All Reasonable Action

by Blackian Ludic Abolition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The State will keep a man alive while he has no job, on one condition: that he treat having no job as a job. Glen Thrower learned this on the second Tuesday of September, in a carpeted room on the first floor of the Jobcentre in Great Yarmouth, from a young woman with a lanyard and a cardigan and a screen she kept turning towards him so he could see that she was not hiding anything.

"Thirty-five hours," said Bethany Gotts. "That's the standard expectation. It goes in your Claimant Commitment, and you agree to it, and then we both know where we stand."

"Thirty-five hours of what?"

"Looking for work."

Glen had driven a reach truck at Breydon Cold Store for twenty-six years, eight hours a night at minus twenty-five, lifting pallets of frozen peas and frozen chips and, for one long winter, frozen turkey crowns for a supermarket that went bust before it could collect them. In March the company announced that the store was being "consolidated" into a site outside Peterborough. Consolidation is when a thing is made more solid by removing everyone who worked in it. He had been to the leaving do, which was held in the canteen. There was a cake in the shape of a forklift, and nobody wanted to cut it, so they took it home in pieces in their lunch boxes, and that was the last thing he ever carried out of the place.

He was fifty-seven. He had redundancy money for six months, and the six months were up.

"Thirty-five hours," he said, "is near enough what I did at the store."

"Exactly," said Bethany, pleased that he had understood. "It's a full-time job. Finding a job."

"Does it pay?"

She took this as a joke, which it partly was, and explained the standard allowance, and the deductions for the advance he had needed to get to the first payment, and the housing element, which would go on the rent of his flat off Northgate Street but not all the way. Then she explained the journal. Universal Credit lives online, and every claimant has a journal there, a running record kept in a box on a website, in which the claimant writes down what he has done to find work and the work coach reads it. "Just put it all in," she said. "Every application, every phone call. Even if it seems small. If it isn't in the journal, as far as the system knows, it didn't happen."

There was a document to accept. It said that he would take all reasonable action to obtain paid work, that he would be available to start immediately, and that if he failed without good reason to do these things his payment might be reduced. Glen read it twice, which Bethany noticed, because nobody did. She told him that a sanction for failing to take all reasonable work search action was what they called medium level, twenty-eight days the first time, and that she had never had to give one and did not intend to start with him. She said this kindly. She was the sort of person who was kind to strangers out of habit, as other people are punctual, and it had not yet occurred to her that it was the kindest people they put on the front desk.

---

For the first week Glen did what anyone would do. He looked for work where the work was supposed to be.

He made an account on the government's job site and on three others. He applied for a warehouse operative post at a distribution centre on the Beacon Park estate, a reach truck driver at a builder's merchant in Lowestoft, a night picker at a supermarket depot near Norwich that was an hour and twenty minutes away on two buses that did not run at night. He applied for a job as a "Logistics Hero," whose duties turned out to be driving a van for a firm that called its drivers heroes and paid them by the parcel. He filled out a personality questionnaire for a call centre and was told by return of email that he was "not quite the right fit," a verdict delivered by a machine in nine seconds, which was quicker than any foreman had ever sacked anybody.

He wrote it all down.

Mon. 09:00–12:30. Job sites. 4 applications. 13:30–16:00. Rewrote CV per library session. 16:00–17:00. Phoned Breydon about reference. Phone not answered (closed).

By the Wednesday he had applied for everything within a bus ride that a man with a reach truck licence, a bad knee and no driving licence for anything bigger than a car could do. By the Thursday he had applied for several things he could not. On the Friday afternoon he sat at his kitchen table with the laptop open and counted. He had done twenty-two hours. There were thirteen to go, and there was nothing left on the internet to look at except the same jobs again, in a different order, on different sites, posted by agencies who were all advertising the same night picker at the same depot, so that the depot appeared to be hiring forty people and was in fact hiring one, through forty agents, each taking a cut. This is what an economist means by a liquid labour market. Glen had worked in cold storage long enough to know that when a thing goes liquid it is spoiling.

He typed: Fri. 14:00–17:00. Re-searched all sites. No new vacancies.

Then he sat and looked at the sentence, and at the clock on the cooker, and at the hours.

---

At his first review Bethany read the journal on her screen while he watched her read it.

