Multi-Tasking

I dreamed I was defending a trench against an advancing enemy while simultaneously teaching a class about mid-nineteenth century thought. It was a wide-screen dream.

Digging The Hole A Little Deeper

Something I read on the Net the other day: an elderly military man arrested for cottaging in the good old days wistfully explained to the policeman who was feeling his collar, "It begins at school, you know..."

Which sort of backs up- albeit in an anecdotal manner-  the point I was making the other day which caused wemyss to blow his top.

The British establishment is largely staffed with chaps who went through the public school system. Hence institutionalized misogyny and pederasty. If you deny there's a link you're effectively saying that education counts for nothing. 

I have visited the House of Commons. It took me straight back to my schooldays. Dreary neo-gothic architecture, high ceilings, long corridors smelling of farts and cabbage. A person passing from Eton (say) to the mother of parliaments by way of a Cambridge college would notice hardly any change in the ambient scenery.

The prefects at my old school (not all of them, of course) were corrupt, in love with their own privilege and crazy for hot boy sex. Are we to suppose they dropped all that as soon as they moved into the greater world?

In Clarification

When- in the previous post- I talk about hot boy sex I mean sex with a power differential built in. Schools- public schools in particular- are intensely hierarchical- and an age difference of a year or two- imperceptible to an outsider- can feel enormous. The sexual relationships I was aware of at my school were all between older and younger boys and had a whiff of abuse about them. A young, pretty boy who was known to be available was called a "ding"- dunno why- and was an object of universal obsession and contempt. Relationships between boys of the same age and at the same level in the hierarchy (if they even existed) were kept very secret because the culture of the school was against them. Such relationships were "queer"- and anyone suspected of being "queer"- unless very big and frightening- was tormented for it.