by Juno Brown

Created on: February 12, 2009

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Britain calling! Britain, as I am sure you are aware, is in the midst of a messy and seemingly endless recession. Many of our citizens are currently unemployed, on the brink of destitution, chewing their nails down to the bit in the dole queue or panic buying decadent treats at the bakery to ease the societal gloom that is upon us. Furthermore the skies are grey and we are forced to collectively wonder:

'Will the sun ever shine again? Will the pregnant clouds, both metaphorical and literal, ever lift to reveal blue skies of hope and promise?'

The answer to this is yet to be found, but in the meantime, we console ourselves with humour, because without a sense of such we are utterly lost.

I have now been out of work for seven months. If my joblessness was a pregnancy I would be eating charcoal on toast and holding my breasts up with a plank by now. The cruel paradox of full-time employment (in which I have indulged, in the distant past) is that any time off is so precious and restricted productivity for alternative activities and recreation is whipped up to fever pitch.

Whereas I can sit happily through the five day week inventing soups, staring blithely at daytime television and entering phrases such as 'biggest cat ever recorded ever' into Google images. I like to think I have some skills (educated to degree level, good with words, able to tie a slip knot) but do I spend this time developing ideas, making contacts, chasing up leads? No. I lie on the sofa eating sticky things and mainlining CNN to keep myself in touch with the real world. I have far too much time.

Unemployment is actually quite useful, sometimes. For instance, I have recently come to realise (sometime in the first trimester) how insufferable it is to have to listen to yourself all the time. There is only one thing worse than having the monotonous whine of your thought process whirring constantly through your head and that is looking for work. Looking for work is deeply and multitudinously horrible.

Firstly jobs are mostly boring. Employers make no attempt to hide the fact that the work they want you to do for not very much money is boring. Secondly most job advertisements are unapologetically and often outrageously badly written. Leaving aside spelling and grammatical errors that do little to highlight the professionalism of a company, what really gets me is how unbelievably bossy they are.

'You will be a committed team player with a dribbling and arguably perverted lust

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