Pack up your troubles

Packing is an art, not a science and packing books is avant garde art. Not how to pack them (they are rectangular, this is not Tetris) but what to pack. To be sure, 97% of the world population of Jackie Collins books smells faintly of suntan lotion, but simply buying the holiday bonkbuster ignores the opportunities for impressing fellow travellers and intimidating the locals that the simple use of the right vintage of Penguin, battered to perfection, affords. Of course, I like to prop up the bar with my copy of ‘Chalet School Sluts’ (hardback, 1927, hand tinted illustrations by the author)which guarantees you uninterrupted boozing and, to be fair, on one occasion, the unwanted sexual advances of a confused Elinor Brent-Dyer enthusiast.

Try doing that with a Kindle.

Yes, Packing is an art. Even more so now that so many laws have been passed that seem intended to prevent the traveller from taking with him or her the very essentials that make a journey in the company of strangers bearable, such as a nosebag of recreational phamacuticals and a paid companion (prior to my latest trip, I thought ‘sex trafficking’ was a sort of upmarket dogging). I presume next on the list of things to be banned from taking on a bus will be the racier kind of literature. Truly, first they came for our aerosols and I didn’t speak up because I have a dread of ‘Lynx’. Then came for our tubes of moisturiser and I did not speak up because I prefer to moisturise from the inside out using miniatures of gin. But if they try and take my copy of ‘Chalet School Sluts’ then they will be faced with a display of rage that will make current events in the Middle East look like a toddler’s tantrum.

My own luggage of choice would be the Huxley and Feathertone portable Gentleman’s travelling wardrobe. Mahogany, with brass fixings, rhino-hide covering, ceramic fixtures and fittings, optional library and cocktail cabinet (never an either/or option) and of course the bespoke ‘Universal Translator’ – an enamelled tin megaphone through which to bellow loudly in English until the person or crowd you are addressing, who has no English, understand your demands for a decent toilet and enormous, ice-cool, gin based drink (not necessarily in that order) NOW! through sheer force of personality and decibels. It weighs as much as a Shetland pony unpacked but, believe me, there’s noting quite like walking into the lobby of a hotel followed by four sweating, straining bearers or, optionally, one porter and a fork-lift truck, to make an impression. All conversation in the bar of the Catford Travelodge for instance, is guaranteed to cease on arrival.

The only thing that rivals it for capacity are those enormous backpacks that tourists wear to annoy tube users. Not only are they huge (if they don’t contain a tent you can use them as one), but the latest fashion is to have so many accessories dangling from them it looks as though somebody is playing backpacker buckeroo.

Of course just as important as your luggage are the luggage labels that adorn it. Looking at those marvellous ‘travel to the Costa Brava by small gauge steam railroad’ posters of yore, showing healthy chaps with pipes and flappers in gauzy frocks taking in some Mediterranean scene, gripping a huge tumbler of gin even though the clock tower in the town clearly shows it’s just after eight in the morning (different rules apply when the British travel, that’s why they love to do it), one notices that the luggage is covered by a collage of square, rectangular or, if one has been East of the Bosporus, dodecahedron shaped luggage labels, showing far flung and exotic destinations. That’s why folk today feel the need to adorn their cars and caravans with stickers proudly proclaiming that they have been to Leicester, or even Gwent.

Today, ‘London to Shanghi by train, airship and camel train via Venice and Omar’s Opium Outlet’ has been replaced by a sticky label with a bar-code. But of course there is noting to prevent one from attaching ones own luggage labels to your suitcase to give it a jaunty, nostalgic appearance. My own battered valise (neither a Scottish delicacy nor a social disease) features a collection of stickers announcing to fellow passengers that I have visited Narnia, Mordor, Brobdingnag and, with the Miskatonic University expedition led by William Dyer, Antartica. There’s also a discoloured patch where my ‘Neverland’ sticker used to be, but I steamed that off after I started getting some very strange looks from those more familiar with the life and times of M Jackson than the works of J M Barrie.

Finally, whenever I travel, I make sure that I take along my preconceptions about the place and especially the people I am going to visit. While many might consider it dinner party, or at least pot noodle, racism to pitch up at a place with manner set to Kate Humble style levels of condescension when dealing with the locals, it means that one is either surprised and delighted that people are so different from expected, or, even better, all your bigoted ideas about them were correct.

