The reality is beginning to dawn...

With my claim for benefits rejected out-of-hand, I investigated appealing, and finally submitted my own appeal, which will be heard long after I've retired and moved to Eastbourne. Or wherever. If I live that long. (18 months to go: where does DWP think I'd find a job even if I were well?)

I thought I had a handle (intellectual, certainly, but I thought emotional as well) on just how cruel our society could be to those at the bottom of the pile. I was (frankly) deluded.

I'm still in a state of shock.

You see, I was a public schoolboy; I'm a Freeman of the City of London; I'm an honorary Colonel; I was in uniform and then for many years a reserve officer (RAF); I'm more closely related by blood to those persons in Buck House than either Cameron or Princess Dy (Gawd bless her). If I hadn't been taken seriously and chronically ill, I could have lived a life of blissful ignorance, praising the heaven-born (IDS, Ozzy, Cameron [that always was a duplicitous family], Mechanica McVey et al.) who keep the plebs (the expression actually used, I can assure you, is "scum-of-the-earth") in their place.

[Except, thank God, I wouldn't. I had already begun to realise the real situation long before I became one of the downtrodden myself. Okay, I hadn't begun to understand the whole horror of it, but at least I was trying.]

 With what I now realise is to be found on the internet, I understand that there isn't likely to be anything I can add. If, by chance, you are reading this, I'll tell you that I'm only writing because I think that (as I grow to understand just this one little corner of injustice that exists in England) I think it's a matter of duty. If nobody ever reads it, so be it.

As time goes on, I'll try to build a coherent Atos/DWP-anschaung. Who can say, maybe I will find something useful to contribute.

God preserve me in this time of trial.