I will now share with you a sure-fire moneymaking scheme. It is unrelated to publishing. But, if you've lost your job in publishing and now you're destitute, for a small up-front investment, you can now earn good money.

In the olden days, peddlers would go door-to-door sharpening knives. These days that's less useful. Curiously men, especially bachelors, would rather sharpen their own knives. But men, especially bachelors, require help in another area: pocket change. What to do with it? Do you carry round a bulging pocketful of small coins and then, when asked for a medium-sized sum announce, 'I think I've got the right change!' and start counting out coppers? Or do you hand over a crisp note and just dump any coins you accumulate at home. The answer is the latter.

So here's the moneymaking scheme:

A knock at the door and a friendly, destitute-ex-publisher asks, 'Got any loose change you want to swap for notes? Five percent commission?'. You jump at the chance. Rooting around the house you come up with piles of coins everywhere. You've even transferred a load to various containers and plastic bags and stuck them in the bottom of your wardrobe. You asked about taking them to the bank, but the bank needed you to count them into bags first. Boring. So you fill an old tin bath with 2p coins and take them out to the peddler, who has a coin-sorter mounted on the front of an old, black, iron tricycle. Putting the bike on its stand, the Peddler pedals away furiously to provide electricity for the coin-sorter. The total: £68.72. The peddler takes a cut of just under four pounds and counts out over sixty quid in nice, neat tens in to your hand. Lovely.