I often think.

The Leo Gentleman:  A jumper knitted by a parent or relative blights your weekend attire and wardrobe. Day time TV influences your sex life. A work colleague buys you a subscription to a man’s magazine. Increasingly your left hand will not know what the right hand is doing. Your right hand becomes tired very quickly: This might be due to stress or the subscription.  New shoes might be the answer to your mumbled prayers.  If you are on benefits, a new calculation by the DWP will set you back and possibly result in Court action.  For the Leo worker a tidy income can be gained by using your expenses claim wisely. A curry with your Scrabble team ends in arrest for one or more of the team.  Your Findus frozen TV Dinner meal collection will bring big rewards on e-bay.  A friend of the family hints that you are a fool at at a Silver Wedding celebration.  Genital warts blight your illicit sexual liaisons.  A dog will look at you sideways s...

It is an odd feeling slowly being strangulated by poverty.  Our savings have run out, the Nationwide refused to negotiate with us to reduce the amount of mortgage payment we made. They insisted on taking the full amount every month. We begged them to reduce it to interest only; they eventually did, but far too late. Our savings evaporated pretty quickly. They now receive payment from the government via the SMI, Support For Mortgage Interest scheme; you the taxpayer are picking up 'our' bill now. Had they negotiated earlier and been less aggressive we would still be paying the mortgage with our money and not yours. Their refusal has meant that you all help us with our repayments now. Slowly we had to economise on food. Going out stopped. Newspapers are to stop soon. £4 a week is a lot on money now.  Buying music stopped early on. I did without things to buy my last cd; PiLs new one. Theatre and cinema died very early on; as did our views on them. Now we only use the c...

I would love to have had the privelege of having a child.  When I was growing up peole used to say idiot things like 'You wait until you get kids of yer own' and bollocks like that. The 16 year old me used to dread the responsibility of having a child to look after. The older me clung to that belief too. Then MrsD and I  looked at each other and realised what was missing in our life, a child. Then came the tests. The bloody tests. We were sat in a Maternity Clinic, this was 1988/9, with all the ladies sitting, doing the rubbing their bump thing that pregnant ladies do and still do.  MrsD and I were treated like lepers. The nurses who staffed the unit treated us shoddily; like it was our fault that we needed their help, rather than just 'falling pregnant' like the women around us had: According to the stories that we overheard. The humiliation of producing a sperm sample followed. This was duly sent off for analysis. We were called in for the result. The nur...