I wasn’t lying when I said my finances were fucked. This is a lean time of year to find work, and chances are significantly narrowed by having a day a week dedicated to my course. I haven’t done any freelancing, or heard from my one client, since before Christmas, and I’m still owed 200 or so quid for old invoices. And my main debtor told me this week he’s been given a month’s notice and isn’t likely to start paying off his (large) debt any time soon.

So what does the JobCentre do at this time when, for the first time since signing on, I actually need them to give me some money?

They send me precisely nothing because the claim was frozen in September and nobody bothered to tell me I was filling the forms out wrong.

Then they go and lose the paperwork I provided to show what I’d earned from my ‘part time’ work.

I swear most benefit fraud is actually because people know that the system can’t handle such complicated things as the truth and want to make life easy for it.