YESTERDAY this ledge-bound column considered swearing in literature. Today’s topic may well leave some readers with a profanity or two rising through their throat.

It was reported yesterday by the BBC that the Library of Birmingham is no longer buying new books or newspapers. Now a library without new books is not much of a library; and a hard-backed irony here is that when the library opened a couple of years or so ago, it cost £188 million. That would buy an awful lot of new books, but now they can no longer afford to put any new books on those shiny new shelves.

Photographs of the library show a modern building that glitters with civic confidence. And that is surely a good thing, even if it doesn’t come cheap. Proud cities should be able to build new and wonderful buildings for their citizens. Each generation should add something grand to a city, rather than solely relying on polishing up past glories.

Maybe that is easier to do in Birmingham than in York, where I live. Here the past is so splendidly prevalent that modern buildings struggle to find any non-sacred slot in which to plant their brash new feet.

Sadly, ever since that library opened in Birmingham, the city council has slashed opening hours, cut staff numbers and spent less on new books. And now they’re not going to spend anything on new books.

But never mind: the library service does have a plan. And here it is… a crumpled note reading: “BOOKS REQUIRED: Due to public savings cuts we are no longer purchasing any new books or newspapers. Therefore we’re looking for any books published in the last 12 months to be donated to the library. All gratefully received.”

I wish I could tell you that I had just made that last bit up. But no, that’s the real deal and not a bit of satirical play-acting.

The writer SJ Watson, author of Before I Go To Sleep, grew up in the area and was interviewed on the radio about this decision. He also took to Twitter, tweeting as follows: “Birmingham have built an amazing new library. But there’s a snag. This actually makes me really angry.” The ‘snag’ of course was the lack of new books, and his tweet featured a photograph of the pleading note mentioned above.

A councillor whose name need not detain us said lots of the usual things, and this: “We have always made choices about which books to buy, but clearly we need to be careful and buy those books that are most needed.”

Well that’s comforting, isn’t it? I assume there is a person with the relevant job title: the buyer of necessary books. I’d love to hear exactly what denotes a “needed book”. The wasteland between those books and all the unnecessary ones must be littered with wasted words.

We have to remember that this is what cuts look like. Not big or terrible, or not at first, but an incremental diminishment of things we need or value; a slow chipping away at the stone until nothing is left but discarded chippings. And often these cuts are decided centrally by Government, and delivered on the ground by hard-pushed local councils.

A swimming pool in West Yorkshire was recently featured on BBC Look North. Well, I call it a swimming pool but those usually have to contain water for the old buoyancy trick to work. This one was empty. But never mind, someone has just put up a note: “WATER REQUIRED: Due to public savings cuts we are no longer able to fill this pool with water. Therefore we’re looking for any old water you may have and are prepared to donate to the library. All old bath-water gratefully received.”

YESTERDAY this ledge-bound column considered swearing in literature. Today’s topic may well leave some readers with a profanity or two rising through their throat.

It was reported yesterday by the BBC that the Library of Birmingham is no longer buying new books or newspapers. Now a library without new books is not much of a library; and a hard-backed irony here is that when the library opened a couple of years or so ago, it cost £188 million. That would buy an awful lot of new books, but now they can no longer afford to put any new books on those shiny new shelves.

Photographs of the library show a modern building that glitters with civic confidence. And that is surely a good thing, even if it doesn’t come cheap. Proud cities should be able to build new and wonderful buildings for their citizens. Each generation should add something grand to a city, rather than solely relying on polishing up past glories.

Maybe that is easier to do in Birmingham than in York, where I live. Here the past is so splendidly prevalent that modern buildings struggle to find any non-sacred slot in which to plant their brash new feet.

Sadly, ever since that library opened in Birmingham, the city council has slashed opening hours, cut staff numbers and spent less on new books. And now they’re not going to spend anything on new books.

