I KNEW it would be hard but I didn’t realise it would be quite like this... I’m totally, utterly exhausted. The days are passing in an alternate blur of waking and sleeping, but not that much sleeping.

I’ve forgotten what a telly looks like. And curling up on a sofa with a book is a distant memory.

I’m in the throes of setting up a new business and it’s proving to be a roller coaster of highs and lows. I’ve become somewhat wild-eyed and manic.

I’m bordering on the obsessive in terms of attention to detail. But the lists of the detail that needs attention would stretch over Lendal Bridge and hit the water several times over.

They used to say that “sleep knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”, which is true – if you can find the hours to sleep. The consumption of food is like the line in that swing band number Chattanooga Choo Choo – simply a case of “shovel all the coal in, got to keep it rolling...”

I’m spending an inordinate amount of time behind the wheel of my car, to-ing and froe-ing, collecting and carrying, hurtling up and down the M1 between home and the National Exhibition Centre where the launch of said business is taking place.

The phone is never off and is always ringing (but honest, officer, I don’t answer it while driving for being in the car is the only peace I get at the moment).

And it’s all so exhilarating! I’ve not had this much of a buzz for a long time. Probably the last time was when I was a cub reporter and got my first front page lead. That’s going back some.

Back then, the world was my oyster and I saw the years stretching before me in anticipatory glee. Youth was very definitely on my side, so it was something of a doddle to be burning the candle at both ends.

So is starting up all over again a bit mad when you’re not that far off official retirement age? Perhaps I should be looking forward to my dotage, flicking through Saga catalogues and spending my silver dollars seeing the world and catching up on all the things that there was never time for when I was younger and money was tight.

Maybe I should be hunting out bargain midweek trips away and idling away my days in nice restaurants and coffee shops.

Perhaps I should become a lady who lunches. Or maybe I should be browsing through clothes rails with nary a care about time or money, frittering away the boy’s inheritance like there’s no tomorrow.

It all sounds very tempting. But I’ve finally – I think, for proof of that will be in the selling – found my niche. After all these years, when I should be taking it easy I’m gearing up for a new career which, if all goes well, will take me well beyond the date for getting my bus pass.

And apparently I’m not alone. The amount of people who are finding new careers when their old one has clocked up the years and come to a time-served conclusion is growing steadily.

Those finding a new lease of business life in their middle years are no longer the strange phenomenon they might once have appeared to be.

For it seems that more and more of us, working life duty done, the mortgage paid for, the kids off our hands, are less and less inclined to put our feet up and idle away our days, and much more prone to pursuing the lifelong business dream that used to sustain us through dreary workplace weeks.

And some are pursuing dreams they didn’t even know they had. That’s certainly the case for me. I had no idea that I’d end up doing what I’m now doing and pulling on reserves of entrepreneurial flair I didn’t even know existed. Entrepreneurial flair?

I’ve clearly learned some lessons here from those thrusting young things that big themselves up on The Apprentice, but if I don’t big myself up, no-one else will. I think they call it marketing. Or promotion. Or something.

So here I am. Worn out, clapped out like an old jalopy, but with all the cylinders firing underneath that battered bonnet. It’s brilliant. I love it.

My new venture might not work, and I might fall flat on my face, becoming another statistic on the failed start-up lists. But I’m giving it my best shot and well and truly going for it.

For you don’t know if you don’t try do you? Lord Sugar would be proud of me.