I WAS cycling to the university the other day for more squash ignominy (don’t ask, the details are too painful) when I passed among a plague of human pizzas.

There were seven pizza boxes on legs within less than a mile. Standing around in the cold dressed as a pizza seems like demeaning work, but perhaps that’s how the unemployment figures are massaged. Two of these pepperoni people even stranded themselves on a roundabout, which didn’t seem wise.

But they did give me an idea: perhaps I could dress as a book and walk around advertising my services: words for sale, no job too small; journalism, copy-writing and novel-writing undertaken (no poetry, please: not sure I can manage that).

With that thought in mind, here are a few Saturday morning words that could fill the pages of my ambulatory book…

According to reports this morning, George Osborne is going to use his budget next week to cut benefits payments to the disabled to pave the way for tax breaks. He wants to cut benefits because he has an £18 billion black hole to fill.

These holes in the economy appear overnight like holes in the road. Then Osborne or whoever has hold of the nation’s wallet spends a bit filling a crater or two, usually by stealing the tar intended for a hole somewhere else (you know, somewhere less important, like the North).

But let’s hold the original thought for a moment. The Conservatives want to cut disability welfare payments by up to £140 a week – and then give the middle-classes a tax break. This raises an important question: who votes for these people?

Another pages turns. On this one we find Justin Welby saying it would be “absolutely outrageous” to claim that everyone who fears the migration crisis is a racist. Now the Archbishop of Canterbury was making a nuanced point, but his words were snatched up in self-righteous glee by the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, while politicians such as the lovely Iain Duncan Smith (‘hero’ of yesterday’s blog) joined in the told-you-so chorus.

Because we have a confrontational culture about such matters, those opposed to the EU and fearful of migration – occasionally to the point of mouth-frothing – took this as sainted justification for their views. What the archbishop said wasn’t shocking or unreasonable, but his words were then bounced around in the pressure cooker of intolerance. Did he really intend to give succour to those who found such nasty relish in what he’d said? That seems unlikely, but perhaps he should have spoken with greater care.

On to a fresh page. The Independent today bears the headline “The betrayal of the North” above a report saying that more northern museums and galleries face closure as the austerity cuts take hold, while campaigners warn that the north could become a cultural desert. This is reported as a ‘kick in the teeth’ when national institutions in London have seen an increase in funding.

And at the same time, further doubts are being expressed about the ridiculous Garden Bridge across the Thames – an idea which seems to stink as much as the water which will one day flow beneath it.

To reiterate a point made a while ago: if galleries and museums and other cultural centres in the North are closing due to lack of funds, that bridge should not receive a penny in public money.

And with that my walking book walks off for another day. I’m not going near that roundabout though.

YOU’VE got to love Iain Duncan Smith – if you’re married to him. The rest of us can hate him with impunity.

And in the unlikely event that your heart is softening, hasten yourself to the Daily Mirror website. There you will find a story about the Work and Pensions Secretary in which he claims that people thank him for taking their benefits away.

The Mirror, no friend to the Tory party it is true, accuses Mr Duncan Smith of “losing the plot” after making a number of “increasingly bizarre claims” about his department’s benefit sanctions regime, as captured in a video by a local newspaper in London.

Increasing bizarreness has long been a characteristic of this most lovable of politicians (sorry, Mrs IDS took control of the keyboard for a second there).

In his latest outburst of oddness, Mr Duncan Smith said 75 per cent of people who have had their benefits stopped by his department’s sanctions said it helped them to “focus and get on”.

In a nice bit of phrasing, the Mirror says that a spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions “was not immediately able to back up Mr Duncan Smith’s claim”.

Well, no – but we are immediately able to hear what else he had to say, according to the Mirror. As well as dismissing protests against benefit sanctions as “classic buzz from the left” he said that protesters were “never going to vote for us. They hate us”.

And then he topped that with the claim that Job Centres were “running out of people” to put back to work – even though, despite a welcome fall in overall unemployment, there are still 1.68 million people out of work in the UK.

The man they call IDS – and if you wish to see that middle letter as representing ‘Dunderhead’, feel free – also claimed his department had made no changes to the sanctions regime since 2010, even though he presided over the introduction of tough new rules two years after that, which drastically increased benefit sanctions.

