Oh Look, A Broken Down Lorry!

[poliphilo]

My fit of anger the day before yesterday was to do with feeling powerless. Isn't that usually what anger is about? At this point of my life I have very little wriggle room. I have to be here, I have to go there. The anger was so much futile wrigglng. It didn't alter the contours of the worm hole.

There was a hold up on the anti-clockwise carriageway of the M25. People were slowing down to watch the cause of an even bigger hold-up on the clockwise carriageway. A broken down lorry was being loaded onto another lorry. Be still my beating heart!

We arrived in Kent to find our bumper questionnaire from Atos had arrived. On us answering it "correctly" depends our income for the immediate future. And of course we know that Atos has been charged with kicking as many people off disability benefit as it possibly can. It's one of the things I was angry about. I lie in bed and play with future scenarios. The most straightforward is that we get our funding renewed. The others are rather more interesting.  At least we have a roof over our heads.

I picture a raggedy Buddhist scholar-monk with his staff and begging bowl. He is carved in soapstone, jade, ivory or- a Yeatsian touch- lapis lazuli (whatever that is). He calms me down. He is my talisman. Sometimes he comes to life and strolls off down the dusty road, past the leafless tree and over the hill.

Just like Charlie Chaplin.

Judy has sent me a play she's written for a competition. It's a pastiche of late-period Shaw. She wants me to check that her Brits are talking and acting as real Brits would. "Brit-proofing" is the word we use. It will be fun.

Comments

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

A friend with chronic illness who was being appraised was warned "to look on the appeal as part of the process"... Not comforting words, but in her case common sense prevailed and she did not need to appeal. I hope your appraisal goes as well as such an appallingly stress-inducing thing ever can go.

And stress, yeah... When there's nowhere for it to go, or for you to go to escape, then no wonder if it breaks out in anger.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ailz regularly reads a website which retails all the horrors perpetrated by Atos. I'd rather not know.

I'm glad your friend was spared the appeal.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

I have heard horror stories concerning cold harsh misanthropy from Atos that i would not dare to mention. I hope that your funding continues without any setbacks. My fingers are crossed.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Don't forget to breathe.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Good advice.

[angiereedgarner.livejournal.com]

Brit-proofing! :D

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You've not heard that one before? Maybe Judy and I invented it. Well done us!

[angiereedgarner.livejournal.com]

I think in these parts it probably takes on a very different meaning. :)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've come across 'Brit-picking' as a term for this kind of checking. It's a practice too often omitted. I've been totally thrown out of books in the past for the lack of it, and sometimes getting it almost right is worse than being totally off - as with the London boy in a book set in the 1940s who declared that he supported 'the Arsenal Gunners'. Chalkboard, meet nails.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'll bet the writer who came up with Arsenal Gunners was really proud of the depth of their research.

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

I have very little wiggle room right now, too. It is infuriating, isn't it? It is a natural response. Take almost any animal and confine it, and see what kind of a reaction you get. I don't know why humans should be any different.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

Our rabbits have a lovely long grassy run but their dearest wish is to burrow under the wire and escape into the world of foxes and buzzards.

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

LOL! Thank you. Well said.