A few years ago, I suddenly found myself out of work.

I was made redundant after more than 30 years with the same company and while it didn’t come as a complete surprise (I could see the way things were going) it did come as a shock.

Having worked all my adult life, to suddenly find myself with time on my hands and no earned income forced me take stock.

Of course I had my redundancy payment which provided something of a safety net but I had a decision to make.

Yes, I was old when the axe fell but it was still several years until I could get my state pension. And the sudden loss of income also had a knock-on effect for my occupational pension as well.

What was I to do?

I didn’t feel ready to give up work and I had years of accumulated skills, I thought. Surely someone would take a punt on me.

I lost my job in April and by August I was becoming a little despondent. The rejection letters I could handle.

I was even prepared to accept that some companies never even responded.

By far and away the worst element of job hunting was when I actually got an interview and I watched as the expression changed on the interviewer’s face when I walked into the room and they saw just how old I was.

The fact remains that getting a job, no matter how well qualified you may be, once you get past the age of 50ish is hard.

(There is a happy ending to this story. In the September after I was made redundant, I had two interviews in a week with two companies in Manchester. One had a lot of young employees and wanted someone ‘with experience’ to look after them while the other simply wanted someone they didn’t have to spend months training so much to my surprise I found myself back in employment fairly quickly.)

These were the exceptions rather than the rule.

Not that long after I started my new job, we had the Covid-19 outbreak.

One of the unforeseen outcomes of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns was the so-called ‘mass resignation’ with hundreds of thousands of people deciding there was more to life than work and handing in their notice.

Suddenly there was a workforce shortage thanks to a combination of resignations and EU workers going back to their own countries and this is one of the reasons inflation is stubbornly high.

Since the pandemic there has been a sharp rise in the number of those who are neither working nor looking for work.

About 8.6 million people in the UK – equivalent to one in five working adults – are classed as economically inactive, according to the Office for National Statistics. More than 3.4 million of them are over 50 but under the retirement age.

Which brings me to work and pensions secretary Mel Stride. He has come up with the wizard wheeze of getting over-50s back into work…by delivering takeaways.

Apparently, according to Stride, these flexible jobs offered ‘great opportunities’ and that it was ‘good for people to consider options they might not have otherwise thought of’.

I have a message for Mr Stride: On yer bike.

On another topic, I have made no secret of the fact that I consider the sale of our water companies to private companies was an act of national self harm.

The provision of clean water and the effective treatment of sewage are too important to have a profit motive attached to them.

But at least before Brexit, EU legislation did at least exercise some control over the cleanliness of our rivers and beaches.

Now we’ve ‘taken back control’, we appear to have a government that is happy for raw sewage to be pumped out and it’s become something of an international disgrace.

Once upon a time, we were labelled the poor man of Europe. Now it would appear we have become the dirty man of Europe.

Ladies and gentlemen I refer you to the report of at least 57 triathletes who fell ill with diarrhoea and vomiting after taking part in swimming competitions off the Wearside coast.

About 2,000 people took part in the UK leg of the World Triathlon Championship series in Sunderland which included a swim off the city’s Roker beach.

Environment Agency sampling at the beach in late July detected 39 times the amount of e-coli found in the water during typical readings. For the record, E-coli is a bacterial infection that can cause stomach pain and bloody diarrhoea.

To be honest, I can’t put it any better than Australian triathlete Jake Birthwistle, who said: “Have been feeling pretty rubbish since the race, but I guess that’s what you get when you swim in s**t. The swim should have been cancelled.”

Yep, another Brexit benefit – free E-coli for all.