This year, perhaps more than in any of the last decade, class is rearing its seething pug face over British public life. Wherever you look, today’s conflicts are class conflicts by any meaningful measure: the unions and the NHS versus a cabal of Etonian, toffy-nosed ministers; the fabled taxpayers rail against swaggering, loaded banking chiefs; stubbly altruists in tents take on the City of London. Honest, salt-of-the-earth graft is everywhere pitted against ivory-towered, silver-spooned privilege.

Only this year could a man in a rubber suit cheerily plop into the river Thames ahead of a scudding, frothing armada of the British establishment, on the pretext of anti-elitism. I can grudgingly appreciate his derring-do, but his cause was as vain and hollow as his sneering, bobbing head. He blamed government cuts (who doesn’t?), the decline of democracy and, just for good measure, colonialism for the prospering of a shrinking, gilded elite and the immiseration of ordinary people. Sadly, there are too many like him who appeal to Britain’s acutest paranoia, and have precisely nothing of worth to say. Days after the boat race, one paper printed a column of such dribbling unoriginality I’m certain its writer had scribbled it in her sleep. The gist of it was that we can’t take a joke, that Trenton Oldfield’s slippery antics were just harmless high-jinks. Who cares, she asks, if he disrupted two boatfuls of toffs? After all, nobody died, and that’s really all that matters isn’t it? Several other papers suggested that the protest might just have been defensible, and the Twittersphere returned ambivalent judgments. I had to rub my eyes. Only this year.

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1 month ago · 0 notes

Cruising is a peculiar way of seeing the world. Budget cruises, like that which I joined last year, tend to be overwhelmed by plump oldies straining the ship’s stores of Twinings and slowly, chirpily melting on the poop deck. When the ship docks, they’re dumped on the harbourside and bundled into buses, which whisk them inland for half a day of numb-bummed wonderment. Then they leap back on ship with visible relief, back to their cabins for a good sprucing before emerging on deck, in frocks and crimson lippy, to watch another country slip out of sight and out of mind. So, that was Crete then. Egypt next. 

Egypt’s strangeness started out at sea. There were shipwrecks; dozens of them, like great rotting cadavers, just abandoned to the wasting waves. A faint, earthy pong hung on the air as we picked out skinny minarets in the haze. It was nearly every bit as otherworldly as in my imaginations. A dumfounding piece of news was waiting for us on the dockside: we were the first tourists into the port of Alexandria since the revolution. A busload of crinkly pensioners with bum bags and handheld fans had just become history’s most improbable pioneers. The Egyptians don’t call it a ‘revolution’. They prefer ‘liberation’; it’s unreservedly hopeful and morally certain. In the Alexandrian docks it was all smiles, but our guide was weirdly matter-of-fact about it all, as if she were remarking on a pleasing football result: ‘so, welcome to Egypt. You’ve probably heard about the liberation. We’re all quite happy about it’. 

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1 month ago · 2 notes

A few years back, it snowed in London. Not limp, half-arsed proto-slush that’s just ugly and annoying, but proper, knee-deep fairy fluff that turns everybody into chums. We headed to Regent’s Park, which was just swathed in the stuff, immaculate and bewitching. Now, there are two ways to react to the prospect of a square-mile of manipulable raw material. One is to build podgy little figures with carrots stuck in their faces, and take jolly snaps and delight in the novelty of it all. The other is to immediately make projectiles and commence pitched battles. Soon enough, we had a base of operations and a hierarchy of command, led by a fearless and fearsome Bulgarian accountant. It was, by a country mile, the most fun you could have with a bunch of people you don’t know, in a field, with no booze. At one point, a lad in a leotard unwisely sprinted through no-man’s-land, and was battered so mercilessly his legs were the colour of beetroot. At another, an unwary jogger caught a snowball so squarely in the face it knocked him flat. This was, of course, a little unkind, but he took it in giggling, commendable spirit. That’s the snow effect. Imagine if, on any other day, somebody had floored you with an improvised missile. You’d go berserk. But on a ‘snow day’, everybody has a wonderfully robust sense of humour. 

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3 months ago · 3 notes

I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while; to be precise, since I first stumbled, gawping, into the Piazza del Duomo, Florence, about this time a year ago. The trip came on the back of a tough few weeks in London. I had to miss a day of it because of a sodding interview in the City, and I’d brought a little keepsake from home: a malicious, bulging ulcer searing angrily at the slightest brush. I was tired and thick-headed, with chewed fingernails and prickly red eyes. And the very instant I got to Florence, none of it mattered.

