Day 707

Aka Monday 7^th January 2019

Today I got confirmation that my Universal Credit application has been accepted and that I will get £317 this month. Which does raise some questions for me about practicalities of working and Universal Credit. 

As part of being on Universal Credit I’ve agreed that I am prepared to travel for, at most, an hour and half for work, which basically means commuting into London. Which is fine, and I had done it for nearly seventeen years before taking redundancy. 

But a weekly London All Zones Travelcard from my train station is £123.10 and a monthly is £472.80. So if I start a job in London at the beginning of the month I’ll need too find an extra £155.80 to make up the shortfall, so that I could travel to work (that assumes that I’d be paid at the end of the month, but even if I was paid after three weeks, I’d still need to spend £369.30 for three weeks travel and need to find an extra £52.30 to make up the shortfall) and that leaves me with £0 for food. Which kinda makes it impossible to travel for an hour and a half for work, because I would soon be dead from lack of food!

...my copy of ‘Heavy Metal’ #287 arrived and plugged the gap in my run of ‘Heavy Metal’ with Grant Morrison as editor. How I’ve just got to read them 😊…

…watched ‘Spilt’, which was okay, it was well acted, with James McAvoy doing a great job playing multiple personalities. But the story felt slight and incomplete, more like an episode in a tv series, rather than a story on its own, although this does give the actors space to make their characters breathe. And the cameo at the end tying ‘Split’ into a wider cinematic universe felt tacked on. Almost as if someone said that the film doesn’t feel complete and needs something to give a sense of payoff. All of which, for me, makes for an okay film, worth watching on a streaming service, but not worth buying for multiple viewings. 6/10.

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

…which gets the week off to a pretty good start as I only needed to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 24), would have gone better if my mind hadn’t blanked on ‘precursor’ as the answer for nine across, ‘forerunner’, and if I hadn’t thought that that ‘non de plume’ had two m’s I might have gotten that eight down was ‘non de guerre’, but at least I learnt that ‘pibroch’ means ‘bagpipe music’.