A comment earlier got me thinking about my working life. Could it really be that I have been self-employed since I could pay tax? Before the age of sixteen I was a paper boy, a grocer’s lad, a walker of retired greyhounds and, I can only hope, a source of abiding shame to the people who took advantage of me.

In the early days, my activities were largely untaxable. There was an import business. Pills, at the pinnacle of their chemical purity, pressed to a standard that would have impressed a Swiss watchmaker.

Then came second-hand books, followed by first-hand writing, which turned out to be the first thing I loved enough to do sober. I got clean because I wanted to get better at it as myself, not as a tribute act to Hubert Selby Jr, Philip K. Dick or any other chemically assisted genius whose mistakes looked more glamorous from a distance than they did up close.

I’ve never had a “proper” job. A salary. A line manager. A Human Resources department asking whether I had considered my tone. Just one long chain of schemes, commissions, hustles, deadlines and invoices stretching from childhood to middle age.

Looking back, it occurs to me that self-employment wasn’t a career choice so much as a diagnosis.