“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” So said someone far cleverer than I. It was probably Oscar Wilde, it usually is. I’ll get my people to call his people and check.

One of the great things about working life as you get older is the phenomenon of having “people.” As a journalist, bon viveur and freelance cultural commentator many intriguing proposals make their way across my desk every week. Because of this, I have a highly trained team of cleavegy girls dressed in white medical coats, lap dancer heels and outrageous fur muffs (the house look I enforce among my staff I like to call “Russ Meyer Dental Hygienist”) whose sole responsibility it is to vet all requests for media appearances and to deliver the few that are interesting enough (or outrageously well paid) to me on a silver platter as I recline on a chaise longue smoking hand rolled cheroots through an ebony cigarette holder. Most offers are laughable (will you ghost write the autobiography of medium springs to mind, as does a recent offer to become leader of a political party – apparently the last alcoholic has had enough) but some, if the price is right and the subject stimulating are enough to make me raise myself up on one elbow and, through a haze of opium smoke, start to dictate a few pearls of wisdom to one of the girls as she sits there chewing on the end of an antique sliver self-propelling pencil.

I wish.

In fact, of course, I’m alone at the kitchen table in my pants, the backdoor’s open, it’s a sunny morning and I have in front of me the tools of my trade: one laptop, one pot of coffee, several packets of fags, a cup of some herbal tea shit called ‘Revitalize’, a can of Red Bull, a radio, four ashtrays and a deadline. Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘That sounds pretty cushty,’ and it is. I can’t complain. It’s 11.30 and I’ve only just started. But, and herein lies the rub, there ain’t no busty secretaries in sight, if the phone rings I answer it and when the photocopying needs doing, yup, you guessed it, my people do it and my people consist wholly of me, myself and I.

What I am getting at (in my slightly spoilt, hands as soft as baby’s buttocks fashion), is this. In a lifetime of working every job from sandwich board carrier to novelist I have come upon two eternal truths which can be applied whether you are stacking shelves or counting bullion:

1) All work is shit.
It doesn’t matter how well paid your job is, where it takes you in the world, or what time you start: getting out of bed and getting on with it will sometimes feel as easy as passing unlubricated concrete breeze blocks from your lips to your arsehole. One of the best jobs I ever had was as Stage Door Keeper of the Royal Shakespeare Company at London’s Barbican Centre. It was a piece of piss.  All I had to do was get in at four in the afternoon and sit behind a desk until midnight, occasionally handing out the odd dressing room key. When the actors were on stage there was nothing to do. And, of course, this being the RSC, the actors were doing Shakespeare so they were on stage for weeks. It paid alright (about a hundred quid a week, which seemed OK when you’re living on speed and beer and it’s the eighties) and best of all it left hours every day free for a struggling young hack to bash out pieces for obscure American magazines. All I had to do was get to work on time. Could I do that? At four in the afternoon? Could I fuck. Got the sack. Natch.

Nowadays, I am in the vastly absurd situation of having a job that often takes me to places I’d give what’s left of my teeth for a free trip to – and sometimes I’ve even been known to pull down a little more that a hundred quid a week. But is it work? Damn straight. OK, the travelling’s great, but someone’s gotta write this shit and despite investing a fortune of my personal money in a team of monkeys in peaked caps with green waistcoats, silver arm bands and old fashioned typewriters, I’ve not yet found a way of getting round the fact that after the plane trip’s over, the work only gets done if some schmuck sits here, in front of the computer. And that schmucks me.

Which brings me to the other not very big conclusion I have come to in my twenty years of working life:

2) All work may be shit, but some jobs are a lot less shit than others.
I have worked as a post office sorting office worker, a van driver, an orthopaedic chair repairman, a care assistant, a farm labourer, a market trader, a shop assistant, a sandwich board carrier, a maintenance man, a cleaner, a Lone Ranger stand in and as the bloke who writes the letters and picture captions for porn mags.

And believe me, sitting in the kitchen smoking fags and drinking tea beats all of those into a bloody pulp.

A few years ago, another day another job, I was climbing onto a plane with Irvin Welsh (CLANG! massive name drop). We were shitfaced. It was noon. Welsh turned to me at the top of the stairs, and announced, all spit and shout:

“You know what’s the best thing about being a writer?” he swung his arms round to encompass the waiting stewards, the ground crew doing their stuff, the businessmen on their way to meetings, all like us, ‘working’.

“It’s all fucking research!”

And I thought, thank God, at last here’s a job designed for the drinking classes. And that day I vowed to quit my job at a magazine and spend more time at the kitchen table, dreaming about having ‘people’.