In other news, reports from France say that when the guillotine was last used, 75 per cent of the detached heads said before rolling away: “Thanks for that, that head was weighing me down something rotten – I feel much better without it”.

You’ve got to love Jeremy Hunt – well, someone somewhere must. The Health Secretary has not only alienated virtually all junior doctors, now he has been in post when the NHS recorded its worst ever performance in January as services struggled to cope with unprecedented demand for A&A care, hospital beds and ambulances.

Patients in their hundreds of thousands had to wait longer than they should for time-critical care as the NHS missed almost all of its key waiting time targets.

At the same time, the NHS is said to be facing a deficit of £2 billion and what has been called the “worse financial crisis in a generation”.

And yesterday, Dr Mark Holland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said that hospitals were now so overwhelmed patients could die and the NHS was now facing an “eternal winter”

Now it is true that running the NHS is fiendishly complicated and expensive – but it is also true that everything seems to slide when the Conservative Party has been in control for a while.

One of the important things New Labour did – even though no one remembers it, including the Labour Party, it now seems – was to turn around the crumbling NHS and the battered public sector in general.

Sadly, part of the solution lay in ruinously expensive PFI deals, but at least something was done.

So that’s one thing we can thank Tony Blair for. You’ve got to love Tony Blair. Well, presumably Cherie does…

THE debate about keeping Sunday special is an odd one as it stopped being that long ago.

Yesterday David Cameron suffered his most damaging Commons defeat since his re-election as 27 Tory MPs ignored last minute pleas and rebelled against government plans to relax Sunday trading laws.

While this strikes me as being for the common good, the modern Sunday isn’t that different to the other six days. In York the streets are crowded and the shops busy. When we arrived here in the late 1980s, we used to walk around the empty streets with our son in his pushchair, window shopping and wandering, enjoying the quiet and soaking up the atmosphere of the city free from demands on purse or wallet.

I am glad the government lost that vote; especially happy that Tory MPs ignored their own ministers, including Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, and Brandon Lewis, the local government minister. The fairly loathsome Lewis said the government’s plan would have given “local communities the power to create more jobs and to boost local high streets”.

What he wanted was to open up the last scrappy bit of Sunday when the big shops have to close after six hours. That wouldn’t create jobs and boost local high streets; it would force shop workers to work a little longer and spread the spending for an hour or two more – without necessarily boosting the economy at all.

But it was odd to hear all that talk of keeping Sundays special, amid grumblings that the vote had been carried with the help of MPs from Scotland, where the laws have already been relaxed (and, yes, that is hardly consistent).

You see, Sundays of old were special in ways that are hard to remember now. There was a particular stultification to a Sunday when no shops were open and church bells hung in the air. As a child in Bristol in the 1960s, I dimly recall being ticked off for playing noisily on a Sunday, which was considered disrespectful, even by my non-believing parents.

Some years later in south Manchester, we went to Sunday school and later joined a church-based youth group a little like the Scouts, called Junos and Inters. A Google search reveals that this group still exists as a youth ministry. Viewed from my distant atheist hill, it all seems vaguely creepy, but that was what you did on a Sunday then – and many people still wish to attend church.

Not my father, though. He was brought up in a religious household and as a boy had to go to church three times on a Sunday. This put him off religion for life, making him something of a rebel in his family. When we used to visit the grandparents in Southampton, he would try to avoid Sundays and any awkwardness over going to church.

Some years later I used to do my under-age drinking in a pub in Cheadle Hulme called the Church Inn, and once when my grandmother was staying, I said I was off to the Church and the misunderstanding left her very pleased.

My mother’s parents went to church too, although I have the impression they were less religious, but attended because that’s what people did on a Sunday. There wasn’t a lot else to do.

Sundays of old are hard to imagine now, with everywhere shut and nothing to do if it involved spending money. My feelings are mixed, as no one would want those silent behave-yourself Sundays back, yet the spend-spend-spend Sundays aren’t much fun either. Buying stuff long ago became the new religion and we won’t stop that now. But even from my non-believing pulpit, I sometimes yearn for those quiet, undemanding Sundays of the late 1980s.

