So how many did you get this summer?’ I ask. ‘Six hundred and fifty,’ answers Lucy Townsend at Cazenove, the stockbroker. ‘More than 400,’ says Caroline Dawnay, a literary agent at PFD. ‘About two dozen a week,’ moans Ann Sindall at The Spectator. And one of them, who was only 14, should have been at home, in Ann’s frank opinion, reading Jackie magazine.
Even I got four requests to supply work experience to students or sixth-formers – a whole generation drawn, like moths to light, to offices over the summer. There they flutter until the darkness of autumn falls and they can go back to school or campus armed with a trophy reference and another impressive line on their CV.
‘Here’s what I really hate,’ one senior fiction editor confided. ‘We get lots of them in the summer, and what they love is going to meetings. So when we get to the meeting, we’re met with this absurd sight of all these self-important 21-year-olds we don’t know taking up all the places round the table, while we have to sit on chairs against the wall.’
‘In the past six months I’ve had a letter a week requesting work experience, and I usually try to interview about a third of them,’ sighed Miss Dawnay. ‘So I’ll call them up and ask them to come in on, say, Thursday at 11 a.m. And then they will drawl, ‘Fine …what’s your address?’ I always want to scream, ‘Do you have any idea how much it will cost me in lost time to read it out?’
Now let’s be fair. Of course, it’s like a kick in the teeth to have to be office nanny to some 17-year-old who has never wiped his own bottom, all in order to spiff up his personal statement, but now there’s no choice: it’s endemic.
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