Three, two, one...contacts!

The Great Contact Lens Experiment continues, with all the drama and pantomime you would expect from a man making a complete hash of jamming his non too clean fingertips into his increasingly bloodshot eyes in an inelegant attempt to fit a tiny disc of wet slippery plastic balanced on a wet slippery finger onto a wet slippery eyeball.

I expect the choice to try contacts instead of glasses is a vanity thing, so it’s good that the end result is that I look like somebody from a Wanted poster in the Wild West (Midlands?), with the wild, piggy eyes of somebody seen without their glasses giving me the appearance of a fellow who is both pleased and surprised at his recent successful bank raid in Fargo yet at the same time assured that he is one step closer to dancing the hemp fandango as a result.

Seen without their glasses, people look odd.

It can be disconcerting enough when somebody puts their glasses on to peer at something, especially if they are wearing a white coat and your trousers are crumpled round your ankles as you stand in a chilly consulting room, but its worse still if somebody takes their glasses off, particularly if you are on a first date and the restaurant was already 'romantically lit' (i.e. gloomy) in the first place.

They can change a mood as readily as they can change a face. They are a sign of imperfect vision yet are taken as a sign of intellect. They can look sinister, they can look cool and, with that iconic addition, the fist-sized lump of fabric plaster holding one leg to the front of the frame, they can identify you as a train enthusiast more readily than even standing at the end of a railway station platform in the rain with your notepad and smelling of crab-paste sandwiches going warm in tupperwear.

Because glasses are great. At the very least they allow you to see properly, and the choice of frame if, it’s the right one, can be far cooler than any haircut, haircuts being prone to damage by wind, hats and sudden changes in fashion which mean you go from cool to tool in a nanomoment.

So why contacts? Well, if I ever do go mountain-boarding again it would be good to know that if I pull off my signature move, the Epic Face Plant, it won't result in my specs being reduced to kit form, and it also means that I get to wear those really cool wraparound sunglasses that make you look young, hip and athletic. In my own head. If not actually on it.

Choices, choices

Selling has been with us for as long as there has been more mammoth meat than the tribe needed that day and some bloke painted a really, really, luscious drawing of a mammoth on the cave wall. This would ultimately lead to disappointment when the world’s first fast food customer looked inside their styrofoam (STILL not decomposed) container and wondered a) what relationship the slightly damp and manky contents within bore to the plump and delightful illustration on the wall and b) what the hell a gerkin was.

Selling an idea has been with us for a slightly shorter time, this required blokes in robes with questionable facial hair and a shedload of wine. Initially many of these ideas were quite straightforward and useful, dealing as they did with issues of mathmatics, geometry and so forth and would result in nothing more than ensuring the future employment of slightly lanky men who would make a living tutoring algebra and making the inventor of the protractor one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

However, it wasn’t long before the greybeards started coming up with ideas like democracy and freedom of expression and, what’s more, tried to persuade others that their ideas were good ones.

Government trying to sell something is not as straightforward as a campaign selling, say, pickle onion flavoured monster munch. One is trying to sell you something cooked up by evil trolls that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and is not at all good for you, the other is a delicious snack remembered with fond nostalgia. (But, let’s be honest, was probably cooked up by evil trolls, left a nasty taste in the mouth, was not at all good for you AND left you with chemically induced halitosis) (and a slightly dirty feeling that you’d not experience again until your first illicit shag) (and even then not with the same intensity).

Previous Government ad campaigns have basically fallen into two categories.

The first tried to terrify you. The one about not bonking icebergs or whatever was a good example and had a profound effect on me, to the extent that not only icebergs but penguins, pemmican and the even the cresta run are all safe from my sexual attention. And there was ‘protect and survive’, where the Voice Of Doom explained that if you hid in airing cupboard, you’d be safe from a thermonuclear blast. Whether this was followed by a further film giving recipes for radioactive rat I don’t know, I was busy changing out of damp pants.

