You may notice, at the very top of the envelope, a short and unassuming phrase: “If undelivered, please do NOT return to sender”.

Now there’s a story behind my posting this image.  And it runs thus.

Most years, around this time, we get a reminder from the DVLA to pay our car tax.  It arrives around the 5th of the month – hardly surprising, really, as it says on the inside that you shouldn’t pay it before the 5th of the month the reminder relates to.

This month, however, it didn’t.  Around the 10th of May, I phoned up the DVLA and was told that Royal Mail holds the documentation for between six to eight weeks before delivering it.  I found this a little curious but nevertheless accepted the explanation and decided to wait a couple of days more.  Nothing doing, yesterday I was moved to phone Royal Mail to see if the story I’d been told was true.  To my surprise (or not, as the case may be), what I got was an outright denial.  I went back to the DVLA and when I questioned their original explanation was told this was what their line managers had instructed them to say.  I asked them if they could feed back to their managers Royal Mail’s denial and also doublecheck to see if the reminder had been sent out.  This they promised to do and they confirmed that it had.  I also mentioned it to our postman the same morning – he knew nothing about any missing reminders and, what’s more, didn’t seem particularly interested in chasing up the matter.

The blessed document arrived this morning, of course (so maybe my postie had done something about it, after all).  In any other circumstances I’d have left it at that.  But that message, “If undelivered, please do NOT return to sender”, got me cogitating on the matter – as sometimes is the case; as sometimes we do.  Because the second time round, as well as questioning their original explanation, I had asked the DVLA what could happen if someone else received a car tax reminder which went astray, as it appeared at the time mine might have done.  She said that the document contained no important information and the only thing someone would be able to do would be pay the car tax of the car owner in question.

Contained no important information?  Really?

Let’s just run that past the reality check:

1. Name of the car owner
2. Address, including post code
3. Licence plate of the vehicle in question
4. Reference number to tax or make a SORN (register as off the road only) online

So no important information whatsoever?

Nothing at all there which could be used in a case of identity theft, for example?

And, what’s more, an open invitation on the back of the envelope NOT to return the document to the sender …

Imagine, finally, this scenario, if you will: the car tax reminder really goes astray; a malicious neighbour picks it up; they go online and register your car as SORN (the process of doing the latter bearing no cost); and, in the meantime, you continue to blithely drive around – neglecting to correctly tax your car whilst you await the arrival of your reminder.

Which then opens you up to the following risk, as the document in question (which you still haven’t received) explains: “… you could be fined or have your vehicle seized or crushed.”

Are we really saying, then, that this document doesn’t need returning to the DVLA when not duly delivered?

So what can be the reason for that unassuming exhortation?  I am minded to wonder if it doesn’t have rather more to do with reducing administrative costs at the DVLA end than assuring the safe passage of our data.  Just think of all those civil servants who’d have to be gainfully employed to process returned and unopened letters – and cross-reference the documentation received with databases of all those drivers and vehicles.

Another idiotic cost-cutting measure from a bureaucracy which more and more doesn’t care to think things through perhaps?

No wonder on the reverse side of the reminder itself we get the following choice piece of information:

Data protection We can release your details from our vehicle register if we are allowed to do so by law.

By law – and presumably by careless belt-tightening edicts from up on high from our dear Mr Osborne …

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But where I detect significant distress is in my daughter.  She has only just turned fourteen and yet her school has decided for some incredibly bizarre reason to put her whole cohort through the stress of GCSEs.  Just remember how you were at such an age: study skills barely developed, if at all; in the middle of adolescent angst, the terror of potential failure and ever-present panic getting ready to strike one down.

Now all credit to her Religious Studies’ teacher (for that is the GCSE which is being sat).  He used to be a lawyer and has produced an excellently structured and logical set of revision notes.  She truly appreciates his wisdoms and his intelligences – and in the evidenced and logical way that she has finds him quite the best teacher in the school.  So it was that this morning, in the face of rising hysteria, he told the cohort not to worry about tomorrow’s exam: it really meant very little and should cause no preoccupation whatsoever.

Good job, my man: sensitive teaching.  Ruffled feathers gently soothed.  Could question the decision to put forward Year 9s for GCSEs in the first place – but would not question the sensibility with which this teacher has carried out his role.

