I'M FUCKING DONE

[IdleRich]

I've been to Stephen Hawking's "favourite" Chinese restaurant in Cambridge, was "OK", but nowhere as good as the one as the other Chinese one down the road, on a corner diagonally opposite some playing fields, which was excellent - I find that there is a lot of trading on former glories in these Oxbridge places

The Simon Raven novels ( @IdleRich will know.. ) are especially hilarious when dissecting the Cambridge culture...

Yes I do indeed. He seemed to really despise the upper classes, despite being as posh as you could imagine.

More interesting to me than who went to Oxbridge is which of us went to public (that's private if you're American) schools. That sounds counter-intuitive in that you can't choose which school you go to (unless you're very precocious) but they get you at such a young age. I think my parents would have liked to send me to public school but sadly(!) they couldn't afford it, when it was my brother's turn apparently they could but, contrary to what I said above come to think of it, he told them to fuck off, by the time of my second brother I guess they had given up on the idea entirely.

 

[william_kent]

He seemed to really despise the upper classes, despite being as posh as you could imagine.

Simon Raven seemed to despise everyone! The working classes certainly get short thrift in the "Alms For Oblivion" series, especially the one set in Cambridge where they ransack the chapel. He just spews bile, which makes for a great read. I'm indebted to @IdleRich for the recommendation...

 

[william_kent]

One of my favourite scenes in the "Alms for Oblivion" series was where the Simon Raven alter-ego, "Fielding Gray", is in the car with "the Headmaster" and they've given a lift to a soldier to the funeral of Christopher, the love interest, and both of them realise they have no idea about how to interact with the "lower classes" outside of issuing "administrative orders" - he successfully encapsulates the British class system in a couple of sentences

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Yes I do indeed. He seemed to really despise the upper classes, despite being as posh as you could imagine.

More interesting to me than who went to Oxbridge is which of us went to public (that's private if you're American) schools. That sounds counter-intuitive in that you can't choose which school you go to (unless you're very precocious) but they get you at such a young age. I think my parents would have liked to send me to public school but sadly(!) they couldn't afford it, when it was my brother's turn apparently they could but, contrary to what I said above come to think of it, he told them to fuck off, by the time of my second brother I guess they had given up on the idea entirely.

State primary and grammar, tho had also been offered top scholarship (= no fees and travel paid for) to a private secondary school

 

[Mr. Tea]

Hawking's parents were both educated middle class, but didn't have much money I think, at least while he was a kid. Not aristos, by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[shakahislop]

I have a strange feeling that somehow certain types of cities can't help but growing to look like each other in certain ways.

There's a certain amount of copy and pasting isn't there. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but I've noticed that coffee shops have an interesting way of copying themselves internationally. I remember going into one in Birmingham (the american one), which is a pretty brutal and unique city, and suddenly being surrounded by white surfaces, sharp lines, metal hardware and all of that. Which could easily have been on the upper west side, or on oxford high street (there is one like that actually, just before magdelen bridge), or in basically any part of london, or in some random town in new england, or berlin....i mean I'm just listing the cafés that come immediately to mind that were the same aesthetic.

actually on the subject of coffee shops there's another kind of aesthetic, the costa and cafe nero one, with comfy chairs and reassuring welcoming fast food style signs and staff uniforms, which is also copy and pasted in so many places, thinking of one in Santa Marta in Colombia, a place in basel, cheap leather chairs and some kind of plastic cabinet filled with 'cookies'.

I suppose its not exactly a new insight but it presumably happens faster than you know, to come full circle, the way that some of the US east coast universities straight up copied the architecture of oxford and cambridge when they set themselves up (princeton is hilarious in that respect)

 

[shakahislop]

For my money, the best pub in Oxford isn't in 'town' at all, but is the White Hart in Headington, which I used to live very near to (a 45 second walk, as it happened). Fantastic massive beer garden out the back, good beers, not generally full of either tourists or students.

i used to live round there, liked that pub. that part of town is dead interesting as well, a kind of buffer zone between the brookes orbit and everyone else

 

[shakahislop]

More interesting to me than who went to Oxbridge is which of us went to public (that's private if you're American) schools.

i went to normal (ie normal comprehensive state) school, anything else was never even a glint in my parents eyes. it is basically annoying having to compete with people who have some of the advantages of the expensive school thing, or at least it was for a decade or so until all that evens out as you get older, and obviously its all completely unfair. i think basically everyone always thinks that the kind of school they went to is how everyone should go to school. i do think that one thing that was great about going to comprehensive is that everyone goes there, apart from the sliver of kids who go to the private schools, you basically grow up with everyone who lives in the local area. it's been relentlessly disappointing as i get older how the rest of the world isn't like that, there is a real tendency to hang out with people similar to you, school was class for being around loads of different types of people. was good being in the countryside as well because you don't get that city thing of there being schools in rich neighborhoods full of rich kids and schools in poor neighborhoods full of poor kids, the geography doesn't let you do that, it's just everyone who lives within traveling difference.

 

[Mr. Tea]

i used to live round there, liked that pub. that part of town is dead interesting as well, a kind of buffer zone between the brookes orbit and everyone else

Yep, and it's also a far older settlement than Oxford, which you wouldn't necessarily know from just wandering around or even living there.

Did you ever go to any of the 'open gardens' events they have there in the early summer? An extremely gentle and very pleasant way to spend an afternoon, listening to all these charming old ladies with posher-than-the-queen accents tell you about their rare begonias. Some amazing old houses too, but there are wonderful gardens belonging to houses from the 1960s as well as the 1560s.

 

[IdleRich]

This is the unicorn which is above the dining hall in Brasenose College by the way



Didn't students from one of the other colleges steal it at some point? The penis I mean, not the unicorn.