But they were as nothing compared with that cartoon about the kid who decided to wander onto the thin ice, which concluded with a shot of the flickering lights of an ambulance in the chill dusk as the bowed figures carried a shape on a stretcher. A decade on and anyone watching a soft focus artfully shot cartoon about a wintry scene was emptied of all emotion except harrowing dread. That’s why I cry when I watch ‘The Snowman’, whimsy be damned.

The other type of Government advertising is when they sold you something you already owned, like utilities. ‘If you see Sid, tell him…that in a decade all his gas will come from politically unstable Eastern European states which previously we had feared because they had sheds full of rusting nuclear weapons or, worse, empty sheds where rusting nuclear weapons should be prior to being sold to terrorists, but who can now hold the nation to ransom by turning off the tap the next time there’s a cold snap’.

Wisdom of the policy aside, I would have liked to see the ad campaign selling off the forests. Question, who would you get to front it, a celeb or a chirpy CGI squirrel called Terry Nutkins who would blether on about how being given the chance to buy his own tree would give him a foot on the property ladder? Or an Ewok?

Selling two conflicting ideas though? Easy. Crisp makers have campaigns to ‘support’ a particular flavour. Result: you just end up buying more of something that’s the same thing really, you think you’ve exercised choice, and you have a nasty taste in your mouth.

In the news

That’s it, it’s time to roll up the internet. I don’t care what you’ve used it for, updating your status on Facebook to tell everyone you’ve left your wife to get together with your school squeeze that you contacted through Friends Reunited (remember that?), selling second hand tat, buying yet more tat, tweeting, twittering, twatting and looking at porn, porn, porn. Doesn’t matter, nothing will ever be as good as this story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12161449

That’s right, a drunk Russian circus. This story has everything, clowns, dangerous animals, ‘mythical beasts' and all of it soaked in alcohol and sadness. And not just any sadness, Russian sadness. Their plays are famously dour but, by God, it takes misery to new heights to have a sad circus. It’s like Ray Bradbury had collaborated on a story with Charles Bukowski. The bit about the family walking through a blizzard, a BLIZZARD, to see the circus only to find that it had been shut down by the police before it could be burned down by the folk who had seen the first, and only, show is enough to make a gargoyle weep. Instead, it was just the children blubbing.

Crying kiddies aside, this is a great idea. I mean, normally at any sort of show you expect the audience to have had a drink, but the performers as well? Genius! Everyone knows that the only way a normal person can tolerate theatre and especially musicals is to bolt gin both beforehand and during the interval. Who can doubt that the RSC would not put in even greater performances if the actors were hammered too, and can you imagine the reviews ‘Patrick Stewart was the greatest pissed Polonius ever to throw up on the stage of the Swan’?

And why draw the line at theatre? Formula 1 is just blokes in cars going round and round while the teams argue about diffusers, which I thought was something that you fitted to a hairdryer. Any sport that the teams look to settle in court is not to be respected but, what if every time a driver pitted, he had to down a vodka shot? Obviously Red Bull would dominate yet again but it would be good to see the drivers knocking the stuff back instead of just advertising it.

I actually went to the circus once. I dimly recall a lady in spangly tights and a sense of tremendous enjoyment but what I remember most clearly was the sheer amount of snacking I got through – a hot dog smothered in sauce and onion, popcorn and God alone knows what else. I probably didn’t need fed again for a week. Certainly the circus comes every year to the village, no doubt to give children the opportunity to run away somewhere for a life of mucking out the clown caravan and nursing a crush on the trapeze girl.

Merry February

Post Christmas

During the festive season, friends and family are greeted with the question ‘keeping up the Christmas?’, meaning: ‘it is ten o’clock in the morning, with the day now in double figures, have you had a drink yet?’. Keeping up the Christmas conveys well the situation when it comes to food and drink at this time of year. Essentially the last normal meal anyone has is Christmas dinner, thereafter everyone just tucks into what is essentially a thinning selection of leftovers until it is time to supplement it with cheese, ham, pickle and of course, a constant flow of booze.

Certainly the Christmas season was extended this year. Thanks to the snow in December bringing postal deliveries to a grinding halt, people were still getting the Christmas cards and presents delivered in mid-January.