Yesterday’s vote holds on to a piece of that old Sunday, instead of fully surrendering to demands that we work and shop all hours. And for that tattered scrap we should be thankful, even if it was in part down to mischief-making Scots.

I SEE the Queen has been having a Eurosceptic rant, at least according to the Sun.

“QUEEN BACKS BREXIT” shouts the main headline. Beneath an explanatory label reads: “EU going in the wrong direction, she says.”

Now you don’t have to be long fallen from the tree to suspect this is nonsense. Once glance tells you this story has been cooked up from dubious ingredients bunged into the Murdoch Microwave and with the dial turned to ‘meltdown’.

The story contains nothing to back up that headline; there is no statement of support from the monarch. So perhaps she will be spluttering over her cornflakes this morning (“Bloody hell, Philip – I know one is getting on a bit, but I don’t remember saying that.”)

This story relies on two anonymous sources – that most dubious and yet handy of newspaper devices. With an unnamed source you can print almost anything you like; you can build your headline as high as you wish.

What the Sun has done is to interpret the words of two anonymous sources. So two people who aren’t named, and in theory at least might not even exist, are used as the foundations for this wobbly tale.

One claims to have witnessed the Queen telling former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at a Winsor Castle lunch in 2011 that the EU was “heading in the wrong direction”.

As for the other anonymous tip-off, this refers to a conversation the Queen might or might not have had during a Buckingham Palace reception “a few years ago”. She is alleged to have remarked with “venom and emotion” that she did not understand Europe.

Maybe her Majesty doesn’t understand Europe. That wouldn’t be a surprise, as lots of her subjects don’t either. This isn’t to suggest hostility, unless they are readers of the Daily Express. That newspaper is easily the most Eurosceptic when it comes to the EU referendum and probably considers a holiday in France to be a crime against the British nation.

Perhaps the Queen doesn’t understand Europe in the sense of it all being a bit much to get her brain round, a bit of a puzzle. All you have to do to arrive at that unsurprising possibility is to remove the overheard “venom and emotion” mentioned in the Sun.

You know what it’s like at parties. Things can be misheard or half understood. If our everyday lives were viewed through the tabloid lens, we would discover all sorts of things we never knew we’d said or done. Our overheard opinions would be reflected back at us in blocky headlines; a bit of gossip we couldn’t remember sharing would suddenly be front-page news.

My advice is not to invite anonymous people to your parties, as they cause all the trouble. “Hello, have you met Ann Nonymous? She’s here to overhear everything you say and then misinterpret it for the newspapers in a year or two. Hope you don’t mind…”

The Sun story has stirred the expected denials, with Buckingham Palace insisting the Queen remains “politically neutral”, while Mr Clegg maintains the story is “nonsense” and he has no recollection of the incident.

We all know this story is nonsense, even if it would hardly be a surprise if the resolutely neutral Queen was in secret a reactionary old grump who resented the hold Europe has on our lives (“Look here, Philip, have you seen what it says on the front page of my Daily Express?”).

As for the Sun story, this is a classic piece of wilful misinterpretation, built from the dodgiest of ingredients in the full knowledge that it is nonsense – but committed to newsprint with gusto. A good old-fashioned inky-fingered confidence trick.

I’ve said before that the problem with the Europe debate is that it is conducted in the main by ranting and shouting politicians with violently strong opinions one way or the other. The other difficulty is that the debate is conducted in the pages of newspapers where this sort of thing constitutes news.

Does it matter anymore in these sad days of newspaper decline? Well the EU vote could well be swung by the undecided third of voters, so if they can be swayed in might influence the outcome. But the virulently anti-Europe coverage is probably only shouting to the converted or bellowing at the bigoted.

I DID the government’s new health quiz yesterday. Well, I started it but stopped for lunch. Those double cheese burgers don’t eat themselves, you know.

That’s a joke by the way, in case my doctor is reading. We had spiced lentils, cabbage, roast carrots and roast potatoes. Only the potatoes were bad but they were very good, quick roasted from raw with a slosh of olive oil and salt and black pepper.

The quiz is part of Public Health England’s One You campaign/big nag aimed at telling unhealthy middle-aged people to improve their lifestyles if they want to enjoy a healthy retirement.

