FULL-TIME employment is something I have always distrusted. It requires you to get out of bed at a respectably early hour each morning and at the same time as everybody else, which in a 30-floor chicken coop, makes a mockery of the water pressure coming out of the hand-held telephone receiver in the bath tub's shower.
It demands that you return from the pub at a spoil-sportingly early hour of the afternoon and it invariably involves a desk which people keep checking on to see if you are behind it.
There are some advantages to a regular income for those who pay their bills on time, but salaried jobs provide no opportunity for claiming the full costs of Aunt Euphemia's hip-replacement operation against tax as a legitimate business expense. Self-employment admittedly requires a degree of civility towards clients. Full-time employment demands total obsequiousness towards superiors.
It is much better to be self-employed, or, if you are in Britain, not employed at all. In that country, GBP32 billion a year is spent on 'benefit' - the benefit of not working - including GBP5 billion on invalidity benefit, an amount so generous that perfectly fit people with barely a scratch on them can spend their days in leisure benefiting from it.
So could I, if I went back there. Ten years ago, I cut and scarred a lower leg on a sharp metal step rim on the stairs of a CMB bus. The withdrawal of some of that company's routes this week is obviously the Government's belated response to this.
Back in England, this would disqualify me as a male swim-wear model, the only job I am thoroughly trained for. I would be on 'invalidity' before you could say Chicago Hope. And you think I'm kidding, don't you? For the first time in 10 years, I departed from these sound principles in 1993 and took a salaried position with a publisher. It was a great opportunity to improve readers' minds and my liquidity. The gravity of my error dogs me still. Seven months after waking from the nightmare of a grown-ups' job where I had to do something every day, the employer and I are still related by marriage through a Labour Tribunal claim. It is he who took me there. Observers tell me that this turn of events is the equivalent of driving an eight-wheel articulated truck against the usual one-way traffic flow of employees dragging their employer to the tribunal - that's what the Employment Ordinance originally had in mind. But enough of these personal details, for the time being anyway.