Princes & Paupers; warning: may contain undirected rambling

I've never really felt like a particular pauper compared to my college-mates (with a few notable exceptions, hey Mr. No-Student-Loan?); but I'm beginning to think maybe I am. All I've really had to go on is the cost of their parents' cars, which isn't much to go on, and whilst I was always impressed by how modest a lot of them were, the cost of a car pales into tiny insignificance compared with the cost of thirteen years of pleb-free schooling. Put another way, whilst I knew a lot of people at home who were wealthier than we were, I never met more than a very few people who went to private schools (indeed, there aren't many of those where I live), and some of those had their school fees paid by the military for practical reasons.

I suspect the big divide (in terms of class/poshness/pauperness/whatever) is not between those whose car cost £5,000 and those whose car cost £20,000, but between those whose education cost £0 and those whose education cost £250,000 (thirteen years at just under £20,000/year). I've always felt that the fact that I'm - on paper at least - now as well qualified as any of my privately-educated compadres (and indeed more so than many other private-schooled people) tends to suggest that it wouldn't've been £250,000 well spent. Another reason why I don't really understand all the fuss over the cost of higher education is that university is much, much cheaper than the schools that many people have been at.

(Similarly the difference between someone who lives in a house worth £200,000 and someone in a house worth £400,000 is tiny compared with the person whose house is worth £1,000,000; presumably you might find the two former at the same state school, one feeling smug and the other feeling paupery, whilst the latter would never associate with the others, and the two groups would probably be unaware of each other's existence...)

Incidentally by this point in a discussion there will usually be someone
1) justifying the unpleasant euphemism 'independent' instead of 'private/public' for '¬state' schools
2) telling me that there's a difference between private schools and public schools (something I never dreamed of until some time into my first year - it had never occurred to me that the ¬state schools could be further subdivided)
3) assuring me that theirs was a very minor private school, that they didn't want to go there, that the failures of the local LEA made them do it, and that they didn't pay for it anyway.

For the record, I can think of six private secondary schools (three mixed, three girls only) and two private primary schools within reasonable travelling distance (30 minutes by road) from where I live; from what I hear from other people this rate is much higher in other parts of the country. [If you really care, they're King Edward's Bath (I hear Bill Bailey went there), Prior Park Bath, Royal High Bath, Grittleton House, St. Mary's Calne, Stonar Atworth, and Grittleton primary, and some school in Corsham. The number keeps increasing as I think of places I've heard of in Bath, but I don't know really how many are there because although I've lived 12 miles away from it since 1984, I only really discovered the place in 2002. I've no idea whether private school people have heard of other private schools, whether some are considered better than others, and so on; I rather suspect there's a whole new world there, or rather a can of worms I don't want to open].

Anyway before I get carried away by this particular hobby-horse I'd better get back on track. Private vs. State was a favourite topic of 'conversation' between myself and my deputy back in West Wilts Youth days; in fact she was pretty much the only person in the orchestra of about 80 people I dared speak to, and that was pretty much all we talked about. Breaks in rehearsals were only 10 minutes or so a week, to be fair...

Where was I? Oh yes, and now that I'm getting people's home contact addresses and suchlike, it seems like a lot of my friends must have a lot more money than I realised. Lots of villages and leafy suburbs and suchlike. All terribly impressive.

All this said, whilst I might feel like a bit of a pauper if I ever got to visit college friends at home, and whilst I'd think twice about letting anyone come to my house unless I'd convinced myself that it wasn't totally beneath them, I've never seen why someone should be judged according to the financial or educational status of the people to whom they happened to be born...

... though I am of course curious as to how people manage to acquire such wealth. On the basis that if I knew, I might be able to do the same. But one just can't ask, can one. Besides which one thing I've learned from Cambridge is that there's much more to life than money and possessions; I think this may be one of my greatest lessons, in fact. Because in Cambridge, at least in the university, it really doesn't matter how much money you have, and it's all about intellectual inquiry rather than the shallow consumerism of the real world, one begins to see that there are more important things in life than shiny new cars and big houses paid for by dull, dull jobs for dull, dull firms.

Of course university is a great leveller because everyone there is, presumably, rather similar in meritocratic terms such as intelligence and/or tendency to work hard, the few possessions we have don't tend to be the kind of things that can mark us out particularly as 'rich' or 'poor'; nobody knows how much our house or our parents' cars or our schools cost; many people don't care at all about what they wear, and very few are slaves to labels - I suspect that adherence to 'fashion' may be negatively correlated with IQ, but don't hold me to that... It's what makes universities, when they work properly, such superbly egalitarian places.

Note to self: What on earth are you rabbiting on about, boy? Just go to sleep. Or actually do some reading for once, and you might finally become as intelligent as you pretend to be.

I'll be off then.