Day 154: I Am Possessed By A Beaverish Spirit

Following a night of sleep so deep I may well have been dead for a bit, I woke this morning full of Resolve and a strange Desire to Work and Work. I made twelve phone calls before lunch, all about Things To Do With Work and Matters Financial. One of these phone calls was precipitated by a letter from the Job Centre:

"Dear NWM

YOUR CLAIM FOR JOBSEEKER'S ALLOWANCE

We cannot pay you an allowance from 31 October 2006. This is because:

- you have not given us the information we asked you for.

If you do not give us the information we ask you for we cannot give you an allowance.

....

PLEASE KEEP THIS LETTER FOR YOUR INFORMATION."

WHAT information? Where? What have you asked me for that I have not given you? Why have you written me this very stupid letter? Oh Job Centre, why are you staffed with imbeciles who waste tax payers' money by sending out letters that have no form and content? It is just as well that I do not actually need the 23p a week that eight hours of form-filling, waiting around and shouting would bring me; but God help those who do actually need it. Maybe driving the non-working mad with bureaucracy is a new Government Initiative designed to bring down the levels of unemployment.

But all this leads to one thing: I am restless, with a desire to Build, Tidy, Rationalise and make sarcastic telephone calls. I think it is called "having a lot of energy". I have obviously been possessed by the spirit of Beaver the Beaver.

I have been stalking about the place squinting at shelves and opening and closing cupboards, sucking my teeth and noting with disapproval that many of the cupboards are full of things that I have not touched since I moved in in 1998. There are things I once thought were funny in corners; they are no longer funny. There are clothes that are now five sizes too big in bags, and books that I have never read and never will read (The Da Vinci Code, for example, and the book by Cecilia Aherne I flung against the wall some weeks ago: I am not mentally deficient, whatever the Job Centre may think), filling cupboards that were meant for something else.

It is all going. I have no call for the superfluous, as the fluous is more than enough to think about. But first I must go to IKEA and get blue bags.