It's official! This country now has more media studies students than plumbers.

That statistic explains why it cost nearly a hundred quid for the call-out alone when one of my pipes sprung a leak.

The first half-hour's consultation consisted of the expert shaking his head silently, then tut-tutting vocally, finally asking which 'cowboy' had installed the system.

I subscribe to the Australian definition of an expert: 'X' is the unknown quantity and 'spurt' is a drip under pressure.

Picking myself up from the floor, clutching the plumber's bill, I realised that my psychoanalyst chum, whom up to that point I'd envied as making the best hourly rate from any trade I'd ever come across, had definitely made a wrong career move.

Meanwhile, last year's crop of Meeja graduates have spent their first months of post-university life mastering that phrase so crucial to future employment prospects: 'Do you want fries with that?'

I recently met one of their number who was really lucky to have beaten off the horde of equally-qualified competitors and land a coveted, if unpaid, position in an open-plan office somewhere in Docklands.

The poor dear is even now getting work experience as his soon to be bankrupted dot.commer boss rants from behind a desk which an endangered rain-forest tree was felled to forge: 'It's not rocket science, dumbo. I take sugar in coffee and sweetener in tea!'

As the new academic year commences I watch the motors of re-mortgaged parents from all over the land, from every social background, drawing up outside the student flats which have taken over our postcode and dropping off clever Tarquin and Wayne, over-achieving Henrietta and Tracy.

They are about to commence modules which, according to the glossy brochure, will guarantee their transformation into high-rolling Jeremys and Jonathans, Kirstys and Davinas or, if they're really lucky, Ants and Decs.

Sorry to disillusion you, folks, but there's about as much possibility of that outcome as a cube of frozen water returning intact from a day trip to Hades.

Word from the wise, proud mums and dads: Haven't you sacrificed enough after a lifetime sweating on the production line, struggling with the filing cabinet? Splurge out on that Winnebago and drive it coast-to-coast down Route 66 name-checking towns from that song you loved so much when you were courting and that you now only dare put on when your so-cool offspring are away at Glastonbury discovering the groovy modern sounds of Pink Floyd and Rolf Harris.

'Media!'. The very word fills me with dread. 'Medium' used to mean some touched soul who would quake and quiver whilst receiving unfathomable messages from the Great Beyond.

And this is what our children are apparently studying now in universities!

I subscribe to the down-to-earth teaching of Professor Waylon Jennings:

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys,

Don't let them pick guitars and ride in old trucks,

Let them be doctors and lawyers and such.

Sound advice, though country music artistes never seem to have taken it on board.

Neither, I must admit, have I. Perhaps that's the problem. Maybe this is all just a question of envy.

It's taken years of determined graft for us so-called media folk to get where we can stumble out of bed of a morning whenever it suits us. And I, for one, will not willingly surrender that hard-won position to some young shaver or shaverette brandishing a qualification from a Portacabin college.

What this country needs is more plumbers. What we don't need is any more cowboys.