A4E

finished once more on the New Deal provision, although now the end is followed by several weeks of the highly inflexible "flexible New Deal". I saw a couple of posh women signing on today, which is something of a rarity. The jobcentre types signing them on were very eager to stress that they had to come and sign on and fill in the forms and so on to help them find work, rather than so they could keep an eye on them. Different approaches for different people. for the posh women they say that and might even mean it. For the likes of me they very definitely want you to think they're keeping an eye on you so you'd better not try owt.

Not much different at A4E, although our local branch has now shut down, despite A4E expanding in the nation as a whole and recently having its arse licked out by Channel 4.

something viewers of that OBN winning "documentary" might have noticed: pictures of the founder, not a particularly picturesque woman, adorning every flat surface with various meaningless slogan stenciled across it. I've got a picture somewhen of one of Saddam's protraits, the type painted on walls and billboards over iraq, but this one has been replaced by GWBush and has a soldier urinating against the mouth.

An odd moment in the "documentary" aforemwentioned, the women running the course took a moment from insulting and harrassing people to use a metaphor, somewhat incompetently, of a butterfly coming from it's crysalis, supposedly an analogous metaphysical transformation to that undergone by someone entering wage slavery. The favourite metaphor of lepidopterist serial killer Hannibal Lecter, of course.

And our branch has another poster: advertising that the church across the road doesn't lkike scum from A4E befouling their steps with our presence during breaks.