Wisdom is not the sole prerogative of schoolboys

Last week the financial world was all agog over a report written for Morgan Stanley in London by a 15-year-old intern. Mathew Robson, a schoolboy hoping for a lucrative job in the City one day, got his career off to a flying start with his revelations that people of his generation see advertising as “extremely annoying and pointless”; they “cannot be bothered” to read a newspaper and even find Twitter, the mobile communication tool that limits messages to 140-odd characters, too costly to use.

This news was greeted like a bombshell. Media experts were all a-twitter, financial analysts were amazed and the poor fellows that own Twitter probably wanted to shoot themselves. The Financial Times dubbed him the “most famous intern since Monica Lewinsky”.

I hate to pour cold water on young Master Robson’s brilliance, but frankly, all he was doing was stating the obvious: no 15-year-old boy ever wants to communicate with anyone. They are too busy reading Nietzsche and squeezing their spots. When I was that age and away at school, I was encouraged to write a letter to my mother once a week. Poor mother, for I always managed to find something just that bit more interesting to do than to regale her with tales of what I had eaten that week and how many double maths lessons I had endured.