In an attempt to impose a routine on my chaotic existence and get a steady quota of reading and writing done, I have taken to commuting to libraries every day. It’s important that the library hasn’t got a free wireless Internet service, otherwise I’d just be idly emailing and web-surfing my days away like I’ve been doing at home for so long. So the new plan is to get up at about 7 and go straight to the institution of choice, as soon as it opens. I divide the day into periods of ‘work’ and breaks. So I now enjoy the discipline of having a job, without the troublesome business of actually having a job. The larger public libraries of London are my office.

I’m a British Library card holder, but though I enjoy the current St Pancras building (when I have reason to use their collections), I far prefer to sit in its ghost-ridden former venue, the fantastic Reading Room of the British Museum. With its leather book rests and pen-hooks, glorious domed roof, and 99.9% perfect circular structure (4 cm off, I learn), it’s a fitting working environment for a penniless aesthete.

I’d also love to use that Groucho Club of libraries, The London Library in Piccadilly; but alas their membership remains beyond my means at £195 a year. It’s on my To Do list when I have the money. If I ever have the money.

The BM’s Reading Room is now the Museum’s public reference library. Anyone can wander in without registration or membership of any kind and sit down at one of the famous desks. There are rules to observe: be quiet, no eating or drinking, no photography, no mobile phones, don’t leave your bag unattended. Standard stuff, you’d have thought. Yet there are one or two absolute idiots who happily make calls on their mobiles here – without even whispering. Still, the place isn’t that much louder than the crowded Humanities rooms of the British Library proper.

I do wonder how some people can think a public library is a place to use their mobile phone, and glower to the point of threatening violence when they’re politely asked to desist. Is there no act more shockingly arrogant and uncaring of one’s fellow man in the field of modern etiquette? To not switch off your phone as you enter a library just beggars belief.

I did once hear of some kind of technological solution which broadcasts a mobile blocking signal across the building. If such a divine box of tricks exists, it must be installed at every library immediately.

A common source of sporadic income for the penurious wastrel is being interviewed for market research. Many of my friends have earned easy sums of cash this way, pocketing anything upwards of £30 for an hour’s slight inconvenience. All they have to do is go along to these little sessions and help some company improve their product by answering a few questions.

I would like to describe what exactly these events are like, but to date I have completely failed to even qualify past an initial selection process. This is my fifth attempt. I wonder if I can be officially designated as Not Normal Enough.

Their message to me:

“Thank you very much for your time and interest in taking part in our mobile phone research. Unfortunately I am contacting you to let you know that we won’t be able to use you on this occasion – I am sorry, but the client’s requirements were most specific and there was simply a mis-match between your answers and the profile they needed for the research.”

‘Simply a mis-match’. Another phrase for the gravestone.

I suppose I should feel pleased that I fail to fit in with their world of ticked boxes and firmly delineated socio-economic groups. But I’d rather lie that I’m a Target Market and have the money, than be honest and poor. Pity I’m such a bad liar. Or a bad actor.

Thing is, I wonder if it’s occurred to these firms that most people who apply for market research are not going to be a ‘target market’ de facto. They are absolutely desperate for money, and live hand to strawberry-lipsalved mouth. The people they do want to interview are too busy having their careers and 2.4 iPods to take any time out for research. I suspect that an awful lot of game playing goes on at these sessions, as the poverty-stricken interviewee pretends he earns £40,000 and is looking for the right type of mobile phone that protects and deodorises 24 hours a day, for the busy executive on the go. Because he’s worth it.

Then again, it probably wasn’t helpful that I asked the research people why they didn’t have a tick-box under ‘Gender’ for ‘Don’t Know’.