Cheaper Not To Work

It’s half term in a couple of weeks. As a kid this would have been cause for celebration and I’d be counting down the days already.

As an adult it is a cause for concern and fiscal trauma.

Not because I don’t like spending time with my family – because I do. The days I consider “the best of times” have all occurred during family holidays or days out together.

It’s because school holidays threaten to break us financially.

It’s fine if Karen and I have holiday to use up at work. No problem at all. We all have a holiday together – or (as we’ve done the last few years) a staycation.

If we don’t we are in serious trouble. Because it means we not only have to keep our youngest boy in ‘pre-school’ but we have to put his older brother into the school holiday club too.

This costs us over £50 a day. For a week this would set us back £250 – or in this case because our eldest boy is off the Friday before the holiday because of a “teacher training day”, £300.

That’s more than I earn in a week.

Thankfully I have just enough holiday entitlement left over to cover the 6 days. If I didn’t it would still be cheaper for me to take the days off unpaid as I would lose less money giving up a week’s wages than continuing to work and having to pay for the boys to be cared for elsewhere.

This seems to me to be utter madness.

And it seems to be a particularly UK kind of madness. I don’t believe this kind of scenario exists in other European countries or, if it does, not to the same fiscally punitive degree. And I choose my words very carefully – because it feels like the state, our glorious United Kingdom, does not like or welcome kids into the protective embrace of its nannyhood. Rather, it feels like it punishes those that bring them into the world.

Now, let’s get my position clear. I’m not asking for freebies or a handout. I’m not asking for special privileges.

I’m just asking to be able to work and earn enough money to make going to work worthwhile.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

Few people work because they love it. We all need to be incentivized. And survival is a pretty good incentiviser.

If I’m not even gaining that luxury, Mr Cameron, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t claim benefits for the rest of my life and loot JD Sports whenever the fancy takes me?

Crime Does Actually Pay

I’ve always been a good boy.

Law abiding. Head well beneath the parapet. Not a toe out of line.

When the UK riots were kicking off my first thoughts were not to rush out and help myself to a nice new pair of orange bri-nylon Nikes and an iPad but to bemoan the state of the nation’s youth and to wish our boys in blue the best of British as they marched out to meet the semi-illiterate foe, wot ‘ad taken to the streets, innit, to protest about the interest rates, the war in Afghaniswotsit and the fact that they couldn’t, like, afford to buy all them widescreen plasmas wot get shown on The Gadget Show every week, you get me, bruv?

I stayed at home in my pinstripe and my bowler hat and waved my sober umbrella in middle-class outraged fury at the scenes of wanton damage being shown on my non-widescreen, fat, cathode ray tube telly. I was a good boy.

And that’s the problem.

In my current novel (and, indeed, in my previous one) the main characters have run foul of the law. They’ve had their collars felt. I’ve had to write a police interview / interrogation scene.

And in all honesty I have absolutely no first-hand experience of how these are actually conducted at all. My only reference points are film and TV but just how accurate is it to depict suspects having plastic bags held over their heads and then being kicked around a dusty evidence room by a furious Gene Hunt? Do the police still do that? Or does that just happen in the armed forces now?

Do the police still do the old good cop / bad cop routine?

Or is it all touchy feely now – calling in a gestalt therapy counsellor, a PTSD specialist, a pedicurist and a Swedish masseuse?

My wife assures me that the police are people too and, actually, unlike the portrayal of the force on the telly, most interviews are conducted in a very conversational manner. When I asked her how she knows this she made a quick excuse about being late for a community service appointment and hotfooted it out of the house as if she had a bag of swag under each arm. Most curious.

So anyway, I’m now wishing I’d pulled a bank heist or two when I was younger. Misspent my youth a bit. Nicked the odd car. Gun ran. Grew drugs at the allotment. Defecated on the carpet at Fortnum & Masons.

I’m now looking back on the summer’s riots in the UK and wondering if I missed an opportunity there.

Not for the sake of getting a widescreen telly.

But for the sake of my writing.

I’m sure the judge would have understood.

Don’t you agree?

RealiPolitik

This weekend saw the launch of one of the UK's hottest and most realistic apps. Grand Theft Footpad hit the shops so hard it obliterated the windows and most of the upper stories. Hoodies all over the country became immediately addicted to this fully immersive 3D real-time game, so much so that even after just a couple of hours of play time many of them could no longer differentiate between the real world and the virtual world.

The game - freely available to download - comes in a neat little package initally consisting of a just cause, righteous anger and a jutisified need to protest. Many of the gamers, however, seem to have ripped the packaging off the product without a second thought and are now playing the game for their own ends without actually working their way through the appropriate levels.

For many of the game's low profile users, the original game story of peaceful and justified protest is being seen as laughable when the open style nature of the game clearly allows the gamer to go on the rampage and set and achieve their own not-so-hidden agenda.

For many behoodied gamers the agenda seems to simply be: acquire an iPad / iPhone / iPrisonsentence, cause as much damage to their own community as humanly possible and cause the game's "end of level" boss, the Prime Minister, to cut short his annual break to Butlins and come back to Downing Street to best discuss how to ship these avaricious little thugs out to Afghanistan where they can play war games for real.

A report that a version of this game is soon to be available for the Wii is as yet unconfirmed but a curled fist waved up and down in a yo-yo motion is already being seen as a possible iconic game move.