With February already more than halfway through, which story this year has caused the biggest stir chez Claude? Well, if there was one thing to wipe the smile off my face it was the collective hate-mongering of a metropolitan clique of braying snobs over the supposed “racism” of people’s princess Jade Goody. At dinner parties, risotto luncheons, drinks receptions and crèche meet-ups across London, I suddenly discovered a dark underside to my supposedly liberal, progressive friends. James[1] , a distinguished journalist and author of, “Ciabatta or Chips? A Playful Look at Changing British Culinary Tastes”, remarked casually that Goody is nothing more than “a piece of shit chav underclass gutter dweller.” His wife Fionora[2] was in agreement, adding that she “wouldn’t let that woman near Tybalt and Fifina.”[3]
Hot air
The sad fact, I realised as I drove back across the river the other night, was that my friends simply don’t understand working class people. They could happily tell you the difference between Szechuan and Dim-Sum[4] , and as for hot air, you could have powered the London Eye for a week when Gianluca and Paula got in that argument over the relative merits of Rustic and Fusion Ethiopian cuisine at my dinner party. Yes, living as we do at the centre of central London, where everyone is either rich or poor-but-foreign; some of us just don’t understand the white working class of outer London and the rest of Britain.
Affectionate greeting
I do, because it’s where I grew up, but my friends don’t. Maybe if they actually bothered to get out of their bubble, they’d know that where I grew up, “How are you me old Paki chum?” was an affectionate greeting between people of any race, often met with the reply “Not so bad you black shit.” The idea that the so-called chav nation (which includes my parents and cousins, thank you very much) is in any way racist is utterly laughable. It’s funny really, the hyper-educated super-literate high flyers with whom I associate couldn’t grasp this blindingly obvious fact, yet Jim, my cockney bin man (with whom I have a very good, mutually equal friendship) understands perfectly.
Bins on a Thursday
When I said that the “racism outcry” was overblown, he was quick to agree. “Yeh tell me about it guv,” he said, “the trouble is they identify a completely false dichotomy between the so called tolerance of a cosseted elite which is actually profoundly ignorant of the realities of life for most of this country, and a ludicrous caricature racism which has more in common with the lunatic fringe of the BNP than with the most racist average man. Don’t forget I’m coming on Thursday next week.”