PDP

When I was a little dot I wanted to be a clown, blue faced for bad luck with wire in my plaits. I slack-roped between the turbines up on the moors and pulled extravagant strings of sausages from unexpected spots. Over time the clown turned inwards and I still live somewhere between Pierrot and Auguste, but I'll never forget the feel of greasepaint in my eyebrows or the happy calm of knowing what I wanted to be.

They say the secret to a happy career is getting paid to do what you love. I love staring and hiding food, drawing troupes of small dogs in the margins of my diary and pretending I live on an island somewhere with the Very Reverend William Buckland and four and a half of the Mitford girls. The world of work has always been hard for me. And yet I must earn enough money to keep me in the needfuls, at least to keep stocked up on Cheestrings and weed.

My skills are many and varied and I'm a personable sort, at least to your face. I can make any animal you like out of cloth, although they always turn out looking somehow like me. I can cross my ring finger over my middle one without moving the others. I have a wide repertoire of untoward recipes. I can write the odd sentence. I have my own dog suit. I am eminently employable.

I think I'd be ideally suited to a career as a familiar, or an Executive Imaginary Friend. I'd make an excellent protagonist - or antagonist - and would be a perfect fit for the position of muse. I could find success as a skeleton in a closet or a madwoman in an attic or some kind of half-forgotten god slumbering away at the bottom of the sea. I could be your nemesis and my rates are more than fair.

Which is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't go down well at the Job Centre.