Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Clan McMabawb...

Ever heard of them? They are everywhere. They infest the blogosphere* with their opinions and 'facts', they moan and whine and bitch. Some of them get to write for a national newspaper, some even write books and go on the telly. They can be Eustonistas, anti-GATSO campaigners (read: criminal vandals), conspiracy theorists, traveller haters, libertarian wackos and all sorts of odd things.

I refer of course to the 'Middle Class, Middle Aged, Balding Angry White Bloke' (MCMABAWB), that mainly British phenomenon of man who makes it his life's work to escalate minor quibbles into issues of life and death.

Of course, I am grossly generalising. After all, not all of them are balding (some are positively hirsuit, others have gone beyong the end of 'balding' into fully balded territory), I'm sure some think of themselves as Working Class or outside the class system (just 'ordinary blokes') and not as much angry asn indignant.

And, of course, I could quite easily be tarred with the same brush. However, better to know what you are, I say.

(* I hate that word, don't you?)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think I will setle for just being a Mabawb.

I refuse to believe that anyone who grew up in a house with an outside toilet could qualify for the middle-class bit.

Nice acronym though. is it your own?

Danivon said...

It is all my own. I googled it and found nothing, so I hereby claim it as my new contribution to the English language.

By the way, does your stint at a non-state school outweigh the privy?

Anonymous said...

Who said it was a non-state school?

It was a comprehensive, co-educational boarding school which was run by an enlightened county council as a place for children of any ability or circumstances, but priority was given to divorced parents, parents travelling a lot (especially forces) and 'difficult' children.

I had divorced parents and was, you will not be surprised to learn, difficult :)

Danivon said...

Just a lazy assumption on my part.
Don't tell me, that was when Essex was not a Tory county?

Anonymous said...

I honestly don't know what colour the council was when the school was set up. I just assumed it had always been Tory, but maybe not.

The original building was put up in 1880, or thereabouts, as the West Ham Industrial School and truants from the West Ham area were shipped out there. In the 1920s some extra buildings with removable walls were ereceted and it became a residential school for consumptives - the idea was that all that fresh air was good for TB.

Some time in the late 60s (I think) a few more buildings were added and the county operated it as a comprehensive boarding school. Essex council also operated one in Surey (Elmbridge) and one near Reading.

In the early 80s they moved the Essex and Reading schools into an old teaching college in Bishops Stortford and moved the Surrey school into my old school premises.

Since then they closed down my old place and converted the original block into yuppie flats, while the Bishops Stortford school turned into a something else - a grant-aided school or something.

So the council certainly got less progressive from the late 70s onwards.