As a fellow member of the middle-class unemployed I can also testify to the horrors radio agony aunt Anna Raeburn described so “movingly” yesterday in the Guardian. Very recently she found herself jobless, without even so much as a rich husband and a poorly-paid but glamorous career in the media to rub together, and thrown into a dependency on state agencies:
“It was hideous. Hideous. The whole thing. Horrible,” she recalls now. “Every time I went in, I had to go through this whole routine: ‘Who are you? What is your name? Are you married? Do you have a partner? What is your date of birth?'”
Luckily for Anna and me, this year, as part of an appeal organised by BBC Radio 3, a choir of orphaned West African amputee children will be doing a sponsored singing tour of Europe to raise money so that people like us need never suffer that kind of humiliation again.
“Once there, she was faced with incompetent and stifling bureaucracy, an experience she went on to write about movingly in a series of newspaper pieces.”
Classic. The mirror-universe version of writing a column about having the builders in.
Yes. I forgive her though, because she’s a silver fox with very nice eyes.