But never mind: the library service does have a plan. And here it is… a crumpled note reading: “BOOKS REQUIRED: Due to public savings cuts we are no longer purchasing any new books or newspapers. Therefore we’re looking for any books published in the last 12 months to be donated to the library. All gratefully received.”

I wish I could tell you that I had just made that last bit up. But no, that’s the real deal and not a bit of satirical play-acting.

The writer SJ Watson, author of Before I Go To Sleep, grew up in the area and was interviewed on the radio about this decision. He also took to Twitter, tweeting as follows: “Birmingham have built an amazing new library. But there’s a snag. This actually makes me really angry.” The ‘snag’ of course was the lack of new books, and his tweet featured a photograph of the pleading note mentioned above.

A councillor whose name need not detain us said lots of the usual things, and this: “We have always made choices about which books to buy, but clearly we need to be careful and buy those books that are most needed.”

Well that’s comforting, isn’t it? I assume there is a person with the relevant job title: the buyer of necessary books. I’d love to hear exactly what denotes a “needed book”. The wasteland between those books and all the unnecessary ones must be littered with wasted words.

We have to remember that this is what cuts look like. Not big or terrible, or not at first, but an incremental diminishment of things we need or value; a slow chipping away at the stone until nothing is left but discarded chippings. And often these cuts are decided centrally by Government, and delivered on the ground by hard-pushed local councils.

A swimming pool in West Yorkshire was recently featured on BBC Look North. Well, I call it a swimming pool but those usually have to contain water for the old buoyancy trick to work. This one was empty. But never mind, someone has just put up a note: “WATER REQUIRED: Due to public savings cuts we are no longer able to fill this pool with water. Therefore we’re looking for any old water you may have and are prepared to donate to the pool. All old bath-water gratefully received.”

HOW much should we swear in life and in literature? This question interests me on both fronts. In clarification it should be pointed out that Man On Ledge doesn’t regard “bollocks” as a profanity. Mrs Man On Ledge, on the other hand, disagrees.

This topic arises thanks to the excellent writer Mark Haddon and a bunch of small-minded parents in Florida, whose complaints have caused Haddon’s most celebrated novel to be pulled from a summer reading list.

Well, I say “small-minded” and maybe they are or maybe they are not. What they are without doubt is so focused on one small aspect of a book that they fail to see the wonderful whole. And it’s a shame when that happens.

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time was a Whitbread Book of the Year and is now also a prize-winning play. It is narrated by a 15-year-old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome, as he embarks on an investigation into the death of his neighbour’s dog (the title is a Sherlock Holmes reference).

Students at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee were given the book as a summer reading assignment, but it was later removed from the list after parents complained. The story was reported by the Tallahassee Democrat and then picked up over here. The school’s head received complaints about the language in the book and cancelled the assignment in order to “give the opportunity for the parents to parent”.

One parent told the paper something which it is worth repeating in full. So deep breath taken, here goes: “I am not interested in having books banned. But to have that language and to take the name of Christ in vain – I don’t go for that. As a Christian, and as a female, I was offended. Kids don’t have to be reading that type of thing and that’s why I was asking for an alternative assignment … I know it’s not realistic to pretend bad words don’t exist, but it is my responsibility as a parent to make sure that my daughter knows what is right or wrong.”

So I think what we have here is one vociferous parent kicking off after, presumably, flipping through the pages, glimpsing a swear word or two – and not being prepared to see further than that. Which is a pity as The Curious Incident is an excellent novel, a grown-up sort of children’s book, or a novel for everyone. A book to open minds and, like all good novels, to present a view of the world the reader may well not have encountered.

There is more to life than a simple calibration of “right and wrong” and what that complaining parent has done is ban a book, at least locally, whatever she says.

Someone on the staff of the Tallahassee Democrat had the predictable but dim idea of counting all the swear words in the novel, and then listing them. Having spent so long in newsrooms, I can just see the sort of editor who came up with that.

