Her preferred talent pool was to be 50-plus-year-old jobseekers. This was in 2019. “I still had the passion and fire,” Oram told Recruiter, “I had my local training providers lined up – then, flippin’ heck, lockdown came along.”

She thought to herself: “What am I going to do with my life?”

As rom-com writers would put it, Oram took her destiny into her own hands. Literally. She wrote an adult novel, putting a middle-aged woman at the centre of the action, complete with “cellulite and big pants”. The comedic adventures of Ann in Wax, Whips and My Hairy Bits: An Erotic Comedy of Errors proved so popular on Amazon that Oram has spun out four sequels in the Wax and Whips series since June 2020, along with two separate – but also naughty – novels with different characters.

“They’re a bit rude, but women love them,” said Oram, whose pen name is SJ Carmine, of her series. “We just need to laugh!”

As she was writing the series, her growing fan base would write to her, begging for details of Ann’s next salacious but awkward and misguided excursions. “They wanted to know ‘What happens next?’,” Oram said. “And they’d tell you what they wanted to happen!”

Oram self-publishes on Amazon, and while book sales – both Kindle and paperback – are “nudging 5,000 copies”, she said her new career has not turned over a fortune yet. “You don’t get a huge cut from Amazon,” she said.

However, Oram is loving her new business. “It was so easy to write,” she marvelled of her first book. “It wasn’t a chore. But,” she added with a laugh, “none of it was from my personal experience!”

From her fan mail, she knows that the light-hearted literature she served up during the pandemic provided some much-needed comic relief for stressful times. “Ordinary, normal women needed breaks during the pandemic – a bit of therapy,” Oram said.

Published in March this year, Oram’s most recent book shares quotes and comments about one of society’s very last taboos: the menopause.

Asked if she regretted packing up her newly-launched recruitment agency in 2020, Oram said: “Obviously, at that time, it wasn’t to be. But the idea’s still there. If I wanted to, I could go back to it.”

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