I’m trying to come up with a way of writing all this that doesn’t come across as self-pitying whining, but haven’t managed yet. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve not updated the blog since January, so firstly, I haven’t fallen down any sort of hole, nor have I been abducted by aliens for any probing. All the aliens I know have far too much sense for that.

So, anyway, I was unemployed at the end of January, due to one thing and another, and Lo, it did Suck Mightily. The downside of gainful employment is that you tend to get used to that lovely income, and everything starts to come unglued when you don’t have it.

Roll forwards a little over six months, and I get offered a new job, a short-term contract. First time contracting, new experience and all that, but that’s no reason to say no, thinks I. And contracting is quite nicely paid, to make up for all the things you would normally get from a permanent job but instead you have to pay for yourself.

It was very quick – interview on the Friday, asked to start on the Monday, let the paperwork catch up. I have to set myself up with an umbrella company (it was either that or start up my own limited company – this was quicker); essentially, they are my employers, and handle all the P.A.Y.E. and National Insurance, and all that.

Unfortunately, there’s a slight hitch in the paperwork – specifically, I have no way of proving that I have the right to work in the U.K. I’ve been here since ‘83, when I was but 13, and as far as I know I have Unlimited Leave To Remain. However, the only thing that proves this is my passport, long since lost in some move or other. I’m not going to offer any excuses, other than it was an expired passport, and seeing as I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, I thought it wasn’t terribly useful. How wrong I was.

Society in general has been getting more and more identity-proof happy of recent late, and not having anything that proves I am who I claim to be is becoming more and more of a problem. Even getting on domestic flights requires photographic ID these days. Makes me wish I’d gotten my driving licence way back when.

More to the point, a couple of years ago, some bright spark in the government somewhere decided that it was imperative that employers be able to prove that anyone working for them actually is supposed to be working in the U.K., subject to really quite large fines. This managed to not be an issue at my last job – largely because I ended up leaving before it came to a head. Once unemployed, I couldn’t afford to get my passport replaced (not that the passport alone would have helped, as it turned out).

All of which means is that although I’ve been working full-time since the end of January, I’ve not been able to complete the contract with my umbrella company, and thus I’ve not been able to be paid.

It turns out that living with no income at all is even less fun than merely being unemployed. Of course, now I’m doing both, as the people I’m actually working for eventually needed to ask me to not come in any more, as they’re liable for all sorts of Bad Things given my rather Schrödinger’s cat employability status.

Add to all this the fact that the people who own the flat I was renting decided they’d quite like to live in it themselves (it was apparently always intended as their retirement home), and I’ve had to move to a new place. Surprisingly difficult on no money, especially as it turns out that Livingston is now becoming more expensive, as people commuting to Edinburgh have been moving in, and driving prices up. It is only with the great help of friends (Six Foot Hobbit, Chocolate Muffin and Agent Grey chief amongst them, especially Muffin, so you should all go to her shop and buy stuff) that it was achieved at all.

I am now in a tiny, tiny town called Harthill, which nestles pretty much exactly between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The new flat is a lot larger than my old place, and costs less money, but and due to the No Money situation, is currently without phone or Internet. The town itself is too small to have any Internet of its own – as far as I can tell, the nearest source is the nearest library, in Shotts, an hour’s walk away. No doubt, when I’m older, I’ll go on about how it was in the snow, and uphill. Both ways.

In order to rectify this mess (well, not the moving bit, which was horrible until actually achieved, as all moving is), I have written to the Borders and Immigration Agency, to request a thing called A Confirmation Of My Status Within The U.K. This will suffice for my umbrella company to press various buttons, which will in turn allow me to be paid, and to work in general.

I sent this off at the beginning of February, and they received it on the 6th, according to the Royal Mail’s tracking site. Since then, I have heard… nothing. Not a sausage. Not even a note to say they’d received it. When I phone them up, I constantly get told that they have no information apart from confirming the receipt, as apparently these things get put onto a pile and eventually somebody looks at them. Until then, nothing gets entered into the system, nothing is logged, and nothing can be tracked. As it’s not on their list of things that have resolution times, they can’t even hazard a guess about how long it might take.

It’s all getting beyond a joke. I’m stuck in limbo until such time as they finally get to my letter. When it arrives – and increasingly I’m wondering if it’s if – then I get paid, get back to work, and I can start paying back the various debts I’ve incurred. Until then, there’s almost nothing I can do – according to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, I’ve already done all there is to do, including getting my M.P. involved. Now that I’m not working, I’ve applied for benefits, but odds on I’ll fall through yet more cracks, and not be entitled to anything. What’s more, the nearest place to have my application interview is Motherwell, and travelling there is going to consume a fair chunk of the money I have left. Hopefully I can get some kind of help from the JobCentre with that.

In other ways, I’m doing okay. I thought I’d had a major hard drive failure on my main computer, but it was survivable. It stopped working as a boot disk (despite my repairing the boot sector), but it worked okay as a data disc once I found a spare drive to install Windows on. In my copious spare time, I’ve been getting a lot of reading done, as well as a rousing game of Medieval: Total War (well, up until I started getting seriously beaten up by the Egyptians and Almohads. But I may well recover!). Plus the occasional trip to the Shotts library for books and Internet (I swear, it should be considered a utility, like electricity or water…).

Unfortunately, my 2008 resolutions haven’t been faring as well. Writing’s kind of fallen by the wayside, what with one thing and another – I think I went down a bit of a blind alley somewhere along the way, and I’m not sure where I need to to back to in order to fix it. The guitar I was doing okay with, until the move, and my laptop’s screen stopped working. I’ve now got a setup where I can plug the laptop into my KVM and use my main monitor – I should start the guitar back up again, I think.

All in all, it could be worse. But it could be a whole heck of a lot better.