Old Etonians, Conservatives and Homosexuals

Cripes, I never thought that would be a blog-post title. Some quip about all good people being at least two of those is forming in my mind, but I shan't burden you with it just now. Perhaps I should also add Church of England to that list. Anyway, onwards, Horatio, as someone once upon a time may or may not have said.

I've just spotted a wonderful quote in last week's Spectator. Opening the review to a new play which opened recently in London's Soho Theatre, Tory Boyz, Lloyd Evans begins:

The Conservatives were once a party of proud Etonians and closet homosexuals; now they're a party of closet Etonians and proud homosexuals.

Which lead to me pondering awhile (as I am wont to do) why this might be so. We're all aware that homosexuality is, thankfully, more or less fully accepted in today's society, or at least so my boyfriend tells me. But why is having been educated at the nation's finest school seen as needing to be hidden from general knowledge as if it were some deviantly-transmitted sexual disease?

New Labour has achieved much in its 11-year reign of terror, erm, I mean power. Some of it isn't wholly bad. Indeed, to be fair to the old buggers for a moment, the increase in acceptability of homosexuality and the equal rights now inherent to those of us who are very close to our mothers can partly be laid at the feet of His Tonyness et al. However, some things, perhaps even most things, that they have achieved have been less than good.

Perhaps that which I find the most frustrating is the dumbing-down in education. Endless tractor-production style figures of ever-increasing pass rates wholly betray the fact the majority of the well-educated population are more than aware that a lot of Britain's youth simply aren't terribly bright. The reasons for this are manifold, and there are enough words spread around t'interweb already without my feeble mind contributing more.

The point I wanted to note was that, more and more, I'm noticing that some people are finding the need to apologise for being intelligent and well-educated and even for being in possession of some erudite social skills. Also, other commentators have noticed a tendency for some people to be proud at being less than cerebrally efficient. Think carefully how many times you have heard someone say "oh, I've never been any good with numbers" or "my spelling's always been bad", followed immediately with an unembarrased giggle, as if to say, "isn't it funny how dumb I am?". Lawks.

The recent successes in CERN at the launch of the Large Hadron Collider have brought mathematics and physics back to the forefront of what be termed "cool" again, though I fear the effect will be but transitory. But things like that, and Concorde, and the jet engine, and the telephone, television, railways and other wonderful inventions didn't come from people who were proud to be numerically inefficient or embarrased to have worked hard and gained a good education.

So come along, those of you who went to Eton, Harrow and Westminster; graduates of Oxford and Cambridge unite; Doctors of Philosophy grab your bonnets and promise me one thing. You're all going to come out of your closet, look the country in the eye, and tell them that you're proud to be who you are, that you're pleased with what you have done, and that you look forward to what you're hoping you'll achieve.

Being a friend of Dorothy is acceptable now. It's time to fight for the friends of Minerva and Athena.

This is no ordinary supermarket offer

As a regular shopper at Sainsbury's (keeping the riff-raff out of Waitrose, as the late and indubitably great Alan Coren once said) I'm aware of their current offers to "feed a family for a fiver". Now, I'm a firm believer in good old-fashioned home cooking, so I'm no stranger to getting plenty of bite for my buck, or even prandial sustenance for my pound sterling.

I was intrigued to note however, passing an M&S Food store at a railway station in a terribly middle-class town in which I occasionally work, an offer proudly declaiming "a meal for two for a tenner". Cripes. How the other half live.

I presume that, for that price, your £10 doesn't just buy you any ordinary pre-packaged, ready-to-microwave, over-salted, Christ-how-lazy-are-you-that-you-can't-be-bothered-to-cook-properly-for-God's-sake food ...

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

I am rather unnerved, slightly abashed, nervously shocked and grievously horrified, to say nothing about quite how smacked my gob is, to realise that, having founded this blog in all good faith at the beginning of the year, I have been rather more lax with its regular updating than Gordon Brown has been with all of our money. I should be ashamed for letting myself down so horrendously. I shall take my feeble body and clearly lazier-than-it-should-be mind off to the headmaster's study for a swish or two of the old cane. It's clear that I deserve it. Things such as this should not go unpunished.

Of course, the wholesale de-moralisation of society starts like this. It begins, innocently enough, with someone not filling in their diary as regularly as they should, goes through people putting their feet on seats on the train, playing their iPods too loudly, chewing noisily in public, and, before you know it, the yoofs are out there wearing ludicrously baggy sportswear, ridiculous hats and knifing innocent passers-by simply for "looking at me funny, like". It's a slippery slope, folks. Mark my words.

Anyway, that's all rather a long-winded way of saying that I'm going to be much more diligent in future about recording my thoughts, travails, moans, winges, delights and other detritus that this gin-soaked nous of mine occasionally dribbles forth when it is its whim.

So, until the next posting (which will, I hope, be sooner rather than later), as the Greeks say, αντίο.