My own rhetorical question in yesterday’s post – “Who in the world buys a magazine devoted to watches?” – reminded me of the most devastating question I was ever asked at a job interview.

It shouldn’t have been devastating. It’s a mark of my ineptitude that it was anything but obvious. But you have to remember that this was back in the day, when we didn’t have such things as interview prep or jobfinder training or whatever they doubtless call it these days at schools like my daughters’. We just got thrown in the deep end, sink or swim.

And this during what a recent programme on The British at Work called ‘The most hostile climate for job-seekers of the post-war period’ – the early ’80s. ‘That’s when I was looking for my first job,’ I said to Ellie. ‘What did you do?’ she asked. ‘I spent a lot of time unemployed,’ I said.

Unemployed, and applying. For anything. Anything I thought I had the remotest chance of getting. Which is how I came to find myself in a homely, slightly shabby office, blindsided by a kindly, slightly shabby editor, who asked me, predictably and entirely reasonably: ‘Now, Mr Paterson, why do you want to work for Concrete Monthly?’