I need a job. I didn’t realise this until Wednesday, when suddenly everyone in our house was gripped by the Graduation Fear. One of my favourite daydreams is to imagine the inhabitants of our merrily dysfunctional home all transferring to a rambling London abode, with four spacious floors and an acre of garden in St John’s Wood. I was happily spinning the story of how we would return from our stimulating, creative, well-paid jobs, to a hearty meal rustled up by our jolly Victorian cook, when I was interrupted by one of my housemates. “Except that’s not going to happen, is it? Because two of us are going to be struggling writers, two of us struggling musicians, one a sexually dissolute novelist, one an unemployed architect and the other a sleep-deprived City worker who will soon grow tired of funding the rest of us.”

A gloom descended upon the table and my joyously impossible future disappeared in a puff of reality. Suddenly I was confronted with an alternate vision, that of living in a flat a fifth the size of my current bathroom, spending my days calculating sums on an abacus for Boredom Inc.

It was time to Sort My Life Out. That night I decided to have an earnest careers discussion with Dissolute Would-Be Novelist. However, when I mentioned employment he burrowed under the duvet for half an hour and I only managed to coax him out by playing the theme song from True Blood – when he discovered my deception he sulked and said “Let’s just have some rum and talk about the career progression of Philip Roth.” But I persisted – for once we would both have a serious discussion – I would not start talking about my womb, and he would not mention Marcus Garvey.

In the end we managed to establish that his ideal professional future would be either a) marriage to a generous dowager who would allow him to pad contentedly around her well furnished flat and eat olives out of the fridge or b) working in space. “You mean like being an astronaut?” “Well, maybe, but really I’d just want to commute into space daily or something from the top of our house. Collect space rocks, look for water. Something like that.” We both sat in silence for a while. “Or I could go into advertising.” We moved on to my job options. “Well, what are your skills?” Five minute pause. I check Facebook. “I can do a reasonably good impression of the accents of most American states.” “It’s not really a transferrable skill is it?” I shake my head sadly, and mooch upstairs to watch The Thick of It and send tipsy, flirty emails to Guardian journalists. 

I think the essential problem is that I lazily ignore the advice to flesh out my CV, to develop hard-bitten interview skills, and stop blinking so much when I’m nervous, and rather hope that my innate charm will carry me through. Even if I know logically that it’s good advice not to lie on a résumé, a small but not inconsiderable part of me scoffs that honesty is overrated. That part can’t help the quiet conviction that my CV full of outlandish exaggeration and half-truths will land on the desk of a cigar chewing newspaper tycoon, who will chuckle “The kid’s got chutzpah!” and make me editor of a colour supplement. Or that I’ll be strolling down a London street and a limousine will pull up, the window will roll down and the voice of a publishing svengali will boom out, “Hey you! You look like your first novel would be a winning combination of thought-provoking life lessons and sass. Have a hundred grand advance and we’ll talk.”

But then the harsh reality of the fact that my greatest summer achievement was getting through three DVD box-sets in a week sets in, and I know that I need a new plan. And so I am determined for the rest of this year to go to every relevant careers event, to find out what exactly ‘people skills’ are, to work out, painful though it might be, what I actually want to do with my life, and to stop considering urban spaceman as a job option.