After five weeks of swimming in the afternoons, last week I finally signed on.
Leith Amusement Arcade
My first visit to the dole office in deepest Leith was every bit as fantastically depressing as I had hoped. The room was doused in a sense of hopelessness, as if atmospheres were now available in Tesco by the jar like pot pourri or crystal meth.
After negotiating an army of security guards who weren’t so much burly as morbidly obese, I was called over by Keith, 58. Keith, a sort of greying, bitter version of Egg’s Dad from This Life, invited me to sit and then stared in silence at his computer for all of eight minutes, occasionally laughing to himself. What he didn’t realise was that he’d contravened Data Protection protocol by leaving the details of his previous contestant for £65 per week lying in front of me on the desk. Kelly Symons of 14/4 Great Junction Street is just lucky that I didn’t have a pen with me to write down her National Insurance and bank account details of DB 22 10 12C and Sort Code 18-20-24, Account Number 18524461.
Keith eventually got around to addressing me, but not before I’d noticed that the woman behind the next desk was in fact the receptionist from Gary’s office in Men Behaving Badly. Next time, I’m going to take them a sign in an awful font that reads ‘You Don’t Have to Have Appeared on 90s Television to Work Here But it Sure Helps’. We went through the various questions on the form, but Keith had been here thousands of times before and could no longer muster any enthusiasm, the cheap, clapped-out tartman.
His key advice went thus: ‘Aye, it’s a bad time just now. There’s nae work anywhere, and Edinburgh’s worse than anywhere’. My spirits soaring, I skipped gaily out of the office. A security man was tucking into a bacon roll. He didn’t skip after me.
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