ANYTHING TO AVOID A PROPER JOB

Looking over the accounts of the business this week I have concluded that the recession has at last caught up with Acme Labels Inc. We are down on last year and unless matters improve soon we shall be heading for Carey Street. Like all businesses we are subject to the vagaries of new and inconvenient technology and an ever-changing market; more and more people are printing their own labels these days (or making do without) and the High Street DVD rental shops that once formed our core market are now largely a relic of the past.

I am not yet ready to retire - nor can I afford to - so I have been idly flicking through job advertisements only to find myself shuddering at the thought of ever working again for someone other than myself.

I am fortunate in that the labels business is not our only source of income. I still do a little consultancy and writing. So I was really looking for further project and writing opportunities rather than a 9 to 5 job in a company. But what surprised me was the dread I encountered when contemplating the job descriptions that flashed up on the screen.

Fear of imprisonment would not be too strong a phrase to describe this; the fear both of physical incarceration in an office (often a great big office) and mental incarceration of being at someone else's beck and call the whole time.

This was the principal reason that I escaped from the Civil Service in mid career in 1982 - an act which every one of my contemporaries thought to be mad at the very least. Had I stayed I would now be enjoying a most comfortable pension and my salary would have mounted (I assume) rather nicely in the interim as well. I could have been a pillar of the community and, if I had been really effective, perhaps even received a minor honour as well. These things do happen.

But I felt then - and looking at today's job advertisements confirms this - that I was selling my soul. I needed to be free to do my own thing, work in my own way. I wanted to be creative. Consultancy was acceptable because I was largely on my own - I travelled a lot and I met many interesting people all over Europe. I was even, for a time, reasonably well rewarded, though my financial career has always resembled an alpine range in its high peaks and low troughs.

So I was cheered this week at the same time as peering into the next threatening financial abyss to read an account of work undertaken by the Institute of Employment Studies which shows that people who value creativity above wealth are actually happier and therefore better able to survive in these tough economic times without losing their equilibrium.

Many of these people (and I suspect that they include many of my friends on Purple Coo) make their living by mixing a range of free-lance projects and part-time jobs. They may not earn much, their report says, but working in this way does make them happy.

Three quarters, it suggests, are satisfied with their working arrangements as opposed to a national average figure of only 44 per cent.

What!? Less than half of all people working are happy with their lot? That adds up to a vast number of miserable people. And if each is dragging the other down it is no wonder we are a country beset by social problems. We may or we may not be a 'broken society' as David Cameron likes to claim, but we are certainly an unhappy and unfulfilled society if these figures are to be believed.

Certainly when I consider my contemporaries there are very few with whom I would rather change positions. And it would take wild horses to make me leave my comfortable little office (the smallest room in the house, but I like the feeling of snugness with everything to hand and no space for intruders), other than for a brief and occasional trip to London or Brussels for a little bit of work-related excitement.

The one thing that you could say about working in an organisation is that it provides a ready bunch of social acquaintances. In the 1960s and 70s when everyone went to the pub at lunchtime and on a Friday evening, this was all rather fun. But even that pleasure has gone today.

By contrast it is the stay-at-homers who now have all the fun using the time they don't spend commuting for social-networking on the internet, that great water-cooler in the sky.

So rather than being tempted back I shall just keep plodding on, confident in the knowledge that I am happy and that something will turn up. For that is what somethings always do, I tell myself; they turn up. Most people find a way of muddling through if the shoe really pinches. Having lost all his money, Jeffrey Archer sat down and wrote a best-seller. You never know, I may just have to do that. Anything to avoid a 'proper' job.