So there was my daughter – slightly less anxious than before – as the morning progressed to Geography.  Can you then guess what happened?  The Geography teacher, whose subject was not being examined in any way, proceeded to truly put the fear of God up the cohort all over again.  The admonition apparently went something along the following lines: “You really won’t want to fail this exam.  The government doesn’t want to see you sitting and resitting exams all the time.”

WTF?  I mean, WTF?  WTF does my daughter’s taking of GCSEs at the tender age of barely fourteen have to do with the government, for Christ’s sake?

Yes.  It’s clear that teachers are being extremely stressed out by the consequences of the government’s stupid cuts and idiotic economic policy.  I am, as a person mildly interested in politics.  My wife and I are, as parents of the above-mentioned children.  But surely the job of such interested parties as ourselves is to strive whenever we can to put a protective firewall between callous government and our charges.  Or should we tell it just as it is?  As the Coalition government proceeds to punish and bully its subjects, should we transmit the message and process down the line and bully our subjects in turn?

To be honest, I am absolutely fed up of a couple of really bad eggs at my daughter’s school.  Bullying of the casual kind that is taking place between teachers and students is utterly unacceptable even as hierarchies continue to accept it.

But the kind of treatment my daughter and her classmates had to suffer today, at the hands of a teacher who (at least today, for whatever reason) was anything but well-meaning, is completely intolerable.

As is the political class which kicks the man who kicks the woman who kicks the kid who kicks the dog which chases the cat which mauls the bird which was once able to eat the worms.

And that’s how the Coalition bullies our teachers into bullying our children.

Only the rest of us must surely manage to do a little better than that.

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YOU IDIOTS. I DON’T WANT TO PICK AND CHOOSE HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS TO FIND THE BEST SERVICE. ITS A HEALTH SERVICE NOT F***ING AMAZON. #NHS

The truth of the matter is, however, as the monopoly on health services by the NHS is slowly but surely picked away at by the business equivalents of flesh-eating bacteria of the most voracious kind, companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung affirm and strengthen their monopolistic holds over the supposedly free-market capitalism we are regularly informed guarantees us transparency and a maximisation of outcomes.

To return to the above tweet, then, whilst the NHS is splintered into many unhappy shards of allegedly beneficial competition, Amazon destroys all those who would plan an alternative to their evermore singular offer.

So why do we allow Amazon to proceed on its merry monopolistic way and yet choose, with respect to something that manifestly delivers true value for money, to destroy a model of economic worth?

We’re almost back at Iraq now, aren’t we?

WHY, WHY, WHY?

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A couple of definitions to start with, just so we know where we stand.  First, social Darwinism:

Social Darwinism is generally understood to use the concepts of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism; but the ideology has also motivated ideas of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism,^[4] fascism, Nazism and struggle between national or racial groups.^[5][6]

Second, game theory:

Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. More formally, it is “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.”^[1] An alternative term suggested “as a more descriptive name for the discipline” is interactive decision theory.^[2] Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic and biology. The subject first addressed zero-sum games, such that one person’s gains exactly equal net losses of the other participant(s). Today, however, game theory applies to a wide range of class relations, and has developed into an umbrella term for the logical side of science, to include both human and non-humans, like computers. [...]

And I did rather assume, for quite a while, that we were the children of the latter: of a game-theory century.  But as awful people do awful things to the majority of ordinary citizens round the globe, we forget all those longer-term lessons of such game theories, of finding a natural and constructive equilibrium in the logical hemisphere of human thought; and – instead – we scurry around and pay homage to those up-and-coming political leaders who can, once more, vanquish our evil wrongdoing opposition at a single and mighty stroke of the political sword.

In the end, a terrifying political expediency – not theirs but ours – returns us to the doldrums of social Darwinism and its unhappy latterday cousins.  Yes.  It’s we who are to blame: they, after all, enter into the Darwin-like dynamics of win or lose with a grand intentionality and coherence.  We cannot blame them for the crimes which, through omission or deliberation, we commit: it is our fault that our society is made up of a disagreeable mix of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism, fascism and Nazism – as well as various kinds of essentially uncivic nationalisms; it is our fault that all of that is there; it is our fault that our civilisations, our politics and our socioeconomic orders are choosing stupid and unthinking pyramidal structures over intelligent and cogent theories of collaborative gaming.