One of the odder ways in which a Christmas continuation manifests itself is the availability of Christmas branded stuff after Christmas. I’m not talking about actual Christmas leftovers, no, they are all reduced in price by about 75% and fly of the shelves as hoards of shoppers pick up cards, wrapping and baubles, baubles, baubles. What I mean is the ordinary stuff that, around Christmas time, is sold in Christmas packaging, cola being the prime example. In December the familiar red and white can usually sports a grinning bloke in a beard and this is all very jolly in the count down to Christmas. Mid-January though, when the vending machine is still spitting out cans decorated with bewhiskered old men, all it serves to do is to turn the January blues positively indigo.

This year much was made of the early appearance of Easter eggs in the shops. This was a good way of getting a lot of free publicity and was also excellent for those us who were going into chocolate withdrawal by 29 December after all the selection boxes had been emptied, chocolate coins cashed in and things were getting so desperate that one starts eyeing up the chocolate with nuts in it.

With Easter eggs being available in December and the weather in April sometimes including a festive looking dusting of snow, there is I think a justification for making novelty chocolate snowmen available at Easter.

Then again, perhaps the attitude to adopt to ensure a smooth transition from one religious holiday to another is to say sod the chocolate and crack open the sherry.

Smallholdings and small magazines

Yesterday at the newsagents, I was more than a little surprised to see not one, but two magazines devoted to smallholdings. One called ‘Smallholder’ and the other ‘Smallholdings’. What staggers me is not that there is a magazine for smallholders, there’s a magazines for just about everything these days, as the existence of ‘backscratcher collector’ proves; but that two magazines could have such different editorial approaches to the same subject that it could support two magazines. What in the world could one offer that the other could not? Surely there’s only so much you can write about getting mud out from underneath your fingernails and sticking your hand up a pig’s arse for fun and profit.

I love the idea that the second magazine might have been started after the editorial team had a massive falling out about creosote and the two publications are as polarised in their opinions as The Daily Mail and any real newspaper. Either that or one of the magazines has been started up by some hip young gunslinger who thinks wants to sweep away the old fuddy-duddy conventions of smallholding and is not afraid to use the term ‘boutique farming’ in front of others.

I love that there is no profession so obscure, no hobby so odd that it can’t support its own little magazine, be it the full glossy or a fanzine produced in a basement in Solihull titled something like ‘Swafega Collector (incorporating ‘Laiths and Laithmen’)’.

Stuff

I read recently that some supermarket is going to start 'offering' (that is, charging for) a dating service whereby they set you up with a potential partner based on the contents of your respective baskets.

Personally I don't think it's the greatest idea in the world to match people with similar purchasing habits, as nothing puts a strain on a relationship quite like the bitter resentment that stems from your partner eating the last bag of quavers, while people who buy quorn should simply not be allowed to breed.

At the value end of the dating service, it's probably nothing more sophisticated than making sure that people who bulk-buy marmite are not matched with those who do not, while, supermarkets being supermarkets, there's probably a luxury end where blokes can not only be set up with women, but can be informed when they are likely to be ovulating and so time their approach to coincide with a time their prospective partner is craving sperm and hence not too picky.

Of course the idea is not new, people have been checking each other out at the check out for years. Indeed it’s quite acceptable to load your basket with the sort of stuff that would make you attractive to the opposite sex, like the keys to your villa in Italy and plenty of single portion ready meals. Try to avoid a dozen cans of cheap, super-strength cider and a DVD featuring Jeremy Clarkson though.

The service is predicated on the assumption that we are defined by what we consume and, certainly, our stuff gives a clue as to our personality. For instance, if a bloke has shelves full of action figures still in their boxes, he’s likely to be a reasonable sort and the body parts in his freezer will be neatly stacked. However, if a young woman has shelves full of My Little Pony, out of their boxes and showing clear signs of grooming, run! Use the window, not the door, it’s quicker. Never mind the drop, just do it man!

Men have, of course, been storing their tat off-site in bespoke stuff-deposit structures for many years and a glimpse into a chap’s shed is truly a glimpse into his soul, except with more homebrew and well-thumbed porn. That people now have so much stuff they don’t have a place for it all and have spent so much on it they can’t afford to move to a bigger home has not gone unnoticed by business, hence those self-storage places that have sprung up round the country, allowing couples who are moving in together a place to hide, sorry to store all his hideous furniture and framed movie posters until she can eBay the lot or simply torch the place.