One of the slogans is: “Do you want to cough all the way to your coffin?” Well, no it isn’t but it could be. What you don’t need me to tell you is that the campaign advises the over-40s to “drink less, exercise more, eat better and give up smoking”.

This is the first national campaign to specifically nag the over-sized pants off the middle-aged. I went back to the test after cycling to the University of York and back for a game of squash (all good there) and eating cooked salmon from the freezer mixed with cream cheese (full fat, am I suicidal?) and spread on toast, plus one apple and one orange (a fruity star there).

The squash/cycling thing happens twice a week, and I also play badminton once a week with a group of friends, and run once or occasionally twice. All of this is good, but my One You score was still ‘only’ seven out of ten, though I did get a pat on the back for not smoking.

My minus points were these: too much alcohol, hard cheese and bad sleep. Now I have a bit of an issue with the booze warning, especially as the email from One Nearly Dead You said: “Your drinking levels put you at higher risk of damaging your health. Cutting down to 14 units spread over the week with a couple of alcohol-free days will lower the risk.”

This is odd as I already have four alcohol-free days nearly every week, as I indicated in the survey, although every day I do like a good coffee or two (oh foolish man, have you not heard of water?).

My long habit of drinking on three days of the week and having four days without alcohol has been redefined as a problem thanks to the government’s new lower recommended level of drinking. Public Health England rewrote its advice on units of alcohol in January, indicating that men should drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week – down from the previous recommendation of 21 units. The new stance warns that there is no such thing as a safe level of drinking. This is true, I suppose, but then there is no safe level of anything.

Thanks to the reduction, I have been redefined as a potential problem drinker, whereas under the old system I wouldn’t have been.

If you are a reasonably intelligent bundle of cells, nerves, neurons and creaking middle-aged bones, you know what is good for you and what is not, and you decide accordingly, mixing the good with the bad, and perhaps telling yourself the occasional fib.

While the One You campaign is well intentioned, the finger-wagging is irksome, a primary school approach to adults long departed from the classroom. Assumptions are made, so for instance my bad sleeping habit is put down to drinking, whereas my personal brand of insomnia comes and goes at random, and seems unaffected by alcohol. I can sleep well after a drink and I can sleep appallingly when I’ve not touched a drop in days.

As I write this a drowsy numbness pains my head, to borrow from Keats, and the inside of my skull feels granular thanks to about four hours of sleep. So stubborn is my sleeplessness that I swear I could give up alcohol and coffee and still see the night ruptured. It seems to be the way I am, with the sheet-tangled nights broken by the occasional sound and solid sleep.

The One You campaign warns middle-aged people that unless they change their ways they “could die early or face a retirement blighted with ill-health”.

Perhaps we all kid ourselves to a degree, but I have always believed that mixing mostly good behaviour with an indulgence or two will see me through. And that’s what this One Me still believes, however much I am nagged or harried by official advice.

And with that I am off to have my porridge.

Not many of us when we die can be said to have changed the world, but Ray Tomlinson did. The name might not mean much to you, it certainly didn’t to me. But his work shaped modern life in remarkable ways and perhaps in annoying ways too.

Tomlinson, who has died aged 74, is described as the inventor of email and the man who picked the @ symbol for addresses. That almost encircled letter ‘a’ is now so familiar it seems always to have been here. It’s almost as if the man who invented the full stop had just died.

“A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers,” a spokesman for his company, Raytheon, said this morning.

Like most of us, I use his invention all the time, rather obsessively checking my two email addresses to see what messages have popped in there. Working from home, email is my link to the outside world. Without Ray and his @ symbol innovation, I’d be sitting here twiddling my thumbs or perhaps cursing the whine of a paper-chewing fax machine.

According to The Guardian this morning, Tomlinson “became a cult figure for his invention in 1971 of a program for ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, that allowed people to send person-to-person messages to other computer users on other servers”.

On the Internet Hall of Fame website – who knew such a place existed? But it does as I’ve just had a look – it says that Tomlinson’s program changed how we communicate in business and personal life, revolutionising how we “shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans”.

All of that is true and few of us could do without email nowadays, but there are disadvantages, especially to the office worker who returns from a break to find they have 1,000 emails to read. Ease of communication does not always equate to having something worthwhile to say.

