f4f3 | People in London Are A Bit Up Themselves

Or, to be more accurate, "the number of people I encounter in a work, as opposed to a social, environment in London and the South East who are well up themselves seems to be significantly higher than the number of people I encounter at work in Scotland who are well up themselves". Which is more accurate but lacks somewhat in pith.

By "up themselves" I mean someone who takes themselves, and the work they do, far too seriously. It's something like self importance, combined with a lack of humour or perspective. I tend to think it's the lack of humour that bothers me most - if you can't take the piss out of yourself, or have it taken out of you, then I'm going to have a real problem taking you seriously, or working with you for any length of time (to cast back to a long ago argument with someone (who I hope is still) on my FL, this isn't about humour used as a weapon to belittle someone else. It's about self deprecation, probably, and a degree of humility.

The amount of conversations I've had over the last month about golf, house prices, other people's jobs, and the fact that the person I'm talking to is vastly important, either by the nature of their job or by the people they know, or by their salary, or the value of their house, or by who they went to school or university (sorry, College) with, or by the car(s) they drive, or by the fact that their wives would never have a job, or by the amount of time they spend in the gym, or running marathons (never jogging, btw, always running) or their diet, is significantly larger than the amount I can stomach in a year.

I've been in Sheffield for the last couple of days, and I commented in a meeting how attractive the city centre is looking (I only saw the city centre) and that there was an interesting looking exhibition in one of the galleries I'd passed on the way up to the hotel (Ruskin and the Formation of Landscape, or similar). My Metropolitan colleague's reaction was "Oh, are you into that", in the same intonation as if I'd just mentioned a passing interest in coprophillia.

I'm aware that I'm verging on racism here, attributing a behaviour and *shudder* a type to a geographical region, but I honestly think that the gravitational pull of money and power to what they sweetly call The Metropolis (the definitive article is a clue, I think) also attracts arseholes. It's nothing to do with being born there, it's to do with why you live there.

Still, I'm back in Glasgow, the sun is shining and, as I reminded myself on Friday, I'm twenty minutes from Loch Lomond. Despit the danger of confirming the interest alluded to above, I'm moved to say - "Fuck this shit."