We took proper, bitterly delicious coffee at sundown. The hulking Duomo sat beside us, enormous walls drenched in fleshy pink and deep emerald and white mellowing into the dusk, and crusted with fleurs-de-lis and figures of stone. There was a grand old café across the road with shimmering chandeliers, vibrant gelato and slender, waistcoated baristas. Aged Florentines deftly wended tinkling bicycles over the cobbles. And the whole thing was set against the most glorious score: quiet, day’s end Italian chat, and a soaring oratorio of church bells. I gulped it all down as I did my restorative cuppa, and England became a remote, sodden, puddle-grey memory. Nothing else mattered but this mesmerising place of marbled, rococo class.

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3 months ago · 26 notes

The single most disheartening sentence in the English language is: ‘let’s go to a club.’ Not a gentleman’s club, or a bowls club (both of which would be preferable) but a night club. The very idea makes my heart sink like a punctured oil tanker.

Few people seem to admit that a lot of English clubs very closely resemble purgatory. Most of the clubs I have been to have been in central London, with a few provincial holes thrown in for good measure. London clubs come in two main varieties: there are the cheap, sticky, thumping, sweat-dripping caves which run student nights and sell vodka for pennies, which are generally full of varsity rugby players bursting out of florescent t-shirts and gulping pints of beer and piss. And there are the pricey, Mayfair joints full of furious, oil-soaked Arab squires and bland, pointy-faced Chelsea girls with fashion blogs. There are variations, but that’s pretty much the norm. (There is, in fact, a single decent club in Camden, but even that’s being sold down the canal). Clubs outside of London are a little different. They tend to be squeezed above or below coffee shops, like a landowner’s afterthought, and the people in them are younger and more hormonal.

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3 months ago · 0 notes

I got a bike for Christmas. Everybody in Cambridge has one. And when I say everybody, I mean that those who don’t are a tiny, plodding minority routinely knocked flying by Pashleys. The city wakes up to a score of whirring and rattling with the odd rasping gear change, as a few thousand braniacs sweep to lectures. There’s a healthy dose of anger about, but cyclists have the most useless, flaccid tool imaginable for communicating it: the bell. You can go blue in the face and frothy-mouthed and properly bonkers at the meandering sightseers in front of you, but your only recourse is to a benign, terribly polite little tinkle. It’s the meek, metallic equivalent of ‘oops, don’t mind me’, and it’s almost unanimously ignored. I don’t have a bell yet, so I just shriek ‘ding dong!’, which tends to cause heart attacks.

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3 months ago · 0 notes

In Lone Scherfig’s minor masterpiece ‘An Education’, promising Jenny is urged by her pushy papa to be, or at least resemble, a ‘joiner-inner’. That’s what matters for Oxford, she’s told; looking like a net contributor to ‘the academic community’, accumulating shiny badges and certificates and hunting eternally for an adjective so whoreishly overused and ghastly it is now almost completely meaningless: it’s called being ‘rounded’, and the word can be found on every single job application in the land.

There are quite a few people at university who have taken that advice deeply, deeply to heart. There are those who do it out of a genuine sense of higher calling, a desire to make everyone’s life that smidgen easier (we do, after all, need to replace the decomposing sofa in the common room, but who among us can present our case to the powers that be?). And there are those who look for these little accolades simply to add bullet points to their CVs, which is fraudulent but comprehensible. It’s just about tolerable to have these little red-cheeked swots running around putting up posters and developing unnervingly close relations with staff, but only so long as they are aware that the service they are performing is not in the slightest bit remarkable. And there’s the problem.

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4 months ago · 0 notes

It’s hard to believe that Mandarin is a language at all. It is so absurdly foreign, so screechingly unnatural that I marvel that anybody can communicate with it. It is also tonal and bone china-delicate, and our attempts to enunciate a hotel address to an open-shirted, big-bellied cab driver must have looked piteous. ‘Chaoyang?’ we ask, referring to the district name. The cabbie looks as if I’ve asked him for a slow waltz. ‘Chaoyang?’ we repeat louder. Cabbie’s frown deepens and his eyes cast around for a compatriot. After half a dozen more attempts he asks; ‘Chaoyang?’, ever so slightly hardening the ‘ch’ and turning the second ‘a’ into a ‘u’; a tiny linguistic nuance which I suppose would mean the difference between Baker Street and Barnstable. 

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4 months ago · 0 notes