Avoiding the Company of the Grim Reaper.

When I was 21 I became unemployed. I hated the job I was doing so much that I walked out and threw myself into the welcoming arms of what was then called the Labour Exchange. There was very little unemployment at that time, and the job of the clerk was to go through his little tray of cards and select a job or jobs for which one was obliged to apply. He gave me two: slaughterhouse operative at the town abattoir and grave digger at the town cemetery.

As you can imagine, there was no contest. Spending my days killing animals would have sent me to an early grave myself, so it seemed a much better idea to spend my time digging other people’s. I thought it might be a little creepy, but consoled myself with the notion that it would afford plenty of opportunity to make Yorick jokes to colleagues who didn’t know whether Yorick was a brand of toothpaste or a slang term for the male member. I rang the number and was told to start the next morning.

I overslept the next morning, and when I rang in to apologise and assure them that I was on my way, they told me not to bother. They wanted somebody reliable, they said, and I obviously wasn’t. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘that’s a relief. I wanted an employer who allows a chap to make one mistake without flying off the handle.’

I spent the rest of the summer watching cricket on the TV, decorating the house, and fishing. It was a good summer in which nothing and nobody died. In the autumn I got a job on the admin staff of a young offenders institution, and not a single one of them was ever executed.