Mutter Grumble Mutter Grumble

I'm not in a good mood.

"Think positive; at least they sent you a letter saying you had been unsuccessful, that doesn't happen nowadays."

A comment made by a friend yesterday after I'd received a letter telling me that my application had been unsuccessful. To be fair, it is rare that an employer will bother to waste postage to tell applicants they have been out of luck. you normally only get one if you've been to an interview and they don't want to phone you and tell you after. There was also the caveat on the letter that said that my skills would be useful to the organisation, so keep looking at their web page for future positions.

You have to look at the positives, otherwise despair is all that's left.

I confidently said, when I filled in the application, that I'd made probably the best job of an application form I've ever done. I followed the job and person specification to the letter; edited, re-edited and made everything just right. I said to the wife after sending it off that I met every single one of the Essential person specifications and all but one of the desired specifications - that was that I am not a qualified teacher. All I can think is that the job was applied to by a horde of unemployed teachers...

It, of course, could be my age. I'll be 50 next year and I'm wondering if prospective employers are scared that I might be a curmudgeonly old bastard who has no connection with young people (the job I went for was to help 14-18 year olds into education, employment or training courses) any longer. I just don't know. All I do know is that when I received the letter, my first thought was, 'Well, they don't send letters out telling you how unsuccessful you've been - I wonder when the interview is!?' That might have been the crushing blow I felt when I read the letter.

I have the opportunity to go and work with adults with learning difficulties. the job is about 12 miles away and pays £6.81 per hour (no shift or weekend enhancements) and depending on whether or not I'd actually like doing it. "You'll either love it or hate it," said my mate who has connections with the establishment. The problem is, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I need to be earning something in the region of what I've just lost; anything less and we're in trouble. We've already cut back on stuff over the last year, not for fear of impending redundancy, but because the cost of living has gone up. Fuel costs on average 26p a litre more now than it did last summer; food bills have risen despite us cutting back on non-essentials. When David Cameron says we're all in this together; it's actually a case of some of us are in it far deeper than others.

***

With half-hearted apologies to my friends that Twitter, but nothing I've seen this week or in the last two years makes me even the slightest bit interested in it. One mate said that seeing as My Monthly Curse is going down well then I had no excuses not to be tweeting; I could publicise it even further. Another friend was really impressed with the way he was picking up 'followers' and after the Ryan Giggs fiasco, I saw several people's tweets on the BBC suggesting that it was nigh on impossible to sue or put embargoes on the people who tweet, because...

I struggle to put Status Updates on Facebook nowadays; the last thing I want to do or read is 100 characters of horse shit posted by someone else. I can see the benefits of the service where news dissemination is concerned; but not if I have to read what people had for breakfast, how solid their last shit was or any pointless or stupid bit of gossip about someone I don't know, will never know and am unlikely to want to know.

I don't care about followers. Really. Once you start getting people taking a lot of notice, you start to censor yourself - well, I do with my blog. Plus, if others lives are as exciting as mine then I don't want to read about it, encapsulated into a maximum number of characters. If television killed the art of conversation, then Twitter is killing detail.

I also really have a problem with Twitter people and their 'holier than thou' fucking attitude, where they think they're so much better than everybody else because they tweet.

Not interested.

***

Make the most of the weather today because if the three long range weather forecasts I've read in the last few days are anything to go by then Wimbledon will be a washout; Glastonbury will be returning to the Dark Ages again with mudslides and cholera and we'll all be wondering whether or not Britain is ever going to have a normal summer again.

Even the Met Office don't have a lot of confidence about the coming months. A generally westerly air stream is going to keep temperatures below average, with rain for the north and west and no change in the pattern. The BBC's monthly outlook is singing a different tune, suggesting that high pressure is going to dominate for June and it will be dry and sunny and warm; I expect that will change on Monday when the updated forecast is put in place.

Accuweather were the people who forecast the December cold snap to end, long before everyone else, and they have the rest of June looking poor. They've been pretty much spot on with their forecasts since I pooh-poohed their mild weather just after Christmas forecast.

Told you.

***

Obviously my state of mind hasn't been helped by my former employer's fuckwittedness regarding my salary, mileage and redundancy pay - none of which has arrived correctly or at all. It seems that I'm being penalised twice by the county council. Can't wait until I finally get all that's owed to me, that'll be the day I tell the world all the things I'm not going to at the moment.

***

Linking nicely into the last line of the above: I'm trying to download a couple of old films: That'll Be the Day and Stardust and it's proving to be more difficult than I imagined. I would have thought that two classic 1970s British films would be easier to find than most things, but this is not the case. It has been well over 30 years since I've seen either and I have fond memories. In fact, the final line of Stardust, uttered by Adam Faith, is one I've never forgotten and feel it is one of the best final lines in a film ever.

If you haven't seen the film or don't want to know what the line is, look away now:

Don't you fucking die on me!

Marvellous.

Now, if you're reading this, fuck off and do something practical; don't spend the rest of the last day of summer whittling it away on a poxy computer (or Twitter).