Where does our politics stand then?  Well – frankly – where we might fall.

I think I am about as depressed about the future we offer up to our offspring as I have ever been in my life.  In the middle of an opportunity to choose brainpower and cooperation over violent impositional power, we are simply choosing to battle the latter with more of the same.

The cycle will never end.

We’re totally and utterly buggered.

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Before, we had experts.  Specialised folk who could boil down from a vast understanding of the ins and outs of a subject the essence an audience in particular might require.  But as life became more complex, such specialisms began to acquire an encysted relationship to each other: crossover skills are now the exception, not the norm.  Niches are what everyone strives to establish.

For a magpie mind such as mine, there is no place in the modern world of business and social interaction.

So when Paul C, from his undoubted ability to understand the self-fulfilling, tells us that the rest of us are speaking bollocks, and when Paul E, from his undoubted ability to disentangle the self-interested, tells us that the rest of us simply do not get it, there is little left for the rest of us to do but shake our heads in confused shame.

Only the real problem is that the Paul C and Es of this world are few and far between.  And whilst with the latter I would find myself on slightly firmer ground if pursuing my instincts to disagree, and whilst with the former I could not react without emotional bloodshed, with most of those often self-proclaimed experts out there we are now gaining an absolute right to totally distrust their judgements.

As the Sunday Times list of the top UK thousand demonstrates, those who have a lot and get it utterly wrong are rewarded with further power and wealth:

Top 1,000 on ST RichList increased their wealth by £155bn in 3yrs: enough to pay off Nat Debt: Many of the 1,000 caused crash to begin with.

It’s only the poor sods at the bottom of the pile who will get the poor pickings they most definitely do not deserve.

There is nothing unusual in what I am saying, of course: you know all of this; we all do.

But I do wonder if what has afflicted us isn’t a question of personal and evil greed, after all.  Rather, it may have a lot more to do with the fact that no one, whether at the bottom or the top of the pile, really has those magpie-mind skills I mentioned earlier on: we only know how to do well what our apportioned role in life allows us to.  None of us can manage, however, for reasons of training, education and upbringing, to bring to a world careering out of simplicity a broad and comprehensive understanding of its weaknesses.

No one at the top, no one at the bottom, no one anywhere can comprehend any more this world we survive in.

We are lost because the relationships between our component parts have become too complicated to appreciate their extent.  A single glance, whilst still enough to lead us to love at first sight, is no longer enough to allow us to understand the socioeconomic implications of our civic and political acts.

Democracy is a simple idea whose time has come and gone.

The world has become a tangled ball of wool whose complexity can only continue to multiply.

Paul C and E, if only there were more of your type.  Unfortunately, there aren’t.  We are doomed.

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A former News of the World reporter has claimed that journalists at the now defunct newspaper regularly made up stories and unethical practices were rife because of a “culture of fear” at the tabloid.

Graham Johnson, who worked at the newspaper between 1995 and 1997, said many employees carried out illegal operations and fabricated articles due to pressures from the top.

Yes, with bemusement I say.  Who on earth might have believed it were otherwise?  It’s not only the tabloid newspapers which have operated on a continuum of the truth – most organisations and individuals which like to believe they edit and describe reality as it is are inclined to waver towards and away from a theoretical accuracy.  Therein the importance of a democratic society which depends for some of its freedoms on a supposedly free press.  Getting it wrong in the short-term can sometimes be a requirement for getting it right in the long-term.  We sometimes need to tell lies in order to dig out the truths.

Whether we like it or not, slander and libel are necessary extensions of a healthy democracy.

Journalistic truth is a little like psychosis, surely: the defining line of whether someone or something might be deserving of such a label or not depends on how it affects their ability to function appropriately.  We cannot say whether the tabloids or the broadsheets fiddle about with this continuum I describe more to our advantage or to theirs (though I’m inclined to believe it’s generally to their advantage instead of ours); what we can say for sure, however, is that the truth is neither necessarily to be found between two extremes nor never to be found in the obvious centre.

Sometimes, then, the attempt to tell a truth involves a sticking-a-pin-in-the-donkey’s-tail unpredictability.

