Tenner Solo in A Flat

Life on the dole is a right song and dance. KG faces the music..
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It's dark. The street lights, heads bowed, spill urine yellow puddles of light onto crisp, clean snow. The covering is quite fresh - it only stopped coming down half an hour ago - and it's brilliant white glare is in such a marked contrast to the dark profiles of the uniformly dull houses in the street that it hurts the eye.

These houses were built of red brick in the early 1940s, and have witnessed over half a century of working class angst and struggle. They've seen it all, and it's clearly been too much for them. They look decidedly tired. The roofs seem to slump forward, and the gable-ends seem to sag, sharing the posture of a chocolate factory drone on the brink of physical collapse after yet another double shift. Even the grass, now mercifully hidden by an all forgiving layer of white, looks exhausted. The trees look ill, as though they exist on some ghastly arboreal equivalent of happy shopper biscuits and sausage rolls.

I stare out from the living room window. Existence room would perhaps be more apt, as by the sort of standards nice people expect to apply to their lives. Not a great deal of living goes on here, more of a day to day rearguard action against awfulness. It suddenly occurs to me that I have lived here, on this estate, for over a quarter of a century. Every year it gets a little grubbier, slips a little further. The other week I saw a discarded hypodermic needle lying amongst the Coke tins and crisp packets in the snicket between our street and the main road. The pole's getting greasier, boys and girls, and very soon we just might slide right off. Don't look down, just don't look down.

Looking out I notice that nearly all of the other windows I can see have their curtains drawn, as though to bar the vision of the street a foot deep in snow from their front rooms. York lays nestled so deep in its sheltered valley that it rarely snows. Once past the age of twelve York people tend to look up to the skies in despair as the snow begins to fall, in pretty well much the same way the Ancient Egyptians must have done as the fireballs and amphibians began to rain down.

The room is quiet, no TV to proclaim that John of Leeds is about to consider gambling for the star prize, no local radio to breathlessly inform me of special offers on shag-pile carpets or VW Golfs. I need the silence. Today has been a bad day, there was no post.

The success of the entire day now pivots on the appearance of the postman in the street, and what, if anything, he pokes through our door. A letter might after all contain news of one of the 20 or so job applications I have on the go at any given time. The waiting is the worst part, those eternities between the sending and receiving of things. On those terrible post-free days you spend the long hours before the next potential delivery trying to fathom out why the Royal Mail's very own angel of death has passed over.

There is the constant and humiliating prospect that your application, despite being neatly typed, despite the attention paid to spelling, punctuation and grammar, despite the utilization of a superior grade of stationery, has simply been binned by a sadistic employer.

Because of the peculiar layout of our flats, we cannot actually see the postman as he slips between the buildings, out of sight on the narrow path beneath our window. We can only hear the clack of his shoes on the path, and the creak, plop, snap of a delivery to Charlie, our neighbour.If we do get mail, then all we see of him are the three fingers of one hand as they prop our letter box open, and the shadow of his other arm on the frosted glass in the door as he completes the task.

Medieval people elevated rarely glimpsed creatures - like the giraffe - to an almost supernatural status, complete with strange and powerful attributes. In the same way our postman is no longer merely just a bloke who delivers the mail, but has become an entity that somehow, mystically, can play a part in determining it's content. On a no-mail-day the disembodied arm and fingers are cursed, as though they have deliberately conspired with a potential employer in a letter's nonappearance. On days when letters do arrive these fingers are inexplicably praised for the way they have magically plucked such a hallowed artifact from out of the job-seeker's ether.

The slap of envelopes on the concrete floor at the foot of our stairs is guaranteed to induce a nervous sweat of the type that Pavlov would have taken an active interest in. Any news is good news. Even the faceless, remote controlled stab in the heart that accompanies every rejection letter is perversely welcomed, as it brings a sense of finality to the process. Boxes can be ticked in the file I present every two weeks down the dole office for inspection by my case officer, a pleasant girl in an ill fitting yellow suit. Every fortnight we play our respective parts in a strange ritual - I show her my increasingly large job-seeker's file, whereby she tuts, shakes her head, chews the end of her red biro, then confidently predicts that something will turn up soon. Stamping, stapling and scribbling in all the right places.

After the deed is done, the paranoia of all long term unemployed whispers in my ear-hole. Yellowsuit is still watching me. It might be a good idea to look vaguely enthusiastic as to the delights they have on offer today, so I amble over to the wall to peruse the latest vacancies. If your expectations of a fulfilling career stretch no further than 2 quid an hour as a security guard doing 500 hours a week in a freezing portacabin stuck out on an industrial estate the size of Wiltshire, or 1 quid 50 an hour cleaning shithouses, then this is indeed your lucky day.