Haddon is used to this sort of thing, as similar rows have erupted before. He makes the very good point that The Curious Incident “is not just a novel that contains swearing but a novel about  swearing” as the boy Christopher is completely unaware of the offence that swearing is intended to cause. And that surely would have made a good topic for discussion on the summer reading assignment.

The question interests me in another way too, as the thriller I am finishing off contains a fair bit of swearing. Sometimes in the edit I knock out the f-words. Sometimes I put them back in. One character swears a lot because of his background and poor education. In life all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds swear: so should such language feature in literature? Well, that’s one of those judgements, but clearly not if your target reader is a narrow-minded inhabitant of Tallahassee.

As it happens I swear rarely out loud in life, so long as bollocks doesn’t count, and a little more often within the curved confines of my own skull.

NB: Mark Haddon’s more adult novels A Spot Of Bother and The Red House are both well worth reading too, although perhaps not in Florida.

HOT milk used to be what you put in your coffee. But now milk itself is a hot topic, thanks to falling milk prices and dairy farmers saying they are selling milk for less than it costs to produce.

This story was reported on the BBC Radio Four’s PM programme yesterday and in the name of balance they spoke to someone from the Free Markets Rule OK think-tank. Well, extensive two-minute research via Google and the BBC website has failed to pinpoint exactly which exponent of the free-market it was who featured in the programme.

But never mind, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that this unremembered man spouted the usual defence of free markets. Put simply, the free market is right about everything and anyone who says otherwise can go and boil their head in a bucket of hot milk.

Well, he didn’t quite say that. But that’s how it came across. Falling milk prices were a fact of life and if farmers went out of business, so be it. They couldn’t have been very good farmers in the first place, and so on, and in time the market would readjust itself, and everything would be all right again.

I couldn’t see this unrecalled man of course because he was on the radio. But in my head he had his fingers in his ears and was going nah-nah-nah… hard cash rules… fact of life… markets know best. This is the usual moneyed mantra from such people.

Had you been listening carefully when this report was going out, you might have heard a man on the west side of York grumbling at his radio: “Yes, but what about the banks?” The banks were fully protected from the free market (and their own colossally damaging risky behaviour) thanks to huge bailouts from the taxpayer.

The problem with milk has been in the news for a while. In a clever stunt some farmers have been staging good-natured raids on supermarkets, swooping in to buy up all the milk as a form of protest, and then giving some of it away.

Mind you, a Mr or Mrs Accountant Head somewhere is probably looking at their spreadsheet for the supermarkets where these protests have taken place and going: “Well, milk is selling very well here … don’t see what the problem is at all.”

Yesterday Morrisons announced that it was to introduce more expensive milk to help farmers. The Milk For Farmers brand will see a four-pint bottle that usually costs 89p rising in price by 23p, with an extra 10p per litre being paid to farmers. This is fair enough if it works, and it does at least answer those (this man on a ledge included) who grandly say: “Oh, I’d pay more for milk to help the farmers.” Well, now you can and so can I.

Now I am no expert, but surely the problem lies in an unfettered world market for food which operates purely for the benefit of the market and is not in the public interest at all – unless you are a member of the public who wishes to buy milk at such a cheap price that the product itself risks becoming so worthless it disappears.

Now I confess to being a romantic fool in these matters. The very notion of a global market in milk strikes me as bonkers and possibly malevolent. How can milk sensibly be shipped around the world – and wouldn’t it be better just to have more and more local farms, producing local milk sold at realistic prices to local people?

Well, I can hear the free-market man on the radio heckling right back at me. But two of us can play at sticking our fingers in our ears.

Incidentally, here is an example of a free-market think tank clearly talking the finest grade of good sense. According to a report in The Independent, the answer to Britain’s housing crisis lies in building more slums. This suggestion came from the Adam Smith Institute – or, more fairly, in a blog on the libertarian institute’s website in which an Oxford student wrote: “Sweeping deregulation is the only way to provide Britain with the slums it is crying out for.”