Made-up stories in the News of the World?  I’d be surprised if we assumed there weren’t any in our broadsheets.  Just imagine if we lived in a world where truth was guaranteed: how lazy and uncritical might we become.  In fact, either by omission or by default, the truth is malleable and never precise.  Only the winners get to fix our histories; only the powerful to fix our news.

Any mainstream media organisation which tries to imply they are so very distant from what they now allege happened at the News of the World is simply in denial as far as their relationship with the world, and its reality, is concerned.  This is not a post-modern argument I am making: just an observation that our recent past has very clearly demonstrated that the truth is fragile.

And, what’s more, highly dependent on where you stand – as well as with what authority.

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[...] The medieval mind is now.  Take the example of London:

London is most unequal city in the developed world, with the richest tenth of the population amassing 273 times the wealth owned by the bottom tenth – which creates a “means chasm” not seen since the days of a “slave owning society”, according to a new book.

So, from medieval ratios of six to one in a society of absolute power, we come to latterday times in a supposed democracy of equals where the top ten percent is worth 273 times more than the bottom ten percent.

This is, of course, a shocking pair of statistics – an example of economic oppression; perhaps, even, in its passive-aggressive dynamic, little short of a socioeconomic bullying.

Shortly after my piece, then, we get another article on medieval mindsets – in this case by Helienne Lindvall, writing in the same newspaper.  And she writes powerfully on a number of issues attached to the matter of copyright.  This, for example, on where Google-style freedom and innovation might lead us:

[...] Their “solutions” would create either a corporate feudalism where I would have to go around hat in hand, or a communist state, where the state would decide how much or even if I should get paid when my music is used. And to think that these solutions come from people claiming to be forward thinking? If this is their version of freedom and innovation, I can live without it.

But the paragraph I’d most like to deal with is the following one, because in its apparently tiny scope it encompasses everything which is hurting us at the moment, and serving to turn those who would fight for freedom against those who would fight for due remuneration:

Around 90% of the UK music industry is made up of “small and medium enterprises” like me, employing fewer than five people, all relying on copyright – control of their work – to survive. Interestingly, the Swedish word for this control is not copyright, but “origin right” – and I’m not called a copyright owner, but an “originator” (upphovsman) – which is probably a better description.

And Helienne is right, though not in the sense she believes: “originator” is the problem and belief system we have to hand.  A part of the battles open source software philosophies are waging against traditional copyright models relates to the fact that a thought – or a wider creation – can never exist in entire isolation. When they argue that content should belong to a community and not an individual, they are proceeding from a perfectly sensible assessment of how human thought develops.

“Originator”, therefore, is a clear idea: deciding who has the right to take full advantage of one representation of such an idea is surely a different matter.

*

Whilst examples of the corporate feudalism she describes are currently legion, the tail-end of the 20th century provided its own clear and provocative leadership: Microsoft, the paradigmatic publisher of modern times (its books, in this case, being operating systems and office suites), was able to spend five years and $10 billion on developing an operating system without being sure of its potential market take-up, without getting it as right as it should, without meeting its own deadlines and without worrying about its future … all because of its copyrighted monopoly position in the marketplace.

If this, in a democracy, isn’t an example of corporate feudalism … well, I really don’t know what is.

And the reason I mention it in Helienne’s case?  At the tail-end of the article linked to above we have this:

When I think about how much Microsoft poured into Vista, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a longtime Microserf.

“I think about what it could have been,” he said.

Microserf, eh?

The truth of the matter is that the issue of feudalism – especially economic feudalism – is much broader than just copyright, and the matter of copyright abuse much broader than simply a question of technology companies ripping off otherwise fair-minded publishers and authors.

In my humble opinion, part of the principle reasons that open source software and philosophies exist so widely – essentially, that the content is owned by the community and not by the people who generate it – lies in Microsoft’s rank abuse of copyright law to maintain a dominant position in what should have quickly become an accessible utility.  As a result, open source software philosophies have become a simple mirror image of – perhaps I should better describe them as a counterpoint to – Microsoft’s abusive approach to consumer rights.

And from a properly licensed environment such as open source and the freedom to reuse and resell without restriction, it is but a small step to seeing all traditional copyright as evil control.  Especially when one sees how Microsoft has behaved.

