Destitute.

Never in my life do I remember being quite this broke, until a few years ago I would always have money in my pocket. Now I cant even buy petrol for the bike.
Embarrassed is not a word people normally associate with me, I don’t give monkeys about most things and live my life as if today was my last day on earth. Having no money is putting a new perspective on my life, I feel I have to turn down invites to various functions, I don’t go to the pub because I cant stand my round, last week I went to a motorbike rally (tickets were bought in Jan) and was looked after by my mates, I spend the weekend in unusually subdued mode; because I felt embarrassed.
This weekend I have to go to a VW event up at Santa pod, I have to go because it’s the last chance I will get to see my Daughter for a while, so tonight I have to go and borrow some money off of my brother, god knows how much I owe him already.
After that I wont be going anywhere for a while, my motorbike has blown the exhaust to the extent where it is barely repairable, no point in selling it as it is not worth anything without the exhaust, besides … sell my bike? FOAD.

The weird thing is I feel in a kind of limbo, I cant seem to even pick up a job driving, I just applied for a job riding a 125cc motorbike (for gods sake don’t tell my mates!) to deliver car parts around London, bloke listened to me on the phone and said “Mate you are far too intelligent for this job…..” no matter what I said he was not interested, the money was also less than I used to earn in 1978.

Now I’m not proud, I have cleaned toilets in the past to earn money, I’ll do anything to get some money coming in, but there are so many people applying for every job, it is a lottery and you now what the odds on winning that are. One job I applied for, driving a van, had 118 people apply in the first hour of it being advertised, don’t believe me? Go to Gumtree.com and look at the jobs section, refresh the page an hour later and look at the number of hits for any job, I was astonished when I had this pointed out to me. Bar work picks up maybe 200 hits an hour!!

So where do I go from here, well bankruptcy is calling at present, I had tried everything I know to either get a job or earn some money, even 3 years ago I could have found a way to make some dosh, but now its ridiculous. So I just keep trying to look for a suitable bit of work, I have even started applying for jobs in Europe, I don’t really want to move abroad, but if I have too I will.

Back in the ‘bad ol’ days’ I never had less than £100 to out with (equivalent to about £4-500 now) but I was a ‘bad boy’ as my mum used to put it, since I have been legit I feel like I have been skint all the time, the government was quite happy to take all my money in tax and NI, but now I get back less than a third of what I paid in every week.

What price is ‘doing the right thing’ costing me?