How Do I Scan?

Hello.

Today, I'm going to burble about three completely different things in a way that is like 'stream of consciousness' but not sufficiently for me to want to use what has now become a terrible cliche... Everyone is emitting SOC these days - the papers say so; so does the TV; it enters into casual conversation ('Would you like a drink?' 'No thanks - I just put one out' 'My, that's very stream-of-consciousness' 'Erm... sorry, I wasn't listening'). Russell Brand is said to be a SOC comic. I think he's actually just a prurient arsehole who has 'arrived' at a time when everyone who is anyone is wearing the Emperor's New Clothes.

Are we becoming consciousness-incontinent? Obviously, to paraphrase your GP, we need to get out of it a bit more. Or maybe just shut up. Yet here I am...

So, today I had an MRI scan.

It was jolly interesting, too. All in the name of research, I hasten to add - some chap at Glasgow University wants to find out if loonies' brains light up differently to squares' brains when subjected to the same stimuli.

Consequently, I spent an hour pushing the same button over and over while stuck in a helmet not unlike Richard Chamberlain's in The Man in the Iron Mask, lying in a very narrow tube and having extremely loud, Frankenstein-like noises made by a bloody enormous electro-magnet. Encouragingly, I was told that I was also surrounded by LOADS of liquid nitrogen, which explained why the place was so fecking cold.

In the end, and bizarrely, I nearly fell asleep. The technician greeted me with the news that (a) he always falls asleep inside the thing and (b) (very tiredly) I do, indeed, have a brain.

He was so convinced of the latter that he let me have a look at myself, and a very odd specimen I was too, with my spherical eyeballs sitting on stalks looking like they weren't attached to much at all. It was, I concluded, a bizarre and amazing experience and I vaguely considered that maybe the NHS should charge people to have a go for fun. I recommend it.

With a mighty leap - ebay. Or is it Ebay? Or eBay? Bugger it, I hate this playing about with the rules.

Ebay has put its prices up again, and, staggeringly, they are trying to make out that this is a price CUT!

Once upon a time, ebay was the world's greatest online car boot sale. That was the whole idea. Ever since then, the company has been ceaseless in its mission to push out the hobbyists and make the place an Internet High Street.

The latest wheeze involves cutting insertion fees for a listing by 33% (for most of us, from 15p to 10p - by the way, these reductions mean that it is proportionately much cheaper to have a high starting bid, which is supposed to be unwelcome). The flip side is that they are increasing their commission on sales from 5% to 7.5%, which means that anyone who doesn't operate a shop, basically, is going to pay loads more for every sale.

The jolly anchorites have the gall to advertise this as a price cut because they've brought out a discount scheme where you can get from 20 to 40% off your commission charges. How do you qualify? By being a high volume seller of course!

And so another great idea bites the dust - watch as everyone but the sellers of CDs, edible underwear and office equipment drifts away to find something else to do. Like going to a car boot sale maybe. Anyone who wants to compete with ebay, now is your time, people!

So, the Department of Work and Pensions then.

I've had quite a bit to do with these guys over the past year and a half, as a recipient of state aid, and while I can say that claiming benefit has never been fun, it has now been reduced to some kind of (I don't want to say it... ooooh...) Kafka-esque (bugger) farce.

There are Jobcentres and benefit offices - but the latter also call themselves Jobcentres... but you can't go in them. You can go in the former, but they can't deal with your claim because they aren't allowed to. And they aren't allowed to talk to the benefit office either... but they are nevertheless the place where you have to sign on, go for interviews and what not. But not if you want to make a new claim. No. In that event you have to phone up a special number and speak to a call centre, who put you through the whole application process over the phone... and you are encouraged to do this in public, at the Jobcentre.... but all they actually do is (a) tell you if the computer says 'no' and (b) send you a form, which carries all the wrong details, for you to give to the Jobcentre, who then ask you all the same questions again... and then send it to the benefit office because it's not up to them... who then ask you the same questions... who call you to be interviewed at the Jobcentre by someone who says they are your case worker, but who can't answer any questions because that's the job of the benefit office... who take the traditional bloody ages to do anything, and then don't tell you what they've done.

One of the main reasons why none of this works, asides from the normal organisational lunacy involved, is that Government ministers have been unable to stop fiddling with the system (in the same way as we now have a shambolic education system thanks to a couple of generations of non-stop tinkering for tinkerings sake) and won't put in the funding to support their brave new initiatives.

If HMG really wants to reduce the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants, I strongly suggest that they spend some money on letting DWP staff do their jobs. My local friendly IB Adviser has a caseload of nearly 100 claimants and is so over-worked she can't service them (that means 'work on getting them off benefit'). If you look around the offices of any Jobcentre these days, what you will see is a bunch of desperate people, and they are all the staff members.

Which is why I was so pleased to hear that Caroline Flint MP, having just moved on from the DWP, is keen to try out some of her great ideas from her former role on public housing - like getting people to work for their homes. Asides from the moral issues, how in ****'s name does she think this will work?

I, for one, am getting sick and tired of junior politicians using their postings to trumpet ridiculous schemes in order to get themselves noticed. Once upon a time, civil servants were able to squash these before any damage was done. Now that the CS is merely the politicians' whipping boy, we are all suffering the results, across the board.

It doesn't really matter what shade of voting belief you hold - the fact is we are drowning in unnecessary law and regulation, much of it badly composed and often actually illegal.

NB: Check out how many times the present administration has broken the law and ignored court rulings.