LETTERS Think of your paperboy

Good morning! Are you sitting comfortably, tea and toast to hand? or maybe in bed, having retrieved the paper from the letter box? Whichever, at this moment you’re reading the daily Mail. What luxury!

And only because your paperboy or girl got up in the dark, probably cold and raining, hopped on their bike, staggered to your door, paper bag bulging, to bring you 90 or so pages of world news, current affairs, sports, finance, leisure pursuits etc, — and you didn’t even spare him or her a thought. Shame on you!

Well, make the most of it, because the Eurocrats claim paper rounds and holiday jobs for kids are against their ‘yuman rights’ and if they get their way your 364-days-a-year delivery will be a thing of the past.

I was a newsagent from 1957 to 1988 and employed hundreds of ‘delivery agents’. As a boy, I did two rounds a day, eight miles before breakfast, taking the dog with me, before going to Gravesend Grammar school. Being a paperboy was the only way for me and my mates to get cash: 7/6d a week. It made you realise that if you wanted it you had to work for it.

Some of the first kids I employed are grandfathers now. Many great men in history were paperboys before they became famous. I once spoke to Lord Beaverbrook, who claimed he had done every job in newspapers and it was the enthusiasm he felt being a paperboy that got him hooked.

MICHAEL JENNINGS, Hartley, Kent.