It’s started. Oh god. It’s started. Nooooooooooo.

My head being crushed by a cold, I was innocently surfing the Guardian website on Friday when I came across this, an introduction to a review of the noughties. Aside from causing me to hate the word ‘noughties’ even more, it made me swear very loudly and write an angry Facebook update.

I wonder why it jolted me so much. For me, the current decade didn’t really start until about 2003 at least. And then it got me thinking about 10 years ago. Christ. For me, 1999 was a chaos of wrong turns and butterflies ballroom dancing in Tonga, seemingly for my sole benefit. How can I forget all the media roundups that were thrown at us as 1999 came to a close, ushering in not only the millennium, but what was to be one of the worst years of my life.

And now the tide of decadeist reflection has begun, and isn’t going to stop for another, what, three months. Of course, one way to fend off the sense of doom is for me to write some decade review stuff of my own, I guess.

So what have we got now? Before New Year’s Eve 1999, people overbought in Sainsbury’s due to fear of the Millennium Bug. Now people are spending, or being asked to spend, exponentially more due to global warming, which really has no time limit on it. The chicken korma-dipped, bleached bunny porn star look for women was still a tiny bit ironic 10 years ago, but now it’s ubiquitous and almost obligatory. Now ordinary people have flatscreen TVs mounted on the wall. iPods. Broadband. 1TB+ drives. All driven by porn, as was technology in the previous two decades.

Remind me, what else is there?

An occasional series, as usual. I’ve been meaning to park this one for ages.

The Cut Price Hero is a man or woman who tells you, in proud and slightly hushed tones: ‘Last year, I bought my mother’s council house for her.’

Let’s stop there for a moment. How wonderful, you are meant to think, that this person has pulled themselves up from such humble beginnings to such levels of success that they are able to pay for their maw’s security in the form of an entire property. See: any number of footballers, pop stars, and, I seem to remember, a lawyer of my ex-acquaintance. Cockles warm enough yet?

Look again. They think themselves terribly clever for doing this, as of course their mum’s house would have been available at a great discount, thanks to the Tories’ right-to-buy scheme that squats immovably in the middle of public life like a dropsical Godzilla.

But if these people really were the caring souls they wish to appear, they would have bought their mum a nicer house from a mainstream outlet, meaning she could put her original home back into the council reserves, thus enabling an overcrowded family who has spent years in temporary accommodation to have somewhere decent to live.

But we don’t think like that, do we?

I really should be on Grumpy Old Women.

Well, it’s always the networking season, really, although this time of year always has that back-to-school feeling – back to roaring crowds in wine bars and Let Me Give You My Card. I figure it’s a numbers game for now, getting as much face time as possible with as many people as you can bear, before they get too drunk. It’s a kind of career speed dating, and in fact I have a strong suspicion that a good number of the folks I’ve seen out in Soho are also on Guardian Soulmates.

But what’s everyone really doing? In my travels I’ve come across an awful lot of people involved in startups that seem to serve no more purpose than to flesh out their CV. ‘It’s a social networking website, like Facebook, but exclusive. You have to be invited.’ So you and your friends all invite each other and you, uh, email each other through the site, right? Cool! Why didn’t I think of that!

‘I’m a Twitter developer.’ Okaay. Presumably you do a lot of other developer-type things as well, food and shelter being at a premium these days. Actually, I’ve already dumped Twitter. When someone develops an instant chatroom function where a few people can add a tag and chat in private, I’ll return with a vengeance. Possibly.

And how could I not mention one of my old favourites? ‘Why do you want to write PR and commercial stuff when you’ve done books? You’ve got to do what you love.’ Thanks, lovey. Economics clearly wasn’t one of her strong points, which became even clearer when she advised me: ‘Never lower your rates. It’s better to work for nothing.’ Not many minutes of not very probing chat revealed that she had been doing just that for quite a while.

I don’t mean to be nasty. We’re all flapping about in the duckpond right now, but my readers will remember that this line of questioning pushes my buttons, because I find it so dumb. I’m trying to imagine a similar conversation with, say, an artist, who told me they were getting into graphic or web design. In fact I’m going to ask around visual artists who are turning to commercial work and find out if they encounter this as well.

However, the reality is that art scares people who aren’t involved in it. There is both a fascination and a resentment, rolled up together. People are sometimes even in awe of you, and express wonder that you even need to work at all(!). This of course clouds any other impressions of your potential as an employee. I actually asked a copywriting guru about this recently, and he advised me to hide the fact that I have done a certain creative thing which I will henceforth not mention, even though it’s on my website for all to see.

The issue may be this: If you create stuff, like books and paintings and films, there is a tangible result to what you do. A lot of people’s jobs however, seem to involve a whole load of phone calls, emails, meetings, and presentations, but with no tangible product at the end. Are there some archetypes here?

How did I get to the Art Rant when I was writing about networking? Because, I guess, you can run but you can’t hide. Or something like that.

