Happy to wait

This increasing trend not just to buy fashionable clothes or go to fashionable restaurants but to go on massive waiting lists for them is absurd.

The Mary Jane Harrietta shoe is currently almost impossible to get hold of, with a waiting list of 800 people. Or you can wait four years for a table at the Bank Tavern restaurant in Bristol.

You or me would surely say, I'm not going on a huge waiting list, that's ridiculous, I'll try another type of shoe/ another restaurant that's more easily available.

What if when you finally get your table at the restaurant, it turns out the chef is having an off day and the meal simply isn't up to much? Then you'll kick yourself for enduring the long wait.

Is it sheer snobbery that people are prepared to go on a waiting list for months or years rather than walking into the local Pizza Express and getting a table straightaway?

Do people get a bit miffed if they're number 754 on the waiting list and they discover their friend is at number 23? Might a few banknotes be exchanged so as to jump the queue?

And how miffed would you be if the famous restaurant burnt down just as you got to the top of the queue?

Pic: the hard-to-obtain Harrietta pumps

In a nutshell

Slang is always contro-versial. Is it a valid part of the language or is it something to be avoided? Does it add colour and vividness or is it just sloppy?

Lucy Frame, the principal at a London secondary school, has decided slang should be avoided, though only in lessons and not in the playground. She has declared that if pupils are using slang they aren't expressing themselves clearly and accurately.

I think she's being ridiculous. Everybody uses slang, and why not? Unless it's a term that's offensive or mystifying, what's the problem?

One academic who was asked to comment pointed out that Shakespeare is full of slang and teachers don't see any difficulty with that. He accused the school of "cultural and linguistic snobbery".

All slang really refers to is unfamiliar words that haven't yet become commonplace. But if the unfamiliar word conveys something useful, isn't that what language is all about?

And who decides if a word is slang or just an ordinary, routine word? Who decides for example whether "getting hitched" or "tying the knot" are slang terms or unremarkable bits of English?

If slang just means an unusual and ingenious way of expressing something, I'm all for it. It livens up the language and gets people's attention.

So that's my opinion "in a nutshell". Which might or might not be slang.

PS: The full list of slang banned by the school is:

• He cut his eyes at me (shot me a withering glance)
• Oh my days (my goodness)
• Oh my god
• That's a neck (you need a slap for that)
• Wow
• That's long (boring, tough or tedious)
• Bare (very, extremely)
• Cuss (swear or abuse)

Frightfully vulgar

It's rare these days to hear someone being called "vulgar". But it was a frequent comment when I was young, and I remember my parents finding any number of odd things "vulgar". Glaring vulgarity had to be avoided at all costs.

Nowadays nobody seems to care very much if their behaviour could be labelled "vulgar". They carry on doing their own thing regardless, and if anyone disapproves, too bad. Seeing something as vulgar has itself become vulgar.

But my parents had a long list of things they deemed vulgar - not wearing smart enough clothes, not mowing the lawn often enough, not using a tablecloth, not washing up straight after a meal, to name a few - and they policed this code of vulgarity strictly.

Of course what "vulgar" really meant was lower-class or under-educated. It meant what they did on council estates or in factories. It meant the behaviour of people with no sense of decorum or etiquette. It meant those too dim to have any sophistication or good taste.

But that's all changed. Now the very suggestion that someone is being vulgar is seen as pretentious, snobbish, superior. It's seen as a mean attempt to spoil someone else's pleasure. It's seen as blinkered, old-fashioned prejudice.

I suppose my parents' strictures had some positive effect, however absurd some of them were. I may have lived my whole adult life without using a tablecloth, but nevertheless I've picked up a sense of "doing things properly" rather than doing them any-old-how, which is probably an advantage.

I guess the idea of vulgarity still lives on in other guises. Today, instead of saying something is vulgar, you say it's embarrassing or cringey. Or you say the person is attention-seeking. Or you complain that everything is being dumbed down.

And dumbing things down is surely the height of vulgarity.

Posh gits

I may have a posh accent, but I'm not remotely posh in any other respect. I may seem "posh" to those who have very little, but my lifestyle is quite unremarkable beside the real thing.

I may own my house and my car, have some savings, and live in a sedate residential area, but that doesn't make me in any way posh. There are thousands of people just like that.

I think the essence of poshness is rarity value (or luxury). The truly posh have things the vast majority of us don't have. A country mansion, a yacht, a chauffeur-driven limo, a private jet. Things the average person can only dream of (that is, if we really want a draughty old mansion or a condescending chauffeur).

The other ingredient of poshness is a "fancy" way of doing things. Soup spoons, fish forks, napkins. Bow ties, cuff links, top hats. Ornate invitations and letters. Always something more than the bog-standard routine. Something that sets you apart from the common crowd.

Not necessarily sophisticated though. You can be as posh as you like in terms of lifestyle, but dumb as they come when any hard thinking is required. The term "upper-class twit" comes to mind.

Poshness often goes hand in hand with pretentiousness. People think that because they're posh they're somehow a cut above the non-posh, somehow in some rarified category of their own.

