Brit Blogs, Surfing and Irrational Quirks

I have joined Brit Blogs!

Was gossiping with a really nice girl blogger a couple of weeks ago (sorry, forgot name) about how there really ought to be a ring for UK bloggers. It never even crossed my mind that someone who had that thought before us would have already implemented it. Doh.

Its a great site - for a start, finding bloggers local to me has been like looking for a needle in a haystack up until now. I admit there is ONE place on the brit blogger map where still, if you click for info, it says there is no-one within a 20km radius except for me. Thats OK, down here you can use up that much space just getting past forests and empty farmland, chalk cliffs and rivers and what they officially call Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

Anyhow, I went looking at my old area, my childhood home and keeper of my heart, West London, specifically LB Ealing and the bits of Hounslow/Uxbridge around the Heathrow Airport. At one point in my childhood a couple of friends and I spent every available minute and penny, catching the 105 from Southall to Heathrow to go into the terminals and play 'up the down escalator' until security kicked us off. The other fun game was getting into Cranford Park, reading some very cheeky gravestones in the churchyard and hunting for the White Lady ghost and Dick Turpin's house-to-church escape tunnels.

So - the point: I found a really interesting blog A Mum's Tale. At the moment I am not ready to sign in to AOL (Graaa! hate that AOL!) just to leave a comment, but its lovely to find someone so similar and yet so different. I shall be watching her blog, and here's why:

1. We are roughly of an age
2. We have similar sized families
   
3. We stopped having kids roughly at the same time (I started sooner)
4. She went to boarding school - I went to the local Grammar
5. She listens to classical music and takes foreign holidays - neither of which fit my chaotic and frugal lifestyle
6. She went from Sussex to West London - I am the exact opposite
7. She passed her A's. I have the same IQ as old Clive Sinclair, but failed mine.
8. She saw education as an honour, I saw it as a chore, because I am STUPID like that.
   

All this makes her blog so interesting because it's a case of 'There but for the Grace of God', or rather 'There but for a throw of the dice' which is nicer and implies that neither life is better, just different.

One thing I really agree with is her attitude that Sussex contains people with "money and status obsessions" (quote). I have escaped life in the really snotty Conservative strongholds but I know what she means and I think they are so funny and lovely to watch, these people who still believe in class.

For a start, they seem convinced they have some sort of birthright to have people grovel before them, to have things their way; the best views, the best land, the best table service. Its not vicious (at least not until things go wrong;) they really DO simply feel thats the way it ought to be and always has been.

Bless their cotton socks, to me the are just like toddlers, "I want because I want", almost psycopathic in their total lack of understanding that other people exist, or that if they exist, they count. Like I said, toddlers in nappies with their hands out going "Me, me me, my life, my world, my way." And they SO value their genteel manners, which is hysterically funny. Ten times as spoilt and demanding as the rest of the population, yet convinced that compliance with social moires makes them somehow delicate, refined; nicer. And of course, because they are such spoiled children right into old age, they expect everyone they come up against to be functioning under the same criteria.

Take fox hunting. Irrespective of the cruelty to the fox, the hunt crashes across gardens, demands right of way, damages property - even if you had no feelings for or against the fox, there are elements of (or in) fox hunting which show blatant disregard for other people. I am sure some hunts were run better than that, but many not. Now look at how very many of the pro hunting brigade are stomping around in outrage, absolutely convinced that the people who voted against them are not doing this out of social responsibility at all, but out of a deliberate and malicious attempt to get one up on 'their sort'.

See? They see themselves as a class, a clique, and cannot conceive that any way but their way is right, ergo any attempt to change things must be borne of spite rather than common sense.

Not everyone with money or manners is like that, I hasten to add, but where pockets exist, boy, do they make a big noise about it. Silly, silly children. Clueless.

Perhaps if I wasn't happy with my Council bungalow, with my income that demands I shop at Scope et al, then I might feel aggrieved by them - having the high life just because they were born to it. But then even I have the high life if you are looking at it from, say, areas of India. Its all relative. And if I DID feel that way it would be my problem, not theirs. I prefer to look at them and simply say "Aww, sweet." I DO try hard not to giggle, honestly.

And would I swap lives? Would I trade for money at the cost of my comparative adulthood? Not on your nelly.