Dewey-eyed, De-mystified

I was preoccupied I suppose, that's how I managed it. I don't know what it was that was making me feel so down. Was it the shortening of the days? Was it some mild form of flu? Was it the certain knowledge that the railway infrastructure of the British Isles could only be saved from a slow and sorry end by a programme of massive re-investment and a protracted campaign of executive assassinations? Possibly. Possibly it was merely that I'd been caught out by the rain and I could smell the unmistakeable odour of damp dog rising up from my Latin American-inspired girlfriend-purchased knitwear (the pattern on this one seems to be something like "dumper trucks of the Incas"). Anyway I was wondering around aimlessly, daydreaming of trains running on time, telescopic sights, fake identities, escape over the rooftops. In fact I was uniquely doing that thing that retail assistants can never believe you're doing - "just browsing". When I found myself holding a large, leather-bound tome open in my hands at the following page: Accruals. The fascinating subject of accruals (the attachment of rates of value change to specific accounting periods) can best be summed up in the following equation: a = 2t/et-ky is something else and

Yup, that should have got rid of them. Fools, if only they knew that the eternal truths of the universe are hidden inside the accountancy textbooks of public libraries, but then of course they wouldn't be fools would they? And how would we, the initiated survive without fools? Gentlemen (and token lady). Welcome to the eternal truths of the universe. But first a customary safety check. If, by some freak accident you have read this far and you are by profession a teacher, social-worker, probation office or other random do-gooder, stop reading this now! Once you've read this you'll never be able to work again, so stop it (if you think it matters).

Right, finally we're ready. Relax. It is all as you secretly suspected. Everything your parents, teachers, social workers, probation officers, elders and "betters" ever told you is false. You won't go blind, hair won't grow on the palms of your hands. The wind won't change and it won't stay like that. Hard work is certainly not (sorry, we're trying not to laugh) its own reward. There is such a thing as a free lunch - were it not for out periodic retreats to the fat farm and the regular attentions of our personal trainers we would certainly die from all the free lunches we eat. If you work hard, obey the rules and do what your teachers tell you, you will probably end up as a retail sales assistant on three farts-fifty a week. Only two kinds of people become rich and famous - those who have genuine talent and those who are capable of standing up in courtrooms, on balconies before crowds, before the world's media, before inquests and telling gob-smacking, fortune-making, career-saving whoppers. The genuinely talented need not concern us here, they are rare and, quite frankly, they give us the creeps. We'll show you how to diddle them out of their hard-earned cash later. But first we need to give you a firm grounding in basic mendacity... And so it continued. But of course I'm not going to tell you how. In fact none of this really happened. I just made it up. That's right, oh yes! (hmmm, probably need to practice this a bit more).