Monday, October 08, 2007
The other half
Its not really half, more like the other couple percent. Its funny, I don't think of myself much as being the other half. I'm just me, grew up with not very much at all. Vicars don't get paid much, and our family lived in perpetual budget land. Not that I ever felt deprived, far from it. Now though, we are... ehem, comfortable.
Sometimes though it gets slammed home. Saturday night was one of those nights. It was a "parents" evening for all the kids in Ali Baba's class. LL had met a few of the other mum's, but I was completely in the dark. Ali had just joined the school this term, so it was a completely new set of parents.
Now when I was a kid, this sort of thing was usually a pot luck at someone's house. This too was at someone's house, but it sure wasn't a potluck. With regemental precision we were preorganised to provide nice shiny cheques. The food was catered, and very good it was too. The bar was potluck though!
What got me though as I wandered talking to this or that parent, was who I was talking to. Putting the class war aside, very few of these people had been born to money or privaledge, but there was a lot in the room. As you do the chit chat, talking about which boy you where a parent of (oddly, pretty well everyone knew each other's kids by name (well, maybe not that off, its a class of 15)), where you lived, what you did.
So, as I chatted, I met two legal managing partners, the head of the local LEA (who sends his kids to private school, just what does that tell you), a CFO of a branded company pretty well everyone would recognise, the head of cultural change at another well known company, a couple of entrepreneurs with their own firms. Really quite the list, and I should stress that was both the women and the men.
I just came away from the night a bit weirded out. Its not a bad thing, such a congregation of talent meant for some pretty fascinating conversation. It just hit home that how I live isn't quite how most live. I still don't know how that hits me.
Sometimes though it gets slammed home. Saturday night was one of those nights. It was a "parents" evening for all the kids in Ali Baba's class. LL had met a few of the other mum's, but I was completely in the dark. Ali had just joined the school this term, so it was a completely new set of parents.
Now when I was a kid, this sort of thing was usually a pot luck at someone's house. This too was at someone's house, but it sure wasn't a potluck. With regemental precision we were preorganised to provide nice shiny cheques. The food was catered, and very good it was too. The bar was potluck though!
What got me though as I wandered talking to this or that parent, was who I was talking to. Putting the class war aside, very few of these people had been born to money or privaledge, but there was a lot in the room. As you do the chit chat, talking about which boy you where a parent of (oddly, pretty well everyone knew each other's kids by name (well, maybe not that off, its a class of 15)), where you lived, what you did.
So, as I chatted, I met two legal managing partners, the head of the local LEA (who sends his kids to private school, just what does that tell you), a CFO of a branded company pretty well everyone would recognise, the head of cultural change at another well known company, a couple of entrepreneurs with their own firms. Really quite the list, and I should stress that was both the women and the men.
I just came away from the night a bit weirded out. Its not a bad thing, such a congregation of talent meant for some pretty fascinating conversation. It just hit home that how I live isn't quite how most live. I still don't know how that hits me.
