“YOU’RE only just in time, Mr Irving. Upstairs ...” snapped the SchutzStaffels’ plump, officious adviser Frau Trout sat behind her desk in Winchester’s open-plan job centre on City Road. “Next,” she demanded.

Unaware, or was she, that L-Nibs - 20 minutes early for his fortnightly appointment to report on the progress of his continuing job search, and looking to sign-on as unemployed for two more weeks - was sat directly opposite and facing her middle-aged self.

Unavoidably ear-wigging her interrogation of one, then a second jobless male, before she called Sam’s name and dismissed him to the centre’s first floor for a one-hour session with the New Deal training adviser making it silently clear his business was with the benefit claimant rising-25, and not his father-all-of-a-half-a-century-his-senior.

“You can imagine it - or Alresford’s Postmistress Jackie Sanger is unlikely ever to forget - when, for so long as a year, this village elder for a Charlie Chaplain collected the start to his state pension in one hand, and the end to his youngest son’s baby bonus in the other,” Blogsbody-of-Cressroads thought to make his presence known.

Stood on his size-nines, the blue-eyed old hack proceeded to outline a plan for Sam to want to become a freelance photo-journalist, while kept busy creating a portfolio of published images to call his own work on the strength of a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera equipped with a Carl Zeiss lens.

“I’ll not sit ... did my back in again this early morning ... and, thank you, but I’m all the more comfortable for remaining upstanding.”

“I’m Tony,” welcomed Sam’s newfound helper.

Tomorrow: Ace! Fee remission. A second chance at Peter Symonds College. Lessons in digital camera essentials, making the most of digital images, and digital imaging with Photoshop elements.