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Holiday is when you spend a great deal of money to go to another country for several consecutive days/weeks which are spent constantly worrying about two conflicting nightmares:

1) That your office won't survive without you, and that you are going to return to a crumbled business empire where even your beloved coffee mug has been smashed beyond repair.

2) That your office will have survived without you, and that you are going to return to a booming business empire that, for some reason, you no longer seem to own nor fully understand.

Not read any reports on the net, but me, my boyfriend, and a couple of our mates have had Android phones (mostly the G1) for over 12 months now and they're still going strong. No idea what the "loads" of problems might be.

This, ten thousand times. I get twitchy enough after 24 hours.

After the "upgrade" to Vista, I'm in no hurry to "upgrade" again.

I don't detest Vista quite enough to scrub it from my machine and start over... but if I did, I'd go back to XP which was not perfect but was the devil I knew.

Well, there's a field full of sheep over there, and another field which is sometimes full of sheep over there, and then over there is a ruddy great big golf course.

It's marvellously peaceful. Usually.

went to mow a meadow...

Unfortunately the GIT, whoever he (or she) may be, is mowing it somewhere near my house and has been all afternoon. The drone of the mower is driving me MAD.

Bloody rural idylls.

OK. That's all I wanted. I feel better now.

Sorry Steve. It's a hot topic in the community at the moment. What with the election, everyone and their dog are wanting to "get tough" on benefits claims and there's been a lot more tabloid rabble-rousing (damned if I'll call it journalism) than usual.

One badly-researched DM article at a time, it's easy enough to Keep Calm and Carry On... but at the moment, the saturation is so intense and so widespread that many of us are feeling under attack and therefore more inclined to get defensive.

Seeing stuff like this, out in the wild, is worse than seeing news stories because it shows that Joe Public is actually believing the biased reporting.

I broadly agree with you on the "benefit system almighty mess" front but I can't imagine where to start disentangling it.

Do you have any evidence to back up that assertion? Other than the disproportionately-reported 0.3% and the occasional anecdote? Or is this based on a layman's at-a-glance medical assessment of those few disability benefit claimants who are able to get out of the house?


Guess what, I've got experience of that too - I AM one, and I'm friends with many others.

There are two things we have in common.

One is that we have all lost clients, been turned down for jobs, missed promotions and had interviews withdrawn because of our disabilities. Fatigue/stamina disorder? "We'd love to promote you, but you'd need to be able to work full-time." Wheelchair user? "The office you'd be working in is on the third floor and there's no lift." Epileptic? "We insist that all employees at grade C or above hold drivers' licenses in order to go to meetings." Illegal of course, but fighting a court case every time it happens would be a full-time job in itself - not to mention the risk of jeopardising future employment prospects.

The other is that we are only able to work because of the huge amount of unofficial practical support around us - making sure things like showering and eating and getting to the bank/shops/social events are covered, which allows us to have the time, energy, and stamina for work. If my partner or my friends vanished I would be back on benefit within a week.

There are very few things that make me more hacked off than when someone decides to use working disabled people like me as a stick to beat those who haven't been as fortunate in their circumstances as I have.

I'm absolutely in agreement with you when it comes to getting upset with people who cheat the system, and I'm sure you could present a hundred anecdotes about instances where you feel a "long term sicker" (yeah, thanks for calling me that) got something they shouldn't. But the cold, hard, inconvenient fact is that such abuse is incredibly low and, in financial terms, is outweighed by the benefits that go unclaimed.

Thanks Mark

Yep, got "differences" nailed. Some differences are more different than others.

I'm afraid the facts don't support your assertion that disability benefits are widely abused. The fact is that the abuse rate of disability benefits, when last officially measured (by taking a random sample of a couple of thousand claimants and doing the surveillance thing), came out at 0.3% fraudulent claims - lower than any other benefit (such as Jobseekers or Housing Benefit) and far lower than tax fraud.

It's just a really easy tabloid story when that 0.3% get taken to court and prosecuted. "This person said they couldn't walk but they ran a marathon," the story writes itself. For some reason I can't possibly imagine, the story of the other 99.7% of claimants who have exactly the difficulties they claim to have doesn't ever seem to get reported. Funny, that.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by Macmillan of their membership of cancer patients found that more than