Last Pair of Trousers Standing

I think that the main thing to come out of last week is that I really need to do more three day weeks.  If I could square it financially, I'd happily knock another day off of my current working week.  But, unfortunately, the bastards just don't pay me enough to make anything less than my current four day week financially viable. Of course, what I need to do is find another job which pays well enough that only working it for three days a week would pay me the same as I earn now.  Either that or win the lottery.  Or discover a lost painting by an old master in the attic which I can sell for a fortune.  (Actually, that sort of thing does sometimes happen: the late author and editor Kyril Bonfiglioli famously discovered a lost painting - by Tintoretto, I think - which turned out to be worth so much that he was able to give up his day job as an editor and focus on the writing, instead).  Unfortunately, there's nothing but insulation and a water tank in my attic.  Then again, I could suddenly come into a vast inheritance from a hitherto unknown relative. (Again, this sort of thing does sometimes occur in real life: twice I've known work colleagues receive life-changing amounts of money this way.  In one case, my ex-boss found that he was the sole living heir to wealthy great uncle he'd never met, in the other, a colleague's aunt died naming him and his brother as her heirs - it turned out that she owned shares worth half a million quid, or so).  Even if such a relative turned up (their toes), it would have to be a bloody big inheritance as, inevitably, my various siblings would also be named as heirs.

Anyway, lottery wins, old paintings and wealthy deceased relatives are certainly not going to turn up, (I haven't played the lottery in years, I probably wouldn't recognise a valuable painting if I saw it and all of my relatives are accounted for and none are wealthy), so we come back to a change of job.  It is, I know, something I keep coming back to with monotonous regularity, but it has been pushed back to the forefront of my mind of late for a variety of reasons.  Most pressingly, by the state of my trousers. You see, the zip broke in my regular work trousers today - which is an omen.  To understand my somewhat off-kilter reasoning, we have to go back to when I first went back to work following my illness last year.  As, at that point, I had no idea of how long I'd stick back at the job, whether I'd find it too much, or might even be forced out by management, I made the decision not to renew any of the shirts or trousers I regularly wear for work as they wore out.  Well, over the past fifteen months or so, I've come down to four work shirts and one pair of trousers as the rest wore out.  Now, the number of surviving shirts currently corresponds to the number of days a week I work, so no problem.  But the trousers - well, when I got down to the last surviving pair, I jokingly told myself that when they finally gave up the ghost, I'd take it as a sign that it was time for me to leave my current job and seek pastures new.  Well, now it has happened, and you know what?  It doesn't seem such a foolish idea at all.  Perhaps it is time that I started getting serious about moving on.