Career advice

My boy left school at the end of last term, aged 16. He can read and write after a fashion, and he knows something about the rise and fall of the Nazi party and how to make delicious scones, so all in all a good result.

After he’d been at home for a week his mother’s boyfriend asked him what he was going to do for a living. My boy said he wanted to be a businessman. My boy’s mother’s boyfriend — an unbelievably decent, hardworking, teetotal, pigeon-shooting man — scoffed. This led to some hard words being said on both sides, which made my boy’s mother weep and left an unpleasant atmosphere in the humble but normally harmonious home.

So when he came to stay at the weekend I sat my boy down and gave him some fatherly advice. What about becoming a tobacco smuggler? I suggested. Everyone that smokes around here smokes Golden Virginia hand-rolling tobacco that has been smuggled into the country. Costing nearly £10 in the shops over here, the going rate for a 50-gram pouch of illegally imported tobacco is a fiver. Petrol prices may fluctuate; the cost of a pint of beer may vary enormously; but a moody packet of Golden Virginia has cost a fiver for as long as anyone can remember. If Britain ever descends into full anarchy, it would probably become the principal unit of exchange.

And there seems to be ample room in the marketplace at present for a keen young operator to set out his stall. As my boy’s mother indignantly tells me, the usual source of smuggled Golden Virginia on her council estate has had his van confiscated. And at the local bar I go to, popular with travellers and space cadets, smuggled tobacco is harder to obtain, I’ve heard tell, than methamphetamine.