I hate money and I'm useless with it.

Only a few things separate us from the apes: 1) there's no direct ape equivalent of The Apprentice; 2) apes are hopeless at changing duvet covers (they pull them over their heads and panic because the sun's disappeared); and 3) apes don't use money. This third fact alone makes them vastly superior to humankind.

Money is the most terrible thing in the universe. It causes more stress, disputes and wars than religion, which ought to be impossible. Everything about it drives me up the pole, which is why I'm useless with it. I pay bills at the last minute, rarely check my bank balance, and get ripped off left, right and centre because I just can't bring myself to care about it. Friends gasp at my ineptitude. A few think me insane.

Immediate convenience. That's important. Not money. It's a wonder I bend down to pick up coins I've dropped. And it's nothing to do with how much money I have at any given moment. It's always been this way. In my early 20s, when I worked for peanuts in the university, I'd regularly take cabs to work because I'd overslept and couldn't wait for the bus. And at the end of the day, I'd often take another cab home because I was tired, thereby blowing my entire daily wage ferrying myself to and from a job I despised. This was, admittedly, astronomically stupid, but so what? I'm still alive, thanks to dumb luck.

As you might imagine, I'm incapable of haggling. I avoid it like beasts avoid fire, because any discussion about money depresses me into a coma. So my current situation is my worst nightmare - my day-to-day comfort is not under direct threat, and the only way out is to plunge headlong into a protracted financial negotiation. I live in a rented flat and the lease is about to run out in two months. The thought of moving genuinely makes me pray for death. Looking round flats, signing contracts, packing things up, lugging them around, sorting out the phones and the bills and the countless petty irritants - just crack me over the head with a paving stone and have done with it. Please. Anything but that.

Am earning some money and trying really hard to save. Folks want me to buy an apartment – quiet insistent on it too. Trouble is, I live in Sydney, where houses are a) satirically expensive and b) people crawl over themselves like rats, scraping each other's eyes out with their selfish, grasping claws at the sight of a halfway desirable property.

And as luck wouldn't have it, my place is slap bang in the middle of the catchment area for about 10,000 flouncey schools full of horrible, bawling little Hitlers called Josh and Jake and Jessica, every single one of whom will doubtless grow up to be as effortlessly brilliant with money as mummy and daddy, while I rot to mulch in the old folks' home equivalent of a pound shop, beaten and abused by underpaid care workers who will film my misery on their cameraphones and upload it to the internet for chuckles because I was too financially apathetic to sort out a pension.

Everyone has their success stories and secret formulas. Save here, invest there, do this, do that – I don’t want to do anything. When I see money in my account I panic – am I not being a good citizen by not spending this disposable income. Shouldn’t I be supporting the economy and making sure that the consumer confidence index is high by buying another pair of shoes.

... Dance the financial tango. Get your money's worth. Play the game.

But I hate the game. Hate it. It's a boring game, of interest only to the soulless. A fool and his money are soon parted. A bastard and his money are best friends. Financial negotiation is the opposite of music, of laughter, of sunshine, of ideas, of absolutely everything that makes life worth living. It's hell.

Do your worst, you awful, boring, terrible world of finance, you. Then leave me alone. For ever.