MY sleep is full of holes from fretful bullets. So I guess you could say that I am not yet relaxed.

When certain calamities arise, well-meaning people dig out rusty old phrases. The lovelorn will be told that there are plenty more fish in the sea – an old-fashioned piece of advice that should probably now be ditched due to over-fishing, EU quotas and the rest. “There are hardly any more fish in the sea, but never mind, she wasn’t worth it.”

A different refrain greets the recently redundant. It goes something like this: “Best thing that ever happened to me.”

People who have emerged from the other side tell you this with enthusiasm, although they do add a rider. This is that the experience was awful at the time, but beneficial in the long run.

At present the long run seems a way off. Frankly the long run is a mystery and a thriller rolled into one ball of worry. Not having to go to work is normally a pleasure, so two weeks in the experience is a little like being on holiday, only without the sun-tan and with a rumble of anxiety over the horizon. Then again, I have managed to sit in the sunshine this week, a little to the annoyance of my work-bound wife.

For now there is money and words keep me busy. Words are good for that. Pushing them around, checking them, feeling their weight and rhythm ­ – all of that is a mechanical task that can bring a sense of achievement. Hopefully those worker-ant words will bring money soon.

Being able to work on a novel in long stretches of three or four thousand words a day is different from getting up early before work and dashing off a page or so on a good day, before heading to the office to push different words around.

Do I still miss the office and the job? Oh, yes. But life changes and you have to change with it. This week I registered for an internet B&B service. The day after putting our house up there, we returned from playing badminton and I checked the emails. Someone wanted to stay for the next two nights, which is to say tonight and tomorrow.

A lot of cleaning and sorting ensued. Have you noticed how other people’s houses always seem clean and tidy? That’s because you have just arrived and they have been cleaning. In another context this is known as the Queen Smells New Paint Syndrome. Anyway, this evening our first guest will turn up. This isn’t a job, just something extra, a bit of pocket money and a chance to meet new people. But it is something different.

One friend made redundant in the past phoned this week with different advice. She wished she had enjoyed her time off work more. Instead she worried herself stupid. She has another job now, and she is back in the routine.

I like that advice, and will try to act on it. But at night those fretful bullets still ricochet around my head.

Troubling footnote: last night I lost a tooth. In the space of two weeks I have lost a job and now a bit of mouth ivory. The dentist will be able to sort out one, but not the other.

TODAY’S Man On Ledge takes the form of a political aside, as Thursday was column day for many years. So here’s a question: to what extent should the party in power be able to alter the electoral landscape in their favour?

This sort of thing has always gone on, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes not. One reason Margaret Thatcher wanted to allow people to buy their council homes was that she believed house-owners were more likely to vote Tory, to become, in the phrase of the day, “one of us”.

From the other side of the ravine, many Tories believed that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown created natural Labour voters by expanding the public sector, and also by making welfare payments more generous. As with selling council houses, that is a subtle form of possible vote manipulation. There are no guarantees. Someone who works in a state-run industry may or may not vote Labour, although the chances are perhaps higher.

At present we are seeing more blatant tinkering with democracy, including a Government attack on how Labour is funded, with union members being required to make a positive choice to pay a levy to Labour. If that does happen, Labour will have even less money than the Tories, but the party might at least be able to look for a different way ahead. Incidentally, you will not be surprised to learn that no new rules are being suggested to limit the extremely wealthy making generous bungs to Cameron and Co.

Boundary changes are also going to be introduced that will favour the Conservative Party: again, this isn’t exactly subtle, but it is the sort of massaging that does go on under all parties.

But one element of David Cameron’s strategy strikes me as more outrageous. This is the plan to extend the right to vote in our elections to ex-pats who have lived abroad for more than 15 years. The logic being that these suntanned refugees from Britain are more likely to vote Conservative. Now if that doesn’t look like a dodgy fix, then I don’t know what does. Surely if people love this country so much that they go and drink cocktails in the sunshine thousands of miles away, they should forfeit the right to vote on what happens back in rainy old Britain.

