The very definition of a philistine?
A little while ago I blogged about a great moment in my French course when a fellow Australian announced to the class how much she admired erstwhile rubbish Australian Prime Minister John Howard. I wrote with slight tongue in cheek about my shock at actually meeting someone of my age who felt this way. All this prodding at the bleeding-heart-liberal bubble that I like to live in fades into insignificance, however, after an encounter I had last week.
To set the scene, I work in the City of London, although not, I would like to stress in the financial sector. This means that I spend my life surrounded by extremely well paid City people - I share my gym and French classes with them, see them in the pub after work, queue with them to buy the newspaper and grumble with them about late running trains. I don’t have a problem with this. I know that working say, as an analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland does not necessarily mean that you are a tosser with no conscience and a record collection full of James Blunt CDs. I have successfully managed to avoid meeting the archetypal shallow, money obsessed City cliché.
Until last week that is.
We met in his office. He was very well dressed and oozed the sort of confidence that only comes from public school and 50 years of telling yourself how fabulous you are. Within the space of an hour I was informed of the following facts:
- Public libraries are an anachronism and have no valid reason to exist.
- People who go to libraries are geeks anyway.
- If you’ve actually got time to go to a concert or gig (and you’re not ‘entertaining clients’) then you are a loser who clearly isn’t working hard enough.
- Most cultural venues (that’s libraries, museums, arts centres, galleries, concert halls etc. etc.) do nothing more than provide respite care for weirdos.
All this was calmly stated without any trace of irony or even devilish provocation. By the end of our discussion, he was just looking at me pityingly as I (geek, loser and weirdo that I am) tried to suggest that he might be wrong.
My boss later summed up the whole encounter by saying ‘Well, at least with this knowledge you’re now able to accurately use the word ‘philistine’’
February 11th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Funnily enough I work just round the corner from that pic, in a financial enviroment but not in a financial role. Fortunatley I’ve only ever come across a couple of bods like that, most of the public school types I’ve worked with are fairly civil it’s the bullish Broker types I find unbearable and alien - they’ve no interest anything (apart from sport) If there’s no money to be made.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Looks like I work just up the road from you then Mr Mondo. Look out for the woman with the Phil Oakey haircut carrying too many shopping bags from expeditions to Rough Trade at lunchtime…
February 12th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Wow! You met someone with no soul. Creepy. Whay was he telling you all this?
February 12th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Yes, it was an amazing experience really. The saddest thing was that he was oblivious to the fact that anyone (like a fair chunk of the world’s population) might disagree with him.
I actually work for a loser organisation myself that provides respite care for the weirdos of London. Mostly my job involves talking to other losers and geeks, but very occasionally I find myself in the company of people like Mr Philistine here.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I’m often in Rough Trade and saw the marvellous Dennishopperchoppers doing a great instore last year
http://planetmondo.blogspot.com/2007/11/dennishopperchoppers-midnight-rider.html
Keep an eye out for someone with a Steve Marriot rooster cut and black and cream Fred Perry ‘manbag’ tutting and shaking my head at the poor selection in HMV.
Have you tried Camomile Library? great DVD section and loads of music DVDs at Barbican Libray too