So what do I actually do?

I've made my living all kinds of ways - as a busker, an (unqualified) teacher, a door-to-door salesman, a BBC journalist. More often than not, I've chosen jobs for the time and space they left for other kinds of work that didn't pay. But if there's a common activity behind all this, you might call it trafficking - between different worlds, of thought and of action.

It is an old trade, always regarded with suspicion, and one for which no single word now exists. The work involves books, thinking, writing and talking. Learning, alone and with others. (My friends claim they outsource their reading to me.) It could be done in a university, though perhaps not easily in the universities we have now. I'm too vagrant (or just too vague) to put that to the test.