Inciting Hatred

Yesterday, I went out for a meal with colleagues. We are all working away from home, staying in hotels (quite posh hotels) in Edinburgh, and we met up in the Cambridge Bar in Young Street (very nice, thoroughly recommend it, even though it's full of awful idiots like me - see below).

I had a sort of out-of-body experience when I could hear our conversation from the point of view of someone overhearing us, and it was horribly sobering. We sounded like utter, utter twats: what airmiles scheme are you enrolled in, what hotel loyalty cards do you have, which of the posh hotels here is the best ("well, the Balmoral has the most comfortable beds, and the Sheraton the best gym and pool, and the Hilton the nicest staff...."), etc etc. We sounded spoilt, tiresome, and expecting an awful lot out of life.

But then, this morning, wearily packing my case to change hotels (fully booked in the one we are supposed to use on this project today and tomorrow), I was thinking that actually, yes, it does require quite a lot of nice stuff to make up for the only being at home at weekends stuff. That John Betjeman poem was going round my head:

From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town.

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam’s escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbelov’d ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!

Harsh, but fair, I suppose. Though thinking of myself as a business woman does make me giggle, rather. And my breakfasts are anything but tiny.