Q

In reference to JTA’s post about middle-class-ness…

Herein, a list of examples of things I have heard about or seen people do, that confuse and infuriate me. I’ve tried to make it a list of middle-class-isms, but I may have strayed somewhat to more general forms of stupidity. Sorry.

• Boasting about giving money to charity whilst not ever doing voluntary work or caring about people
• Giving money to the most useless charities first, e.g. Donkey Sanctuary before Save the Children, National Heritage before Terence Higgins
• booking the cheapest holiday you can find to an in vogue place just so you can say you’ve been there, rather than using the same amount of money to go somewhere else more interesting and less well-travelled in better accomodation.
• having a complete dining set that you never use, displayed in a cabinet in the dining room
• The feeling that ketchup is wrong and you have to have, I dunno, sun-dried tomato salsa instead.
• The need to redecorate a room of your house every 6 weeks.
• The kind of gardening that never produces food.
• The idea that manners can replace true care for others’ feelings.
• Thinking anyone who hasn’t read and understood shakespeare is an idiot.
• Thinking anyone who went to a comprehensive must have had a shit education.
• Shopping at charity shops and at Debenhams, but never at Matalan.
• building a conservatory that you know you won’t ever sit in, just so your house price goes up.
• Buying a fondue set you know you’ll never use, because it looks good on the dining room table.
• Caring which fork you’re supposed to use.
• Thinking of people who run restaurants you frequent as friends, even though you’ve only ever spoken to them to order your food or complain that your steak is too rare.
• Buying organic food because a TV chef says so.
• ORNAMENTS.
• Thinking that culture is something you can buy in Borders.
• Doing a job you hate so you can afford to pay a maid to do the cleaning you hate.
• Trading in your car for a new one every year.
• Buying personalised numberplates to hide the age of your car. Or for any other reason.
• Buying fabric softener.
• Reading books about other people travelling and never going travelling yourself.
• Deliberately cultivating a neutral accent. (yes, I’m guilty of this!)
• Thinking boarding school and nannies are a good way to bring up children without having to, you know, get involved.
• Polishing furniture.
• Becoming unable to eat takeaway food.
• Reading the Guardian/Telegraph but secretly agreeing with the Mail.
• Insisting on eating a different meal every night.
• Owning a bidet.
• Reading particular literary classics so that you can tell people you have read them.
• Thinking it’s important to know about wine.
• Refusing to buy anything that’s “Tesco Value” or equivalent.
• Not visiting people whose houses are untidy
• Keeping your house completely spotless, so it appears that it’s a showhome and that no-one lives there.
• COMPLAINING about how your house only has 17 rooms, or how you don’t even have a gardener for your 20 acres of land, or any other complaint that would make any normal person go “hang on a minute, are you just saying this so you can tell me how well off you really are?”
• Thinking that swearing is *always* inappropriate
• using really long words just because you like showing off that you know them, rather than because they make the meaning more clear.
• Having lots of dogs but still determinedly removing every last hair from the furniture.
• Having house cats that aren’t allowed in the garden because they’ll ruin your dahliahs.
• Delighting in pointing out mispronunciations by interrupting the speaker
• name-dropping celebrities or rich people who you’ve not really actually had any contact with
• owning a piano when no-one in the house plays
• Having an open fire in a room so big you need the central heating on as well

Ok, that’s quite long. Any more suggestions? I have a few more, but abnib’s going to creak as it is.

My last blog post was a bit too hippy so I’ve got to flip back to the opposite side for a bit… or do I? I’ve been wanting to look into this for a long while, because all I have really had to go on is gut feeling before finding time to read about some of the issues.

I just read this article from the Independent. It’s quite old now I suppose, but I thought it was interesting. I’ve always been suspicious of organic farming, because it feels like a backwards step, rather than fixing the problems with the technology we’ve created, we decide to throw our hands up in the air and say we should have left it to nature all along, and live like the Amish. Who, by the way, you can insult on the internet as often as you like.

Basically organic farming varies wildly in whether it is better or worse for the environment, depending upon what is being farmed (and where, and when). I’ll pull out some stats from the article, but it doesn’t have any “good” ones so you’ll have to put up with only one side of the argument I’m afraid.