I may have forgotten to mention it, but I’ve been on Blog Strike for the last two months. I got tired of the relentless unpaid self-promotion that we’re all supposed to be getting on with, every minute that we’re not working for, you know, actual money. Besides, most of the things I really want to blog about are probably best done under a pseudonym.

However, due to the flood of requests to start up again, here I am. Plus, I just had a wonderful holiday in Greece, and it’s autumn, which always makes me feel relieved.

I’m still on Tweet Strike, mind.

OK OK, I’ve heard enough people tell me that the first thing they’re asked in job interviews nowadays is ‘Do you blog?’ So just for completeness, I’ll join in.

Roy Greenslade made this comment about the middle class taking over the media a whole week ago, but there has been much to ruminate on, and the issues aren’t going to go away. Plus, the comments, astonishingly, are constructive and interesting, and not the usual stream of vitiated, embittered bile you’d expect in newspaper web comments.

Anyway, Roy Greenslade has been teaching at City University in London for five years. Their journalism MA, he says, now costs £8,000. Eight grand! A woman I know told me she had to drop out of the City course, a couple of years ago, after a term, because of the cost of having to relocate to London. That’s not right.

And I wonder, how does anyone do it? Actually this isn’t just about ‘working class’ versus ‘middle class’, it’s about rich versus not rich. Plenty of the despised ‘middle class’ has very little spare cash, although the way some people carry on, you’d think we all lived in castles. And anyone leaving college in the last how many years [Google's not giving it up right now] will be saddled with a stack of debt. Mind you, I’m also astounded by the number of people whose parents buy them flats while they’re at university. Hardly anyone had that when I was an undergraduate.

And why does journalism have to be taught at this level? What happened to learning on the job?

Just for fun, let’s go back in time, to 1990, when I was a student at City. From the late 80s I’d become aware of the concept of the unpaid internship, and wondered how people did it. Then I got a traineeship on a Sunday paper, and part of the year’s training was a term at City. It was a very good course, taught by ex-journalists and editors from the national press, but I was dealing with some health problems at the time and probably should have deferred it.

There was quite a spread of people in the class, but there were a few staggeringly well-connected people who made the likes of me look like chavs. These are the people you know will probably float to the top, whatever they do. One of the tutors had a hard-on for a) the male students, and b) the posh ones, and made her preference clear. I remember one time in her office, when we were having a chat about my inability to get out of the bed in the mornings, and my constant tiredness. I actually had something quite nasty, and sobbed as I told her. She had never heard of it, however, looked at me as if I was mad, and I had to explain to her in detail. During my tearful account of it all, her phone rang. It was a student, one of the super-posh ones. She had called the tutor to say that although she had had tonsillitis, she was going to file a piece of work only half a day late.

After hanging up, the woman looked at me and said, ‘Xxxxx, she’s such a trooper.’

Oh esprit d’escalier! Oh to punch folk in the face with impunity! I gained some consolation from the fact that, over the following 15 years, every time I ran into someone who was on the course, they had exactly the same impression of her.

For contrast, there was another tutor who was exactly the opposite, had a massive chip on his shoulder and favoured anyone who identified as ‘working class’; openly, if indirectly, despising anyone who wasn’t.

Now I look back, their behaviour was kind of outrageous, really, but, with the benefit of years, perhaps they were just trying to teach us that this is the way it works, in journalism as anywhere else.

As soon as I decide to have a news blackout, because I’m sick of it all, a very sad booze story pops up in the media, and they called me in this morning, to talk about alcohol and the workplace.

Here’s the audio.

Someone asked me the other day if there was an excerpt from Cleaning Up on this site, and I realised there wasn’t.

So here’s the introduction as a pdf.

I’ve been dying to get this one off my chest. What better time than the fourth day of a nasty cold that has kept me indoors and away from other homo sapiens for too long.

The conversation, which has been occurring for years now, goes something like this:

I start chatting with someone who runs a graphic design/web design/advertising/digital marketing company. I tell them, or they are already aware, that I have written two novels and – more recently – a memoir. We talk about work for a while, and when it becomes clear that their output includes copywriting, I say, casually:

‘Do you ever use freelance writers?’

And they look at me, utterly baffled, and they say ‘You mean creative writing?’

And I open my mouth to reply, and they say ‘Oh no, we don’t do anything like that. What we do is commercial, technical.’

And I realise that because I once had some fiction published, they have automatically labelled me as someone who only knows how to write about ice creams melting and shadows dancing on walls and memories lost and found, and I couldn’t possibly turn my hand to anything else.

No matter that I’ve also written features, columns, news, reviews, websites, press releases, and newsletters. Sure, I’ve also written short stories, monologues, and performance pieces. But that’s because I’m, like duh, a writer. I write stuff.

I’m not sure how much clearer I can be about this without the strategic use of a baseball bat.

Here’s the audio of Calling Time On The Binge Drinkers, in which I appear near the beginning, and then later.

Here’s the Radio Four page.

PY Gerbeau’s programme about binge Britain is finally coming out, on Friday 1st May at 11am on Radio Four. As well as interviewing me, he spoke to some other alcohol connected people. I can’t wait to hear it.