Thought I’d try a new career. One that would help me make a bit of money to see me through my forthcoming retirement in three years’ time. Got plenty of time to plan for it. I know what I want to do. That’s not a problem. It’s just about getting your foot in the door and not letting anybody crush it with the slamming in the face. Or the foot. That’s a particular area of vulnerability for me. Click the link, spend the dosh, and I’ll happily tell you all about it.

Anyway, I thought there would be incentives for people setting up new businesses. Especially here, in the welfare state. So I did a google search. Grants for writers. Grants for artists. Financial support for new enterprises. I could go on. Nothing. Nothing that would apply to me. Oh, there’s a few bob out there for those who qualify, but the rules are complex. Nobody knows how to qualify. Not even the ones with the money to award. So it all gets stockpiled. Good thing, or otherwise the country wouldn’t have enough left to invade places.

Meantime, I’m trying to think out a way so I can get started, and have a fighting chance of getting by without starving. But that’s where my imagination stops. Writer’s block. Doesn’t stop me writing. Writer’s block for me is the dam that stops it getting to the millions who really want it.

What? I hear you say. That rubbish?

Well, it may be rubbish, but it could be the highest-quality rubbish you’ve ever read. If you’ve even bothered to go that far. So don’t tell me about rubbish. I’m the master. I’ve been refining it for forty years.

Well, no good whingeing, I thought, so I dashed off a letter to the Prime Minister, and the Chancellor, and the Queen, with copies to Angela Merkel and Nicola Sturgeon because they seem to have quite a bit of influence these days. I got nothing at all from the first three, other than a quick note from Prince Charles’ office to say that my enquiry had been referred to him as the Queen was trying to cut down on her obligations. It further went on to apologise for the fact that he currently has no executive function and that I was number 400,000 in the pile for his attention when he does. As far as Angela Merkel was concerned, I was neither a German national nor a true European, as we Brits have been redefined under our own Prime Minister’s constantly mobile terminology, and that sadly, no, my germanophilia and fluency in her language count for nothing in financial terms. Nicola Sturgeon was even less forthcoming, denouncing me as an ex-pat living south of the border, who had contributed so little to the country of my birth that any further entreaties on my part would be futile. She didn’t put a stamp on it so I had to pay postage due. But in a way she was right from a certain skewed viewpoint. Valuable voters might see me as a freeloading invader rather than a returning hero now that the borders are being defended.

So, nothing left but to play my trump card. I didn’t want to do it, but I’ve been pushed. It rankles, it really does, to have to present myself with all my vulnerabilities on show in order to get a square deal, but I did it anyway. I wrote to the Minister for Equalities and laid out my grounds for a claim. Enclosing a form I had downloaded from the internet, I ignored all the gender and race and sexual orientation stuff and went straight for the jugular. I clicked in the box marked ‘Other’. I thought that would be a strong statement of intent. And then I typed ‘Writer’. A little further down was a box asking for the restrictions imposed by this particular condition. I thought a while, and carefully typed ‘Earning Disabilities’.

To be fair, I did have a response by email within twenty-four weeks, but the implication of its content was that perhaps ‘writer’ was a wrong choice of direction for someone with ‘Learning Disabilities’ and perhaps I ought to reconsider? Well, I gave up at that point, as you can imagine. And the great thing about being a writer, which I would tell them if I had the energy, is they can never stop us writing, even if we cease feeding…..