Looking around I notice several other ex-railwaymen milling around. Roughly half an hour into my railway career I wanted out - the keywords filth, chaos, danger, insanity and asbestos were carefully omitted at the interview stage as characteristics of my daily experience once I donned the boiler suit for the first time. I hung on in there because the money was good, especially when after about 3 weeks I discovered the joy of sick leave. In the ten years I was on the railway I managed, with the aid of a very sympathetic GP and several memorable performances the like of which draw tumultuous standing ovations at the RSC, to spend approximately 3 years in total on the sick. This, however, did make me rather unpopular with some of the more enthusiastic and company minded members of the management clique, who would have preferred that I spent a little more of my time actively engaged in the fabrication of railway rolling stock, rather than shuttling between home, surgery and ale house.

When the time came to shed staff, both BREL and I were quite keen to see the back of each other. So keen were they that they were even prepared to pay me a handsome sum to go away, and take my stiff back, creaking knees and spluttering lungs with me.

The gentlemen I left behind were lifers, a peculiar breed who actually enjoyed hacking away at bits of steel, dead tree and plastic in a huge dark shed surrounded by the mentally ill. Their skills and experience had once commanded respect, and they had grown used to being revered as part of the elite corps of York's workforce. That, as they say, was then. Now those once proud inhabitants of the traction shop had to resign themselves to coming here once a fortnight to pick over the scraps with the rest of us.

Back at home, the arrival of an application form is a major event. All the relevant paperwork is assembled, and writing implements prepared. I then retreat to the sanctity of the spare bedroom, and fill out the form with the required due care and attention. An invitation to attend an interview sparks a veritable frenzy of activity - phone calls are made - always problematic when one relies on a temperamental phonecard-driven device a half mile away - Best trousers and shirts are checked for cleanliness, washed and pressed as appropriate, and a route to the interview's location computed allowing for the vagaries of the local bus network.

Interviews, however, have been rather thin on the ground of late.

Potential employers see the ever growing gap between the day I left my last place of work never to return and the proposed start date as their humble servant. A good enough reason to fire off yet another "Dear Sir, Thank you for your interest, kindly fuck off..." letter in my direction. A lack of immediate success in the job-seeker's jungle can quickly make you feel as though you have become ensnared in the huge coils of a (u)b(40)oa constrictor. The longer and harder you struggle, the worse you ultimately make it for yourself. Don't look down.

It is thoughts of my impending disappearance beneath the heaving quick sand that is York's employment market that fill my head as I stare out at the cold miserable scene beyond the window. It is time to visit the spare bedroom.

Having had a hunch that a prolonged stay in the Giro-cashing queue was more than a distinct possibility, I had the good sense to invest in an impressive battery of home brewing equipment. Whatever else the world might conspire to throw against me it would never find me without a pint. Half the spare bedroom is taken up by 40 pint pressure barrels and old lemonade bottles of ready to drink lager, and the other half by several fermenting bins that sit gently bubbling away, converting water, sugar, yeast and a sickly brown goo into the perfect antidote to the dole-queue blues. Three one litre bottles are held up to the light, and pronounced clear and ready to quaff.

And quaff I do. In fact so efficiently do I quaff that I miss the early part of the next day completely. Ephemeral arm and fingers take advantage of this situation, and covertly deliver several letters whilst I am busy showering and breakfasting. I only discover them when on my way out to the greengrocers. One in particular piques my interest, from York City Council.

I tear the envelope open, only to find that the very same people who interviewed me and subsequently rejected my application some months ago have since realised that there was enough work for two, rather than just the bloke they hired in front of me. They would like to know if I would still be interested in working for them. What a strange question.

The trip to the greengrocers is canceled. Instead I pay a visit to our friendly neighbourhood newsagent, purveyor of fine solvents, cigarettes and Special Brew to the discerning schoolchild. A phonecard is purchased, and I find to my delight that the phone itself still works, despite looking like something swept up off the arena floor at half time in a Destruction Derby. I make a call to the secretary of my new boss, and a start date is arranged. I then hop on a bus into town to interrupt Yellowsuit's consumption of a monstrous baguette, as long as a child's leg. She is pleased for me. She one-handedly stamps, staples and scribbles me back into the world of gainful employment, whilst green stuff with bits in oozes out of her monstrous sarnie, splattering over some other poor sod's tale of woe lying on her desk.

I take the UB40 home, and burn it, along with the contents of my job-seeker's file, in an upturned dustbin lid.

The day after next is my first day at work, and as I leave the house I collide with the postman as he attempts to deliver mail through a door that has unexpectedly swung open and away from him. I am surprised to find that the mysterious fingers and arm are attached to none other than Darren, who lives round the corner.

"Oh, I didn't know you were a postman", I said.

"I didn't know you lived here", he replied.

"Just off to work then?", he asked.

"Yeah, another day another dollar!", I say as I make my way to the bus stop.