Deleting at will is usually the only response, killing off what is mostly unnecessary. Occasionally an important message will be culled in error, but the sender can always send another one. Nowadays I am often that sender, a member of the annoying “Did you get my email?” brigade.

Tone can be difficult in emails, and offence can be caused unintentionally; and of course you don’t hear a voice, which is a loss. But still, we’d be nowhere without emails now.

Tomlinson, who was originally from Amsterdam, New York, was said to have been fooling around when he came up with his invention, which just goes to show the creative benefits of messing about – a much undervalued enterprise in an age when everything is meant to be done for a particular purpose.

Reportedly, Tomlinson showed his invention to a colleague, then said: “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”

As few people had personal computers at the time, the popularity – and perhaps unpopularity, too – of personal email didn’t take off for many years. But it is now hard to imagine life without email.

Sometimes we try so hard to do things, and yet the biggest achievements can be the ones we never knew we were working on at all. Must dash now. Need to check those emails.

We are at the supermarket checkout and my wife looks at everything coming out of the trolley. “That’ll be £65,” she says. This is a game she likes to play for some reason. My part in this is one of dumb optimism – “Oh, it’ll only be fifty quid,” I say.

The bill comes to something like £64.84, so clearly she was miles out and foolish optimism wins the day again.

There is no alchemy in her calculation. She merely tots up how many items we have bought and reckons on everything costing a pound and a bit (it used to be a round pound years ago).

I have mentioned before this difference between us. One of us is a foolish optimist, the other a realistic pessimist. My optimism has taken a pummelling lately, and keeping hold of that half-full glass has been tricky at times, but I’ve just checked and it’s still half-full if you close one eye and squint.

Perhaps it isn’t even fair to call my wife a pessimist, but she is more likely to peer nervously over the precipice while I have my eyes on the distant twinkling horizon, too busy dreaming to concentrate on where I am placing my feet.

Harry S Truman, the 33^rd US President, had something to say about the differences between us. Not about counting out the shopping as I don’t think he knew about that. Here is what he said: “A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”

As someone who has spent many months now trying to make opportunities out of my difficulties, I rather like that. I’d say the old Democrat nailed that one.

I don’t know if it is better to be an optimist than a pessimist, and maybe you have no choice and it’s just how you fell out of the mould, either carefree or anxious, foolish or realistic.

Optimism is the better trait from my point of view, but maybe if I was more pessimistic I would have been more realistically equipped for my present situation.

After a reasonably busy spell, everything has fallen quiet again. I have a couple of good features written and waiting to appear, but nothing new on the go, apart from my own writing.

Three job applications fell on stony ground at the end of last week, two at universities in York and one for a museum in Leeds. One of the university applications was for a very good job in the press office, so my hopes weren’t high (even an optimist steps under a cloud sometimes). The other one seemed a better bet, but after spending 90 minutes or so on filling out the form online, and essentially answering the same question 12 times, the rejection arrived two days later. Harsh, but there you go.

The museum job was a wild-card thing in that it sounded interesting and crossed over with my experience to an extent. Another university in Leeds still hasn’t responded to an application, which is what happens sometimes.

Perhaps I should pay heed to that friend who wondered if I’d ever thought of driving a taxi. But instead I shall keep taking Harry’s advice and continue to make opportunities of my difficulties.

SOMETIMES what you type into Google can be telling. A moment ago I asked the following question: “Who wrote the music for God Dave The Queen?”

A stumbled finger produced one of those happy accidents, a sort of Google malapropism. The answer to the intended question is Thomas Arne, the 18^th century composer – an Eton old boy, just like God Dave The Queen.

So Arne is to blame for saddling us with what The Times this morning refers to as a “plodding dirge” in a front-page report on the role the national anthem plays in our sporting culture.

The Labour MP Toby Perkins last month used the ten-minute rule motion in Parliament to propose that a public consultation be launched to decide which song would make the best English anthem.

Before going any further, it is worth remembering what God Dave the Queen said ten days or so ago at prime minister’s question time about Jeremy Corbyn. In reply to a heckle from Labour MP Angela Eagle about his own mother being opposed to his welfare cuts, Cameron popped the following pimple of pomposity: “I know what my mother would say. I think she’d look across the dispatch box and she’d say: ‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’.”

