There has been some grim news lately, God knows, but on St Patrick’s Day the Daily Mail came up with a front-page headline that cheered me up to no end: “DEATH OF THE WORK ETHIC”. Finally, I thought. I have been fighting the work ethic ever since I was first given homework, which severely cut into my free time at home – time that could have been better spent, in my view, by staring at the walls and saying, “I’m bored.” Actually, I didn’t do that. As you can imagine, I was a voracious reader as a child, and there were plenty of books in the home. Strangely, few, if any, of these books were any help when it came to doing my homework. History was always the worst. We had a set of the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was helpful up to a point, but I always felt that any plagiarism would be easy to spot. I remember we were once told to go away and write a biography of a former cabinet minister and in desperation I picked Selwyn Lloyd, former chancellor of the Exchequer, because he had the same first name as my grandfather. The only thing that could have been worse than writing my homework would have been to read it. As for trying to dig out, pre-internet, enough facts about life in 18th-century England: that experience scarred me. I still have an unreasonable prejudice against the 18th century.
Cut forward to my first holiday job, delivering newspapers. I liked the fresh summer mornings but I hated getting up for them, especially when it was raining, and the pay was an insult. My first actual job was at an importer of Indian furniture and knick-knacks in East Finchley, north London, and I got to wear one of those brown grocers’ overcoats you don’t see any more. My co-worker, several decades older than me, taught me the importance of the tea and fag break, to the point that what I really did during the day was have the occasional work break during a whole day of sipping tea and having a thoughtful cigarette. The second I was able to claim the dole, I was out of there.
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