"This is really good," she said. "Honestly. Most people put 'looked online' and that's it." She scrolled. "You're a bit short, though."

"There isn't anything else."

"There's always something else." She had done a training module on this. "Not every job is advertised. A lot of employers never post at all. So what we encourage is speculative approaches. You go out. You walk round. You talk to people and ask if anyone's taking anyone on. That counts. That's actually the best kind." She smiled. "You'd be surprised what you find when you're out looking."

Glen said he expected he would be.

On Monday he put on his coat and went out looking.

He walked south from Northgate Street, through the town and over the Haven Bridge and down the far side of the river, past the ends of the old quays, where the herring drifters used to land in their hundreds when Yarmouth fed half of Europe on salt fish, and the curing houses ran all night on girls who came down from Scotland for the season and gutted fifty fish a minute. All of that was gone. There was a wind farm service base now, a car park, the hulks of a couple of supply boats, a man in hi-vis leaning on a bollard with a phone. Glen asked him if they were taking anyone on. The man said you needed tickets for offshore, survival, first aid, working at height, and that the tickets cost about two thousand pounds and the course was in Hull. Glen thanked him and wrote it down in a small notebook he had bought at the newsagent, and walked on to Gorleston, to the harbour mouth, where the river goes out between the piers into the sea.

It was a bright, cold morning with a north-east wind. On the wall of the harbour, sitting on buckets and folding stools at intervals of ten or fifteen yards, there were seven men and one woman fishing.

He stood behind the first of them for a while, the way you stand behind a man playing dominoes, and then asked whether there was any work going.

The man was about eighty. He had a flat cap, a face like a walnut and a rod propped on a stand made from a length of copper pipe bent into a fork. He looked at Glen for a long time.

"Work," he said.

"Anything."

"No," said the man, whose name was Mervyn Brundle, and who had been a fitter in the shipyard at Lowestoft until it closed and had not, as he put it, troubled the Revenue since 1993. "But you can hold this while I have a pee."

Glen held the rod. It was a beachcaster, twelve or thirteen feet, and the line ran out at a shallow angle into the green water, and he could feel the tide pulling at the lead on the bottom, a long steady pull with a tremor in it like a dog on a lead. While Mervyn was gone the tip nodded twice, sharply. Glen did nothing, because he did not know what to do. When Mervyn came back he took the rod, wound in, and lifted out of the water a silver fish as long as a man's hand, with a dark spot at the root of each fin.

"Whiting," he said. "They've come in early. You want it?"

Glen went down the wall and asked everyone else whether there was any work. A Lithuanian named Darius, who worked nights at the fish processor on the industrial estate and fished in the day because he liked to see the fish before they were frozen, said they were always taking on at the processor, through an agency, on zero hours, and that he would not wish it on a dog. A woman of about forty in a fleece said she was on the sick and not supposed to be there, and if he was from the Social he could go and do one. Glen said he wasn't from the Social, he was on it, and she gave him a bit of squid for bait.

He went home at half past two with four whiting in a carrier bag and wrote in the journal:

Mon. 08:30–14:30. Speculative approaches, river and harbour, Great Yarmouth and Gorleston. Spoke to 9 people about vacancies. Offshore (needs tickets, approx. £2000, Hull). Fish processor (agency, zero hours). No other opportunities.

All of it was true. He had spoken to nine people about vacancies. He had also eaten two of the whiting, fried in a little flour, with bread and butter, and put the other two in the freezer, and none of that was in the journal, because the journal was for looking for work and he was not a man to put things where they did not belong.

---

He went back on Tuesday, and on Wednesday. On Thursday Mervyn brought him an old rod of his own, a solid glass thing with a cork handle that had gone black, and a reel with a ratchet that clicked like a cricket. "Don't thank me," said Mervyn. "I've been trying to get rid of it since the nineties."

Glen learned things. He learned them the way he had learned the reach truck, by having them done wrong in front of him and then doing them wrong himself, a little less each time. He learned that you did not cast far at the harbour mouth, because the fish ran along the walls, and twenty or thirty feet out was plenty, and a bit uptide. He learned that you needed five ounces of lead on a small tide and six or eight on a big one, or the water would roll your bait round into the wall and you would spend the afternoon tying knots. He learned that ragworm was dear and lugworm was better, and that you could dig your own on the flats at Breydon at low water, which cost nothing but your back. He learned that whiting bite at dusk and on the flood, and that a nod is not a bite, and a bite is not a fish, and a fish is not supper until it is on the wall.