In that moment it felt as if we were seeing the real Cameron, the mean, snobbish, vindictive one, not the smooth user-friendly version trundled around in an expensive suit like a political shop dummy.

There is a theory the line had been written long in advance, and that the prime minister mistimed its utterance in responding to a heckle rather than to the Labour leader himself.

Anyway, what is it about the national mumble-along that gets Cameron so hot under his tie-strangled collar? Nothing in truth, at a guess, it’s just that the national anthem is a weird sort of patriotism litmus test. Anyone who doesn’t sing it loudly and proudly (an accusation thrown at Corbyn in the past) is somehow seen as not properly British.

The thing is, the tune is a plodding dirge, a dull dutiful ditty seemingly designed to make everyone who sings it feel they are back in school assembly and being forced to mumble their fealty to the Queen.

Is there a single person in the country who actually enjoys our national theme tune? Ah, yes there is actually. Step forward Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said in Parliament: “What greater pleasure can there be for a true-born English man or true-born English woman than to listen to our own national anthem?”

Well, I am sure we can all think of quite a few greater pleasures, Jacob, but never mind. Incidentally, is Rees-Mogg is for real or the creation of a comedy scriptwriter? Sometimes he is actually quite funny in a caricature pompous twerp sort of a way.

This story never really dies and shuffles back with a polite cough every so often. Last year Eoin Morgan, the Irish cricketer who captains the England national cricket team in one day internationals – I know, don’t ask me, it’s sport – annoyed supporters by not singing the national anthem before matches at the cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Piers Morgan, England’s favourite irritant, took to Twitter to complain that if the former Irishman wanted to captain England, he should “sing the damn national anthem, too”.

The problem lies with that damn national anthem, a dull, uninspiring endless plod of a tune that always takes about 20 minutes to sing – or so it seems.

Whenever this matter comes up, the most popular suggestion for an English anthem is Jerusalem, the musical setting of a William Blake poem. Stirring in a buttoned-up sort of way, I guess – but we’d still be stuck with God Save The Queen for national occasions.

Perhaps when God no longer saves the Queen, for she will be 90 soon, we could slowly turn down the volume on the national anthem and let it fade away.

WHEN the stubby finger beckoned, you were in trouble. The digit belonged to a sub-editor with a reputation for toughness. He was hard on trainees, hard to like if you’d slipped up, although he was always right. Occasionally he surprised you with a gruff beardy nugget of praise.

That was back in the days of noisy typewriters, overflowing ashtrays and long lunchtimes in the pub – a distant era now.

I don’t remember all the names from my days as a trainee on the South East London Mercury, but I do recall this man. That’s because he was called Steve Martin, an easy name to remember. He left to work on the Sun, where for a while he wrote a column called something like “The View From the No 36 Bus”. This was a spin, I guess now, on the man on the Clapham omnibus, that hypothetical reasonable person in English law against whom a defendant’s conduct could be measured. In his column he offered the ordinary man’s view on life.

Those days came back to me thanks to something the editor of the Sun said yesterday in the Press Gazette. Tony Gallagher believes that journalism is a trade and one you learn with a notebook in your hand. “The idea that it’s a profession and held to the same standard as doctors and accountants is something that’s grown up over the last 20 years and should be resisted.

“You become a journalist by practising it not by learning it in a classroom.”

Gallagher then went on lament the rise in journalism degrees all the way up to the post-graduate MA. He regretted that the old entry point of starting on a newspaper at 18 seemed to have gone.

I think he may well have a point, although it comes late in the day. Most young journalists are graduates these days, although it was different back when the Seventies collided with the Eighties.

People from all sorts of backgrounds used to become reporters. Turning journalism into a more or less graduate-only job risks excluding non-graduates who’d make good reporters, as the main qualities – nosiness, doggedness and so forth – can’t be taught in a classroom.

There were certainly all sorts on the Mercury, including Steve Martin and other Fleet Street-honed subs, who were hard on the trainees, but in a good way. I ended up following them in a sense, doing my three years as a Saturday sub-editor on the Observer while still working on the paper.

