FROM GRIMMER TO GRIMMEST

The harsh winds of the recession have reached gale force round here which means blog time is soon to be mine once again.
"Grimmer" is about to become "Grimmest" as in a couple of weeks' time I will be starting from scratch and looking for work along with thousands of other unemployed journalists.
"Unemployed" is a slight misnomer in that as a freelance I have job-hopped for 21 years.
But this time it is serious.
After 16 months as a casual shifter at a leading paper in Yorkshire the management have decided that our services are no longer required. Why?
Despite the fact they got us cheap there is even cheaper to be had in the form of young trainees who will work (who can blame them?) for salaries many were earning 15 years ago.
Circulations are plummeting along with advertising and the internet has made massive inroads into newspaper readerships. Paywalls don't work. And neither do many of my colleagues in the NUJ.
Much publicity recently re Miriam O' Reilly who successfully won a case against the BBC for getting rid of her on grounds of age. As a fellow baby boomer, I sympathise.
My generation had a good time. We got free NHS orange juice, free university education, and we came in at the tail-end of the good times in journalism. And I had those too.
This means I face job-hunting in my fifties with at least a fair back-up of money which I saved for the bad times. Because I knew they were going to come.
Thatcher arrived when I was 21 and those of us who knew the horror of the Tory years never bought the end of boom and bust.
The 1980's have haunted most of my working career and now they are back it seems they have never been away.
I'm shortly off to meet a publisher. I have an idea for a book.It won't make me much money but maybe channel my thought in the coming months on other ways of earning a living.
Over the years I have learned resilience. And now I shall need it more than ever.
In recent weeks, many of my pieces have been on the plight of students at the sharp end of this Government's wholesale destruction of the things we all took for granted.
At the recent demonstration in Manchester, I felt like weepng for all the youngsters facing mountains and mountains of debt. It was as if Thatcher never went away.
So, though this maelstrom of misery, I plan to chart life as it is at the Coalition coalface. Solidarity to all in similar state.....