Returning to Stone.

All that late winter and spring I rode the bus in the early afternoons down the ugly London road, noticing the queues at the eel-and-pie-shop, the students by the college, the blacks at the street corners. Then I would get off the bus, turn left, and walk through quieter streets, where the open space was desolate. In the porches of the council estates I only saw children, playing together in small knots. No one walked in the little park, with its dark verdant tunnel under the overhead railway line. The river was somewhere nearby, but access to it seemed to be barred, as it often was in those reaches of London where no one had yet thought of pleasure-walkways or shopping-malls.

I didn't have far to walk to the squat dark-brick Edwardian building that was my goal, and I wasn't often unhappy. For human company, undemanding pastimes, and even a small economic profit awaited me.

I was an unemployed single man of thirty-three, well-educated and of a passive temperament. I had spent ten years doing jobs I didn't enjoy, and now I was quite content to be on the dole. I had discovered that you can live in London on very little, if you have cheap accommodation and simple tastes.

I got up late, and ate my lunches at art arts centre. Three evenings a week I worked in a bookshop, getting paid in cash. The shop was open until ten, and often friends would arrive at that hour to take me to a pub. When I got home, I read into the night. At that time, I remember, I had become interested in the literature of late nineteenth-century France, and was reading Huysmans' A rebours and the Contes cruels of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

The months were turning quite nicely into years, and nothing disturbed my almost Buddhist serenity except the six-monthly interviews with Restart, the government agency "designed to assist people who have been unemployed for some time".

At one of these interviews, the official tired of my suggestions that I intended to start my own business and said I should join a Jobclub. These were groups of unemployed people who met in a room, under a supervisor, to try and find a job. They were provided with everything they needed: phone, writing-paper, stamps, photocopier. They only had to attend daily for three weeks; then it became optional. And they met in the afternoons.

So I said yes, and did that unremarkable journey for the first time on a frosty afternoon in January.