He learned that nobody on the wall asked anybody what they did.

Darius told him where the sea buckthorn grew in the dunes north of Caister, a thicket of grey thorns hung with berries the colour of a hi-vis vest, and how to cut whole sprigs and freeze them and knock the berries off frozen, because if you tried to pick them fresh they burst in your fingers and the juice was so sour it made your teeth ache. Glen tried it. The juice was so sour it made his teeth ache. He mixed it with honey and hot water and drank it in the evenings, and the cold he usually had from October to March did not come. The woman in the fleece, whose name was Shona, told him that the blackberries on the old railway line at Southtown were still good, because they were sheltered, but that he was to get them in before the tenth, Old Michaelmas, when the Devil spat on them. He asked if she believed that. She said no, but they went bad about then anyway, so the Devil was a fair guide.

He picked up driftwood on the beach at the turn of the tide. His flat had a gas fire that cost more to run than it was worth, and a back yard with a brick barbecue a previous tenant had built and nobody had used. He started cooking the fish on it, and then the vegetables, and then, on one cold night, simply sitting by it with the gas fire off and his coat on, watching the embers do what embers do. Mrs Kerrison in the downstairs flat, who was eighty-four and had not been out of the house since her hip, said the smoke smelled like her father's allotment. He gave her whiting. She gave him a jar of her own beetroot. The next week he gave her more whiting and she gave him a scarf she had knitted in 1987 for a man who had not deserved it. The more they gave each other, the more they both seemed to have. Nobody had told either of them this was an economy, so it worked.

He kept count, because he was a man who had spent twenty-six years being counted. The food came to about two hours a day, three on a bad tide: digging bait, fishing, gutting, the berries, the wood. Marshall Sahlins, working from Richard Lee's figures for the Dobe foragers of the Kalahari, worked it out at about fifteen hours a week for a whole people to feed itself, which is two hours and a bit a day, and was promptly told by several generations of his colleagues that he had left out the cooking. Glen had not read Sahlins. He had arrived at the same figure by a different road, the coast road, and he did the cooking too.

The rest of the time he looked.

That was the thing. He did look. He sat on Mervyn's spare stool at the harbour mouth with his rod on the copper fork and he looked at the sea, which is a thing a man can do for a very long time, longer than he can look at a screen, because the sea is never the same twice and the screen always is. He watched the supply boats go out to the wind farm, and the pilot boat, and the grey seals that put their heads up in the harbour mouth to see if anybody was throwing back. He watched the light come over the water at eight and leave it at six, and then at half past five, and then at five. And whenever a stranger came along the wall, a man walking a dog, a couple of boys on bikes, a council worker emptying the bins, he got up and asked whether they knew of any work going, because that was what he had agreed to do, and he was a man who did what he had agreed.

His journal grew long and exact.

Tues. 07:00–15:00. Speculative approaches, Gorleston harbour mouth and South Pier. Spoke to 11 people about vacancies, incl. council refuse operative (agency only, see website), dog walker (self-employed, "no"), 2 boys (asked if I was hiring). Looked for work: harbour, pier, beach to Gorleston cliffs. No opportunities.

Wed. 06:30–14:30. Speculative approaches, Breydon flats at low water, then harbour. Spoke to 7 people about vacancies. One man offered cash work clearing a garden in Bradwell; declined as not declarable. Looked for work.

Thur. 07:00–15:30. Speculative approaches. Spoke to 14 people. Looked for work. Wind NE 5, grey seals x3 in harbour mouth. No opportunities.

He added the seals because they had been there, and he had looked at them, and it seemed dishonest to leave them out.

---

Bethany read the journal every week. She read about four hundred of them. Most were a line. Applied for jobs. Looked online. Job search. One man had written as above every Friday since February. A woman with two children and a husband in Norwich prison wrote at length about why she could not do the hours, and Bethany read every word of it twice and could do nothing about any of it. Glen's she read last, on Friday afternoons, after the review targets were in, as a reward. She did not tell anyone this, and she was not sure herself why she did it, except that it was the only document in the building that had weather in it.

