I’d very recently started a new job. I was White Van Man: hurtling down the M4 at ninety towards my soon-to-be-evicted-from flat. My battle of wits with the Mayor of London’s army of sour-faced parking attendants (or bastards, as I prefer to call them) was over for another week. My friend Jon phoned to ask how I was, what was I up to, and now, considering my latest vocation, just how many jobs had I actually ever had? It was a question that occupied my mind long after I’d reached home; much of the remainder of the journey having been spent reminiscing about crippling celebrities, being pursued by Oasis-seeking paparazzi in a limousine with Noel Gallagher’s wife-to-be, upsetting the Russian Mob, and accidentally causing eleven thousand pounds worth of damage to a restaurant in Blackpool as a result of my ineptitude with an industrial belt sander. For almost the entirety of that return journey I had sat, grinning like an idiot, my foot pressed hard against the accelerator pedal as the engine screamed like a bag of lawyers in a vice. Arriving home, shortly after wading through the piles of unopened bills, threats and court summons I fired up my certifiably-insane laptop, waited impatiently as it whined, whirred and crunched into life (and then for no apparent reason rebooted itself), and set about listing each and every job, role or vocation that I had taken throughout my sometimes surreal, frequently chaotic, and all-in-all quite absurd career. Ninety-nine: the final tally, the mention of which to one friend met with uncontrolled hilarity and to my parents’ complete horror, shortly before they disowned me. Unable to ignore that ridiculous figure I continued to recall those rather odd incidents of leaping from a blazing BMW with a Walther (pistol) in my hand in a desperate, albeit significantly-flawed attempt to impress a girl whom three weeks previously had been entirely oblivious to my existence. My stalker, herself as dumb as a bag of hammers, a flying crocodile, a bizarre time-travelling incident and, of course, my attempted assassination at the hand of a tree-hugging hedgemonkey while getting pleasantly drunk with the comedian, Johnny Vegas. I thought too about each of the business ventures that I’d attempted as time after time I’d embarked upon World domination: my antipreneurial endeavours, if you will. I recalled how I had attempted to become an internet millionaire, a movie producer and a nightclub impresario, albeit not all at the same time. I had attempted product design too, attempted to sell fortune cookies and holographic lollipops. And I had attempted to make a living from buying and selling anything and everything from cars to coffeemakers to cranes, and from skis to betamax video players that didn’t even work. I was hopeless at it all, and so it was inevitable that early one morning I’d find myself the target of a rather reluctant hitman: paid for by someone hell-bent on making my life very unpleasant indeed. Still, I made him a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich and he didn’t want to hurt me after that. Anyway… It was a couple of days after the phone call from Jon, with my list of career failures increasing by the minute, wandering through Waterstones it struck me that I had something of a tale to tell. I had quite a few, actually. I decided on one final push. I decided become a writer. I decided to write, No stranger to the P45. Err… Sorry about that.