Restless legs
March 24, 2008 – 8:05 am
Unemployment should be recognised as a craft, if not as a full-blown profession. The many pitfalls and traps thrown at the dole-ite must be negotiated with no small measure of skill and expert insight. Never mind restart training and back-to-work classes. The DWP should run seminars on the best way to fill the dead time between getting up and the One O’Clock News, or on how to sit in a cafe and make a 50p cuppa and a copy of the Daily Record last all afternoon.
I spent over a year out of regular work, first of all on occupational sick pay, then on incapacity benefit, and latterly as a freelance doing the odd article whenever I could be bothered. Superficially it was an easy life, with financial pressures eased by the facts my parents refused to charge me rent and I managed to squirrel away a small amount of savings. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too did my brain loathe the absence of the intrigues, internal politics and distractions of office life. So it endeavoured to come up with a few of its own.
The biggest challenge faced by the benefit claimant is how to fill up the day. Generally I’d wake at about 8.30am, make myself a cup of tea, and wonder what on earth I was going to do until the evening. In the very early days of my recovery this wasn’t too much of an issue. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, but had a large pile of DVDs to get through. By the time I’d watched them all, however, I was well enough to get restless without being fit enough for employment. When the novelty of not having to hit deadlines and being free to amuse myself wore off, I was frozen by that dead chill: how do I fend off boredom?
If the weather was ok, I could go for a walk: that’d take a hour and a bit if I paced it out. On the way home I could get a paper, and flicking through that would take me to lunch. The process of preparing, eating and washing up this meal could last me from 1pm to 2pm if I had the radio on. And then what? I could read a book (I could get through one a day for much of my convalescence), or email some friends, or plunder my record collection for something I hadn’t heard for a while. Anything to pad things out.
Time slows down when it has no value, when the absence of deadlines takes away any premium from the ticking of the clock. But so too do the passage of routine events when you don’t have to rush them. Now I’m back at work I’ll be in and out of the bathroom within 10 minutes each morning. For much of last year it might have taken me an hour to get from nightclothes to shower to dressing gown to brushing my teeth to shaving and finally to getting dressed. There was no rush, why hurry things? If I got finished any quicker I’d just have to find something else to do.
People assumed I must have been watching a lot of TV; in fact, I rarely switched it on before my parents got home. This was not because I think of myself as one of these terribly clever people who is much too smart to waste time on popular culture. Quite the opposite: my attention span is so short that the average half-hour programme is too much for me to concentrate on. That, and the fact that daytime telly is a profoundly depressing experience: endless adverts where Carol Vorderman and Phil “wife-beater” Tufnell implore those with poor credit ratings to fall deeper into debt might as well have been replaced with a big flashing sign reading YOU ARE WORTHLESS, LUMPEN FLOTSAM, DOLE BOY.
Thank God, then, for the internet. Email kept me in contact with friends on the other side of the country and this blog gave me a task to focus on. As well as writing it, there was a stage after my brief flurry of minor press celebrity when my inbox was getting hundreds of new messages a week: apologies to anyone who didn’t get a reply during this time. And who needs TV when you’ve got YouTube? I could literally spend hours floating around the site watching three-minute clips of rubbish: Chaka Khan playing the drums , for instance, or Phil Collins wrestling with Ultimate Warrior. While singing Two Hearts.
The digital music revolution helped keep me sane, too. Although I’m still too Luddite to work out how to illegally fileshare, the MySpace pages of new bands were probably my single biggest distraction. Filling up my iPod was a mammoth project that took a couple of months, and through my laptop I usually had 6 music on for most of the day.
The advent of spring and summer made the task of keeping myself amused much easier. Though Dumfries is hardly a town brimming with distractions - once you’ve wandered along the High Street once you’ve done it a thousand times, and believe me, I did do it a thousand times - it is surrounded by spectacular countryside which, like some sort of Enid Blyton character, I spent a lot of time exploring. It was at this point that I stopped worrying and learned to love being unemployed - where would I rather have been, sweating in an office filing weather stories, or wandering through a forest in shorts feeling the sun on my face?
As documented elsewhere, I started to develop an uncharacteristic interest in physical exercise. Initially my physiotherapist suggested I go to the gym as a way of working on my balance. But after a few painful initial sessions I found myself addicted. At the time I was focused on shedding some of the weight I had gained, but looking back this was probably a way of expending the surplus of energy and restlessness that I’ve accumulated. It is ironic, at the same time, that it took serious illness to get me fitter than I ever have been in my life.
As I started to return to my keyboard, however, I found I was in suddenly caught between two stools. I lacked the affirmation that self-sufficiency and a permanent job provide. But likewise I was now clearly too healthy to be excused from duty. Whether rightly or wrongly, we define ourselves by our jobs: and “I’m a journalist” was clearly what I wanted to say, rather than “I sit in my parents front room scanning the job pages and then making myself a scone”. Friends would make jokes about being dole scum and so on, and I’d laugh along with them; but I’d feel a nagging twinge at my sense of self-respect whenever I thought about being out of work. Damn this protestant work ethic.
The unemployed are always the first target for rightwingers: never mind millionaire tax-dodgers or corporate subsidy-junkies, who cost the taxpayer far more, it’s the poor sod on £56 a week who’s the real sponger. While I don’t excuse benefit fraud, I also know how low people’s self-esteem must be to see no other future for themselves other than depending on the largesse of the Job Centre.
If anyone else finds themselves in a similar position, my advice is simple: embrace the dole, look for the positives in escaping the career treadmill, take the opportunity to enjoy the scenery. Do all the things you’d want to do if you weren’t too busy. Think of it as a gap year. But make sure when the novelty starts to wear off that you’ve got an exit strategy. Oh, and get a blog. That’s another hour of the day used up.
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