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through that. Things that I would naturally avoid I suddenly became open to regardless of any prejudices that had steered me away in the past. The main change in me was study, a discipline I had avoided like the plague after academic failure at school. Science was one of the natural interests I always had but that normally stretched no further than the theories behind my favourite sci-fi. But that was changing. I now found myself visiting libraries and losing myself for hours in those huge stuffy textbooks that I avoided at school. All of a sudden I found myself meticulously combing the shelves for Einstein or anything to do with quantum physics, atomic science or the metaphysical. It’s true that I always had an interest in these things but now I was looking at the hows and whys behind them and also managing the concentration threshold that I never thought possible. It was great to be able to digest things this way without drifting off on a useless tangent. The way I grasped and retained the information I read brought me to another conclusion--that perhaps my intelligence was extending. Perhaps it would no longer be restricted the way I felt it had been before. The best move I considered was to seize the momentous breakthrough by embarking on full time education and accelerate from wherever it was I floundered before. My current job appeared to be needing me less and less and it would only be a matter of time before redundancy reared its ugly head. Being a contractor, this meant no pay so I wasn’t going to wait around for the wounding. I handed in my month’s notice and used this time to browse course literature while applying for a student grant. I had no particular career aims in mind other than knowing I wasn’t going to fulfil my childhood dream of becoming a stage magician. All I wanted to do for now was engulf myself with the subject that always fascinated me, science. limmediately enrolled at a local college for a science degree, pretending that l already had the formal entry qualifications. When I began the course I was rather dubious about that reckless decision thinking it would leave me mercilessly slacking behind. At first there were signs of this but my new thirst for knowledge soon helped me catch up on my peers without any painful effort. After all, what I lacked were the foundations, the facts and figures that enabled my fellow students to sail through but these were soon acquired by the way I had applied myself. Something had definitely happened in the way I developed this new ability to concentrate and grasp things. Normally the sheer capabilities of the students around me would 51