Applied to go on the dole today. Why not? I either hear nothing back from recruitment agencies at all, or get a rejection email on the same day. It’s not like I’m not trying, you know. I just have ‘not enough experience’. Not enough. Experience. Did you see the bit in my CV and my covering letter? The bit where I indicated quite clearly how much experience I had that was relevant to the job? How much more experience does one need to answer a telephone? Do you know where I could purchase some experience as I seem unable to get any without any.

Remains to be seen if the dole application will even be processed. The small print (was very small) on their website said that you can only use a Windows computer and Internet Explorer to fill in the forms. Ludicrous. Lazy programming. No excuse. Bloody minded – filled it out anyway. It was either that or not do it at all. At all. Because I’m going agoraphobic. It’s a choice. I haven’t left the flat in five days now. Why should I? Where could I go? I’m going a little bit strange you know. And I’m so fed up with trying and being patient that I’ve all but given up. It should not be this stressful, this depressing, this wearing to try and do something you don’t even want to do in the first place. That you pathologically detest. That left you feeling isolated, unfulfilled, stupid, alone and crying the last time you did it. Just to survive.

And you should see the kind of stuff I’m reduced to eating. Swill. Slop. None of your This Is Marks And Spencers Sexy Food. No Tesco finest for me. You wouldn’t feed a dog what I’m now cooking. Just stick some more parsley in it. More chillis. You won’t taste it after a while.

I can’t articulate anymore. Not right now. Just the frustration. The stupid rules and meaningless hopes and my hateful hateful bank leaching every last fragment of willpower from me. Nothing to say, yet the desire, all the same. There’s the rub. Misfortune shoves me to apathy, whilst neurotransmitters sympathise with aphasia. I do not see words, I do not smell sounds. I only hear the ticking, ticking, ticking of the relentless clock; see its haze grow as age holds my eyes that behold it.

Just found the above sitting in the drafts folder of my Gmail account, written just under a year ago. This is either a peculiar attempt at three syllable tanka, an horrific summation of my life (bar the friends bit, who are all priceless), or both.

Either way, it’s depressing to know that much of what was apparently troubling me a year ago is still headlining at the chapel.

Bored friends with access to a franking machine.

Three wasps. Three.

They were waiting for me when I went back to my room. Earlier I’d been sitting working in the front room when one flew in through the window and started buzzing angrily around the lamp. It took all of my courage to approach it, stick a glass over it and take it outside. I hate killing things. Detest it in fact. Almost as much as I detest wasps.

But there were three in my room. Which is half the size.

What was somehow more unnerving was that they weren’t flying around most of the time. They were crawling quite casually (if there is indeed a nonchalance to how wasps move) over my bookcase near the door. First I thought there was one, having heard it buzzing as I went to shut the window, and retrieved my recently commended wasp-catcher beaker and newspaper to snare it back outside. Then, as I crept closer to it with the glass upturned, I heard another flitting irritably around the inside of my lampshade. And I ran away. I think there was even a small degree of girly flapping as I ran. When I came back I could make out three.

And now they’re all dead, their axons well and truly poisoned with pyrethroidic toxins. I really do hate killing things.

The stupid thing is that I don’t want to go back to my room now – I can’t go back to bed. All I can imagine when I think of going back in there is the sight of those ferocious little Eumenides crawling insouciantly all over my Argos bedsheets. So I’m lying here on the front room sofa, aching all over with tiredness.

And all I can hear is buzzing.

In my head, I’m fairly certain. It’s just another symptom of my wasp-related paranoia. I’m being driven slowly insane by the ghosts of the insects I reluctantly Raided to death. In my dozy state I’m starting to hallucinate, and occasionally see little black and yellow blobs darting angrily about the corners of the room.

I’m also trying not to think I’ve killed off some sort of avatar of divine will, having only earlier this evening left a candle burning on a patron statue beside the open window, before going back to writing my novel – a story thick with symbolism regarding the Moirae/Fates. And then they came – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – the three ladies themselves. And how did I greet these ancient purveyors of human destiny? Why, I sprayed them in the face with neurotoxins of course, just like they used to back in the day at Delphi.

A scientist of course would tell me not to be so foolish, but I would retort that the scientist’s religion and associated beliefs are surely just as valid as mine. And then I’d probably point out the absurdity of quantum theory, and the scientist would no doubt have to shut up, or clumsily change the subject.

How many wasps make a swarm? Should I be worried about a nest? Isn’t it a little late for workers to be hatching if there is a nest? Where would the nest be, and why haven’t I noticed it before?

I really don’t want to go back in there and find out.

Mum do u know what i can take for runny stools? It’s really bad and i’ve got a sore bum.

For sale: One burnt out type 3 novelist: Leto model. No longer remotely top of the range but these models are proving increasingly popular with collectors, and is still just about functional at benchmark level. Details below.

HARDWARE:

FIRMWARE AND ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

KNOWN DESIGN FLAWS:

All offers considered. Buyer accepts Paypal, cash and lager.

I’ve only just read that Michael Rosen has been chosen as the Children’s Poet Laureate.