Without Microsoft’s economic bullying, without such childhood abuse, we would not have a generation of content consumers which had grown up in an environment where it perceived all corporate and copyrighted production as an abuse of end-user rights.  That an entire sector – the software publishing industry – could be built around zero liability for its products is a significant example of abuse; that Microsoft – and others, let us not forget – allowed in the early days their software to be freely copied, in order to destroy competitors’ holds on the market (anyone remember WordStar or WordPerfect any more?), is, however, far more than significant – it is absolutely damning.  It wasn’t the ordinary people who started the cycle of piracy but the corporate feudalisms themselves which looked to wrest and achieve world domination by sneakily marketing their products through allowing manifestly illegal activities.

Abuse is a cycle, not a single act by a single party.  Both copyright abuse by content pirates, as well as corporate feudalism of the type Microsoft represents, tend to take place – just like bullying – because someone previous to the abuser under the microscope also, in turn, carried out abuse.  As I’ve mentioned before on these pages, the Internet and worldwide web is not really the problem here: the Internet and worldwide web simply reflect the oppression offline.  If offline abuse – from voracious capitalism to cash-cow media corporates – wasn’t so widespread and unjust, then the people we form a part of wouldn’t be so minded to take advantage of the current freedoms online exploration allow.

It’s not Google-style mindsets we have to sort here: it’s the whole package, history and baggage of offline and legally sanctioned abuse we must first deal with.  Only then will we have a moral right to set the online world on a course of sense and sensibility – a sense and sensibility which would allow Helienne’s small- and medium-sized enterprises to do the good they must surely be allowed to generate.

Without, that is, allowing the cash-cow media corporates, as well as their bosom pals in government, to control and marshal their legal forces against the need for a true spirit of free speech and expression.

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I had to phone up the school late last week and insist that they bought expensive photocopiable materials my son managed, after an extended search, to unearth on the Internet – in order that at least something may be saved of the year.

So, sadly, that is why my son hates that part of the history course this year – and is determined not to continue through to A-levels next year.  Even though he is consistently getting a B in his AS-level mock exam results.

And even though the civil rights’ movement and Stalin is something that truly fascinates him, and would clearly engage him intellectually throughout the second half of the course.

And it’s really sad, because as I helped him through his densely written revision notes it seemed to me that a lot of the behaviours in Henry VII’s reign are reflected in latterday politics.  This, for example:

Although Henry can be credited with the restoration of political stability in England, and a number of commendable administrative, economic and diplomatic initiatives, the latter part of his reign was characterised by a financial rapacity which stretched the bounds of legality. According to the contemporary historianPolydore Vergil, simple “greed” in large part underscored the means by which royal control was over-asserted in Henry’s final years.^[1]

In a sense, then, the achievement of this current Coalition government of ours is to avoid the commendable stuff mentioned above and go straight to self-enrichment as a reason for all they do.  They have, in two short years, conflated the natural cycle of political rise-and-fall to a simple hubris of monumental proportions – a hubris none of us could have anticipated.

It may, after all, be true that this government is no more corrupt than previous governments.  Yet why we truly resent their corruption lies in the fact that even as they enrich themselves in much the same way as modern managerialists do so the world over, they fail to deliver the minimum of wider improvements for a society now cast in the role of street beggars.

The social compact is utterly shredded.

“Live and let live” as a guiding philosophy for class interaction a mere chimera on the horizon of a foolish abdication of all sense of propriety.

Perhaps the instinct was there at some time in the past, as these wannabe greasy-pole-climbing businesspeople fashioned themselves in the image of professional politicos – but the flesh, being so very weak, has dampened their enthusiasm for true, honest and radical change.

Yes.

I am inclined to believe we now do resent this government its corruption much more than any other government in the past – mostly and precisely because we receive nothing in exchange.  Their corruption is so excluding that our corruption has no chance.  The bribing of vast sectors of the voting public by one or the other of the major political parties has reached a political cul-de-sac  – as those who are currently on top realise they need bribe no one any more who does not already belong to their circle.

So it is we receive that nothing-in-exchange – except, of course, the misery of a future entirely without hope.

