22nd January 2001 - 8:33 p.m.

I am now officially Long Term Unemployed. When you’re Long-Term Unemployed, the man behind the desk is much ruder to you and treats you like an idiot. When you’re Long-Term Unemployed, the Jobcentre pen-pushers forget about your middle-class background, and that you’ve been to University, and that they can make polite conversation with you, and begin to treat you with as much disdain as they treat everyone else. When you’re Long-Term Unemployed, you find yourself tempted to go out and blow a fortnight’s Benefit on a flash new suit, just to make you feel like a proper Human Being again. And there’s nothing else for it but to come home again and begin drinking at 11am. So it’s not all bad. And not so bad, either, is the fact that, on every visit to the Jobcentre, you now get to titter at the laminated sign reading “WELCOME NEW DEALERS!”