Not On the Picket Lines

I daresay that you are expecting me to give more blow-by-blow accounts of life on the picket line during today's public sector strike.  Unfortunately, I can't, as I wasn't on strike myself.  The reason for this quite simple: I couldn't afford to lose another day's pay.  As, for various reasons, I couldn't take the day off, I had little choice but to become a strike breaker for a day.  Luckily, there was no picket line to cross today but, nonetheless, I felt lousy about it.  One of the worst aspects of today was that people who saw me at work, (non-union members, those opposed to industrial action and, for all I know, Tory voters), assumed that I was on their 'side'.  Believe me, that hurts.  But the sad fact is that, despite talking a good revolution on these pages, I'm as subject to financial realities as everyone else, and when push comes to shove, paying the bills wins out over principles.  To be fair to myself, I also have serious issues with the union's strategy and, to be honest, I really don't see the point of today's action.  We've effectively lost the battle over pensions - if industrial action was going to alter the government's plans, then it would have happened last November when we went out.  All that continued one-day strikes achieve now is to cost members money in docked wages - money we can ill afford with a pay freeze and increased pension contributions.  It seems clear to me that we need to be smarter, this kind of brute force approach just won't work and risks alienating public opinion.  New strategies need to be deployed, we need to win the argument - in the eyes of the electorate - through using the media to our advantage.  We also need to be prepared to play dirty, take a few leaves out of Malcolm Tucker's, sorry, Alistair Campbell's book when it comes to PR.

But then again, all these reservations on my part could just be my subconscious trying to justify my failure to support the strike.  Like I said, it has left me feeling lousy, the perfect end to a dismal couple of days, in fact.  Yesterday, in particular, was a nightmare from beginning to end.  I woke up to find that my watch had stopped.  I then wasted time searching the house for a non-existent replacement battery for it which I thought I had.  Of course, I didn't have such a thing and had to get through the morning without a watch, then waste part of my lunch break finding someone who could sell me - at well over the odds - a new battery.  To make things worse, I also found, at lunchtime, that I'd lost my hat, (not the straw one you can see me waring during the summer in a lot of my films, but a cap I wear to keep the rain off).  Despite retracing my steps, I could find no trace of it, so had to buy a replacement.  There was no respite when I got home in the evening as I found that Microsoft Office had stopped working on my laptop.  No reason, I just kept getting a message saying it couldn't load any of the applications in the suite.  Which was a bit of a problem, as I was trying to complete a new story for The Sleaze and needed to use Word.  In the end, I was forced to download Office again and make a new installation.  Which took forever.  Which, in turn, meant that I couldn't complete and post the story until much later than I had anticipated, resulting in getting to bed later than planned, waking up tired and being in a foul mood this morning.  Truly, a shitty forty eight hours.