 

[Mr. Tea]

This is the unicorn which is above the dining hall in Brasenose College by the way

View attachment 10124

Didn't students from one of the other colleges steal it at some point? The penis I mean, not the unicorn.

Oh, I'm sure - anything like that has to have been stolen by students at some point, like Jeremy Bentham's mummified head being abducted from UCL by those scurvy Kings College dogs.

The unicorn's dick reminds me of the equestrian statue of some national hero in Budapest, where the horse's balls are permanently polished to a high shine because students traditionally rub them to ensure luck in their exams.

 

[IdleRich]

There's a certain amount of copy and pasting isn't there. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but I've noticed that coffee shops have an interesting way of copying themselves internationally. I remember going into one in Birmingham (the american one), which is a pretty brutal and unique city, and suddenly being surrounded by white surfaces, sharp lines, metal hardware and all of that. Which could easily have been on the upper west side, or on oxford high street (there is one like that actually, just before magdelen bridge), or in basically any part of london, or in some random town in new england, or berlin....i mean I'm just listing the cafés that come immediately to mind that were the same aesthetic.

I mentioned this before but I believe it was before His Lopness had joined dissensus so I will tell the story again if noone minds (and if anyone does it will be too late so tough... but you can skip the bit below I guess).

Personally, I find the idea of increasing homogeneity between the hipster bits of cities and the hipsters within them somewhat depressing, in fact I reckon that most of us here dislike that idea and assume that everyone thinks the same.

But...

One time I dj-d in Moscow in a trendy, or at least very expenaive, bar/clothes shop that was called Old Ditch, the name a homage to the then trendiest parts of London - Old Street and Shoreditch - and the promoter and his mate drove us slowly round this area pointing out people and asking how successful they had been in their attempts to ape the appearance of a London (and by extension I suppose, a NY or Berlin) hipster.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I mentioned this before but I believe it was before His Lopness had joined dissensus so I will tell the story again if noone minds (and if anyone does it will be too late so tough... but you can skip the bit below I guess).

Personally, I find the idea of increasing homogeneity between the hipster bits of cities and the hipsters within them somewhat depressing, in fact I reckon that most of us here dislike that idea and assume that everyone thinks the same.

But...

One time I dj-d in Moscow in a trendy, or at least very expenaive, bar/clothes shop that was called Old Ditch, the name a homage to the then trendiest parts of London - Old Street and Shoreditch - and the promoter and his mate drove us slowly round this area pointing out people and asking how successful they had been in their attempts to ape the appearance of a London (and by extension I suppose, a NY or Berlin) hipster.

Was that the trip where people kept buying you bottles of this achingly hip UK craft beer called "Fuller's London Pride"? The only beer that any self-respecting Shoreditch hipster would be seen drinking, etc. etc.

 

[IdleRich]

Yes and no... I mean, they did keep offering me that, but I don't think that they were saying Pride was a hip beer (although they were quite, er, proud to have it in a number of cases), it's just they thought that as a Londoner it would be what I would want to drink.

 

[luka]

little bit of chat about it here

Air B&B

I've just stayed in an area, in an air b&b, with its fair share of anti air b&b graffiti. The argument on the walls focussing on rent rises and housing shortages caused by the conversion of flats into one room hotels. Yyaldrin doesn't like the free dock less bicycles and scooters which are left...

dissensus.com

 

[luka]

There's a certain amount of copy and pasting isn't there. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but I've noticed that coffee shops have an interesting way of copying themselves internationally.

i made coffee for a living in london as that first wave of new zealand/australian inspired coffee hit town and the best example i have of this is there was this dickhead i worked with at foxcroft and ginger in soho that i next saw when i was in berlin and he was working in an identical coffee shop there.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yes and no... I mean, they did keep offering me that, but I don't think that they were saying Pride was a hip beer (although they were quite, er, proud to have it in a number of cases), it's just they thought that as a Londoner it would be what I would want to drink.

Oh right. Well I remember you telling me this and it being sort of awkward because you didn't want to seem ungrateful but at the same time you wanted to say "I don't really like bitter, have you got a Beck's or something I could have instead?"

 

[shakahislop]

I mentioned this before but I believe it was before His Lopness had joined dissensus so I will tell the story again if noone minds (and if anyone does it will be too late so tough... but you can skip the bit below I guess).

Personally, I find the idea of increasing homogeneity between the hipster bits of cities and the hipsters within them somewhat depressing, in fact I reckon that most of us here dislike that idea and assume that everyone thinks the same.

But...

One time I dj-d in Moscow in a trendy, or at least very expenaive, bar/clothes shop that was called Old Ditch, the name a homage to the then trendiest parts of London - Old Street and Shoreditch - and the promoter and his mate drove us slowly round this area pointing out people and asking how successful they had been in their attempts to ape the appearance of a London (and by extension I suppose, a NY or Berlin) hipster.

wow. do you like that part of the international superstar DJ life? i can see how it would be class to rock up in a city and have some ready made mates who want to drive you around and show you things.

 

[shakahislop]

Oh right. Well I remember you telling me this and it being sort of awkward because you didn't want to seem ungrateful but at the same time you wanted to say "I don't really like bitter, have you got a Beck's or something I could have instead?"

the classic with this is someone in australia or america proffering a can of Stella like it is some kind of sophisticated drink, and figuring out whether or not you tell them that it's known as 'wifebeater' where you're from. i know a couple of people with this same specific story.

 

[shakahislop]

there's another question in all of it isn't there, which is basically what cities are for, what they should be optimised for, what should be protected, and who gets to decide all of that.