It worked for Elvis Presley, why can't it work for me?

Is a line from Considering a Move to Memphis, a 1987 song by Colorblind James Experience. I have just found it on Limewire after searching for ages. Listening to it washes all my cares away and makes me very happy. It should be taken up and re-released as the anthem of wordy, self-obsessing nerds and weirdos everywhere.

What am I considering, exactly?

I very much enjoy my line of work and remain generally efficient and enthusiastic, the more so close to pay day and pay review time. But there are times when it is all a bit too much and I fantasise about doing something else, escaping office drudgery in the afternoons and evenings and getting a bleedin' life.

So, a second career. My back is too creaky for dry-stone walling, for which there isn't much call in Cambridgeshire. Could I be the Svengali (read pimp) behind a series of slap and tickle parlours? Too much of a grey area ethically and with the taxman...and in about ten thousand other ways. How about bank robbery? Er, no. Computer fraud or pyramid selling scams? Ditto. Commodore Crouch postulated the other week about being a parasol attendant in the Balearics. I like the idea but wouldn't want to get too much of a tan. Peeling shoulders...yuk. All of these, save the first and last, are get-rich-quick schemes and almost certain to fail.

What about inventing things? My present standpoint - that everything I could ever want and more beyond has already been invented - seems to indicate a lack of the creative spark and foresight necessary to make a go of it. I thought I was on to something once with a half-cocked plan to fit moisture sensors to domestic tumble driers so they would automatically shut off when your smalls were dry. Someone has been there and done it.

But maybe I'll hit the jackpot with - get this - a periodic table for Chinese food. You simply paint out the names of all the elements and write in dishes in various categories: sweet and sours in the inert gases column; oyster dishes in the hydrogen, lithium, sodium column; things with boiled rice in the middle where the other metals go. When it's done, get a load printed and sell them to every Chinese takeaway in the world so that customers wouldn't have to faff about reading through the menus and noting the numbers they wanted. Global domination, though I offer apologies in advance for offending a quarter of the world's population.

A slightly better idea - and one I quite fancy - is to work for the National Trust. Be a warden a Blakeney Point where I could wear shorts, a fleece, shades and a baseball cap for most of the year round (no change there, then) and be paid a pittance. Not quite yet, but maybe one day.