Letter to a school-leaver for the attention of other school-leavers

I suggest you come and spend your spare year working with us. I call us the high IQ ghetto of Oxford, and you will incidentally get a lot of information about what goes on at Oxford and Cambridge (my associates include two former lecturers) as well as some real philosophical and psychological ideas.

We are in the process of moving back to Oxfordshire and Oxford from East London, so your time would be divided between Forest Gate in East London and Great Milton in Oxfordshire, and much of the work would be that which arises in association with buying and selling houses.

If you can’t drive a car, the sooner you get to learn the better. We are always needing car-drivers for various errands.

If you should wish to retake maths A level, or any other A-level, to get better grades, we would be able to help you and I have a very good track record of helping people do much better than expected in Oxford degrees in various subjects.

What goes on in philosophy and psychology at Oxford and Cambridge is terrible crap, and your insights would certainly not be appreciated. So you might come to think that you would do better to go on working with us here (or, by then, in Oxfordshire). I am planning to give seminars in Oxford, which they probably will not let me give officially, so I shall have to pay for a lecture room and nobody will come. But I have been completely stifled for too long. We will be having as much contact as possible with the Oxford population, and will foreseeably be buying a central Oxford base as well as a near-Oxford campus (more space for the money in country than in town).

But we have a lot of ideas which we haven’t managed to get published, against the censorship, and you should be prepared to spend a year at least with us collecting your thoughts before making up your mind about the desirability of taking a degree.

East London sounds bad, I know, but actually our two houses, which we are in the process of selling, are quite respectable Victorian properties, on the edge of Epping Forest with open views at the front and pleasant gardens for sitting in at the back. We would be able to accommodate you in one of them to start with and maybe rent an extra room nearby for you if that seemed necessary as the moves progress.

Yours,

Celia Green

\joiners and workers\Working here in gap year June 2004