By the way, if a female colleague mentions in passing that she is moving at the weekend and putting some of her stuff in storage, remarking that it’ll transform the inside of the storage unit into something resembling a typical female’s front room, don’t on Monday morning ask her if she had a hard time stuffing her ladycave at the weekend. The resulting tribunal won’t result in you being sacked, but you will be tagged as ‘insensitive’ by HR. Like I care.

I’ve always thought that if my personality was wiped as the result of some medical experiment gone wrong, conspiracy or, more likely, trying to fork a muffin out of the toaster while wearing a hat made of tin-foil, I could construct it by re-reading all the books I own, being in the lucky position of not having an original thought in my head and having cobbled together what passes for a personality from a collection of fiction and the odd reference book about cheese. Umberto Eco wrote about this process in ‘The mysterious flame of Queen Loana’ so it turns out that even that idea’s not original. I mean, I thought of it first, but just because he wrote it down he gets all the credit.

But he didn’t take it to its logical conclusion, just like putting fresh fruit in your shopping basket because you know nobody wholesome is going to strike up a conversation with you if it contained your actual dietary staples of pot noodle and mars bars, you could load your reading matter to tailor your reconstructed personality to something, well, a little less freakish.

And the place to start if your teenage diaries. That’s why I’m currently bidding on eBay for a blank Letts diary for my teen years. I’ll then be able to substitute this for my actual diary and convince myself that I was in fact a stylish, confident and happy teen, rather than the shambling collection of grease and neuroses that was actually the case. Hence, for instance, replacing this not untypical entry: ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball today. Made me feel funny. Went home, touched myself. Watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed.’ with the rather more erudite ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball. She is beauty poise and elegance and my heart swells with yearning, a divine ache every time I see her. Went home, masturbated to the point of dehydration, watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed’.

Big Society and Dystopia repost

Growing up, those twin essential devices from stopping healthy developmental play in the fresh air; foxed-to-the-point-of-badgered library books and terrifying BBC children’s drama, provided essential preparation for what to expect from the dystopian future.

If you read the books of John Christopher, dystopia came in the form of some sort of disaster that set technology levels back to those of the dark ages (alien invasion, mankind tinkering with nature, everyone on the planet simultaneously joining Civil War re-enactment societies, that sort of thing), while the BBC’s Bleak Future was essentially far muddier then the present, being a place where the appearance of a steam engine was greeted with exactly the sort of slack-jawed mixture of fear and awe currently on the faces of the kiddies being traumatised by this tea-time apocalyptic drama, filmed in the West Midlands to save money.

The drama conveyed to kiddies with some style that when they grew up there would be more chance of them being a subsistence farmer than a spaceman* and, most brutally of all, ‘Angel Delight’ would no longer existed.

What was never predicted (along with mobile ‘phone ring tones so irritating it makes you wonder if perhaps the plot of some of these stories: that advanced technology is jealously guarded by a social elite or at least people with taste, is not in fact a good idea) was the solution proposed by politicians to head off a future where the fabric of society is as ragged as a pair of Primark pants after a boil wash: the Big Society.

The Big Society is not, as you might think, Brobdingnag, but rather a model for the future of community services. Essentially funding is slashed for supporting council services and the people who rely on those services are told to ‘get on with it’, much in the way the same phrase is used when you are locked in your study with a bottle of scotch and a service revolver after you have lost a rather important battle or, worse still, committed social suicide by tonguing an unsuitable minor royal.

The Big Society suffered a set-back this week when Liverpool Council announced that they didn’t want to be considered part of the pilot for an idea thought up by posh boys, but instead were quite content to continue to be considered as a city of lovable rogues, chirpy female flatmates or, of course, lesbian patio-layers (might be getting that last one a bit confused).

A ‘pilot’ by the way is where you don't have enough confidence to roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas. So, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, you can explain that either the idea needs work or the bloody yokels in charge of the pilot couldn't be trusted to run a car boot stall, never mind a complex social experiment and anyway, next time the posters will be better).

The gist of the Big Society is that English people, who by tradition would all like to live in castles with moats far from any neighbours and by practice only really talk to their neighbours if they are caught dumping their garden waste over the fence, are supposed to take a community approach and look after things like keeping the streets tidy and, no doubt when the cuts to public services really start to bite, other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals including; maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence farming), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'tickly cough'?), or air traffic control.