But this sharp bit of electoral accountancy does raise an intriguing possibility. If that is considered to be acceptable, will any future independence referendum north of the border therefore be open to anyone who has lived away from Scotland for 15 years? And will the promised EU referendum be open to relocated Brits who actually live in Europe? Well, it’s a thought.

IN A way I have my dream job now. Sitting at home and writing is something I have long fancied. The trouble is, at present it isn’t what you could call a job. The words are mounting up, with 3,000 to 5,000 words a day being added to the crime thriller, plus another 500 or so in the guise of Man On Ledge.

But there is no new money coming in, lots of words but no money. This situation cannot continue indefinitely. Those words will have to do their bit and carry a pound or two eventually. In my mind I see those words as ants busying away as they struggle with the coinage on their back, but perhaps I have drunk too much tea already.

In a way I had my dream job on the newspaper. Editing, writing, designing, running a small team, these tasks kept me gainfully employed and, for the most part, happy and fulfilled. There were dark moments, you know the sort, when you wake in a panic at some godforsaken hour to feel the weight of failure pressing down on your chest. This is it; this is all I will ever amount to. Then you get up and go to work, and the stone of anxiety rolls away.

But then the dream turned into one of those dreams where everything is in the wrong place. I believe they are commonly called nightmares. My job was swept away with an organisational flick, and suddenly a role that had kept me fully occupied, a job I was good at, wasn’t there any longer.

This is upsetting, disorientating, isolating, and many other negative things, but in the end you have to pick yourself up and press the self-reboot button.

In the fine city of York, where I live, you can find many people who used to work on my old newspaper. The most recent departures were editorial people in assorted jobs, but in the past printers, camera-room operators and lorry drivers were among those who left.

Indeed journalists took on roles once performed by printers and camera-room people, thanks to the march of computers. Hot metal was abandoned and cold typewriters too. For a while the newly tasked journalist was king, although without the royal salary. We could do everything. We ruled the world, and then one day we didn’t, or at least some of us didn’t.

There was no cockiness involved in this turnaround. We were too busy taking on all the new roles required of us. Then the plates moved again, the earth shook once more, and some of those who had risen took their turn to fall.

Writing these words in this space is one of the ways this cast-off journalist is attempting to get on with life. It’s a valuable experience, but those worker-ant words will have to pull their weight one day.

THERE was a tradition on the newspaper where I used to work, a nice tradition. Anyone leaving was presented with a mock-up front page of the paper, filled with a jokey story about the departing person. I was amused and touched by mine, and include a rather amateur snap of it here.

One of the jokes on my page was a strap across the bottom of the page inviting readers to turn to inside for “Julian’s David Cameron tribute column”. Ah, how well my friends and colleagues knew me.

There was no such column, of course, but the wit was clear. And in that spirit, Man On Ledge would like to provide a few words about the prime minister.

Don’t you just hate it when you address a room full of people and they all misunderstand what you say? There you are talking the most perfect sense, only you later discover that everyone in the room has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. There is only one stick, you are holding it and you jolly well know which end you are grasping.

This is what happened to David Cameron after he reportedly told a posse of national news reporters at the G7 conference in Germany that he intended to impose collective ministerial responsibility during the EU referendum.

Not surprisingly, all the national newspapers went big on this and ran do-as-you-are-told stories, only for head master Cameron to then summon the offending reporters to his study, as it were, to receive a prime ministerial bollocking. He had been misinterpreted, he said, and blamed the reporters for misunderstanding him.

In the TV news footage, Mr Cameron went a little pink, while the reporters shuffled around looking cross and exchanging glances.

So either it was a giant conspiracy by all the reporters from all the newspapers, each with their own agendas, or the head master had said something he later came to regret.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear David Cameron speak I try not to feel annoyed, which is a distraction, but instead concentrate on attempting to gauge whether or not the prime minister actually believes a word he is saying. Even when he passionately expresses himself about something or other, it is hard to tell whether the heat is real or confected.

Sometimes there does seem to be something wrong with the man’s temperature control, which can lead to him turning a funny colour.

David Cameron has just successfully won an election, so none of this will bother him immediately. But the way he apparently said one thing on Europe, then swore he hadn’t reminds us that Europe remains a political quagmire for the Tories.

