Here goes for the Indignity!

Coming to a computer screen near you, the final degrading step that a person who is already ground down by the benefits system in the UK has to undergo.  

I have been poked, prodded, lied about, forced to travel near enough 200 miles to fight my case and now I'm called for a Work Focussed Interview.  This is an interview that will most probably be carried out between me and a twenty-something slip of a girl (or man) who has had one job in their life, other than a paper-round while still at school.  

The idea of this interview is to tell me that I should be doing this, that and the other to find a job where the employer will not employ me, or if they do, they will most probably ask me to leave after a week because of my disability.  I mean, what employer wants an employee that has trouble concentrating in the morning and has trouble staying awake in the afternoon, needs to get out of a normal chair after about 15-20 minutes to loosen his knee joints, can hardly climb stairs (and so is a fire hazard), cannot lift his hands above his head and cannot stand for more than a few minutes.  

Yet this is the indignity I have to face on Tuesday.  I have to pray that I can park near the DWP office on the other side of town and that they do not want me to go upstairs to an interview room.  On top of all this, I have to hope that I do not do, or say, the wrong thing and have the DWP "sanction" me.  For those outside the UK, this is where the Department for Works and Pensions arbitrarily decide that I have breached their rules and stop all of my benefits.  Not some of my benefits, we are talking, for a first offence (supposedly), all of my benefits.  This will mean that my wife and I will have no money for food, heating or light, but we will owe our landlord £200 for the two weeks of rent that will not be paid, if not more if the council do not restart the payments after the fortnight.

The standard working period for the DWP is a fortnight, as, in the past, unemployed people had to sign on for their benefit and then get paid this often.  This is not a problem for the clerks in their centrally heated offices who can mark off two weeks on a calendar easily enough.  For businesses and banks this is unworkable.  It seems that direct debits and the like can only be paid monthly, that is, on the same date every month, days do not come into it unless the 14th falls on a weekend, in which case it used to be paid on the Monday following.

Now, I think to normal people, the problem will be becoming obvious, some months have five weeks in them, in fact, the only month that is an exact four week period is a non-leap year February.  So, although the 14th of January is on a Tuesday this year, it is not an even number of weeks from the 14th of February, and so on and so on.  This means that budgeting on benefits is an amazing feat of accounting, and if the Chancellor of the Exchequer needed to do it, he would fail unless, as he does, he had a large bank balance in the black.

So, the Minister for Works and Pensions has decided to bring in a system whereby benefits claimants will be paid monthly.  It has already cost £50M of lost money already to prepare the system to do it, but it doesn't work.  So will future sanctions be for a minimum of a month?

The government, which, yet again, has been caught in a PR lie, is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by making every claimant guilty of "shirking" and cheating the system by use of the media.  This government by Upper Class Twits who only have the needs of themselves and their own classmates from Public School or University in mind.  These cheats who started by preventing themselves being voted out in the first days of their filling the seats of power with a bunch of sycophantic cronies who are all filling jobs for which they have little or any qualification for.  

The people are getting fed up with the austerity package they are being forced to undergo - pay rises capped to 1% while MPs vote themselves a massive pay rise; high paid people get tax cuts in their favour; power companies raise prices by 3% and train companies raise fares by 6%.  There will come a time when the people can take no more hypocrisy.

Its were the system fails!

I do not apologise for the title of this post, in truth I wanted to take it further. I have turned into a Spelling Pedant!

Reading an item posted on facebook today, I had to mentally replace "there" with "their" and "where" with "were" on so many occasions it made me feel physically ill.  I fully realise that not everyone is blessed with a decent education in the UK, but please people, if you are going to write in English, use the right words.

I must have been so lucky in my education that I was taught where to use the right homonym.  There are several ways to remember which spelling is required for the correct meaning to be conveyed, it's a case of finding the one that works for you.

For example, one of the worst culprits is the easiest to remember:

THERE/THEIR/THEY'RE

• There - is not HERE.
• Their - that person is the HEIR, the item is tHEIR property.
• They're = They are - the apostrophe is here to take the place of missing letters.

WHERE/WERE/WEAR/WE'RE

• Where - it is not HERE, wHERE is it?
• Were - They wERE here ERE they left.
• Wear - You wEAR glasses over your EAR.
• We're = We are - the apostrophe is here to take the place of missing letters.

So you can see that with a little simple thought and care homonyms can be tamed. (sEE with your EyE not sEA that meets the bEAch.) [oh, and that was mEEt as in sEE not mEAT as in EAT]

The biggest drawback with homonyms is that you the user has to know how to use them as a spell-checker will see "We wear here" as correct as "we were here".

So please, people, take care and learn the differences, and make sure you use the right word.  I know some will knock my use of grammar in the examples I have given, but if it works, it works!

The turn has wormed!