Yes, there you have it: solve the housing crisis by erecting jerry-built slums where the poverty stricken can congregate in cheerful penury. I can see those happy people now, thankfully raising a glass of cheap milk to the wonders of the free market.

I HAVE some sympathy with Benedict Cumberbatch over people filming his performance in Hamlet. Some days as I sit on this ledge, I can hardly see for all the blinking red lights of the camera-phones. Or phone cameras. Or whatever they are called.

The other day I nearly fell from this vertiginous perch mid-sentence thanks to an ill-timed picture taken by an admirer. Only a last-minute stiffening of the legs prevented my fall into clouds below this thin lip of rock I use to characterise my present circumstance.

Benedict has his so-called Cumberbitches who hang on his every movement and photograph it too given half a chance. I have my Cole-crowd Cuties, screaming and shouting. Some even carry banners with the slogan: “Cole Not Dole” splashed across.

We shall return to Benedict in a moment. What I have just written reminds me of something. When this blog began the intention was to record my life as a redundant person. I have just glanced back to the first one. This said: “So these jottings will chart what it feels like to be out of work for the first time.” And so they have occasionally, but there is only so often you can return to that subject. Day three: still no job yet. Day four: sorry, nothing yet, still feeling rejected… and so on.

What does it feel like now? Well, miserable but with happy glimpses of what might be. There has been some freelance work, and very welcome that has been too. And more to come. But nothing yet knits into a life. The thriller is almost written and will be sent to my agent soon, with even more fingers crossed than usual. And these jottings jot along. Half a book’s worth already if you tot up the daily scribbling. Anyone interested in publishing a Man On Ledge compendium?

Anyway, back to Benedict. The Sherlock actor and film star is in Hamlet at the Barbican in London. In greeting fans outside the theatre after an early performance, he treated them to a gracious moan. You can find a clip of his polite tirade on the BBC website and other places too no doubt (just in case any of those inveterate Beeb-bashers happen to be passing).

In this clip he says it is off-putting trying to remember his lines and get into the “Hamlet zone” (my phrase, not Benedict’s) with those red lights flashing in his eyes.

Why do people feel the need to film and photograph everything? We have forgotten how to live the moment. We don’t trust our memory of an experience. We need visible proof rather than variable memory.

So Cumberbatch’s fans will now be able to proudly show their friends fuzzy snaps of their favourite actor frowning in the dim distance as he tries to deliver some of the most famous lines in literature while people pepper him with red lights. These future spies have come to shoot him, not watch him. They are assassinating him in public for private posterity, and no doubt spoiling the experience for other members of the audience while they’re about it.

Actors are easy to characterise as loveys. It would be a doddle to mock Cumberbatch for his well-mannered strop. But why should he have to suffer fans firing off their bloody phone cameras all the time? Those lucky enough to have secured a ticket for the biggest theatrical turn of the moment should sit back and enjoy the experience. Put those cameras away and concentrate.

I know this next observation risks putting me in old fart corner. But here goes anyway. One of the downsides of mobiles phones, tablets and so on is that people don’t enjoy the present. They don’t talk to the person opposite but instead send texts to a different friend. They don’t concentrate and watch something properly as they are too busy recording it for future reference or show-offery. They don’t look with their eyes. Instead they squint through the little window on their phone.

Oh, look here. Someone’s just fired off another of those red-eye flashbulbs things at me. How’s a man supposed to sit writing on a ledge if people keep doing that?

I DIDN’T get where I am today by waffling… a fitting dust of irony for a columnist turned blogger, perhaps. But more importantly one of many quotes from CJ, that spout of splendid nonsense in The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin.

The writer of that comedy, David Nobbs, died yesterday at the age of 80. By all accounts an unassuming and decent man, Nobbs had that rare ability of coining seemingly ordinary phrases delivered by seemingly ordinary people – yet which have stayed with us.

