CH Official site: a plethora of pomposity and pedantry

[rockfreak]

For a while I was banned from the official site but they seem to have relented (perhaps foolishly) and I now have an inviting little window winking at me again. Actually I found it rather more bizarre than the Unofficial site where there is at least a robust exchange of honest views.
I note one ageing, pink-faced, old-school-tie-wearing gent fronting up for the camera on the subject of "What makes CH unique?" He starts off in a grandiose, self-satisfied sort of way saying: "What makes Christ's Hospital unique is..... (Pinteresque pause here)...Education!"
Well glory be! Education! Who would have thought it? I'd fondly imagined that the school was actually one giant sex club where all those mysterious buildings emanating out from the quadrangle were full of wipe-clean banquettes with curtains round them, and where what looked like a gymnasium was a dungeon with walls full of manacles, shackles and whips for those who had developed a taste for this sort of thing at their boarding school, and Big School where I imagined that throngs of horny punters gathered to dance to throbbing disco music while an Adonis-like gay guy gyrated in a giant cage suspended over the stage while being righteously fisted by another guy dressed as a Roman centurion.
Shows how wrong you can be. Actually it seems to me that Husband, Dobbie et al might well have been working towards the latter scenario but the law intervened. But stangely there's no mention of them on the official site.

[sejintenej]

I'd fondly imagined that the school was actually one giant sex club where all those mysterious buildings emanating out from the quadrangle were full of wipe-clean banquettes with curtains round them, and where what looked like a gymnasium was a dungeon with walls full of manacles, shackles and whips for those who had developed a taste for this sort of thing at their boarding school, and Big School where I imagined that throngs of horny punters gathered to dance to throbbing disco music while an Adonis-like gay guy gyrated in a giant cage suspended over the stage while being righteously fisted by another guy dressed as a Roman centurion.

Did you go to the other Christs Hospital? The one I went to certainly would not bring up such thoughts or possibility of such imagination.
As for fisting - never even thought of the concept and anyway how would men do it? I have trouble passing a small log! "Gay guys gyrating" - were there gay guys there? obviously I missed out on something. As for Adonis - the only possible one has to be David (and not me either, David).

Sorry, mate - just not my cup of whatever turns you on

[loringa]

For a while I was banned from the official site but they seem to have relented (perhaps foolishly) and I now have an inviting little window winking at me again. Actually I found it rather more bizarre than the Unofficial site where there is at least a robust exchange of honest views.
I note one ageing, pink-faced, old-school-tie-wearing gent fronting up for the camera on the subject of "What makes CH unique?" He starts off in a grandiose, self-satisfied sort of way saying: "What makes Christ's Hospital unique is..... (Pinteresque pause here)...Education!"
Well glory be! Education! Who would have thought it?

I'm not surprised that they banned you from the official site. You have never stopped whinging about privilege and the private education from which you benefited. I don't know why you have such an enormous chip on your shoulder but I imagine that the official site moderators are as fed up as we are of your never-ending complaining about the school. As for self-satisfied pomposity and pedantry - well, perhaps you should re-read your posts on this forum (from which we were briefly spared following the general election). I wouldn't want to ban you from this site; I just wish you'd shut the f**k up and stop whining!

[rockfreak]

As far as privilege and private education go, this is precisely the point I'm making. Although you and I benefited from it, it cannot be fair. Alan Bennett (northern, working class, grammar school) has said the same thing, as indeed has Mark Thomas in an interview I read with him. He said that the system wasn't fair and also remembered that when he was at CH (perhaps when Brideshead Revisited was being reshown on TV) there were a certain number of CH pupils poncing around the place like Charles and Sebastian. So even CH seems to imbue a considerable number of people with what I can only describe as an air of grandiosity. I remember them from my time there.
Personally I think that class still runs through this country like lettering through a stick of rock. These days it's a different sort of class from the old stratified system, but class nonetheless in a way that does not exist in other comparable western European countries. The monarchy, the rich landowners, the City, the public schools (which of course are not public), all these things were gradually changing in the three decades after the war until Margaret Thatcher came along. Yes, Thatcher a grammar school girl. Why did she decide to throw the gears into reverse? We know that she didn't like compromise (she told an aide on a foreign tour) and that she didn't like the old, pink-faced grandees who then constituted the remains of the Macmillanite one-nation party. "False squires!" she called them. Interestingly though, they were a rather benign old bunch even though as Thatcher correctly called, they were overwhelmingly from Eton.
But I think that their views had been changed by their experiences. They had seen two world wars (Macmillan was wounded in the first), they had seen the slumps of the 20s and 30s, the unemployment and slum housing and they knew at the outbreak of the second that things had to change. They were perhaps an aberration in the history of Tory politics (although someone better acquainted than I with Burke, Peel, Disraeli etc might like to discuss that). By their lights I think now that they were a decent sort of bunch although we used to mock them at the time. Certainly preferable to today's vintage who have been born with a silver spoon in their mouths, joined the Bullingdon, and never had to confront anything that might change their minds. Which is why the country doesn't change - and indeed gets worse. But what chance of this pandemic perhaps waking people up and changing minds?

[rockfreak]

An angry OB named Loringa
At Freaky would oft point the finger.
'Twas him, so he claimed,
The old school had defamed,
And on this point he tended to linger.

As far as my "whingeing" goes, it's called free speech, and as far as I'm aware the site is open for free speech. Unlike the Official site which represents a glossy PR brochure frequented by pompous, pink-faced and privileged old buffers (and a few buffessses). I suppose that Loringa's own posts might be described as whingeing. Only in this case in favour of the boarding school system. Anyone who doesn't like free speech can of course always decamp to Saudi Arabia.

[time please]

I like free speech, I like a good debate, I like heated debates. I like at times in a debate to provoke. I like the fact that in debating occasionally one gets a ' I had not thought of that' experience. I like the fact that listening to other people increases my knowledge.

What I do not like are people who assume that whatever they say is correct and whatever anybody else says is wrong.

[rockfreak]

I like free speech, I like a good debate, I like heated debates. I like at times in a debate to provoke. I like the fact that in debating occasionally one gets a ' I had not thought of that' experience. I like the fact that listening to other people increases my knowledge.

What I do not like are people who assume that whatever they say is correct and whatever anybody else says is wrong?


What, like Avon, you mean?
Where on this site have I implied that all others are wrong?

[Avon]

I like free speech, I like a good debate, I like heated debates. I like at times in a debate to provoke. I like the fact that in debating occasionally one gets a ' I had not thought of that' experience. I like the fact that listening to other people increases my knowledge.

What I do not like are people who assume that whatever they say is correct and whatever anybody else says is wrong?

What, like Avon, you mean?

No. As a general rule I confine myself to thinking that wrong people are wrong.