Tip: Drop the accent, Nicholas

After the post about the aborted survey from Giff Gaff, and as we approach the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (Hooray! For years I have been the first to use that quote in late Summer but was almost pipped to the post by Weave just now), I have been thinking of how I have fitted-in over my life.

We live in times of drastic change and are usually ill-equipped to adjust to them. Like generations of British people before me, I was brought up under a rigid class system, the rules of which were never spoken about, let alone written down. Now all of that is almost gone, and the change begun only a matter of a year or so ago.

One's class was usually defined by one's job (or lack of one) and the tendency for using the word 'one' when referring to oneself. There was only one occupation which transcended the class system completely, and that was Artist. There were a few Northern or left-wing (and often both) artists who thought that they could bring their credentials with them when entering the Art World, but nobody ever took them seriously.

You didn't go to Art School to learn how to be an artist - only fools thought that. You attended Art School to be issued with a paperless document called an 'Artistic Licence'.

This licence was the invisible ticket which opened doors normally closed to people who worked with their hands, and permitted the bearer to behave badly at dinner parties to which tradesmen were not invited, just so long as they were entertaining. Nobody - absolutely nobody - liked bores. The entire class system was united in agreement on that one point.

In the space of twenty years, the Middle Classes have expanded to include everyone except a handful of royalty at one end and a handful of junkies at the other, but the very thing which either elevated the Lower classes or demoted the Upper Middle is now in the process of biting off the hand which fed it.

Silicon Valley: Working from home is no longer encouraged, because your boss cannot see how hard you are working. Open Plan offices are not so much to make everyone feel they are on an equal footing, they are to allow everyone to compete with each other by seeming to work that much harder than the person at the next desk. Everyone feels they should be the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Old people just don't count unless they are famous. They are unproductive and out of the race. Even Nicholas Parsons is only just tolerated these days, but too much more 'Scottish Accent' during the Edinburgh Fringe and he will not get an invitation next year, even if he is till alive and talking.