A Day In The Life Of The Near-Unemployed.

I arrive at the place I volunteer to find the toilets have leaked. The rooms are filled with the smell of sewage and the building is evacuated. Outside, it's raining in the spit-in-your-face way rain does when it can't be arsed to do it properly. The wind blows my umbrella inside out enough times for me to fold it away. The sky's gray.
By the time I reach the Odeon I am considering jacking it all in and stuffing my face with KFC. Against all my ethical principles, probably.
Bravely, I march up the street and opt for a similarly gross option - a cheese & onion pasty from Greggs and an Easter cornflake cake.
I stop in front of Stanfords on Corn Street and gaze longingly at the sonic travel toothbrush then drop crumbs from the cornflake cake down my front. No one has seen, I brush myself down and head to the central library to look up some origami techniques.
In the toilet someone has written on the cubicle door:

'In answer to the question scratched in a desk in the reference section of the library: Can you write something about nothing? Yes.

Nothing is a state of mind. It is the alpha and omega of despair. It is the element of emptiness. It is the irony that holds the universe...'

Someone has written 'what a load of rubbish' next to it.

Downstairs, I sit down in the children's section by the window. An eighteen metre drill is boring a hole into the earth - it's amazing. If my friend Ruby and I had had one of those when we were little, perhaps we would have understood the impossibility of digging a hole in my back garden to get to Australia.