I have decided to give up being a cartoonist.

There's no cachet to the title. Most of the time people don't believe me and think I actually said something like 'I scribble a bit in my spare time from my highly-paid normal job'.

The only country where cartoonists are respected is France. (In the days when your job was on your passport, I used to have interested conversations at French customs.) The problem with being a cartoonist is the title. It's too straightforward. It needs jazzing up into something obscure and impressive-sounding.

I was in Tesco recently and came across an aisle marked Italian Meal Solutions. This raised a number of interesting questions, the main one being that, up to that point, I hadn't realised I had an Italian Meal Problem.

This is the crux of the matter, of course. There are never solutions to things which the rest of us consider to be problems. What we really need are General All-round Life Problem Solution Providers.

This is an area which has attracted attention recently, notably in Private Eye, and you'd think by now that no one could take themselves seriously enough to perpetrate these linguist contortions. But corporate-think is not renowned for including a sense of humour.

I was discussing this only the other day with my household exercise solutions provider and we decided it was all part of the phenomenon of nomenclature creep. Well, I say 'we decided' but actually it was just me - he agreed by going 'woof'.

Titles start off perfectly respectable and then their owners feel the need to upgrade them into something incomprehensible, labouring under the delusion that their status is enhanced as a result. I blame consultants, or, as they are sometimes known, appellation obfuscation providers.

Recently, for example, I noticed that the Lake District National Park now has a Corporate Communications Director. Since when did the National Park become a corporation? I was going to ring their Press Officer and ask but couldn't find one listed. Perhaps it happens automatically when staff become outnumbered by Native American tribal leaders.

So, back to the problem of calling myself a cartoonist. In this case, the answer is obvious: From now on, I shall be advertising myself as a humour-focused scribbly drawing solutions provider...

Incidentally, if this trend ever gets as far as the police, what do they call themselves? Crime solution solutions providers?