But of course if all those irresponsible journalists with their digital recorders and their pesky shorthand, that’s if any still possess that skill, simply misreported what Cameron said – if they are indeed wilful mis-reporters ­– then there is nothing to worry about at all.

TODAY is my second Monday without an office to go to. Perhaps in time this will become the new normal. At present it still feels oddly dislocating, but the weekend was good, combining music and a lovely coastal walk.

Elvis Costello put on a great show in Harrogate on Saturday, coming on stage in a white fedora or some other sort of white hat, tipped at a jaunty angle. He was wearing a three-piece suit and his patter and anecdotes belonged to an old-time showman as much as a rock star, part Buddy Holly, part Eric Morecambe. But then Costello has always has his own complicated shadows, to adopt one of this own song titles, and a long solo concert, two-and-a-half hours, saw him navigate many of these shadows, showing his dark and light sides.

Costello is a still in great voice and he is a fully committed performer, rolling out song after song, sometimes acoustic, sometimes electric, then at the piano, but rarely less than electrifying to watch. For this observer, the highlights included Shipbuilding, Watching The Detectives, Alison, Pump It Up (that one rattled the dust in the mental attic) and, strangely She ­­­– the oddity being that I’ve always hated Costello’s version of that old song, yet played live with an acoustic guitar it really worked. No Indoor Fireworks or I Want You, but the man does have so many songs.

Someone in our party said that Costello should have done a cover version of a song with local links, suggesting I Predict A Riot. Surely in Harrogate that would have been I Predict A Polite Disagreement.

Then on Sunday a group of us, friends who like to walk, went to Ravenscar near Scarborough, and followed the old railway track to Robin Hood’s Bay. We had fish and chips, or fish and no chips, or chips and no fish, bought sizzling hot, and sat above the beach to eat. I had the works, loved every mouthful and carried a lead belly for the rest of the day. After lunch, we walked back along the beach and then up by the youth hostel, and climbed up towards Ravenscar, passing by the alum works.

As we headed for tea opposite where the station used to be, we passed the outlines of what might have been. Ravenscar is sometimes still known as the “town that never was”, thanks to ambitious Victorian plans to turn the place in a resort to rival Whitby and Scarborough. The Ravenscar Estate Company bought the area in 1895 for £10,000, laid drains and built new roads. But the north-easterly gales that can hit the area saw off potential buyers, and by 1913 the Ravenscar Estate Company went into liquidation, leaving only ghosts.

A lovely walk, with a hidden past. My own past is not so hidden, but it is just as gone.

June 6

ELVIS COSTELLO has always been a bit of a hero to me, although I have only seen him twice. The first time was a bit special. It was at a party thrown to mark the departure of Jools Holland from Squeeze.

This happened so long ago that sometimes I have wondered if it can have happened at all. The leaving of Jools tied in with the closure of a community arts venue in Deptford, south east London, where I was training to be a reporter. The Albany Empire was moving round the corner to a new building, and the old place hosted the party for Jools.

I searched online for proof that this wasn’t just a mental mirage, something wished into being through a hole in my mind. It took a while but I found the reassurance I sought on the Elvis Costello home page, where an excerpt from the New Musical Express of August 23, 1980, read: “Squeeze said goodbye to Jools Holland last week and there to send him laughing on his way was one Elvis Costello, that famous flashing smile spreading light all around him.”

And that is exactly how I remember Costello that night, and his appearance was a surprise of the sort you don’t usually stumble across. But then those were the Deptford days, when Squeeze once played on the roof of a pub in the high street, echoing The Beatles, and Dire Straits headlined a festival on a local council estate, called the Crossfield Estate, unless there really are holes in my memory.

The other time I saw Costello was at the York Barbican in 1994, so even that was an age ago, while that surprise concert was 35 years ago. Tonight will make it a third time as I’m off to see Costello at the Harrogate International Centre. This Year’s Model from 1978 was the album that played out my final year as a student. And ever since then, Costello has reinvented himself many times, and tried many different genres, some more successful than others, but he has never been more than thoroughly committed to his music and always interesting.