Many of the lines people remember from Perrin tumble from the mouth of Charles Jefferson, or CJ, Perrin’s ridiculous boss. These were prefaced with the words “I didn’t get where I am today…” and this was funny in itself as, like many good comic lines, it’s a spin on the every-day pomposity of those who proclaim about being “self-made”.

Sometimes the comedy came from the ridiculousness of what followed that refrain: “…by selling ice cream tasting of bookends, pumice stone and West Germany”.

Sometimes there was a degree of pathos, such as his reflections on the disappearance of Reggie Perrin: “I didn’t get where I am today wondering what life’s all about” and “I didn’t get where I am today by thinking”.

One I particularly enjoy has a semi-tragic circularity: “I didn’t get where I am today without knowing there’s no fun in getting where I am today.”

Well, you could continue riffing with CJ all day. No one who watched Perrin is likely to forget this comedy about a mid-life breakdown and unravelling. Certainly not me, because as well as enjoying the series at the time, the first person I interviewed was the Perrin star Leonard Rossiter. He was in Tartuffe at Greenwich Theatre in December 1976 and I was playing at being a journalist for the student magazine at Goldsmiths College. I recall that he was a little prickly, probably due to being interviewed by a fuzzy-haired know-nothing student.

I had always thought that Rossiter died playing squash – memo to self, try to stay cool on the court tonight – but read this morning that he died in his dressing room at the Lyric Theatre in London while starring in Joe Orton’s black comedy Loot. He did play the crazy rubber-ball game though, as the Daily Mail later reported that: “The squash-playing, keep-fit enthusiast had a heart attack that was sudden and unexpected.”

As for Nobbs, he was an interesting man, funny and sharp, and painfully aware of what made people tick. And what happened when the ticking went awry, as with Perrin. He was also, towards the end of his life, an avowed humanist, and a long-time patron of the British Humanist Association.

In a moving piece he wrote for The Guardian five years ago, Nobbs explained how watching his mother die was “quite simply, beautiful. It was serene”. The experience found expression in his later novels, but also in his belief in humanism.

Nobbs lost his earlier religion, the standard-issue Church of England faith. Of this he wrote: “Loss of faith. It sounds so negative. I didn’t lose faith. I gained faith. Faith in people. I am proud to describe myself as a humanist.”

And you couldn’t wish for a better memorial than that.

THE calls, they keep on coming. You know the ones, you’ll have them too.

“We have been trying to contact you,” says the well-spoken woman in one call, lamenting that she hasn’t been able to catch you yet.

“We phoned earlier but you weren’t in. We would like to speak to you about that the PPI insurance claim you are entitled to/that accident you had/the compensation you are due for your dreams falling somewhat short… please phone us back so that we can bamboozle you and trick you, cheat you and deceive you; and set your foolish hopes floating off in a boat made of folded paper…”

Well, they don’t go quite like that but you know the form. The one we get all the time at the moment is the nicely spoken woman dangling the possibility of reimbursement due to having once bought a PPI insurance policy. In this house we have been down that road already and it was paved with small change rather than gold, but never mind, as all contributions are gratefully received, especially at the moment.

But here’s another thing. I am in all the time. Being in is what I do, how I try to earn a freelance shilling. Sometimes I do go out but mostly I stay in; in with the in(doors) crowd, that’s me right now. So if I am in all the time, how on earth is it that I keep on missing your calls?

Other than the unadventurous retired or a housebound person, you couldn’t meet someone more likely than me to be in at the moment. So I haven’t missed your calls, nice-voiced lady, because you don’t make calls you just send out relentless recorded messages in a mammoth fishing exercise in the hope that someone will phone you back. At which point the bamboozlement can begin; and how pleased I am to see that the spell-checker allows that word, although I would have used it anyway.

The other day on the radio, that provider of incidental company to members of the in-crowd, there was a report concerning these phone calls. One complaint was about a firm selling hearing aids. The caller speaks very quietly and when the householder says: “Sorry, I can’t hear you” the salesperson replies: “Well you clearly need our hearing aids.”

