Ghosts and Relics

[snailrind]

Gothly came to visit me for the first time since we separated. I brewed some tea and conducted a tour of my place. It went well, apart from a brief moment when we got to my bedroom: Gothly took in the sight of all my old familiar things and looked sad--which of course made me sad.

We sipped our drinks on the living room sofa, and talked about my

Comments

Benefits

[snailrind]

I agree about the finding of medical fixes and the the general wasting of money. I was chatting with my housemate (in the pic above) about this recently. He mentioned having seen a TV programme in which some famous economist was placed in charge of a hospital that was haemorrhaging money. He kept the direct admin, but fired all the middle management, and the hospital functioned well and began to make a profit.

Why it's necessary for hospitals to be run like businesses, I don't know; isn't that what our taxes are for? ...no wait, I keep forgetting--taxes go to fund aimless attacks on Middle Eastern countries.

That said, the Welsh NHS is better than the English one in a number of ways. Everyone gets free prescriptions; people like me get free dental and eye care; and the people who administrate Long Term Incapacity Benefit are very understanding and unsuspicious. So I am currently living on Incapacity Benefit; unfortunately, this gets immediately eaten up by my rent.

It's Housing and Council Tax Benefit that I'm waiting for. It's normal for these to take four to six months to be processed here, so it wasn't until a couple of days ago that I discovered that my application wasn't going through, because they had sent me a form (during the postal strike) that never reached me. There's a fifty-fifty chance that they will backdate the money for me.

I have also been trying to apply for Disability Living Allowance since I moved in, because this would give me more money than Incapacity Benefit AND entitle me to a free bus pass; but filling in 47 pages of excruciating detail about how awful I am is so far proving beyond my capabilities.

I'm still doing the teaching, but haven't invoiced them for ages, owing to the details being scattered around on verious bits of paper that got mislaid when I moved house. Anyway, I've been calling off a lot of lessons, on account of being ill.