It’s 11pm and Buffy is on in 35 minutes. I have to conjure up something vaguely readable by the end of the night, before I start a few packed days of “stuff” – like “normal” people, I suppose. It’s called work. But it’s work that, at the moment, is just not producing the spondoolicks that the taxman, the landlord, the phone companies and the bank want from me.

It’s the sort of work that, perhaps, those who have recently graduated in the caring professions will recognise – the sort of voluntary/semi-apprentice/charity/do-gooder activity that looks great on the CV, that builds up a network of contacts, that helps you hear about the good jobs that are around, the worthwhile companies, the nightmare bosses. It’s the stuff that gets you good references, but pays you peanuts. If you’re a carer, there is no New Age of plenty – it’s a hard slog. The feminist revolution will only truly come of age when an old nurse gets paid as much as an old consultant, when caring as a quality – emotional intelligence – is valued as much as intellectual rigour and encyclopaedic memory.

So, why am I not writing this missive to my loyal readers in a sensible fashion? During the day, for example? Treat it seriously, like a professional journalist? Pretend I’m a real writer?

Ah, yes. The “real writer”.

Were I a real writer, I’d not have to worry about money, it would all be flooding in from Japanese translations of my best-selling angst-ridden trilogy, The Boy With The World On His Shoulders. I’d have time to travel and see lost Inca cities and spend every autumn in an old Etruscan village to tend to my vineyard.

I’d wake up to The Irish Times and an espresso and spend a few hours each morning devoted to teasing out the sexual conceits of my subtle anti-hero on my laptop, followed by lunch with a Hollywood comedy writer, who once was a cabbie. We’d spend a pleasant trip down nostalgia lane reminiscing about how good it was, when times were hard. Then a trip to a gallery, a walk through young-old streets towards a creamy pint, followed by dinner with a loved one or two, out on the decking overlooking the pond and the trees, and then cuddles on clean lavender-steeped sheets before midnight.

But no. I’m not a real writer, obviously. Today, I woke up late, sleeping off a bad cold. I’d arranged to help my neighbour install her new light fittings, so we gossiped over coffee and I heard the sobering news that a woman was raped in our estate a fortnight ago in the bin-shed, but nobody’d been officially told about it. On her table was a note from her 7-year old for Mother’s Day: “I love you so much Mummy I treat you like a queen but you are better than a queen happy mother’s day”. I guess I’ll never know that love, again. Or that innocence. Again. On with the wiring. Tada! They look great. Then back to my blank computer screen. Oh yes, plenty of emails to answer, I do them for a while.

Oh yes, avoidance techniques. I must be a real writer, after all. Today, Bootboy day, I washed up every scrap of about three weeks’ worth of dishes, watered the plants, emptied the bins, disinfected the pedal-bin, changed the cat-litter, sent off two invoices, put up a few more flyers in a shop, and paid a final demand bill by phone.

My main obsession this week has been chasing up a part-time job (one afternoon a week) that I really, really want, that I applied for a month ago. I’ve been applying for lots of stuff recently, ducking and diving, little Internet schemes here, few hours’ work there, brochures, flyers, CVs, search engines, trying to get the money in. They call it a portfolio career. They do. Really.

But this particular job isn’t about money, it’s about doing something I’ve had lots of experience in, and would have a hell of a lot of fun doing, as well as a little regular income. Almost a vocation, if pagans are allowed such pretension.

But when I called Ian yesterday at the privatised employment section of the council that’s offering the job, I hear that I haven’t been shortlisted for interview. Actually, that’s not the whole truth. I also heard, while Ian held the wrong button down that didn’t put me on hold, that Jim is going in for a brain scan on Friday, and that it was all very freaky, wasn’t it? Who would have thought it? he asked his colleague in the office, who was going home for the day at 4pm.

I certainly wouldn’t have, I felt like saying. But I held my bitter tongue.

This was when I was stupid with my cold, and wasn’t feeling much like loving the world. I tried a forced polite enjoinder for Ian to let me know why I wasn’t shortlisted, and he hummed and hawed and said that there were far too many applicants for him to go into details with everyone.

Not everyone, Ian. Just me. Get it? Just me. Me, me, me.

I know when I get, as we say in astrology, plutonic. It’s the sort of mood where steam hisses out of every pore, when looks curdle milk at fifty paces, and smiles are so brittle that they cut. So I cut my losses instead, and regrouped to the sofa and duvet with Lem-Sip and telly and a big bunch of South African grapes that still feel slightly wrong to eat, even after apartheid. But let’s not go there. All storms blow over.

So, this morning, feeling vaguely less murderous, I imagine myself in the place of the woman who runs the job agency, and fantasise about just the sort of good-humoured, non-confrontative, confident letter that might get her to ask Ian, down in Applications, to send her up my file for a quick look-see.

I spend hours composing it, rehashing highlights of my erratic but fascinating CV and adding a dose of witty pleasantries that one would hope would convey the air of someone sincerely baffled that a slight procedural error has resulted in this minor oversight, which could be easily corrected by picking up the phone and adding my name to a list, without anyone losing face or feeling pressurised. In local government in New Labour Britain, everything has to be so transparent and egalitarian that it’s almost done by quotas now. Interview questions are read out, in monotonous tones, the same for each applicant. We shall not have individuality, is the message. We shall have conformity.

I tried, in my letter to a woman I’ve never met, to imply that she has the key to making a faceless bureaucracy human, responsive, and adaptable. To refuse would be churlish. You see, when people turn me down, I want them to know it. To really know it. Ever the narcissist, they have to feel some twinge, even if it’s a slight shudder of guilt, when they’ve said no to such a talented, creative, and hysterically humorous guy. And I will move mountains to make it happen.

That’s avoidance technique number 74, which successfully takes all afternoon. Next comes cooking, eating, hanging three loads of washing up. Iron shirts for the next few days, as shirts will be needed. Phonecalls from wandering minstrels wondering have I recognised their gifts, and do I want to play? Yes, indeedy, and no, I’ve got a column to write. I’m an artiste. The world owes me a living.

As I finish this, a poem is emailed to me by a friend whose light is burning bright at the moment. The last four lines go:

“So many words/Lost in the wide world/Within me, and thereby to have known/That in spite of myself/I am here./As if this were the world.” – from In Memory of Myself by Paul Auster.

And it’s 2am. Definitely missed Buffy. Up for a day’s training in five-ish hours.

A writer’s life. It would be nice.