How the other 0.002% lives

I treated myself for the ferry back to an upgrade to the best cabins on the ship (the difference between steerage and Commodore for a single person was actually only £200).

And my fellow Commodore’s are an interesting bunch.

There appear to be a fair number of other oiks like me who have paid that little bit extra for the unlimited free beer, snacks and breakfast (and with costs on board, you don’t have to go spectacularly overboard to be making a profit!)

Then there are a couple of clearly very well healed people who I think don’t like the idea of the lower classes being allowed to upgrade.

This really came into focus earlier when I was having a snack in the lounge washed down with two gallons of beer.

There was a small family group, and one of the kids was getting quite excited, so excited that their accent slipped from the kind of received pronunciation English that you can’t place to any particular part of the UK other than “well-educated” to what was very noticeably South West, and I’d even go so far as to say a full Bristol.

The reaction from the parents was quite swift with a stern telling off about “not using “THAT” accent in public” and comments to the effect that they weren’t spending good money on pronunciation lessons for their daughter to keep reverting back to “THAT” accent every time she got excited.

Now I know it’s not the nicest of accents, but then I can hardly talk with a nasty South London accent (or Sauf Lunun accent), but at the same time I really didn’t think that accents mattered so much any more. But obviously for a very small number of people they do (and for an even smaller number of people they represent a way of making an awful lot of money by beating RP English into people)