Now that is awful but kind of funny, too. Whoever had that idea has a brain, even if it is not being put to the best use.

Today is Sunday and I have been out for the morning run, which gets me out of doors and gives the knees something to complain about. A bacon sandwich made using the granary-style sourdough bread I made yesterday has been eaten. From the kitchen below I can hear the Cerys Matthews show playing just the sort of music I like. In the garden I can hear my wife talking to our Spanish guest.

I think it must be time to step away from the laptop.

IT’S so dark in here and when they come past I have to hide and wait for the terrible noise to end. Then the air storm blows away and I carry on walking, always walking; walking until my feet have been lashed a thousand times and my legs they are dead legs.

First the desert and then the seas, then another sea where it is hot and there is not enough water to drink, only water to look at and the boat smells of what they put in the engine. Then the lorry that smells of whatever was in there before, a bad smell.

Then the place they call a camp, where the people they live in shacks and wait. The camp is near the sea. That other sea, the last sea, it is hard to cross. So instead I walk, always walking. The dark place is long and dangerous, but I keep on for mile after mile. Then the men come for me. They take me to where I have dreamed of, but they take me in a way that is not so friendly. They stand me in a room and the man tells me how I have broken the law of this land that has been calling to me; calling me for so long and for so many miles…

Apologies to Abdul Rahman Haroun, aged 40, from Sudan but now said to be of no fixed address. The details as described here are entirely made up. A man on a ledge in York, even a man who sometimes feels sorry for himself, cannot know what it is like to be so desperate that you are prepared to walk through the Channel Tunnel. Walk, what’s more, for nearly its entire length of 31 miles. Such a long and dangerous trek only to be arrested.

If this story, and the whole migrant crisis, didn’t have such a tragic element to it, there would be something almost comic about the law Mr Haroun broke. He is charged with causing an obstruction to an engine or carriage using the railway under the Malicious Damage Act 1861 and is due to appeal at Medway Magistrates Court on Thursday. That’s a very antiquated charge for a modern problem, an act put into law long before the tunnel was dug and anyone was foolish or desperate enough to attempt to walk along its unfriendly length.

If I was one of those magistrates, I would deliver a mild rebuke to Mr Haroun and then tell him that he could stay in Britain as reward for his sterling efforts. Perhaps that is why I am not a magistrate.

But in terms of sheer determination to get into this country, you could hardly try harder than this man from Sudan. Many people will say that he should be sent back, the stock response of the terminally unimaginative. Some people do have to be sent back under whatever system is set in place to control migration. But surely a man who has tried so hard should be slapped on the back and told that we need people of such guts and determination.

With the country watching and the newspapers reporting his long walk, it was almost as if Mr Haroun had been taking part in a gruesome new reality TV show. Perhaps it could just be called The Tunnel, as that’s the sort of name these affairs tend to have.

One irony of all this is that it is often Conservatives who complain about such migrants; or if not that, it is people giving into the more conservative side of their nature, for many people do have such a side.

Yet traditional Conservative/conservative values of determination, hard work and a willingness to strive and suffer to improve your life and the life of your family could hardly be better illustrated than by a man so desperate to arrive here he was prepared to walk all the way through the Channel Tunnel.

THE names sound colloquial and matey: Little Boy and Fat Man. But there was nothing friendly or informal about their purpose. Little Boy was the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima 70 years ago today. Three days later the more powerful Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki.

The arguments about whether or not these were right or moral actions have echoed through history ever since. There is no definitive answer to that question, even if there should be.

You only have to look at the archive photographs to gain a glimpse of the magnitude of what was perpetrated by the falling of those terrible bombs. A whole city reduced to little more than toxic dust and rubble, apart from bleached and blasted metal skeletons that once were buildings. And the human cost was terrible: an estimated 246,000 people were killed by the bombs or died in the aftermath, with long-reaching effects on health after that.