Incidentally, three years after Jools left, the Albany Empire staged a musical called Labelled With Love, inspired by their album East Side Story. As a young reviewer I was a little sniffy about this show, something which seems a shame now, but there you go. Incidentally mark two: Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze asked me to help him organise a Run The World run on Blackheath, which I did through the now defunct pages of the South East London Mercury, a once mighty local newspaper. The race was a success and I ran it too.

June 5

TODAY I have a drowning man on my mind. Pincher Martin is his name. “His mind inside his dark skull made swimming movements long after the body lay motionless in the water.” The phrase is repeated in the paragraph below: “His mind made swimming motions.”

This is what you get for hanging around with dusty old English Literature students. Pincher Martin was the third novel by William Golding, following Lord Of The Flies (the one everyone knows) and The Inheritors. In the book, Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed boat, is clinging to a rock and fighting for dear life.

I won’t spoil the story by repeating the two words a young man I once knew wrote on the opening page. Many and detailed are the notes inscribed in my old paperback copy (Faber, 95p). In red ink my student self writes of Prometheus being bound with indestructible chains and other things I no longer recall. How much we once knew and now much we forget.

My own chains have been broken. I am not drowning but standing on a ledge. This ledge exists in my mind but feels real enough. The wind blows and it’s a long way down. But you do at least get a view from a ledge. And sometimes there is company.

Years ago, Richard Thompson wrote a song called Meet On The Ledge:

“We’re gonna meet on the ledge
When my time is up I’m gonna see all my friends
Meet on the ledge…”

Being made redundant is strange and somewhat bewildering, but you have to get on with things. Any organisation/newspaper will survive the departure of a staff member or even a whole bunch of them. I have always known that much. No one is indispensable. Life will carry on without you, possibly in a diminished way, but it will continue. So dust yourself off and try to make a plan.

All this is what brought Pincher Martin to mind. Faber still publishes this classic (now it costs £8.99), and its website says: “This shocking, unusual bullet of a book is the definitive survival novel and has an ending that is guaranteed to leave you reeling.”

What I recall from long ago earnest discussions in seminar debates was that Golding’s novel addressed the idea that some people cannot imagine the world continuing after their deaths, while others have no problem in picturing this inevitable scenario, and might even be comforted by the thought of life going on without them.

That is what an eager young man learned many years ago, no doubt before going for a lunchtime pint in the union bar, spouting pretentious nonsense and falling in love with the third girl of the day. That’s what too many years in a boys’ grammar school did to you back then.

As for Pincher Martin, it must be time to read that scrawled on copy again. I might even learn something from myself.

June 4

A LONG time ago I once had breakfast with the TV impresario Michael Grade. I think he was boss of Channel 4 at the time. It wasn’t anything personal, just one of those business breakfasts. Well, I say just one of those business breakfasts, but it’s the only one I can recall ever attending.

Anyway, because of our fleeting intimacy over the croissants, I have always noticed when Michael Grade has something to say. Three years or so ago, he made an enjoyable BBC4 programme about pantomime, in which York panto dame Berwick Kaler was given much prominence, and I noticed that.

Now what I have noticed is a sensible quote from Grade with regards to the Home Secretary’s plan to vet TV shows for extremism. Theresa May wants the media regulator Ofcom to take “tough measures against channels that broadcast extremist content”.

This is one of those measures that are designed to sound reasonable. In fact David Cameron thinks the proposals are “extremely sensible” which ought perhaps to make us extremely suspicious. But are they sensible or just a display of what might be termed populist knee-jerkery, to coin a phrase?

Grade is a former chairman of the BBC and chief executive of ITV and Channel 4, so his CV puts most of us to shame. What he was quoted as saying about May’s proposal was this: “I would be very suspicious of ex-ante powers of publication being given to a regulator or anyone. The old Hugh Cudlipp dictum of publish and be damned still holds forth. You would have to see the details of any proposal but I think it would be very difficult to justify.”

I had to Google “ex-ante” and it means “before the event”. Cudlipp, meanwhile, was the editor of the Daily Mirror who led the paper during its mighty days in the 1950s and 1960s.

