I had a job interview on Monday and another on Tuesday.

On Monday I sat in an office with two well-fed men in their late 40s/early 50s exploring the ways I could help their law firm rise from the play-off places in the Championship to mid-Premiership anonymity.  That job would involve a lot of shuffling piles of papers from one side of a desk to the other and would pay over 3.5 times the national average salary with the potential to earn telephone numbers in the longer term in the (highly unlikely) event I ever made partnership.

On Tuesday I sat in an office with some terribly posh, well-fed men in their late 40s/early 50s exploring the ways I could help a very large and prestigious merchant bank to continue to make gazillions of pounds every working day from activities that seem to add little value to human life.  That job would equally involve a lot of shuffling piles of papers from one side of a desk to the other and would pay a steady five times the national average salary.

Both jobs would stimulate me intellectually only rarely, though both would involve 12-14 hour days.

This evening my mind turned to mush as I slumped in front of Richard & Judy; one of the eponymous duo’s guests was the actress Trudie Goodwin, who is to leave The Bill this week after 23 years playing June Ackland.  She wanted to leave, she said, because she was bored of playing the same character and wanted to do something different in her career.

I went through the motions in both interviews, but I essentially felt (and still feel) like Ms. Goodwin.  I desperately wish it wasn’t the case but I would rather stab myself repeatedly in the eyeball with an HB pencil than sign up to another soulless gig in another soulless law firm or business.  Being a solicitor is so boring that I once seriously considered quitting the profession to become a florist, purely on the back of an execrable movie called Bed Of Roses; worse still, I repeatedly regret not having done so.  (Years ago, one former colleague apparently quit the law to become a reflexologist.  She was a bit odd generally, but she clearly had far more sense herself than the rest of us collectively.)

If I’d had half-an-inch of spine when I was 18 I would have stuck to my guns and studied Modern History & Politics at university instead of Law.  If I hadn’t been a borderline lush when I was 21, I wouldn’t have waddled, blindfolded, into the profession just because a law firm waved a cheque under my nose and I couldn’t be arsed to go out and find a real job for myself.

Last birthday I hit the halfway point on the road to my three score years and ten.  Is this a mid-life crisis?  I’m not sure.  It may have something to do with the fact that on the way to and from Monday’s interview I read the novel based on this blog.

There is probably a moral to this story but at the moment I’ll settle for a decent night’s sleep.