Guilt ridden.

Slating people who've sought my advice really doesn't sit well with my conscience and I have to confess to feeling terribly guilty for the past few days (since my last post), and deservedly so.  I could of course go back and delete the offensive blurb but part of my commitment to writing is that nothing can be amended after 24 hours of publishing ....this being the only way to maintain a true reflection of the real me.  So, I am just going to have to accept that I'm not half as nice a person as I like to believe.  Although I was pre-menstrual at the time which surely has to bring me down a few notches on the bitchometer.  The fact that I am always pre, post or presently menstrual and blaming my moods on it, I feel, is irrelevant.

A further source of guilt and remorse is that my diet is dying.  In fact who am I trying to kid....it's dead, cremated and just waiting for an official ash spreading ceremony.    I have regained four pounds and feel like a whale of bloatedness and cellulite.  Admittedly I appreciate that four pounds in itself can't much alter the way I look, but in my minds eye I have digressed from sylph to slob;  Cheryl Cole to Chubby Brown and all on account of a few pot noodles.  Hardly seems fair.  But then life is not fair, and if the biggest injustice I'm feeling is the resulting weight gain from eating several (hundred) treats, my life is hardly troubled. 

However it isn't the biggest injustice I'm feeling......no indeed,  there is something bigger and even more worthy of a paragraph of whining.  Today, to add insult to injury, the Department for Work and Pensions called to ask if they could visit me at home next week to give me a Caution.  How big do they think my living room is?   Wow!  Not only do I have to repay the overpaid benefit (see previous posts for more info on that little chestnut)  but because I should have known the rules and realised that I earned £9.80 a week over the  limit (after allowable expenditure of  tax, national insurance and childcare at a rate of up to 50% of the remainder of the balance of your weekly wage, so complex that even the chappy I spoke to admitted  he himself didn't know the rules)  they have a right to prosecute me.

Fortunately (or so I was told) they understand that the error was genuine and therefore only wish to give me a formal warning.  Not as much as the something I'd like to give them.   I am now debating whether I shall refuse to sign their document in protest against this further recrimination, as I would quite happily tell my story in Court just for a chance to expose 'the system'.  My reticence is that it could all backfire and leave me with a whopping great fine to pay as well.  My nature is telling me to oppose it, but my bank balance is screaming something else; something along the lines of "this is hardly up there with the likes of the Kennedy Assasination and Roswell....in other words no-one actually gives a crap" . 

What would you do?  Comments on a postcard please.  Be aware though that should the majority of you recommend a contest which results in my incarceration, I will be relying upon my readers to start a "Free the Shropshire One" campaign.

Don't count on me to take part in a hunger strike though.