• Organic tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses in Britain generate one hundred times the amount of CO2 per kilogram produced by tomatoes in unheated greenhouses in southern Spain.
• Organic milk requires 80 per cent more land to produce per unit than conventional milk.
• The depletion of natural resources is measured at 99 for organic birds compared to 29 for battery or barn hens.

I don’t really want an animal welfare discussion but my basic view on this is that the free range specification is good enough for chickens. Nor do I want arguments against GM foods — that’s a separate and (mostly)unrelated argument. Really I’m interested in what is good about organic farming for humans, especially from people who are keen to save the environment (I agree it’s important to try to maintain a human-habitable environment). We couldn’t actually feed the population of the world if all food were organically grown. Sometimes it produces more greenhouse gases or uses more energy. Sometimes the by-products are worse for soil and water courses. The taste and nutritional value can be worse than conventional production.

So, the question is, do you investigate every kind of food and buy the most efficient version? Do you make a sweeping generalisation one way or the other? What is most important in the growing of food: space, biodiversity, CO2 emissions, energy input, feeding everyone, treating the animals as nicely as possible, taste, price? Here’s my personal list of priorities:

1. Feeding everyone — I don’t think the solution to overpopulation is to provide less food to humans in general. I don’t think we’ve solved it yet, but making less food isn’t going to help.
2. less space — forests are good, they eat CO2 and provide biodiverse habitats. They also eat space, so we should minimise space use for other things.
3. less CO2 emissions — Most of the human effects on climate change that we have a chance to reduce come from CO2 emissions.
4. less energy input — whilst our energy is produced mostly from fossil fuels, this is as relevant as the point above.
5. more biodiversity — Benefits listed on the wikipedia page especially disease resistance.
6. better animal care — I don’t like when we engineer or selectively breed animals such that they are too fat to breed normally or move at all. I would happily pay a bit more for a better cared for animal, up to a point. This point in my list, in fact.
7. better taste — You should actually want to eat the food, I don’t want some sort of communist gruel serving going on. But, if that’s the only way to affordably feed everyone whilst saving the planet, then… maybe.
8. lower price — this matters, but not a lot, it only has to be affordable for the poorest people. This can be a tall order for some things, actually. I don’t really know where to put this one, because I would happily pay more money for any of the above, but presumably something that satisfies all of the above will price the poorest out of the market. Free market economics is tricky that way.

With that, it’s pretty obvious that I shouldn’t be buying organic veg out of season, or chicken and milk at any time. It is in fact my feeling that people who buy organic chicken are effectively putting the welfare of chickens above the welfare of the entire planet. If it’s not chicken or milk or out-of-season veg, I’ll consider it, probably by trying to find out relative values from the list I’ve just made. Buying food shouldn’t be this complicated. I’m hungry. I’m off to make lunch.

PS: if you’re reading this on Facebook, please comment on my actual blog at blog.nowebsite.co.uk or I may not notice.

Despite the title, this is not in fact a declaration of my sudden conversion to naturism (sorry to dash those hopes), but a recognition that perhaps I might have bought too many clothes in my life. I don’t believe I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of money on clothes, but rather that I buy things instead of doing washing at times, and buy clothes on a whim rather than because I actually need anything. This has resulted in Dan pointing out that I own 24 dresses and skirts, which I apparently never wear.

Obviously this is ridiculous. I propose to not buy any clothes for an entire year. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible, I still have clothes from when I was 16 that still fit, so I doubt I’ll change in shape so much that this becomes a problem. I have a lot of stuff that’s practically new, so it should last at least a year. I don’t follow fashion particularly, so I don’t think I’ll feel bad about wearing the same clothes for a year — there’re still things in my wardrobe that I’ve never worn, anyway! And finally, I have enough shoes. Oh my, do I have enough shoes.

A few provisos:

• I can buy fancy dress costumes if I really can’t make an appropriate costume from what I have
• I can receive gifts of clothes from other people (The idea being hand-me-downs and presents, not going on a shopping spree with other people’s money)
• I can buy clothes for other people
• I can buy material and make my own clothes (I predict this will not happen)

This is not an April Fool.