(Post) MBA Blog

British television at Christmas time is traditionally such a dull affair. The paradox is that at no other time in the year are there so many people gathered round the stupid-box, yet TV folks chose precisely this time to screen the worst of the lot!

Maybe it's because I've been without TV for three months that my expectations were unrealistic, but I'm afraid the only fare that did it for me this year was Amelie and yes, Muppets from Space, both excellent choices.

Shanghai Noon (Jackie Chan) was a bit of a let down, as was Polar Bear Battlefield. Surprise nuggets of the day were Natural World's take on Prince Charles' Highgrove and Some Like it Hot. To be honest, I'd be happy just with re-runs of Magnum!

Yes, I did watch the Queen's speech this year, (for the first time), and no, I didn't stand up, because I'm a rebel like that, see!

Quality time with the TV, ahem, family, was only interrupted by a few hours sporadic work on Org. Behaviour revision. The exam for OB is on the 9th Jan and Acc. & Finance is on the 7th, so plenty to keep me out of trouble.

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The trip to London for Sir Paul Judge's party was a pleasant enough affair - guys in black tie and girls in cocktail dresses. Everyone was on their best behavior; plenty of milling around and polite chatter at his pad, which turned out to be in Pimlico, not Tower Hill.

There were also lot's of digital cameras floating about and I quietly pointed out the irony to a number of fellow guests (the line was too good to use only once) that the "lovely" building they were taking pictures of across the Thames was in fact none other than MI5 headquarters (the not-so-secret service) and that MI5 were probably taking pictures of us taking pictures of them!

Hey, I said it was ironic, not funny.

Tough crowd...

The trip to Sir Paul's flat was not uneventful. We sliced through East London in two coaches, barely slowing down to admire those monuments to 60's Modernist Optimism, that tower blocks that blot, sorry, dot the landscape, the warehouses, factories and industrial estates.

Anyone who says people can pull themselves up by the bootstraps to get out of places like East London by and large don't know what the hell they are talking about. Most of the time they haven't been brought up there, or even lived there, among the despair and poverty and soul destroying estates. A land of daytime TV, rizlas, Tennants Extra and local Kebab shops. Junkies, drunkards, pollution and gangs. Sure they visit - it's very trendy for rich suburban kids to get a taste of 'real' London by spending Saturday night in Shoreditch and getting a 'real' bagel from a 'real' shop on Brick Lane at the end of the night. How exciting! How 'real'!

No we didn't slow down, because we were still in our Cambridge Bubble you see. What is the Cambridge Bubble? Well, it's a weird sense of being sucked in to another, parallel reality, after you've spent just a little time at Cambridge. Nothing else really matters; the rugby cup, Saddam being pulled from the ground...all these passed me by to a large extent, and I don't really mind that they did.

But being in the bubble can make you complacent; it truly is an ivory tower, from which everything seems safe, and/or fixable. I grew up in those streets of East London that we rushed through on our way to, well...anywhere nicer. And it felt very weird passing through, still in this bubble. I know just how little separated the privileged ones in it from those less lucky outside it.

Merry Christmas



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