I ponder my fourth year of unemployment since graduating, I would like to tell your readers who are fortunate enough to be in employment, what it is like trying to find a job.

Gone are the simple days of calling into a place and asking for a vacancy. Now, finding a job has been elevated to a science.

Job searching has been invested with a philosophic profundity which it does not need or deserve. People write books on interview techniques, composing CVs, how to write a letter and the science of job search.

I sometimes wonder whether it is just me who is mad and everybody else is completely sane.

Mr Blair and his government promise to help the long-term, not just the young, unemployed back to work. But how, short of forcing employers to take on the long-term unemployed, can this work? If an employer does not wish to take on a person, there is nothing the government can do about it.

I have been told I am too old at 42 to be considered for certain jobs I have applied for.

What would today's human resource managers have done with, say, Sir Winston Churchill's CV and spec letter in 1940?

Would they have told him that he was too old to lead the country through its "finest hour"? After all, he was 66 years old then.

Perhaps the government should introduce a GCSE in job search. After all, lots of young people and, indeed, older people invest a great deal of time in trying to secure that ever-more elusive thing called a job.

J BIRKETT (Mr), Rome Avenue, Burnley.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.