Which is surely what now is to await those citizens who believed in and practised the conditional politics our society so depended on.  In a sense, it was our fault for allowing them to implement the mechanisms of pork-barrel politics in the first place.  If we had spent the last thirty years voting with an adult sense of efficiency and probity, we would have got a body politic of the same characteristics.  As it is, we have allowed the corrupting business classes (not all the business classes by any means, of course) to become so politically powerful these days that jettisoning the baggage which is voter opinion has become a quite practical and attractive option.

“No longer do British politicians need to suck up to their electorates.”  A fair enough epitaph for all our political gravestones perhaps?

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• For legal reasons, this article will not be opened to comments

Not even a moderator in sight, it would appear.  Clearly, Comment was free before #Leveson hit our screens – but not so clearly afterwards (though some, of course, would argue it had never been as free as was claimed).

Is this, then, how censorship of social media really begins?  With those you’d least expect to kowtow to the establishment?  Under the guise of a lawyerly decorum, we randomly pick and choose when, where and whether our legions of page impression-generating readers can interact in public or not.

Mind you, it may be that I haven’t been paying too much attention to all of this.  It may be that they’ve been doing it for quite a while now.  It may be that all newspapers, from the Daily Mail to the Guardian itself, like to create a veneer of freedom and interactivity whilst – deep down and in their amoral innards – they are essentially looking to sustain a simple and coherent business model of advertiser and political interests.

Curious, at the very least, is all I can say, that one of the articles which shuts down the free interchange of comments on a matter of serious public issue should be one which praises a man who used to be at the centre of Cameron’s government – a man who clearly played an important role in Cameron getting quite as far as he did in his process of detoxifying the Tory Party brand, and therefore in his process of getting into power.

Now I’m not for a moment suggesting Greenslade himself is writing out of bad faith – nor offering up to the straitjacketed reader what might be interpreted as an outrageously political slant on the matter.  Rather, all I’m inclined to point out is that social media stuff as run and marshalled by mainstream media won’t always find itself able to deliver the freedoms it claims so wholesomely to support.

This article and the decision taken on preventing reader comments being one such case in point.

And if a first as I suggest might be the case, then a sad example of even more creeping establishment censorship.

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I think it has something to do with the fact that I feel I might know how the data is structured and where it’s going.  That is to say, maybe I like Twitter because I understand my data.  A single stream of my occurrences which responds to ideas and trains of thought that belong to others.  It’s a virtual conversation – that much is clear.  But it’s also easy to understand how it might match a real-world equivalent.

Facebook and Google+?  Now they’re a completely different matter.  If I wished to download everything I do, make and action in the latter two environments … well, in what state would it arrive to me and – indeed – how might I incorporate it into a different system?

The problem, of course, with datasets such as Facebook and Google+ is that, almost certainly deliberately, they do not respond to easy-to-comprehend relationships.  Yes, of course they say you can download your data if you so wish – and take it with you wherever you care.  But whilst I could easily see myself turning my Twitter data into a book – a book of virtual stanzas maybe but, even so, still a book with sense and sensibility – there is little physical form I can currently contemplate which would allow me to understand what on earth Facebook and Google+ could even begin to look like in an offline form.

They are online octopuses: difficult to grab hold of; difficult to know where they start or stop.  How on earth could I replicate such experiences in an environment truly of my own?

In some curious way, also, they are everything and anything to anyone and everyone – and, consequently, nothing at all for very long.

They do not have an underlying mission which is not driven exclusively by the market.  They do not lead but, instead, follow.  They are virtual objects rather than vehicles for ideas.  In a way, whilst Twitter can constitute an intellectual book for a book-reading public, Facebook and Google+ constitute encyclopaedic tomes for tome-buying publics.  The latter audiences like by-the-yard purchases to beautify and physically impact on their lives; the former, however, are far more interested in being fascinated by concepts that serve to engage their minds.

And therein the real difference between Twitter and the rest.  Whilst I can understand what I’m generating in Twitter most of the time, in Google+ and Facebook it’s a mess.

A mess whose envelope I am unable to determine; a mess whose dividing lines between yours and mine simply do not exist.

In a sense, then, you could argue that Twitter is by far the least socialist and society-minded of the three.

And that I prefer it to the mishmash of ownership I perceive Google+ and Facebook to represent does make me wonder if – deep down – I’m about as petit bourgeois as you could get.

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