Until last August.

It was a lovely summer’s day. My plans had collapsed, clearing my afternoon’s diary, and landing me on the sofa with that delicious feeling of space – the rest of the day miraculously vacated of tasks and obligations, when I heard the flap in my front door flick open and shut. I retrieved a letter and, back on the sofa, drew from the envelope a sheet with tables, columns, and figures that swam before my eyes.

USS, a pension provider I had forgotten all about, was notifying me that money was coming my way. But the figures didn’t make sense. I reached for my phone two or three times to call someone for assistance, but each time I dropped it back onto the seat beside me, bewildered.

I’m not proud of this – but in the interests of honest journalism I admit – I stretched over to the only friend in reach, a carafe of whisky that sits, purely for decorative purposes, next to the sofa looking golden and glittery, and poured myself a dram. (No, I don’t know either; it was enough to excuse the swimming numbers.)

In the course of the following hours, as I sat on that sofa in a peaty, alcoholic haze, I underwent a personality change. First, the realisation dawned that with USS’s £550 a month, I would never have to find another job again. Then, with an incredulous slowness like a piece of flotsam being brought to shore on waves that draw it back and then forward a further inch, the corollary at last landed on my addled consciousness that I was now free of all implicit obligations to employers and other powers-that-be. I hadn’t even realised I had them! I felt, I swear this is true, a weight lift from me. I still puzzle over this – my own “mind-forged manacles” as Blake called them, which I never knew I had, melted away. A sense of liberation bubbled and infused my whole self, wholly unexpectedly.

I am now beholden to no one! An independent woman. The world is my oyster. I can buy my round without prior calculation; stay in bed another hour listening to the radio entirely guilt free; happy to schedule a long lunch with a friend in the middle of the day because there is no application form to be filled, errand that can’t wait, or task required to meet that week’s KPI.

But more, I can be bold. The first thing I did, while still on that sofa, was to donate £1,000 to a cause I feel strongly about. Since now I can (when inebriated). Later, I went and got myself arrested for holding up a placard saying something innocuous, to strike my blow for free speech. Since now I can. What next? Watch out world! I think I may be coming into my unbridled own.

A M Poppy a local writer, tutor, and campaigner