Yes, OK, I know that it should be the worm that has turned, but in the two months since I last wrote on this blog things have changed a little and it's not me that changed.

So there was I, at the end of my tether, DLA had been denied, ESA on Assessment Rate while I appealed and the thud of paper hitting my doorstep threatened to break my floorboards.  Wait five weeks and the date for the appeal into my ESA arrived. Nice and close, BRIGHTON!

In case you don't already know, Hastings is 52 miles away from Brighton and like most people asked to visit a town or city so far away I do not know the layout of it.  So, thanks to my dad, I bought a train ticket and got some cash for the taxis and some food.

The day arrived, fortunately as I was about to walk to the station (600m to the platform) so I was going to be in agony before the day started, and my darling daughter turned up to drop her mother off, so I begged a lift and cut out 400m of the walk!

I got to Brighton, fell off the train (at the wrong end) and hobbled to the exit.  Unfortunately, Brighton station is designed so that you have to walk across 20 m to get to the ticket barrier and then back 20 m to get to the taxis, which I sort of bypassed and went and got a coffee.  Great little coffee bar in the old waiting room with the imaginitive name of "The Waiting Room", nice staff and nice coffee.  So then I downed some instant hit Tramadol (those that I get sent into the country from Spain) and shuffled off to get a taxi for the mile to the tribunal centre.

So, there is our hero, arriving at the tribunal centre with his customary early arrival - 30 minutes in this case, and the security man says "Really early sir!  You're due to be here in 2 and a half hours!"

"No," Says I, "my appointment is for 2 pm.  If they don't like it, they can get me a chair to sit in because I am not sitting on that sofa, as there's no way I'll ever get out of it!"

He dials a number on his telephone and I am soon greeted and taken to the Tribunal Service office and shown into a waiting room.  Barely had I sat when a clerk with his shirt hanging out from the back of his trousers called me in to the hearing room.

Quick little chat with a GP and a judge about how things were and how they are (I told the GP that Arthritis is a degenerative illness and yes, over the last 18 months it had got worse).  How do you manage to do things, like shopping? We have it delivered, I can drive to the supermarket, but can barely walk round it.

"How do you grip the steering wheel?" asked the judge.  The next day I nearly died at the answer I gave!  "I don't grip the steering wheel, you don't grip a steering wheel, if you do and hit a pothole you're going into the kerb or a car, anyone that says you grip the steering wheel should go back and learn to drive!"  It was the next day I realised the judge had blushed!

"Go sit down again and we'll make our decision." Eh, what? I haven't had a chance to put my side of the argument over, I haven't had a chance to point out the 22 errors in the Atos report!  If you have a complaint about Atos, you'll have to take it up with them!

So, I go back to the waiting room, take my bag off my shoulder sit down and the clerk comes back!  I was escorted back to the hearing room and there on the table was a piece of paper with "Appeal is allowed"!  Mr Turtle is hereby awarded 15 points! 6 more than the original decision.

Now all I have to do is wait for the money to go into my bank for the backdated money that they owe me, including TWO Christmas bonuses - a whole twenty pounds!  Ten pounds for each Christmas, a measly fiver for me and a fiver for my wife!  This amount was instigated way, way back many decades ago when £10 filled a shopping trolley, now it will pay the delivery fee for the shopping and the electricity to heat the house on Christmas day!  Still, the government know the use of a ten pound note, it's used to light a cigarette, well, you can't light a cigar with a £10 it's way too small!

Still, my 18 month fight against the system has been won and now I have to fill in the 40 page form for Personal Independence Payment. I did 5 pages last night, I might go for 5 tomorrow that'll be a fortnight to fill in the whole form!  Don't these people realise we're disabled and we didn't choose to be!

Poetry Day UK

Today is #PoetryDayUK apparently, and my friends that tweet on behalf of WoWPetition suggested a WoW Petition Poetry book.  Good idea, if it gets people using poetry.

Poetry is a much maligned form of communication, it takes a lot of thought and a fair smattering of vocabulary.  It can't take a lot of brains as Rappers do it (sorry Rappers).

So I thought I'd better get started, and, as a fair shot, I decided to blog a one-hit poem about disability.  I promise you the poem below came out in one go, no editing and re-editing like I have the first few paragraphs! Oh, I will come back and add a title, the poem will suggest it.

Hidden Pain

It can't be seen or measured up,
It can't be cured with a click,
It can't be fixed by a suture's stitch
Or by visiting a local witch.

The government think it really simple,
You can see it like a dimple.
Pain comes upon a simple scale
Like a colour dark or pale.

Now think real hard just for me
About some pain that used to be
Now on a scale of one to ten
Say how it hurt and when?

So if I walk for twenty yards
Tomorrow's pain is on the cards
But I can do it so you see,
DLA is not for me!

