First day of unemployment

Has been very nice indeed. I went swimming this morning at about 9.30. The pool is extremely delapidated but they're tarting it up to look like a cheap Fitness First. I really just wanted to go for a swim but got the invevitable desultory tour of the gym. I feel like I've done that tour a hundred times, always with gym staff who point out the machines as though they're slightly embarrassed by them. The pool was huge, the deep end impressively deep, so you have a sense of swimming on top of a vast empty space. School children were being dipped in groups of twenty while I was there, but this didn't bother me as much as I thought it would.

Anyway, hem, politics. Pandora, of The Independent runs a story on Home Office spending an annual £1,000,000 (six, count'em, noughts) on refreshments. In 1997 they managed to get by on a mere £300,000. How can this happen? Are they subsidising the Home Office dining room? In which case we are paying for their refreshments twice, both as wages for the civil servants and subsidies to make their ginster's pasties cheaper. It surely can't mean bottled mineral water and sandwiches for meetings. Can it?

Blair obviously (see below) will not cave into pressure from his MPs to announce a timetable for departure. I wonder if his defiance does in fact extend to continuing in office in the face of widespread unpopularity. But then he was only voted in a year ago, so can still, fairly reasonably, claim to have the mandate of the British Public. It does make Brown seem awful, hanging around impatiently - no one likes impatience, it is too common a flaw.

Went to Tesco's at around 1.00pm. It seems that no-one round here has a job. I was beginning to think ungenerous things about state benefit, when it occurred to me that I didn't have a job either.

Question: do state benefits actually create positive change in people's lives, or is the change merely cosmetic?