I’ve decided to embark on a new career. For years I’ve depended on the goodness of someone else paying me a salary for my journalistic wares. It hasn’t earned me a fortune, but at least it’s kept a roof over my head with enough left to feed the cat.

Now, at the ripe old age of 59 I’ve decided I shall veer off wildly in a completely different direction and be master of my own income.

The only galling thing about this decision to enter the world of the entrepreneur is that I’ve probably missed my biggest payday. But still, there’s enough out there to keep the bank balancing ticking over nicely.

Last week while suffering from man flu and having little energy to do anything other than sleep or sit staring at the idiot box (I rarely watch TV), I was staggered at the blatant adverts encouraging accident victims to seek professional help getting their hands on some ‘well deserved’ loot.

That’s when the penny dropped – well several thousand of them actually. So I’ve started drawing up my ‘hit list’, so to speak.

1: Uneven pavement: trip over and seriously re-arrange my face – kerching 2: Wheelie bins: rick back pulling it up the drive – kerching 3: Street lights: walk into one of those that has been switched off by the council and re-arrange face again – kerching 4: Pot holes: car disappears into one of the many around the roads at the back of Penn and Tylers Green. There goes the back again – kerching 5: Freshly mopped floor in shopping centre: slip – kerching 6: Windowless swing door in pub loo: pushed open into my face, another re-arrangement of features – kerching.

That’ll do for starters, after all I’m not a greedy man. I could just tick off one of those a year to earn enough to keep me living in the style to which I’m accustomed without having to be chained to a desk for eight hours a day, five days a week.

There is, of course, a depressingly serious side to this whole business. A few years ago I had the misfortune to break my back while running across a shop car park in torrential rain.

I spent a month lying virtually motionless in hospital and a further three months walking round in a metal jacket that looked like it had come from a Middle Ages torture chamber.

During this time I was asked several times if I was going to sue the shop (I could probably have retired on the proceeds). I found it a repulsive suggestion on two levels.

Firstly it was just an accident and secondly the woman who owned the shop almost certainly saved my legs as she, who was trained in first aid, realised I had seriously hurt my back and made me lie still when others wanted to pick me up and move me out of the rain.

Wycombe District Council has been wrestling over this very problem of late in the murky red-taped world of public liability insurance and such is the situation that it could put various public events and parades under threat if the organisations involved don’t have enough cover.

If they don’t, the authority has to decide whether or not to pick up the liability in allowing the event to go ahead.

A report to councillors gave an ominous warning: “If we still go ahead with the order then we must have very good reasons for doing so.”

As Cllr Tony Green said, we have become a society that is too quick to sue.

“Sadly when something happens they think someone is to blame. Before people have just seen it as an accident.”

Now it’s seen as a nice little earner.