Another harmless-sounding name that was anything but was that given to the US research into atomic weapons: the Manhattan Project. This was led by Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico after fears of a Nazi bomb – research intensified following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Oppenheimer seems to have understood the monster he had unleashed, or at least that something unspeakable had been created. In 1945 he said: “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”

One of the arguments in favour of nuclear weapons has always been that of deterrent. This rests on the weapons being so appalling that no one will ever use them: so their existence ‘secures’ peace. Let’s agree that this not the most comfortable argument ever put forward in the name of preserving mankind’s future.

Much more reassuring would be that nuclear weapons no longer existed at all – or had never been invented, but sadly you cannot undo what the past has already ordained.

The big scare story is always that of the rogue state, and that is indeed sobering: one hot-head state or even leader of a terrorist group unleashing a nuclear weapon. Perhaps just as alarming is that nine powers are known to have nuclear weapons: Russia leads the way with 8,420 atomic bombs, while the US follows with 7,650.

Great mushroom-clouding heavens – just imagine if Vladimir Putin really did take one final flip in an international slanging match with new US President Donald Trump. The only comfort in this crazy sketch of a scenario is that toxically bonkers Republican hopeful Trump is unlikely even to win his party’s nomination, let alone the presidency. But it is scary in a James Bond manner.

Nuclear weapons truly are appalling, surely we can all nod our heads to that. Yet so are all weapons and the likelihood of man doing away with nuclear weapons or other means of slaughter is sadly very thin.

That is why we should all be peaceable instead of playing roughshod God with atomic weapons.

MOST of us have them hanging about our person somewhere, once-proud medals to some and a dusty disappointment to others. I’m talking about exam results.

Achieved, or not, at such a young age and with you for a lifetime. For some of us exams happened so long ago that the results are a little hazy. In applying for jobs while sitting on my ledge, I have struggled over the O-levels and even sometimes the A-levels (although that saving-grace Grade 1 S-level in English stays in mind).

My degree I can remember, it being an average 2:2 – or a Desmond as people now sometimes say. In truth the English literature degree should have been better, but in my days at Goldsmiths College in London, nothing counted except the final exams: no dissertation or anything, just that final exam slog. No essays contributed to your ‘score’, only those last-minute, panicky exams. In retrospect this seems unfair, but God what a long time ago it all was.

I was better at the essays that the exams, but there you go. An irony hovers here, perhaps. A man who didn’t particularly like exams now sets himself an exam most days: sit and write a blog off the top of your head; you have an hour at the very most (quicker would be better); try not to be boring; top marks will be awarded for, well, they won’t but awarded for anything at all – it’s all in the name brain engagement and amusement.

Anyway, exams.

The reason for recalling what is often best forgotten was a report yesterday on the BBC news. This said that the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is to stop using A-level grades as a way of selecting graduate recruits. The firm now believes that using grades to filter candidates could disadvantage those from poor backgrounds.

Well, what took them so long? It has long been clear to me that A-levels are a blunt device and, potentially, a block to social mobility. PwC believes its move could improve diversity and in effect open up new pastures of talent.

The firm is said to be worried that able candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds are losing out. A company spokesman said: “Our experience shows that whilst A-level assessment can indicate potential, for far too many students there are other factors that influence results.”

To which a blogger on a windy ledge replies: “Isn’t that a coded admission that too many pupils from private schools land too many of the good jobs?”

In a sense that’s what people are paying for if they can afford to privately educate their children: a push to the front of the queue. So selecting on other grounds seems both fairer and smarter.

Anyway, exams (again). I see that my self-appointed time limit has expired. I now have to lay down my pen and stop writing. Or move my laptop from the dining table as our guest will soon be needing to sit here for his breakfast. The invigilator will be along any minute to ask me to stop writing. Well, that’s one way of looking at my wife.