Getting Ground Down By The System

Quick recap for those of you who may not know me:

I am 50 years old, I have been suffering with a dislocating knee cap and arthritis in my right knee until 2009 when they replaced the knee joint.  This has now put the weight off the left leg which is now suffering from an arthritic condition.  The arthritis now affects my arms so I can hardly scratch my own head, I am stuck in my basement and ground floor maisonette with only my car to get me about outside.

The DWP decided last year to reassess me for ESA, and sent out their 21 page form the ESA50.  Half way through is a question that I misunderstood and that got me into BIG trouble.  First off, in concert with the French Data Processing company ATOS, they based a decision on a report with a minimum of 21 errors and my stupid error and said I am fit for work.

Then the DWP set a person, who to my knowledge has done nothing in their life other than work for the DWP and has no medical knowledge, to look at my Disability Living Allowance.  Based on the report with a minimum of 21 errors and my stupid error they said I am not eligible for DLA.

I do a voluntary job on Tuesdays, on Wednesday I am in bed until about 11am trying to get moving as I am so stiff and painful.  Many nights, I don't get to sleep because I am in pain until 2 am, but do they care about that?  No.

So, as you would, I put in an appeal against the decision to class me as fit for work as far as ESA is concerned, when the decision about the DLA came through, I appealed against that.

Now, twelve months after the so called Work Capability Assessment, I have not yet had my appeal for ESA heard, but the Tribunal Service have drawn a line under my DLA appeal - Not Approved. Basically, Mr Turtle, you have had two 36 mile round trips two towns over on the South Coast and had to climb a massive flight of stairs at the hotel that the tribunal was held at, all for nothing!!!

So I had a quick chat with the DWP representative about what to do, his answer, Shut Up and Put Up, until the ESA Appeal is heard, they may give you points and you can appeal your DLA again!

Alright for him to say, he doesn't realise what I am facing. He doesn't realise what I am about to lose.

Unless I can find a way round it, I will lose my car, therefore, I will lose my mobility, therefore I will be trapped inside this house with no way to get out and about, therefore I will lose my voluntary job, therefore I will have nothing to keep my mind occupied, therefore I will lose my sanity!  But I'm FIT FOR WORK!

There's the good news, I can get a job that allows me to move about when I stiffen up, will allow me twice the time of a "normal" person to walk down the corridor to the photocopier/break room etc. and allow me to be taking close to an overdose on Tramadol.  Then, on the day after I get into work, they will allow me a day off to recover from the first day, so, possibly, I could work Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  So does anyone know anywhere that will pay me five days pay for a three day week? (Apart from being an MP)

I just wish there was some way of temporarily inflicting the pain I feel, the fuzzy head making me question everything I do, the feeling of "have I remembered to do all I had to do", on some one so that they can understand what I am going through.  The frustration I feel when I reach for something in a cupboard that I can no longer reach, and it's only just above eye-level.  The anger that I cannot keep up with my wife or grandchildren when we are out and about.  The way I scream inside my own head at night, so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open, but the pain is so great that I cannot get off to sleep. The useless feeling I get when the weight of my laptop sends needles of pain through my knees and I have to put a tray on a cushion on my lap with the laptop on to ease it.

So here am I, wondering if I have the internal strength to carry on, wondering why everything is mounting up against me, wondering why my MP is such an uncaring sheep she follows the lies and mistruths that the Prime Minister and his cabinet keep spouting without question.  Why do all these politicians listen to the lies that are spouted and don't question them I do not understand.

It's a simple thing to go on-line and check on the lies that the government are spouting, it's easy to spot when David Cameron is lying, it's when he's talking about caring, "Being in this together", or benefit claimants in general.  I am still looking for the proof of "The test of a good society is you look after the elderly, the frail, the vulnerable, the poorest in our society. And that test is even more important in difficult times, when difficult decisions have to be taken, than it is in better times." as said by David Cameron on the Andrew Marr Show on 2nd May 2010.  Three years later and we're getting to see that his society is a BAD one.

Another week has gone by - thank God!

If I have any regular readers, you will note that I have been less forthcoming with my comments lately.  There's a very good reason for this, or as I would have typed a week ago " h   's a      good  eason fo   his", basically, the old laptop had a keyboard explosion, 8 keys had lost their buttons.  I struggled on, even to the length of borrowing a plug-in keyboard, but, have you tried using a keyboard on top of a keyboard?

So, when MrsT's laptop decided to start issuing blue smoke, I went a-begging of the paternal parent.  Two laptops later and we're back on-line.

So now I have to try and get used to, not just a new keyboard layout, but a new operating system, Windows 8!  So far, I have only found use for one or two things on the so-called "Metro" screen, the Google shortcut I added is weird, the twitter and facebook shortcuts are so "Retro", I feel as if it were back in the first few months of facebook going global.

