Return of the

Interesting and mercifully short day at A4E. A bit of a reunion, the place is packed and mostly with people who were on the two week course when I started the long course or with people who were on the course when I was on it previously.

Up late last night. Stayed awake to listen to repeats of Paperback Hell and The Consultants on Radio Four. That's me, party animal. I'll be up late again tonight as the BBC is showing a good film, "Citizen Ruth". I recommend it.

As usual the day was boring and largely consisted of sitting around an unusually crowded room reading the papers. The only interest was the conversations I was eavesdropping on. Foreigners popped up, for example, stories in the vain of the old man arrested for saying "bloody foreigners" when a couple of foreign girls blocked the path of his wheelchair. Specifically the stories were of a group of foreigners having raped an Englishman in Lincoln and the overjoyed nature of the Ambitions personnel agency at EU enlargement. Opening the border brought in a load of foreigners only too happy to do rubbish temporary jobs for incredibly low wages, deppressing the wages of the English worker and getting the Ambitions staff accustomed to abusing the staff. Foreigners are happy to be abused. The staff at A4E are very friendly towards the agencies, especially Ambitions (who dominate the local temporary work market) and claimed to have found twenty or thirty people work through them, but in that small room of actual workers with actual experience of Ambitions there were four people out of less than a dozen with bad experiences. One man had his forklift licence taken by Ambitions, never trust an organisation named after something the Bible condemns, then had a week's wages confiscated to part-pay the ransom money the agency were demanding to hand back the licence. The consensus among non-staff-members was that employment agencies are a bunch of cunts, with which I heartily agree. Equally no-one was too fond of foreigners, although most of them would have taken a foreigner over someone from Ollerton.

There are signs up in the A4E office. One is typical Birtspeak/pseuds stuff (for Private Eye readers), the others promise immediate retribution against users of bad language, another demands PC time be booked. It's rubbish, of course. No-one books PC time (there is no way to do so), and just today I've heard the words "cunt", "fuck" and "wank".

Another little piece of information I picked up: one of the men on the course, I didn't notice which one, spent six years married to a Red Indian from Oregon. That led to more talk about foreigners, foreign women liking Englishmen (largely for their passports) and Iraqi men marrying Lithuanian women to get EEA (EU) passports so they can't be booted out of Britain.

Additions to your vocabulary: main drag - main road; skanked - ripped off, especially by a temp agency.

The last of mohicans is on a New Deal course. At least, it's the only mohican I've ever seen. Outdated haircut. Of course, I've not had a haircut since I had it all cut off a few years back, so I've got very long hair.

I'm meant to be doing a tech cert. I don't know what one of these is, but it would seem that I've done most of the work without anyone realising. Funny old world.