Postal Strike

I earn a very modest income from freelance writing. All my payments come in the form of cheques that (normally) plop through the letterbox at irregular intervals and set me leaping and whooping all the way to the bank, where, if I'm lucky, they clear just in time to pay the direct debits.

I was just due for a couple, amounting to around £600, when the strike began. I was also expecting: an important book from Amazon which will form the basis of a meeting with a publisher and a possible commission; a pair of winter boots ordered online; an 'insomnia cure' in the form of a machine that pumps soothing noises into your stressed lughole and (I hope) cancels out the sound of Mr Boom-Box driving past at 3 am with his car windows open and stereo pumping 10,000 decibels into the owl-flapping, bat-sniping night.

Then there was the First Aid DVD. I ordered that just before the last postal strike and it has never come - and I've forgotten who I ordered it from. There was the £40-worth of anti-ageing skin products (don't laugh); I aged ten years while waiting for them and eventually the firm had to send out another batch and put in a claim against Royal Mail. As did an Irish firm from which I ordered.... no, can't say. Too personal. The embarrassment of phoning to say the goods hadn't arrived was second only to the way the humorous Irishman at the other end of the line gently joshed me as he spoke about the product.

And now it's all happening again and I, along with many other of the self-employed who are flapping gently about at the bottom of the income pool like so many floundering fish, are all washed up for real. I can't take it any more. I am about to shoot myself in the brain with an iced vodka bullet. This could really be my last post.