The “all sorts”, incidentally, included Geordie Greig, now editor of The Mail on Sunday. Eton old boys were a rare sight in Deptford in those days, and probably today as well, unless they are property developers (parts of this once down-at-heel but honest area are now known as North Greenwich, apparently).

Even though I did go in as a graduate, looking back I’m glad I had to endure that stubby finger. It was good training and a little bit of shame went a long way, in a productive sense.

As it happens, recently I was back at my old newspaper, helping out with trainees from around the country. They had an exam coming up needed to be put through their paces.

A cynical person might wonder at that, helping young people to find their way in an industry that just chewed you up and spat you out at the other end. Well, it wasn’t their fault and the experience was rewarding, if mildly stressful with trainees who feared they were heading for a fail. I guess that Tony Gallagher would approve of the training given to these young journalists, as it was practical and based on the job.

There has been a lot of comment recently about how actors from relatively wealthy backgrounds now dominate the theatre and film industry, with obvious examples being Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne. The likes of David Morrissey and Julie Walters, who came from working-class backgrounds, worry that they wouldn’t make it today.

From seeing the sort of people who turned up for work experience on my old newspaper, I reckon something similar is happening in journalism. Unpaid internships are partly to blame, as these are only available to those who can rely on parental largesse.

I don’t make a habit of going round agreeing with the editor of the Sun, but I reckon he’s got a point here.

TODAY’S newspapers play a game of retirement bingo when reporting on the government’s official review of the state pension age. The consensus is that people under about 55 may well have to wait until their 70s to retire, while the Sun tops that with: “WORK TILL YOU’RE 81.”

That curiously precise headline figure is based on a quote from former Lib-Dem pensions minister Steve Webb, and no, I don’t remember him either. The headline might as well have been: “Work till you drop.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that George Osborne plans to sneak into the Budget later this month a Zombie Tax proposal that pensions should only be paid when people die. That would be a fiscally brilliant solution and one right up his street.

Although come to think of it, there is always a danger that the spare room tax might be extended to embrace that final ‘room’. Yes, make way for the spare coffin tax, to be applied to people who insist on taking up that extra ‘room’ when they are dead.

That is of course a satirical slight aimed at my second least favourite politician (dear David somehow manages to just sneak it). But it is the sort of satire that falls only a foot or two short of reality.

In previous generations it was common for men to die on or just before retirement, especially if they were in physically arduous employment.

Now people are living longer and that, it is said, has caused the problem. That much is true, but my rule of thumb is that governments can afford all sorts of things if they want to. Untold billions on renewing the Trident nuclear defence system: not a problem, admiral. Giving people a decent pension at a decent age: oh, we’re not made of money, you know – and mending holes in the road is generally considered to be very good exercise for old people.

The review is being led by John Cridland, the former director general of the CBI, who earned a salary of £312,000 in that job, according to a Management Today blog last March, so will not be too worried about his pension pot. Although that isn’t actually a lot (believe it or not) up in the boss stratosphere where the air is thin and the wallets are thick.

Cridland has been appointed to act as the independent reviewer of the pension age and will consider whether the pension age should continue to be linked to rising life expectancy.

Another slant is that the state pension age could depend on the sort of job one does. This prospect causes today’s Daily Mail to ask on its front page: “WHITE COLLAR PENSIONS BLOW” above the sub-head: “Millions face longer wait to retire than manual workers.”

The logic here is that if the pension is linked to life expectancy, then industrial workers, who have a shorter life expectancy, could be allowed to claim their pensions earlier.

Well, here is a shocking suggestion from me and my ledge. Never mind manual versus white collar, why don’t we just pay everyone a decent state pension at a reasonable age; and while we’re about it, why don’t we find a way to pay for the NHS that doesn’t involve divisive internal markets and hiving off the profitable bits to private industry?

Amazing, I know. Why they never made me Chancellor of the Exchequer is a mystery.

If the state pension age can be linked to life expectancy and the nature of a person’s work, I reckon that MPs should not receive their Westminster pension until they have reached whatever age is decided for the rest of us.

But this plan falls down when so many of them, especially on this government’s front benches, are independently wealthy and therefore comfortably insulated against the bumps and furrows of ordinary life.