So what May wants is for broadcasters to be vetted before they can show anything which might be considered extremist. There are deeply worrying shades of opinion in this suggestion, and deeply worrying notions of a Home Secretary wanting in effect to muzzle broadcasters. How the media covers extremism is a tricky business. Even saying exactly where religious conservatism becomes extremism is a tricky business. But if we can’t study something, how do we learn about it?

It occurs to me that I have filled this blog with a column. It must be Thursday.

FOLK FOOTNOTE: Well, there’s a deflating Tweet: That’s All Folks – Bellowhead Call Time eepurl.com/bpaEnH

There is symmetry to the announcement that Bellowhead are calling it a day. The gloriously rumbustious folk super-band contains 11 musicians and is stepping away after 11 years following what started as a one-off experiment at the first Oxford Folk Festival.

Lead vocalist and fiddle player Jon Boden wants to step down, and the band doesn’t wish to carry on without him, saying: “We have therefore decided that we should give Bellowhead the send-off it deserves and go out with a bang.”

Well, their concerts always go with a bang. I’ve seen the band three times in York, once at the Grand Opera House and twice at the Barbican ­– some of the best gigs ever. Tickets for the final two-part tour in November this year and May next year go on sale next week.

June 3

I WON’T make this the insomnia diaries, for risk of sending the reader to sleep and achieving what so often eludes me. Let’s just say that last night wasn’t tender: asleep from around 11pm to 1.30am, pretty much awake from then until four, then asleep until 5.30am. The sleeplessness isn’t connected to my situation or at least I don’t think so. This pattern has been going on for years, on and off. Perhaps the night will soften again soon. The only trouble is that the reported side effects of insomnia include dementia and heart attacks, to call to mind two. It’s enough to keep you awake at night.

It is also not my intention to look backwards too often. Still, it is hard not to transpose this week onto last week, and all the others leading up to it. Wednesday was always the toughest day, working flat out from 7.45am to around 6pm, with a quick walk down the road for a coffee from the Polish restaurant and ten minutes or so sandwich time. The rest of the day was given over to editing the letters, checking my column, seeing off the property pages, and then putting together the What’s On supplement for the next day. Wednesday was a day full of rigour and routine, but now I have to make my own structure, with coffee being served in the kitchen at around eleven. After a few more words here, I shall return to the novel. But stay around, for there are some good words coming up.

Thanks to Blake Morrison, poet, writer and the man who once got me a part-time job on The Observer, for the following. Last weekend The Guardian literary supplement had the clever idea of asking writers to choose the words they love. Morrison, a man of the Dales, dredged up some lovely Yorkshire words, the best being dialect words for fools and scoundrels. And here, to close today, are some of them: bizzumhead, dunderknowle, hauvey-gauvey, ragabash and fustilugs. Say them out loud, it’s really worth it.

June 2

Man On Ledge was saddened by the news today about Charles Kennedy. He always seemed like a clever and decent man, possessed of sharp wit and a proper sense of humour, something so often discouraged in our politicians and indeed in public life. For the former Liberal Democrat leader to have died at only 55 is shocking, and a sad conclusion to a once high-flying life. He was only 23 when he was elected as MP for Ross, Cromarty and Skye in 1983 for the SDP/Lib-Dem Alliance (what an age ago that arrangement seems). His easy TV manner earned him the nick-name of Chat Show Charlie, yet he was a serious man beneath that, as shown by his principled opposition to the war in Iraq. He was a man with the common touch, and a man with acknowledged drink problems. A proper, complex human being, in other words, high-flying then brought low. A full life emptied far too soon.

If I my bottom was still parked in the office, this is the sort of topic we would probably be chatting about over the computer screen. The lack of company is one of the challenges of working from home. My time doing this is too short to draw conclusions, yet the company will certainly be missed. There is a lot of incidental companionship in an office, people to chat to, people to say hello to. At home today there is only the cat and me, and the cat is asleep, curled up in a feline self-embrace of fur and warmth (unlike the writer, who is a bit of an insomniac, prone to yawning away the day).

At work there was the tea room/kitchen or whatever, a mini hub of conversation, a place for gossipy communion, somewhere to catch up. I don’t expect to find anyone in our kitchen when I go down to switch on the kettle. No one will wander in while the kettle boils. At least I hope not, as it would be a shock rather a comfort.