At the 60th Birthday Party of a dear friend, Zak, I was talking with my friend Nina, who is a Social Worker. She was bemoaning the fate of the modern profession which she tells me is now around 80% paperwork. She spends the larger proportion of her time not doing social work but writing reports and filling in forms. She also added that it is the young, inexperienced colleagues, just fresh out of training, who are assigned to the worst child protection cases, because nobody else wants to do them. They are chronically understaffed with very little admin back-up, and so it is no wonder that problems arise. We worked together in the good old days in the Inner London Education Authority, a world-class organisation that was abolished by Margaret Thatcher's administration in 1990. What a monumental act of vandalism. However, if it had remained, so would I, and I would now be retired and on permanent holiday - a thought to conjure with. Instead, I am still in harness, under the hardest of slave-driver bosses (ie, myself.)

Life has been good to me in the intervening years and I could never return to being employed in a corporate setting. Being one's own boss can be hard, and has its own pressures, but ultimately so rewarding.