We all have a birth certificate, and in the end we’ll wind up with a death certificate. Now, it seems, UK citizens need to get a Life Certificate. I discovered this at the weekend, in a letter from the DWP. It tells me I need to fill in my Life Certificate, and get a doctor or Mayor to sign it in front of a witness, to prove that “we should still be paying you”. It also says that if I don’t reply within eight weeks, they’ll stop paying me.

Let me just repeat that bit: if I don’t reply within eight weeks, people who were scarcely out of nappies when I began paying into my State Pension 46 years ago will stop paying it to me.

In the accompanying letter, just one page of A4 employs the word ‘must’ six times, and the word ‘please’ once.

If that doesn’t worry you, then nothing ever will.

The sole thing I did to deserve this affront was move to France. In France, I have been waiting seven months for the Carte Vitale that gives me, as an EU State pensioner, access to the French welfare system “on fast track”. It took the UK service 3 months to turn round my request for a request to get a Carte Vitale.

Every day I pester, variously, my GP, the Mayor, and the French welfare office in Agen to request help in getting my request for a request formule out of their system and turned into a request for welfare at pharmacies, doctors and dentists. (The only organisation to come out of this with deserved dignity is the French government’s English-speaking help service).

But the DWP wants a reply in eight weeks, or else. The “or else” is that my pension stops. Purely because the bureaucracies of two EU nations cannot speak to each other without losing a sense of proportion, a sense of decency, the plot, and my S1 formule.

Although it takes breathtaking brass neck for anyone to demand I give them a Life Certificate (after a year, the UK tax office still hasn’t replied saying why I should pay any tax for 2013-14, given I wasn’t there) this kind of Kafkaesque nonsense is not a particularly outstanding example of the genre. Across the EU, wherever you go and without exception, there is a fat layer of bureaucracy getting in the way. They cost billions, they all have top-hat pensions, and many of them are corrupt.

Every day for the last fifteen months, I have been forced – by divorce, buying my wife out of the house here, dealing with Orange re internet access, being messed about by WordPress, tax affairs, residency matters, banking idiocy, delivery problems, notaire idleness and obduracy, boiler guarantees, pension reforms, vehicle registrations, investment market manipulation, insurance claims, questions from builders, cash for builders, unreliable lawnmowers and accountancy drivel – to devote anything from 2-4 hours a day in the car, on the phone, sending emails and making decisions that relate to absolutely nothing of any importance to me.

None of the people with whom I deal in this farrago of fumbling contribute anything to the greater contentment and material wellbeing of the Citizenry.

And people wonder why I am a communitarian entrepreneurial capitalist with a preference for mutualist companies.

Why is that, I wonder?