(You might have heard about it Sal, in between reading the Guardian and cycling on the South Bank.)

As a would-be freelance journalist and writer, it’s true, my life doesn’t correspond to the “wage earning cycle” of punching the clock, though I do obey the grander circadian cycle. This means that I wake up roughly the same time as you - though probably earlier, since reportedly your particular “wage earning cycle” allows you to rock into work circa 11am - and work roughly the same hours, except arguably longer because there’s no reason to stop working, there’s no moment when I can punch out.

Moreover, as a freelance journalist and writer, I couldn’t possibly be doing a good job if I read only one newspaper. One of them happens to be centre-left, though my favourite (yours too, I note) is in fact centre-right. Also, for the record, I don’t usually buy organic, and the last time I checked, the only food you ever eat would have to also be called ethnic. At least I eat a wider variety of ethnic. It’s not all meat and rice, my brown-skinned friend.

I would also like to dispute the use of the word “traditional”. A life lived according to the “wage earning cycle” (give or take 11am starts) is not traditional, it’s conventional. I think it’s fair to say, without any intention at being pompous or self-aggrandizing, that I’m not conventional. I’m not a Lopez-esque butterfly flying on the winds of time, either, but I walk a middle road. As such, I’m more disposed to a career that allows me to move in different directions.

And this brings me to the crescendo. A conventional life is no more real than an unconventional life. The only possible way that one could argue that a conventional life is more real than an unconventional one, is if by sheer force of the majority, conventionality had greater reality than unconventionality. But to argue that unconventionality is not real because it is less frequently found, would be to deny the entire experience, knowledge, aspiration, and impact of the unconventional person.

Let’s think about that for a moment. If we were to deny the entire experience, knowledge, aspiration, and impact of the unconventional person, then here are just a few names off the top of my head, whom we can immediately discount from reality because they were unconventional.

- Albert Einstein
- Nelson Mandela
- Pablo Picasso
- Bill Gates
- William Shakespeare

And the list would go on. PLEASE DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME. By identifying these people as unconventional, and also myself as unconventional, I do by no means intend to equate myself with those illustrious personages. But my point is that if unconventionality were not real, and therefore these people’s lives were not real, then we would have to live without the following advances:

- general and special relativity, which had practical implications towards nuclear energy, and pure implications towards both the refinement of Newtonian physics and the discovery of quantum physics
- the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the beginning of majority black rule
- Cubism
- Microsoft and the resulting information and productivity revolution around the world
- the heart and soul of literature

So. The “wage earning cycle” is real. The “freelancing” cycle is real. Both are real to their respective people, and for either to claim that the other is unreal is both silly and ungenerous.