Internet Explorer 10 keeps crashing, and I thought they would have had the glitches sorted already!  So, the most used shortcut from the "Metro" screen is the "Desktop".  But those users of the earlier Windows system will know and love the "Start" Button, the first point of call for closing the computer down, has gone! Still, Microsoft have given a simple way of turning off the computer from any screen.

Half of my programs that I used to use are 32 bit, so won't run on a 64 bit machine!  Why MS didn't allow for this beggars belief.  We're in a global recession, not enough time for the Software houses to get their act in gear to provide 64 bit versions of all their systems and not enough money to buy it if they had!

Still "Nil carborundum illegittimi" as the pig Latin phrase goes.

So, we have the ultimate in sporting weekends, mid-way through (yawn) Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix of Formula One Motor-Racing, the second Rugby test for the British Lions and the start of the Tour de France.  I'm surprised the Cricket world hasn't got a big match on!

With a little bit of a fight for the remote, I got the TV onto the start of the cycling and the Mrs sitting there on her sofa looks up and says "Ooh, is that an easyJet team?", "No dear," I said trying not to be too patronising as all the participants in her choice all wear all white, "that's the Basque cycling team sponsored by a phone company, Euskatel-Euskadi!"

Pity that the Basques are so proud of their region that they won't let an airline that doesn't serve their area aid sponsoring their cycling team.  Or Blogger, the people that host this blog, their "corporate" colour is orange too.

Cycling is a strange sport, the female of the species is as fierce as the male, we saw that last year at the Olympic Games.  If we're lucky we see it if ITV4 show the National Championships as they did last week.  It's a heck of a sport, and you have to be an amazingly fit person to do it, my hat is off to every sport cyclist.

It amazes me when footballers scream for millions of pounds wages per year when they will play two or three matches a week.  The 198 cyclists facing the 3,404 kilometres (2115mi 259.65yd) over the next 23 days with only two days rest and will be in the saddle for about 90 hours.  Each stage (other than the time trials) will be about 200km (124.274miles) long and at the end of seven of them there will be (hopefully) a sprint finish with speeds reaching 60 km/h (38 mph) on the flat, on a pushbike!!!

I know I ask many people to appreciate what it's like for disabled people, but can you imagine riding a bicycle for six hours and then being able to push it to nearly forty miles an hour?  After driving that distance, I want to lie down and have a rest, (OK at the moment, I want to do that after 20 minutes), but when I was younger and fitter, I would have.

So, what's the rest of what's happening? I'm still preparing for round two of my DLA appeal, I'm still waiting for the ESA appeal and it's now a year since the Atos Assessment. 

Life, the Pain and the Medication!

As a follower of the Diary of a Benefit Scrounger - Sue Marsh's views on life I read with a growing awareness that her blog And Drugs Don't Work They Just Make Things Worse mirrored my life. 

I am fairly fortunate that my GP understands how much I respect the lack of control that some medication gives, the fact that some of the medication he has me on is OK for some parts of my life, but doesn't quite help out at the times I need it to.  Yes, my GP has agreed to let me control some of my medication with the clear knowledge and understanding that I do respect the maximum daily dose. 

Through this, I have now been able to adapt my medication levels to the extent that I can manage to cope with my voluntary job on a Tuesday. This is a good thing.

The negative side to being able to cope with Tuesday is to lose Wednesday.  I don't do Wednesdays very well, it takes until about 2 p.m. for the near overdose of Tramadol on the Tuesday to clear out of my head enough for me to feel safe driving (I just pray I don't get a drug test when driving on Wednesdays). 

In addition to the loss of Wednesdays and the fuzzy headedness is the disbelief of my wife.  Yep, she that must be obeyed can not get her head around the fact that I can cope on Tuesday but not through the rest of the week.

The other really annoying thing about pain, that thing that I have tickling away at my nerve endings even now as I sit here feeling no pain, thanks to the meds, is describing it.  Every Health Care Professional wants to know how much pain I'm in on a scale of one to ten.  I don't know, I seem to remember the pain I had when my knee dislocated as being the worst I can remember.  Now this being the most, it should be a ten.  Now I have to think where my pain level is compared to that?  At times it seems more as it lasts longer. 

Is it as bad as hitting my thumb with a hammer (about a four)?  Is it as bad as breaking a rib (about a seven)?  Is it as bad as slicing my arm open when falling through a plastic gutter (6)? Is it as bad as ... ? That's my interpretations, what is someone else's?

I can understand 30°C temperature, I've felt it.  I've felt it in the south of Spain, I've felt it in the South of France (well in the Pyrenees), I've felt it in the south of England.  Three places where the temperature at ground level was the same.  Oh no it isn't!  In Spain, it's warm.  In France it was tolerable.  In the UK, however, it's stifling, to hot to breathe.

We can measure temperature, we can measure blood pressure, we can count the number of pulses in a minute. We can do all these things, and do them accurately and repeatedly.  So why can't we measure pain accurately?