DOLE DIARY CLAIRE X:ON ONE Tuesday of the month, I'm up and showered by 5.45 a.m. Its chilly. The foxes are still in the garden.
I turn on the oven. Make the coffee. Start the scones. Then, cats saved, scones made, children fed, lunches packed, battles refereed, gear-bags sorted, hair plaited, poems heard, tables tested, hugs given, by 7.30 I'm off. The car is needed to get the children to school, so I'm on foot. Knot in my stomach. Heart in my mouth Morning Irelandin my headphones. Aine Lawlor, you do me good.
Our neighbourhood is already on the move. A few doors down, a balding father is squeezing a cello and a teenager into a stubborn Volkswagen Lupo. Further on, blonde mothers hunt their Latin-crested darlings into run-about SUVs.
This is James Joyce territory. I smell the snot-green sea. Wishing the scrotum-tightening bit on the lads on the radio, with their tough decisions, taking the pain, we are where we are.
Because where I am, they most certainly are not. Which, by now, is the yard of my local Dole Office. It's eight oclock. The news with Brian Jennings.
The caretaker is a gentleman. He arrives by bike, still in summer shorts, opening the gates to let the early-birds in. The gates are blue. Not Farrow Ball Skylight, the paint of Celtic Tiger lunatics. More the fervent blue of a Marian Shrine circa 1952.
By half past eight, there's around 20 of us. Only an hour to opening. Thank God the weather's fine.
The yard is rectangular and miserable. Shunned even by magpies. With its high, concrete walls and rusty, barbed-wire bunting, its redolent of Mountjoy. Or according to the woman beside me, the Workhouse. The jingle jangle is not the auld triangle, but texts arriving along the queue. Mostly locals, it seems. Hardly a peep now from Warsaw or Timisoara..
The yard has a solitary, teenage tree, branches fidgeting with the scent of each new arrival: DKNY, Chanel No 19, Issey Miyake Man. Remnants of past lives.
Like Everest, it has its own microclimate. The signature wet and cold going right to the skin and marrow; mini tornadoes flinging dust into your eyes. Two feral cats - black, sleek, superior - patrol the perimeter-walls.
It's lousy for women with babies in buggies. There's no shelter. But better the chill here than the heat on the road outside. Yes, like a large proportion of the 460,000, I'm embarrassed to be on the Dole. Probably the same large proportion with degrees, awards, professions, careers, mortgages, savings, standing orders to charities, insurance policies, rainy-day funds, plans, VHI, holidays, extensions, vet bills.
The kind who thought it was okay to buy a small three-bed semi – a home – because redundancy would never happen to them as, Christ, they were good at their jobs.
Inside, the office has a nautical feel, the roof giving it the milky light of a wedding marquee. There are long, thin, wooden poles finely-sharpened, like pencils for visiting giants. Or stakes for impaling bankers. The Interview Room looks intriguing. 1960s Bucharest.
I hope for the lovely woman with the blonde hair or the gentle man with the tie, dread the possessor of the charm of Idi Amin and the voice like 9,000 Vuvuzelas. You don't know where Community Welfare is?She's heard it all now.
Last signing day, there were gloved staff at the hatches. Not Audrey Hepburn gloves. But toilet-cleaning, hair-dyeing, Right-Mr-Dawson gloves. Intimate searches? An outbreak of Dengue fever? This was Social Protection, after all.
The gloves crinkled. I signed, looked, left in silence. Feeling strange.
Back home, couldnt get over the gloves. Was this stupidity or one of the myriad indignities of being on long-term welfare, I wondered. Rang the Minister's Office, for all of us. A nice man on the switch put me through to a nice woman inside. For her? Naked Camera definitely.
"Gloves. Plastic gloves? In Social Welfare? You serious?"
"Deadly. A ministerial order? Or some weird, European directive?"
"Eh. I'll have to check."
Next morning she spilled.
Me and my catastrophic thinking. The ET palaver with the plastic sheeting, the kids, the Buzz Lightyear suits, the poly-tunnel, the megaphones and the garden hose? 'Twas all down to paper-cuts.
"Paper-cuts?"
"Yes, that office says they're experiencing a very high level of paper-cuts."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"Other offices? They getting them too?"
"No. Just them."
"Rogue paper then? Danger money? Are the unions in?"
"I couldn't say....."
"It's just not exactly dignified to be greeted by a row of public servants in plastic gloves when you arrived to sign on, all pleasant, polite and scrubbed? I take it the kid gloves all went on the bankers?"
"I couldn't say."
I reckon the paper must become delinquent only at the hatches. Because, at the back, more staff who I know to be efficient, professional and hugely compassionate, were managing fine. With bare hands.
The weeks go on. Many of us have used our savings to pay the mortgage. Now they're gone, we're in freefall. I recognise them in the queue, by a certain distractedness. The unconscious rictus of worry - about the children, about home.
Sent my latest job application off on Tuesday. Nothing yet. Keep you posted.
Claire X is a pseudonym for an unemployed woman whose identity is known to The Irish Times. Dole Diary is a continuing series