Paper round

At the age of nine I was described as "Erudite". At fourteen I was invited to join Mensa and at nineteen I won a college scholarship at Oxford. Today I am twenty-two years, five months and ten days old and I have just completed my first paper-round.

Why, you ask, am I now spending my morning struggling up roads with names like Beacon Road, Fairmount drive and Very Steep Street, laden down with a metric hell-tonne of Daily Telegraphs?

You see, I'm a socialist. I have the three classic character traits that always seem to go along with socialism:
1) I have a good heart
2) All my ideas slowly turn into monstrous totalitarian dystopias
3) I am very. very bad with money.

As such, this year the opportunity to earn a pittance in time otherwise wasted on eating and washing is very welcome.

Though to be honest, if it were purely the money, would I be competing with 14-year olds for less money than I could earn by standing very still next to vending machines with my mouth open?

Sorry, sports fans, but today's thrilling denouement will have to wait. My normal access is screwing up and even now, I'm typing this on a 'Sliced' temrinal normally used to display the library catalogue. The things I risk for you, I don't know.

The El-boro

I am vaugely suprised and very dissapointed to discover two harsh truths about the world as a graduate.

1) The Internet is not transmitted by walls, readyto flow forth like a magic river from any port or terminal. Rather, the invisible society has been commodified, priced and is sold in lumps that must be bought and transported to your door.

2) Money doesn't grow in my wallet.

3) People get really upset if you don't find some other way of making 2) happen.

I would go into more detail but I'm on a timer, and right now I'm using the internet to buy internet. Yeah, I know. I'm in a public library and I must be brief because the clock, as they say, is ti