DBS processing times, a result of bottlenecks at Stage 4 (the bit where the local police force manually checks you out (one shivers at the thought)). Resolving this DBS ordeal would eventually involve an email chain with the local MP, my remembering the existence of middle names, and the GOV.UK equivalent of a wheel-up reload, all while the shrapnel lodged in my pocket dwindled with each passing day. Suffice to say, I have done many things in this life of mine, but none yet so harrowing to dirty the clean white sheen of my DBS check, which arrived safely in the post on December 11th. My record is vapid and blank, much like my conscience.

I once heard or read a story about an unemployed young man, who gradually grew weary of questions and comments from his family and friends regarding his ongoing state of joblessness, noticing the transformation of their tone from pity into something closely resembling frustration. To combat this developing issue, he decided he would tell people that he wanted to become a printmaker. In the early 1970’s, when this story takes place, printmaking was a hard industry to break into, as even an entry position required a considerable amount of training and qualifications. This line was met with a much better reception, – “Good on you son, it’s a hard market for one so ambitious.”, etc.

Before its eventual arrival, I had begun to exercise this same technique with regards to my DBS check. Whenever anyone asked me about my situation, I would reply that I was, unfortunately, still waiting on the return of my DBS check, and simply could not start work until its arrival. This, thankfully, shifted the focus of these conversations away from my ever-solidifying position as something of an idler, and onto a more abstract critique of state bureaucracy, which suited me just fine.

Money doesn’t talk, it swears. However, with regards to these obscenities – Who really cares? I did manage to sell a few pouches of tobacco, an admittedly easy feat when you don’t smoke. I also considered crowning myself again with the title of busker, one which adorned my CV for several years, to many a potential employers dismay. Unfortunately, the youthful exuberance once set in the marrow of my goodly frame went a-wanderin’ some time between 2021 and 2025, and I frankly could not rise to the occasion. No longer would I wander such sterile promontory.

It was around this point that I also began to notice the general dearth of modern artistic representations of life on the dole. You see, I tend to rely on art to explain to me the situations I find myself in – when I was a student I listened to a lot of Galaxie 500, when I was a smack-addled sailor it was Sister Ray. All the world’s a stage and music, like clothes and dialects, help me inhabit whatever role I find myself in. I am Al Pacino, I am Frank Serpico.

Where was I? Yes, the only artistic representations I found myself relating to, let alone relying on, in this period were George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ (1933), John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Snap, Crackle & Bop’ (1980), and Half Man Half Biscuit’s ‘Back in the D.H.S.S.’ (1986), the former being the primary inspiration for this series, the latter being a woefully under-appreciated piece of social realism. Indeed, looking around at my immediate cultural surroundings I could see nothing that said anything to me about the life I had found myself living, one which primarily revolved around boredom, and, as an extension, the profound minutiae one concerns themselves with when so utterly bored.

I realise now, as I write this out, that my point here is rather half-hashed, as I am sure there are artists today, musicians and writers and the like, who are exploring these situations, I was just not aware of them at the time, which only compounded a growing feeling of isolation from both my peers and my heroes (not that the two don’t frequently overlap). Instead, I occupied my thoughts with a fabricated nostalgia for the 1980’s, a time when unemployment, it seemed to me, was a more artistically recognised cultural phenomenon. Perhaps the novelty wore off.

“We dress like students, we dress like housewives, or in a suit and a tie. I’ve changed my hairstyles so many times now, I don’t know what I look like.”

David Byrne, 1979