This is sheer spite on my part but there’s a certain thrill in hearing the shortcomings of Jobcentre Plus being exposed on national news this morning. In this case it’s their computerised calling centre. In my case it was the rules concerning the self-employed. In both cases it’s skilled, helpful people doing a job that many saints would turn down as too stressful, being let down by the crap they are expected to work with.

My company went under, I was reduced to 15 freelance hours per week at £13/hour. Not really enough for any more than scraping by, especially when you have a mortgage and loan to pay off. But said mortgage and loan were insured, so that if I hit hard times, payments could continue. All I needed was to get a monthly certificate signed for each by the Jobcentre, to say that I was claiming …

I already knew that because I had at least 10p in my pocket there was no earthly way I was actually going to get any money out of HMG in return for my diligently paid taxes and national insurance. Absurd idea! But at least I could claim, and the Jobcentre could say I was claiming, and they would sign my bits of paper and that would be the mortgage and loan taken care of for another month. Right?

First obstacle was that I was due to go abroad on a scheduled, paid-for trip while my initial claim was being processed. If I did that, I was warned, the claim would be cancelled and I would have to reclaim once I got back. This is apparently a measure taken in light of all those people who fleece the state for thousands of pounds and go off to live the high life in Benidorm. God knows how they do it. So I’ll let you into a little secret. I didn’t tell them I had gone abroad. They are welcome to sue me for every penny they didn’t pay.

For the first couple of months (while the claim was being processed) it worked — I signed on, got my bits of paper signed, and in the meantime (I really should add) was genuinely looking for work. Then my claim got processed and came back as refused, because I worked more than 15 hours a week, so was ineligible to claim anything.

3 hours a day, 5 days a week somehow worked out at more than 15 hours. “Maybe it averages out at more than 15 …” someone said vaguely, using an obscure form of calculus in which the average is able to be more than the total. And oh, the fun and joy I had from that, trying to get a real live human being to explain it to me. To do that, they had to squeeze an answer out of the computer themselves, which is easier said than done. But eventually someone managed and explained it in words of one syllable, which is what was needed. You see, this freelance work meant I was self-em-ploy-ed. And if you’re self-em-ploy-ed then the time you take tra-vell-ing to and from work is ad-ded to the time you spend work-ing. In my case this was an hour’s travel every day. So, 20 hours per week! How dared I even show my face at the Jobcentre door?

I could go on — like, the way their most useful suggestion, visit Connexions which was just down the street (and isn’t just for teenagers, though I had always assumed it was) — came after six months, when it should have been suggested on Day 1. But I won’t. That was the personal failing of one individual; my larger problems stemmed from the fact that they have to work with one of the sillier laws on the UK statute books, designed purely to keep the claims figures down and not actually help anyone. It’s not their fault.

Connexions, by the way, were marvellous and their service included an in-depth critique of how my CV was all wrong. So I redesigned it and within a month I had my present job. Which I got by filling out the standard company application form. No CV needed. Poo.

When it hails so hard you can hear it over the headphones, you know it’s hailing with attitude. Checked the BBC web site for weather and saw that no snow is forecast — forgot to check for hail. The reason it’s all of such interest is I’m taking a group of teenagers paintballing in Banbury on Saturday, which is great fun but a notoriouslyoutdoor sport.

I have my old leather jacket, which is both warm and as kevlar where paintballs are concerned. Found a drawback to this at the last paintballing session in July, when I got so warm my visor steamed up and even the good old scuba trick — gob in it — didn’t work. Only solution was to remove jacket and expose my delicate torso to the possibility of bruising. Fortunately everyone else was fogging up too, so if you got hit it was just bad luck more than malice. But looking at the forecasts, I don’t see overheating being a problem this time.

Still, after Saturday I have no outdoor pursuits planned other than the usual this side of Christmas. So if the snow can just hold off for 48 hours, that would be great. Actually, if it can make 49 hours, that should cover the return trip too.

Always such a thrill to start a new book and find that you’re enjoying it straight off. My new read, begun last night, is Alistair McGrath’s Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life. It’s well written and it’s exactly the kind of book the world needs — someone with a similar intellect and scientific background to Dawkins who can respond meaningfully to some of his, let’s say, more simplistic or downright inaccurate warblings.

I have a huge respect for Dawkins based on the books I’ve read – The Selfish Gene,The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable. His account of the sheer science involved in evolution cannot be bettered, and whenever I’ve devised an alien race in my head I’ve always had one eye mentally on Mr D so that, in my own head, I can account for how this race came to be. But I have always been frustrated by his evident conviction that the leap he makes from these facts to a QED denial of the existence of God has some form of logical basis — mostly because whatever he holds up as “Christianity” bears so little resemblance to the Christianity I know.

I’m sure he’s not making it up — I suspect his notion of Christianity is genuine within his own head and is based on the dead, moribund type taught in his youth by a complacent Church of England. It just seems sad that, having rightly rejected that, he doesn’t bother to look a little further and see what else might be on offer. It’s like rejecting the whole rich field of science fiction because of a particularly bad episode of Trek. But of course, to do that you would have to want to do that, which he clearly doesn’t. My suspicion is that those who want to be atheists will be; those who don’t, won’t. Atheists often have good reason, up to a point, rejecting religion for very Christian reasons — disgust at hypocrisy, rejection of pointless ritual, wanting to live in the present rather than the past. But that only works up to a certain point because for every bad example of Christians there are many more good ones out there. The only really honest reason for being an atheist is to say “I just don’t believe it.”

An example in point. In one of the above mentioned titles — and I have to confess I forget which — Dawkins says that the church condemns Doubting Thomas for, well, doubting, when in fact he was asking perfectly valid questions. Well, maybe, but not any church I’ve been to recently, where questions are positively encouraged on the basis that the truth of God will withstand any kind of scrutiny. Again, perhaps the church of Dawkins’ childhood was like that. It was an unviable meme which lost out against the much more viable meme of honest questioning. Someone should tell him, but I doubt he would listen.

Sadly such memes are still alive and well in other areas of the church, leading to the intellectual anaesthesia of creation science etc etc etc. Rather than just say “I believe …” they have to contrive reasons where none exist for believing. Which is kind of sad.