Wednesday 22 August 2012

Ashbourne 22/8.

There were two young women playing Irish music on fiddles. They looked like sisters at least, if not identical twins, and one of them repeatedly smiled at me as I watched them. I went into a shop to buy something, intending to put some money into their case when I came out. By the time I did so, they’d gone. I wonder whether that was life reminding me again that if you have something to spend money on, do it now. Tomorrow you might be dead.

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Can you believe that the supermarket trollies still carry an advert for toothpaste that says ‘the leading brand that dentists use.’ Surely, surely, surely, nobody’s taken in by that sort of thing these days, are they? Remember the famous old American one that said ‘Doctors smoke Camel?’

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The ice cream van made a rare appearance today, but they’d put the prices up - £2 for a standard cone or tub. That’s twice what they charge in the nearby cities of Stoke and Derby. It’s what they do in Ashbourne: they assume everybody’s well off, so they charge more for everything. I declined the ice cream on principle. If everybody did the same, we could put the situation right.

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I saw a young lad who obviously came from the poor end of town. Whatever they wear and however well or badly groomed they are, people from the poor end of town always wear their origins on their faces and in their eyes. They live in a different world than the one most of us are used to. It’s a different form of reality with different conventions, attitudes and expectations. That’s something the pompous, privileged politicians – as well as the majority of Middle England – singularly fail to understand.

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