(no subject)
In town this morning there was a little girl crying and trying to keep up with her mother, who was striding ahead with a pushchair. ‘Joo want donuts?’ said the mum. ‘Eh? Joo want donuts? Well urry up then!’ The mum had that strange pale-blotchy skin of someone who probably doesn't eat much other than donuts herself.
Jesus I'm such a snob. What is the matter with me? I remember once going to report on a murder in Scunthorpe. When I turned up on the estate where it had happened, there was a crowd of kids all gathered around the police tape. Predictably enough, when I got my camera out of the car they all swarmed around me: ‘Am I on telly?’ ‘Is this live?’ etc etc. From a few doors down, a woman leaned out of her window and called out, ‘Oy, Lisa, leave the man alone, don't you know someone's been killed.’ One of the seven-year-old girls just turned round and screamed, ‘Shut the fuck up Mum, you fucking junky.’ I stared at her, open-mouthed, but she just carried on shouting with her friends as though this were the most natural comment in the world.
It reminded me of something one of my close friends, who is a teacher, said. Her first teaching placement was at quite a rough inner-city school with a lot of misbehaviour. When she was telling me about it, she said, ‘It made me realise that I am middle-class, whether I like it or not.’ That was quite an honest thing to say, and sometimes I still think about it. It is a comment that could only be made by someone who's English. I don't even know if it would have any meaning to an Aussie or an American. But my friend was so right - much as everyone hates the idea of classes, it is built into society here. You can see it especially in the trend of reality TV recently, where it has become acceptable to laugh at poor undereducated white people in shows like Wife Swap, and well-educated commissioning editors are all pitching ideas about "chav TV". Of course this is happening all over the world, but in the UK it is implicitly built around the idea of one class mocking another, which maybe ought to make people more uncomfortable than it does.
This is all very serious. More fart jokes next time.