Last night I had this notion to tell you how many jobs I’ve had. I truly have not one thin clue why, but given that I’m freelance and also — face it, William — old, I did also think that there might be a few.

I stopped counting at 30.

And I hadn’t even reached the 2000s.

And there was an early one that was important to me but I didn’t remember until the end of that list. Actually, I’ve just thought of another one from back then.

Okay, 31. For the overly exacting record, it can be difficult to say what a job was. I can tell you I worked at Radio Times, for instance, but that was sometimes three different jobs: the RT website, a weekly TV history column for the magazine, and — god in heaven, four jobs. Hang on, website, history, I was going to say also occasional features plus an RT guide to the web where I worked for someone staggeringly irritating and who I could not now picture if you paid me, but I’ve also just remembered a weekly thing in the magazine called TV Stats.

It is beyond me how I could forget TV Stats when for a couple of years it was the stone in my stomach every week. Trying to think of an idea, then researching it, then writing it in maybe 60 words and doing so all in time for a cartoonist to illustrate. Now I’ve a pebble in my stomach trying to remember an example for you. I know that the one that had a lasting impact was that I once counted up how much you’d have to spend on Amazon to buy all of the merchandise related to BBC children’s shows.

At this distance, I can’t figure out how I figured that out. But I can tell you that to this day Amazon notifies me of every new release featuring Dora the Explorer.

But back to what might generously be called the point. All of that was Radio Times so I can’t argue if you want to say that was one job, but I’ll try. Because it was a couple of different departments and I was paid four separate sums. So I think of it as four jobs.

Anyway.

The thing about all of this is that I doubt there was a single day in which I had just one job. Even before I went freelance and was employed full-time writing computer manuals for McDonnell Douglas, I was working backstage for the BBC Radio WM breakfast show before it in the morning, and either being a subeditor on a freesheet newspaper or producing something on BHBN hospital radio in the evenings.

So it’s not that I was constantly being fired, it was that I was multitasking.

But then a consequence of this is that I can readily tell you that in every case I was the least of the people in any of the jobs, at any of the companies. Take BBC Ceefax, for instance. As important as that was to me and as many years I wrote for them as I did, I was never full-time or even close to it. So last Monday when I was asked onto 14 BBC Local Radio stations to talk about Ceefax’s 50th anniversary, I relished getting to enthuse about something that mattered to me so much, but I also felt like the fraud I was.

Which I have to think was the problem on Monday evening when I went to the Ceefax anniversary party.

Because I was scared going to it. Actually scared.

I suppose, rationally, there was the fact that this was a celebration of half a century since Ceefax started and I was only on it from the mid-1990s. So there would doubtlessly be people who’d been there since the start and just statistically — you can’t shake TV Stats even if you can forget it — it had to be that I wouldn’t know the majority of them. As it turned out, I think my time and specifically the Entertainment desk (pictured) was particularly well represented.

But then if it had been mostly Ceefax people from the 1970s, I’d still have had a fantastic time asking them about it. That would have been brilliant, that wouldn’t have been scary. I’d have relished that.

It also wasn’t that there could be people there I worked for and with who didn’t remember me. That would be a shrug: I do not expect to be remembered when I’ve left a room, and very definitely not when I was only ever around for a while each week.

Yet I was scared and all I can think of is that was somehow connected to this sense of being a fraud that I have naturally, and that my butterfly career hasn’t helped squash. I’ve done all these jobs, worked in all these places and for all these people, but I’ve constantly just flitted between the lot. I like that, I like it a lot, but it’s different to being full-time anywhere.

I should say, by the way, that the fear went and I had an especially good night at the Ceefax party. There was a point during one of the speeches where there was a reference to some particular thing and the line spoken was that “if you know, you know” and I realised that I did. There are things you cannot know unless you worked on something, and here was one, and here I was knowing it. In that moment more than any other in the whole evening, I felt I belonged where I was standing.

I worry about why I was so scared and I do not understand it, the feeling was too strong to have solely one cause. I will continue to fret.

But then, if I can’t explain the fear I had, I also can’t explain the absolute beaming delight I had at this: the very first person I saw and spoke to at the party was the woman who fired me from Ceefax.