What certainly won’t be needed are civic poo scoopers. This is thanks to the invention of the doggie bag. Certainly not to be confused with a device used to transport expensive leftovers from a restaurant (itself an alien concept to anyone brought up to believe that not scraping the plate at the Berni Inn until the last morsel of food, and quite a lot of the pattern, was removed was a sin), but a bag full of Scoobie Poo. Thanks to resilient, hole-free (and that’s important), plastic bags, owners of defecating hounds can now swoop with the speed of a cockle-picker racing the tide and simultaneously bag the unthinkable and make a mental note to stop feeding Fido leftover masala.

*Ironically, this is true, if by subsistence level farmer you mean owner of a boutique farm in the Cotswolds producing some sort of organic cheese and pork scratching smoothie concoction that is perversely popular in Japan, sells for a fortune at farmers’ markets and has just been picked up for national distribution by Waitrose.

A class act

Ah, class. It used to be that everyone knew where they stood in the class system, you were either Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker or John Cleese. What class you were was determined, back when the world was black and white, by height, apparently.

It used to be much simpler, back when the world was colourful, but two dimensional. You were either a monarch, somebody who owned a castle, or a peasant. Class in those days was largely a matter of how filthy you were and how largely root vegetables featured in your diet. If you ended the day covered in pig-shit and looking forward to a hearty meal of a parsnip, you were a serf. If however you owned your own castle, had a selection of falcons and dined off hunks of things that only featured parsnip as something to help soak up the gravy, then congratulations, you can look forward to dying of the pox or in a crusade but until then, enjoy yourself!

Things became complicated with the introduction of the printing press, the artisan class and merchants, leading to people without castles having more money than people with castles, a situation that continues today, largely because of the cost of maintaining a castle (and also of course to that particular condition that afflicts the landed gentry: their bitter resentment of any member of the National Trust). Moats, as anyone who has scrutinised MPs expenses will know, are expensive to clean out. Must be all the pike-men and bits of siege equipment that presumably get stuck in the filters.

Britain is to class what Catholicism is to religion, taking a very simple concept and wildly complicating it. Other countries react differently to class. The French decapitated all of their aristocracy and hence now have no class at all, while in the rest of Europe the upper classes seem slightly embarrassed about having wealth and power and so reside in large residences far from commoners. The American system is slightly different and can best be described, as I read somewhere, by the following: if your name is on a building, you’re doing very well, if your name is on a desk, you’re doing OK and if your name is on a badge pinned to a shirt that features a corporate logo, you’re fucked.

Now we have not just your basic classes of; aristocracy, gentry, upper class, middle class, working class, lower class and underclass, but many sub-categories of class. And while the British are very good at identifying what class other people are (‘posh idiot’, ‘chav scum’ or ‘foreign’ for instance), they are less well able to categorise themselves, and terrified of asking in case somebody actually tells them.

The problem with Brits is that they consider that there is social mobility inside the class structure. Worse still is that those folk most acutely aware of the class structure are often the most uncomfortable when speaking to people from outside their own class. For instance, when speaking to tradesman, a middle class person will, if they have prepared properly for the occasion, have a variety of conversational gambits, usually sport related. This is partly because middle class people like to believe they can ‘get on’ with anyone, but mostly because they are trying to avoid the 30% middle-class surcharge that they secretly believe tradesmen apply to anyone who drives an audi.

They’re wrong of course, it’s actually 33%.

Gentry of course just treat everyone exactly the same. Unfortunately they do this by being universally ghastly.

This does not stop middle class people wanting to access the world of the upper classes and recently great steps have been taken to achieve this. Prior to the broadcast of ‘Downton Abby’ however, the sole guide to how to behave at a country house party was the writing of P G Wodehouse or Agatha Christie. Hence, if one were to be invited to spend the weekend at a country house, one would reasonably expect to spend one’s time either attempting to steal cow creamers and involving oneself in hi-jinks in the shrubbery, or beating the host to death with a candlestick in the library.

Hold on, isn’t that Cluedo? Boardgames, how very middle-class.