Advice for the people of Wales

I really must calm down, perhaps, with a little housework around Fruitcake Miniature College. I must not think about Iain Duncan Smith. He's the Work and Pensions Secretary, and he's told the people of Merthyr Tydfil to get on a bus and look for work in Cardiff. I won't be alone in hearing overtones of Norman Tebbitt back in the Thatcher era telling the unemployed to get on their bike. I mustn't think of Norman Tebbitt either, but weirdly, Tebbitt and IDS have both been MPs for Chingford.

Hoovering, on the other hand, is very productive. If you go up the stairs of Fruitcake Miniature College you can collect an interesting layer of blue felt in the bit you have to empty eventually. Mixed in with the felt is hair and fur (which is not mysterious) and of course dust (which is). Where does it come from? How many millions of light years ago were the atoms of all this dust created, and in what region of the universe? Surely this is so much more interesting than a complacent privileged bore suggesting to people that they don't know their own bus timetables. The thing is, he says, the jobs don't come to you. No, mate, we know. And, increasingly, the job you were doing wherever you may be disappears altogether. Not only that, people will then have to move to places where there are no jobs because the cap on housing benefit will mean you can't afford to live in an area where there are jobs. However, keep hoovering. I believe there's a Hoover factory in Merthyr Tydfil, and they'll be needing all the support I can muster.

I wouldn't  imagine that people in the Welsh Valleys really appreciate a Conservative former guardsman with a double-barrelled surname giving advice on job-seeking. However, if you are Welsh and on the way to Cardiff, can I reassure you that IDS is actually Scottish, though I know he doesn't sound it? As for him being a Conservative, it may be some consolation to remember that while leader of that party they passed a vote of no confidence in him. Mind you, I don't suppose he left by bus.

You may also like to bear in mind that Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems, thinks it's a bit thick, possibly disgraceful, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies to say the cuts that are coming are unfair and will hit the poorest hardest. So, while you're sitting on the bus to Cardiff take care not to alarm the other passengers by saying you think there may not be enough jobs when you all get there. Maybe chat about sport - about what sort of plonker Wayne Rooney is, for instance, or your hopes for British medals in the 2012 Olympics. Babble on about astrophysics or housework, or any damn thing, except the grim prospects that at least some of us out of work will be facing. My God, these stairs are clean!