At their review in the first week of October she said, "You're out a lot."

"You told me to go out."

"I know. No, I know. It's good." She scrolled. "What's 'looked for work'?"

"What it says."

"Where?"

"Wherever I am."

She looked at him. He looked back at her with the patience of a man who has spent a month looking at the sea and found that it made other things easier to look at too.

"It's just," she said, "if somebody else read this. Not me. If somebody looked at this and saw the same place every day."

"It's not the same place every day. Tide's different."

"Glen."

"Do you want me to put less?"

"No. God, no. I want you to put everything." She hesitated. "Are you fishing?"

"There's men fishing there. I talk to them about vacancies."

"Are you fishing?"

Glen considered the question with care. He had sat in front of the personnel department at Breydon three times in twenty-six years, once for a forklift that went into a racking end, once for a fight that was not his, and once for clocking in a man who was in the toilet. He had learned that in such rooms a question is never what it is, and an answer should not be either.

"I'm holding a rod while I look," he said. "Some days a fish gets on it."

She wrote nothing down. She looked at the screen for a while, and then she said, "Okay," and moved on to his housing costs.

---

The trouble, when it came, came from the other direction, as it usually does.

Every month the Jobcentre's team leaders were sent a dashboard. It showed, for each work coach and for each claimant, the number of work search activities recorded, the hours declared against the commitment, the number of applications, interviews and "employer contacts," and a coloured dot beside each name: green, amber or red. Simon Tooley, who managed Bethany's team, was forty-one and had come to the Department from a bank, where he had managed people who managed money, and before that a building society, where he had managed people who managed mortgages, and he believed in dashboards the way other men believe in the saints, as intercessors with a higher power whose face it is not given us to see. He called Bethany into the glass room on a Wednesday afternoon with the dashboard open on his laptop.

"Thrower," he said.

Bethany felt her stomach fall about a floor. "He's doing everything he's supposed to."

"I know. Look at him."

She looked. Glen's dot was green. It was the greenest dot in the office. In the column marked EMPLOYER CONTACTS (SPECULATIVE), where most claimants in Great Yarmouth recorded somewhere between zero and three a week, and the best of them eight, Glen Thrower had recorded forty-one, forty-four and fifty-two. His hours had not been short of thirty-five since the first week, and in the last fortnight they had been forty and forty-two, because the whiting were in thick on the evening flood.

"I've never seen numbers like this," said Simon. "Not here. Not anywhere. What's he doing?"

Bethany opened her mouth to say that he was fishing, and found that she could not, because it was not what was written, and she had been told many times in training that she was to go by what was written. "Speculative approaches," she said. "At the harbour, mostly. And on the beach. He asks everyone he sees."

"Fifty-two people in a week."

"He's very thorough."

Simon leaned back in his chair. There are two things a manager can do with an outlier, and both begin with noticing it. He can investigate it, or he can replicate it. The first is cheaper, but the second gets you into the regional newsletter.

"Here's what I'm thinking," he said. "We've got a peer-support pilot. Claimants sharing what works with other claimants, so it's not just us telling them. Regional want a case study by the end of the quarter. What if Mr Thrower ran a session? Took a small group out. Showed them his method."

Bethany said, slowly, "His method."

"Speculative approach in the field. Getting out, getting talking, getting seen. It's exactly the culture we want." Simon was already typing. "You'd go with them, obviously. Duty of care. Eight, ten people. Pick the ones on the amber list, the ones who've plateaued. Let's do it next week. Tuesday."

"It'll be early," said Bethany. "He goes early."

"Even better," said Simon. "Early's a mindset."

---

She told Glen at the next review, with her eyes on the screen. He listened without saying anything. When she had finished he asked whether the session was voluntary.

"For you, yes. You'd be helping."

"For the others?"

Bethany swallowed. "If I put it in their commitment as a work search activity, they have to go."

Glen nodded slowly, the way Mervyn nodded at a fish that had come off the hook, in respect for an outcome that could not now be changed.

"They'll want coats," he said. "And they'll want to be there for half six. The tide's at nine."

