Happy Friday! It’s been a quiet week around here for reasons of illness (and I promise after tomorrow’s goal update, I’ll stop mentioning it!).

1) More from the frontlines of unemployment. I think it’s really easy when you’re employed to forget how difficult it is to look for work.

So I’m made to feel like scum by the Job Centre: like a fraud, like a lazy piece of shit because someone with my qualifications and experience is still unemployed after three months. Well, it’s not for the want of trying, DWP! I’m also told that if I haven’t found a job in the next three months, they’ll stop my small benefit completely, because my husband (on a short term contract) earns “too much”. (NB: anything over £17,000 is deemed “too much” for a couple to live on by the DWP.)

2) It’s not often I link to anything from the Telegraph. This is about Dresden. Just don’t read the comments.

But I do think that Dresden doesn’t have a place in our minds in the way that the London Blitz does, or Stalingrad, or for that matter Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It, like the devastation of Hamburg in 1943 and the USAAF firebombing of Tokyo in Operation Doolittle, isn’t as widely known: understandably, since the winning side is unlikely to dwell on its own murky deeds. So, listen to that Victor Gregg interview, read Slaughterhouse-Five and the Command Posts piece, and the eyewitness records on the Wikipedia page, and be aware of it all, if you’re not already. Some things deserve to be remembered, whether we think they were justified or not.

3) On living standards. 

Really big questions are now being posed, questions which connect disparate elements of the state we’re in – the inequality and the slump. In Wednesday’s FT, for example, Martin Wolf asked why the government will create funds to bail out irresponsible private lending, but not to bolster a stricken public infrastructure. It is an excellent question, but instead of being left to the newspaper of the City, it should be thrashed out in the house charged with representing the nation as a whole.

4) This fabulous article on Connie Britton. I can see why people want to be her when they grow up.

“In my experience of watching Connie Britton’s dating life, it has not been Connie getting beaten out by 25-year-old girls, let’s leave it at that,” says the producer Sarah Aubrey, a friend. If Britton bristles at characterizations of a 40-year-old woman as losing her appeal, it’s because she thinks those assumptions are off-base. “Because frankly I’ve had a different experience, as a single woman,” she said. “Younger men and all that.” It’s not that she has a particular pattern of dating younger men, she clarified. “Let’s put it this way: The older you get, the easier it is to date younger men.” She laughed. “There are more of them.”