That absolutely doesn't wash in Northern Ireland. It's very refreshing that people here despise any kind of pretentiousness. Anyone who acts superior is very quickly cut down to size. As we say here, they're "losing the run of themselves".

You can talk to a chief executive as casually as the refuse collector. You could be with someone who's filthy rich but they'd show no sign of it. People aren't as obsessed with social status as they are elsewhere.

"Pomposhity" will get you nowhere.

Snobbery

I know all about snobbish-ness. I've experi-enced plenty of it in my time. Sometimes I think my birth-country of England is snobbery capital of the world. Most of the English are obsessed with their position in the social hierarchy, looking down on anyone supposedly below them and feeling inferior to anyone seen as above them.

Being lower middle class myself (he says, reluctantly categorising himself), I've been given the cold shoulder regularly by those who regard themselves as financially, culturally, educationally or occupationally superior.

I especially remember the time Jenny and I lived in a posh block of flats in Islington, London. Some of the other residents, mostly high-end professionals like lawyers and doctors, were always slightly sniffy towards us, seeing us as "not quite one of them", suspecting us of dubious tastes and opinions, and generally on the lookout for unpredictable and embarrassing behaviour.

They seldom invited us in for a drink or a meal, did their best to avoid us and seemed to regard us as temporary interlopers who had somehow tricked our way into their prestigious block of flats*.

During our time in London, I can recall many social occasions where those present would form into cliques of perceived similar-status guests, each clique keeping themselves firmly separate from those seen as lower status, and taking care not to mix with them or in any way recognise their presence. Such recognition could irredeemably damage their own social standing.

I wonder why it is that people are so insecure and self-doubting that they find mere contact with someone from a different background so threatening. They must be terrified that their own lifestyle will be found wanting.

As an ex-journalist and ex-bookseller who has mixed with people from all sorts of backgrounds and with every possible viewpoint, and having learnt a great deal on the way, I find such aloofness baffling and pointless. How can we possibly begin to understand the rest of the world if we try to permanently seal ourselves off from it?

It was extremely refreshing to move to Northern Ireland, where people are much less status-conscious and plumbers and chief executives mingle quite happily without regarding each other as an alien species. Shock horror, they may even live next door to each other.

* PS: Not that this bothered us particularly. We were perfectly happy without their company. We had some good friends there who didn't have an ounce of snobbery. And we had plenty of other friends. We found the snobs more amusing than upsetting. 

Thanks to Cheerful Monk for the inspiration. 

Drawing a line

A cruise entrepren-eur visiting a new terminal at Portsmouth was shocked to discover that passengers on his five-star cruises might come across smelly, shirtless, unshaven lorry drivers. This would ruin the luxury ambience, he said.

As well as whiffy lorry drivers there would be young people lying around and customers might trip over them. Lord Sterling of Swan Hellenic wants the cruise passengers to be segregated from the unsavoury hoi polloi to "create a certain atmosphere".

I presume that means an atmosphere of snobbery and elitism well away from the unwashed minions who drive their caviar and oysters across Europe.

Actually segregation might be a good idea. Then the lorry drivers and fun-loving youngsters wouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable and awkward by the sneering glances of the well-to-do as they embark on their exclusive £8000 cruises.

They could take off their sweaty shirts and sprawl around without feeling inhibited. They could even play loud music and flaunt their tattoos without anyone cramping their style.

The cruise passengers could have a special deluxe lounge where they can enjoy each other's fully-dressed fragrance, properly seated in well-padded chairs, and aren't forced to endure the trauma of irregular behaviour and uncouth habits.

Lord Sterling is quite right to be concerned. If you just had any old person mixing with any old person, who knows what unpleasantness it could cause? One's tolerance is limited, dontcha know? One has certain expectations and too much lowering of standards does rather strain one's fortitude. One has to draw a line somewhere, dammit.

Now where's that steward with my G and T?

Unputdownable or unreadable?

When is a book a good book? Is it only the literary critics who're expert enough to decide? Or is the ordinary reader's opinion just as valid?

I get constantly annoyed by the lingering belief that there's some kind of literary elite who know better than you and I what's a talented, well-crafted book and what's ham-fisted rubbish.

There's a continual assumption that only those who've studied literature at some fancy university, or hung out with famous authors, or are themselves authors, have enough discernment to tell the wheat from the chaff, the humdingers from the penny-dreadfuls.

I say this having just sampled two novels heaped with praise by the self-proclaimed experts, which seemed to me anything but praiseworthy. Everything from the plot to the characters to the writing itself seemed sadly lacking.

The cognoscenti of the book world would no doubt regard my opinions as worthless and uninformed. Yet I studied literature at school, I've read thousands of books and for many years I was a bookseller. Why would my opinions be any less valid than those of the literati?

Nobody would suggest that ordinary football fans are incapable of worthwhile opinions about football. Or that ordinary music-lovers can't have sensible opinions about music. Yet there's still this sniffy elitism about books.

So let's hear it for all those anonymous readers, Jo and Joanna Page-Turner, who're as entitled as anyone to proclaim the Booker Prize Winner a load of pretentious twaddle, or that well-known "literary giant" an overrated, long-winded dwarf.