Who's Afraid of the Fourth Man?

[f4f3]

This isn't what I was expecting to be blogging about tonight. I expected to be talking about my Caledonian odyssey this weekend (Drumna-fucking-drochit?) or the kicking we gave the Bastard English or possibly the Guardian giving page one space to a racist and religious diatribe from one of our greatest living postcard illustrators, and probably I will, but I read yesterday's Guardian Review over dinner, and something caught my eye.
In the Guardian Book club column, John Banville writes entertainlingly about his decision to write a novel based on Antony Blunt. At one point he writes:
"Like so many of my generation I have been, and indeed, still am, fascinated by the Cambridge spies."
And I stopped, and crinkled up my brow. I'm not fascinated by the Cambridge spies. I'm not vaguely interested by the Cambridge spies. I don't, if truth be told, really give a shit about the Cambridge spies. Nobody I know gives a shit about the Cambridge spies, and nobody I've ever spoken to seems to give a shit either. I've always thought I was immune from the Oxbridge chip on my shoulder. I didn't go there, nobody else I know did either, and it never seemed even an option to worry about from my point of view. But I do wonder that somone could say that "So many of his generation" did care. I tend to regard myself as pretty mundane, in that my interests and fascinations are pretty reflective of everyone else's, but I seem to have a blind spot here.
So, knowing that some of my F's out there did go to Oxbridge, is anyone out there fascinated by this? Am I in this particular way less than mundane? Or is it an example of the lensing affect caused by so many of our opinion formers coming from such a closeted background?

Comments

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I confess to having skimmed some of the above, and that there's a certain lazy shorthand to my original comment. I agree with you that that sort of attitude among the Oxbridge-educated is probably diminishing (and a good thing too, IMO). However, Banville is not of my generation, but rather my Dad's. I get the impression that to people of that generation, Oxbridge is still something of an enigma (ha), eliciting reverence or irritation, sometimes both at once.

It might be that the whole thing is merely an example of the inability of someone fascinated by a thing to understand why others might not find it so compelling. I can think of any number of occasions when I've seen this, or done it myself.

Of course, I should know better than to get into anything approaching an argument with a lawyer, not least because I have the debating skills of a bowl of porridge ;)

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

A well flung bowl of porridge can derail the most carefully though out argument, believe me....

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

That's my kind of sophisticated retort, yup.