As we line up to be slowly judged and patronised one by one and tested on whether we applied for those 3 job applications a week (such a strain!), it always amazes me that I'm not alone in this process that thousands of people are willingly going through this every week.

If Im honest you would think it would be depressing but its not actually its like a big fun day out.

One guy breaks down and starts crying, caught up in the misery of his failed existence, well that justs cracks the rest of us up right there. A old man who has had too much juice starts peeing in the corner asking for some service from the maitre d'hotel and my sides are splitting. A husband tries to kiss his wife but she turns away and walks out as he stands alone with his head looking down, I am literally rolling on the floor.

Suddenly a single mother who has just lost her benefits stands up out of her chair and starts wailing hysterically flying her hands around completely disorientated not sure where she is.

But if you narrow your eyes, make them slightly blurry, you realise she isnt crying and in a fit but laughing and dancing around and soon we are all in on the act.

The collective unconscious is suddenly as one and everyone in the queue together start tapping their feet in the rhythm of the new sunny, shiny day around them and the song of a trapped bird comes out collectively.

Everyone is singing and clapping and noone more than me, I am in rapture tap dancing around the room on tables and chairs and recruitment consultants. Everyone cheers as my tapping gets quicker, I am possessed, I am singing while it pours with rain, I am finding love on my first time in Paris and I just, God Damn it, gotta dance.

I am Gene Kelly of the Dole Queue.

Then I wake up but I am not in my bed or on a couch but in a seat at the dole office an hour of waiting gone by to be seen.

I sigh.

If only this place was more like my dream but it aint, neither despair or happiness instead its just all very english with its repressed emotion, fake enthusiasism and pretend niceties.

And now in my sleepy haze, Im realising that for the last ten or twenty minutes I have been unconscious which means in that time I was the least competent person in this building which pretty much means I am probably one of the least competent people in the country.

Thats a wake up call that makes me wanna go back to sleep.

I finally get called up to the consultant after an hour of waiting and I sit down at her office desk.

She gives me the robotic smile of someone who has grown to loathe every person she deals with and I cant blame her. I worked at a cinema when I was 17 and I havent eaten nachos since (word of advice- never never have nacho cheese in a cinema- I know where they get it)

'so how have you been doing this past two weeksin terms of looking for employment?' she asks.

'well I apply for jobs every day and have had some interviews but I didnt get any of them because we had a disagreement on my skills.'

'How so?'

'They didnt think I had any.'

She breathes in deep and looks up in the air, completely ignoring what I am saying.

She gives me an impatient and small smile again and talks slow like I am a complete idiot,

'In interviews you need to be more bubbly, fiery and sparky.'

'Thats not advice, those are just a list of chemical reactions.'
she gives me a vacant,

'What?'

I give a vacant look right back,

'...um...what?'

She sighes in a why do i bother type of way and signs my form and its done, I waited one hour for 2 minutes of resentment.

What a wonderful world.

Ah, to be honest life is not too bad, still got my bad health which is health all the same.

I am just a bit down after a week that involved literally one of the all time worst job interviews ever.

I can only think of one that would be worse and that is if Osama Bin Laden decided to relinquish his terrorist activities and arrange an interview with a film producer and try and make it in Hollywood. ('I have great name recognition, I'm gonna be a star')

During the job interview, I looked up half way through and saw the interviewees faces and it was a look of pity...thats cold.

I get out of the dole office and walk down the sunny London street smoking cigerettes.

You know, the worst part of unemployment is that there is no progression, you start every day new as if its your first day- new applications, new rejections, new false dawns and new drunken whisky binge freakouts in your underwear standing in a toilet bowl singing the Irish national anthem. (I will never be allowed into Starbucks again)

But then its not a new day because you carry two months of these constant little emotional scratches that sting everday until there is no way to compete with the fresh jumpy recent graduates who havent experienced really feeling fucked.

Its hard to express to someone the humiliation of walking into a bank and asking the cashier for the £3.48 that is all there is in your account, which I did this week.

As I walk around central London, I realise I dont have enough for the bus to get home due to the collapse of the global economy which is shit but luckily due to the collapse of the global economy there are thousands of protesters on the streets of London for the G20 (where all the self appointed smartest guys in any room tell each other how smart they all are in a room).

So I guess you gotta take the highs with the lows, now I got plenty of people to get the desired £2.00 for the bus ride or so I thought.

For a group of anti-capitalist protestors trying to bring down a society build on greed of the Pound they are surprisingly tight with their money.

But after, an hour and a hundred 2p coins I get the bus home through London, at first through the good area where the rich go on the roofs and hit golf balls to the poor areas where the golf balls land and then to home which never seemed to quite recover from the Blitz.

I get into the flat, have some little to eat and then put Woody Guthrie on and smoke cigerettes as I listen to his songs through the night watching the smoke play and circulate up to the roof but always disappearing just before it does.

'Whatever happened to those dirty small town girls, that taught me how to be a man.'

I need you now.