In a bar last night, the DJ played Pulp’s Common People and the crowd, a drunken mass of former St Martins sculpture graduates, sang along without a shred of self-awareness to cause them disquiet. I felt like pointing out that he was singing at them, not for them, that if you called your Dad he could stop it all, you could stop pretending to enjoy yourselves in these dingy bars, where the smoking ban did more harm than good because now there is no fresh nicotine smoke to mask the smell of the bar, and flee to Fulham where you suspect you would secretly be happier and leave me to enjoy Shoreditch the way it used to be before people like you “discovered” it.
Luckily I managed to resist the urge, which is why I am now sitting here typing these words and not in the Royal London having my spleen stitched back together. It rarely pays to be the one to point out the ironies of the day, just ask Juvenal. So instead I sit there in seething misanthropy, before fleeing the place to write something nasty about the clientele on the Internet. Much braver, I’m sure you’ll agree.
