Cocktails and Records

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:

1. Public libraries are an anachronism and have no valid reason to exist.
2. People who go to libraries are geeks anyway.
3. 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. 
4. 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’’

Every now and again something happens to jolt me out of the bleeding heart liberal lefty non-Daily Mail reading bubble that I live in.

It happened in my French class yesterday. There are people from various different countries in my class and we were discussing how we felt about living in London compared to our home countries. Typical responses included that there are more opportunities in the UK, we like the culture, we have family here etc. etc.

The other Australian in my class, however (and there always is one, we’re ubiquitous around here), responded with a tirade about how much she detested the Labor party and how much she liked arch conservatives John Howard and David Cameron.

I was shocked. I don’t think I have ever (knowingly) shared the same room with someone of my age who feels that way. I didn’t even know those people existed. Well, I do but I don’t speak to them. And I don’t want to; I am happy in my bubble.