---

They met at the bus stop at the end of the High Street in Gorleston on Tuesday, the thirteenth of October, at quarter past six in the morning, in the dark. There were nine of them, plus Bethany and Glen. There was Kieran, who was nineteen and had been on the amber list since he left college and had not been out of bed before ten since he was fifteen. There was Mrs Duffield, who had been a care worker for twenty years until her back went, and who arrived in a long padded coat and a hat with ear flaps, carrying a flask. There was a man called Trevor who said at once that he did not see what this had to do with anything and that he was only there because he had been told. There was a girl called Lacey with a baby in a sling, because she had nobody to leave him with, and Bethany, who knew the rules, said nothing. There were two brothers from Bradwell, a tall quiet man who had been a chef, Neville, who had been a postman for thirty years and still walked faster than anyone, and a woman called Pam who had been a dinner lady and was the first to laugh.

Glen walked them down to the harbour mouth as the sky was going from black to iron. Mervyn was already there with his copper fork. Darius was there. Shona was there, and pretended not to see Bethany's lanyard, which Bethany took off and put in her pocket.

Glen had borrowed rods. He had borrowed them from the wall, a rod from every man and woman who had a spare one, and two from a man in Southtown he had met on the beach, and one from the tackle shop, whose owner had asked what it was for and, on being told, had laughed so long he had to sit down and then given him a bag of lead as well. He had dug lug at Breydon the evening before, two hours on the flats in the dusk with his trousers rolled, and it lay in a bucket of wet newspaper at his feet.

He did not make a speech. He showed them. He showed Kieran how to bait a hook with lug without putting the hook through his thumb, and then, when Kieran put the hook through his thumb, how to get it out. He showed Trevor how to cast short and a little uptide, and Trevor said he didn't see the point of it, and cast, and stood there with the rod in his hands and the line running out into the green water, and did not say anything more for some time. He showed Mrs Duffield how to set the rod on the fork and sit, and she sat, and poured tea from her flask, and offered it round. He showed Lacey where to stand out of the wind, in the lee of the lifeboat shed, and Mervyn, who was not a man for babies, came over and held the baby so she could cast, and was seen to sway.

At half past seven the first of them, one of the Bradwell brothers, hooked a whiting and screamed like a man on a fairground ride.

Bethany stood at the back with the attendance sheet on a clipboard. She had brought it because she was required to bring it. Under SESSION TYPE she had written Peer-led speculative work search (field). Under ATTENDANCE she had written 9/9. Under OUTCOMES there was a box, and the box was empty, and she stood looking at it with the pen in her hand while the light came up over the sea.

At eight o'clock Glen went along the wall and spoke quietly to each of them. He told each one that if anybody came past, a dog walker, a council man, a boy on a bike, they were to get up and ask whether there was any work going. "That's the job," he said. "You do the job. You ask. You write down that you asked." Then he went back to his stool.

A man came along the pier with a spaniel at about twenty past. Nine people stood up at once and asked him whether there was any work going. The man looked at them, and at the spaniel, and said he was retired, actually, and went on rather faster than he had been going. Pam laughed until she had to hold the rail. Then they all sat back down.

Glen came and stood by Bethany. He did not look at the clipboard. He held out a rod, the old glass one with the black cork, Mervyn's, with the ratchet that clicked like a cricket.

"I'm working," she said.

"So am I," said Glen.

She looked at him. Then she put the clipboard down on the wall, under a stone, and took the rod.

He showed her how to hold it, the reel under the hand, the line on the finger. She cast too far, and he made her wind in and cast again. The lead went into the water twenty-five feet out, a little uptide, and the line slanted down into the green and pulled. She stood with the rod and felt it: the long pull of the flood coming in, the tremor of it, like something alive on a lead. Behind her the wind lifted the corner of the attendance sheet and set it down again under the stone.

The tide was making. Along the wall, one after another, the rod tips began to nod, Mervyn's and Darius's and Shona's, Trevor's and Kieran's and Mrs Duffield's, Lacey's in the lee of the shed, a dozen rods and then one more, all of them bowing at once towards the harbour mouth, as if somebody out there in the water had asked them a question and the whole wall was answering yes.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Blackiānō Lūdicae Abolitiōnis Simulācrō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Blackian Ludic Abolition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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