I’m surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. The man has a quite Dahl-like quality to him in capturing eloquently the sort of world that children love to live in, namely a world that largely involves things like bogies, puke, dog poo and making a mess at dinner time. I was lucky enough to meet him when I was no more than about 7, and he visited my primary school in Chiswick to give us a brief talk on what poetry was. I still remember this very tall, floppy haired man with big feet arriving late, much to the relief and then delight of the assembled female teachers, and plod gleefully to the front of the gym hall where we were all sitting crossed-legged and patient. There he performed what I can only describe as ‘stand up for kids’ – a mix of poems and stories that I can still remember a few of to this day. It is one of perhaps three happy memories I have from my first primary school.

Those of you who missed out on this charmingly anarchic man as part of a staple childhood diet should really try and get hold of a copy of his recent collection Carrying The Elephant, which recounts, amongst other things, the sudden death of his eighteen year old son. Having grown up reading his silly titles such as Hairy Tales and Nursery Crimes, I wasn’t quite prepared for how moving this recent collection would prove to be, and it made me fall in love with his work again in a very different way, about fifteen years after I discovered it for the first time.

I am a drug addict. At night I lie in bed, too hot to sleep. My head pounds, my clammy skin itches and burns. I can’t breathe. If I sleep my first thought when I wake is of nothing else but reaching for my drugs – the idea of going another minute without them too terrifying to consider. One pill popped and I know it will make me better. I think it will make me better. I hope it will make me better.

I know, deep down, that it makes no difference at all.

So my eyes go a little less red. So my mind clears long enough for me to remember where the bathroom is or that human society requires people to answer their front door clothed. The symptoms always come back in an hour or so, just when you think they’ve gone away. Just when you think you’ve had your last sneeze. This is the curse of the summer, and I am finally becoming a vampire. I am allergic to the outside world.

There are two types of people in this world – people who get hayfever, and people who wonder what people with hayfever make such a fuss about. I’ve been both. I never used to get this contemptible little affliction until two years ago, when it suddenly appeared from nowhere, like a visit from an unwanted relative. I remember walking through Tavistock Square, where huge clumps of pollen, seeds and other such vile treebits were in quite visible swarm. They said that year many people spontaneously developed hayfever who had no such allergy before. This is a war, and many fell that summer in nature’s devastating attack on day to day life; days that live on in infamy. It is intolerable, and like vampirism and unemployment, is insidious in its conspiracy to stop you living any sort of normal life during daylight. Oh, how I press my snotty nose against the window and watch the normal children at play! How I long to enjoy a glass of wine and a cigarette; how I crave being able to taste my food!

Having since tried what feels like every drug on the market in the space of only two summers, from the budget to the not so Tesco Value, I have found only two things that make any real difference (remembered from my days as a budding teenage hedgewitch). I here share these with anyone else so similarly suffering. First, honey. Ideally locally made, but a spoonful of honey works wonders for a tickly throat. Honey is an excellent natural antihistamine, and local honey is of course made from the very little bastards who are doing this to you in the first place. Of course, not all of us live in a Miss Marple novel so finding something made locally isn’t always a possibility. For those of you not accustomed to weekly village fetes (thank you, oh, thank you twee and middle class Highgate), any sort of honey should still work very well, but the thickly set stuff is the best. Secondly, sage. Ideally fresh, but even dried sage will do. Chew it with gum or put it in tea. Sage is a brilliant decongestant. I don’t know about anyone else, but in large amounts it also gives me a slightly Zennish feeling, so there is the added bonus of being able to alarm your family and friends with your unnerving aura of calm. I often just combine the two and make tea out of dried sage, stirring in plenty of honey.

This is a really horrible condition. I just want to stamp my feet a lot of the time and have a petulant little sulk at how unfair this all is. I’ve waited months for summer, and now I can’t go outside because the flowers are flocking, Hitchcock-style. I can’t even stay inside because my hayfever is now branching out into the dust mite market, and I need fresh air more and more. I suppose the only alternative is to not breathe at all, or wait until I evolve into some genus of aquatic bathbound homosexual. Or move to Alaska.

My blog wasn’t sending me emails to let me know when someone has commented on a post like it usually does. I wandered into ‘Comment Control’ just earlier to see if it’s indeed true that no one loves me to find a whole list of scribbles left like shopping lists to yellow in the ever-increasing confidence of the June sun. Having found out that not everyone does hate me after all, there was then a feeling of discovering your Christmas presents were merely locked away in the cupboard by your wicked stepmother or Margaret Thatcher.

I started a new month of 100 words in May, but I barely finished half of them. My heart just wasn’t in it, and it’s depressing that the self-congratulatory masterpiece of One Year In The Life Of Ben is still left incomplete on the site several months after its transition, despite me going through Google’s archives myself and picking out entries one by one and forwarding them on offering to insert them if that helped. There’s no point there being just half a year up there. The whole thing was written as a big picture. It’s like printing only the second half of a novel. I’ll continue to add what little I did write to here instead.

Still no word on my little laughing girl and her pig. I’m starting to get anxious. They should have at least opened it by now, surely?

And the sun’s out – isn’t that nice? Well, sort of. Does anyone else get hayfever? I feel like there’s chili powder in my eyes and a duvet up my nose.

I am ashamed to say that at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival I hadn’t heard of even half the new authors speaking on the day I attended.

Hay on Wye meanwhile is rightly ashamed that not a single bookshop could offer me a hardback Mrs Dalloway or a copy of A la recherche du temps perdu.

I did however find the following “Kilroy was ‘ere”…