Because Good Men Get Shafted Too

Here's a dilemma for all of you ethicists out there.

The sum total of all my worldly goods is £194. I currently have two bailiffs and three banks chasing me for the £22,000 that I owe them. Clearly, divvying up the £194 is not going to satisfy them much.

As I own no home, have no savings and no income neither as I haven't been allowed a proper job for seven years, the chances of me leaping back into solvency are somewhat dim.

I do have a car, I forgot about that. I have a VW Golf which is worth £700 tops. I suppose the bailiffs could have that, although it would be a bit of a drag if they did because although I cannot drive it [as I cannot afford to insure it, not even just third party] I was planning on using it to sleep in, in that scrunched-up sort of way that gives you backache in the morning.

Get a job, you might say, go out selling double-glazing, become a something. And ordinarily I would agree with you, but I'm 55 and the moment anyone in HR sees that age you may as well put 'child rapist' or 'Catholic priest' as your occupation for all the good it won't do you.

I suppose I could lie and claim to be 33 but  suffering from that disease that makes you age so rapidly that Channel 4 wants to make a voyeuristically-sick documentary about you, but then 'disease' is not much of a good word to use in an application form either.

I could be honest and write in the 'previous experience' box that for a very long time I used to be one of the closest and most-trusted aides to the most famous man in the world [not the Pope, bigger than that] but when I have put that in past applications, including the one I made to fill cream buns on a production line in a cakes factory, they either don't believe me or, I guess, the adjudicating HR executive was a Stones fan.

I applied to teach journalism several times. The HR bloke - whom I rang after not hearing anything - said did I have any experience? I said I had been a journalist for 30+ years, five of them in Fleet Street and 15 as head of press to the most famous man in the world. Ah, he said, but do you have any teaching experience, could you pass on what you know?

Well yes, actually, I said. And he said, do you have a certificate to prove that? And I said, well it doesn't prove anything, does it, a certificate? I have a certificate for A-level Economics but that doesn't qualify me to be a banker. Whereas 30 years experience does qualify me to lecture in journalism.

Sorry, he said, no certificate no job. So I said do you have a certificate in teaching journalism? He said no, but what did that have to do with it? I said, well then how can you be qualified to tell me that I am not qualified?

He said that was not how it worked. He then rang off which was a shame because my next question was going to be where did he get his certificates in being an asshole.

I applied to be a street-sweeper once. I figured that I had the experience for that and my own broom. The town council didn't even write back. I wrote to them three times and they still just blanked me. Last week I read in the local paper an article about the same town council kicking up merry hell about the untidy state of the streets around here.

So here's the dilemma - clearly I am £194 short of being destitute. But I do have a life insurance policy which will pay out a quarter of a million pounds in the event of me getting dead. Although I cannot see how it could have been legal, or at least moral, for them to have done so, when Barclays Bank sold me the policy it came without a suicide clause.

Or rather the policy states that the insurance is not valid if I committed suicide within the first year of its term. If I killed myself after that, then that would be fine and they'd pay out the £250,000.

Seeing as I took out the policy in 1990, I should therefore be quids in [apart from the actual being alive bit].

So, dilemma - do I do the decent thing and thereby pay off the banks and the bailiffs, with more than a little to spare to cover the Mars Bars and crisps that they'd need for the long drive from Doncaster to come and knock rudely on my door, or do I put the hosepipe away and soldier on in this blind optimism that at some point certain people might grow a conscience?