Only five minutes from this cinema...

The missus and I are off to our new local cinema tonight.  It's one of those faceless, multiplex shitholes - the kind of human skip I normally wouldn't touch with a barge pole - but it's a cinema that's walking distance from our front door, and that has got to be worth celebrating.

Our last local one closed in 2003.  Since then we've had to travel by bus or tube to see cutting edge flicks.  To those of you who don't live in a large city, this won't sound like much, but to a Londoner, not having a cinema hobbling distance away is like not having central heating.  Yes, one can manage, but surely this shouldn't still be happening, should it?  It's 2014 ffs.  People were coerced into fighting a war for this country.  What was the point?

My only misgiving about the new place is that multiplexes are like honeypots for scumbags.  There's a risk, therefore, that one might be sharing the auditorium with noisy, fcuk-witted fellow denizens, of which there are plenty in my hometown.

The area I live in has been furiously regenerating over the last five years or so - particularly the "village" bit I live in.  All my neighbours are respectable, educated and middle-class.  But the self-same area used to be exclusively working-class and not a little rough with it.  Most of the locale still clings doggedly to its lumpen tattooed past.  Nothing wrong with that of course - it's just that I demand respectful silence when I at the pictures.  What's the point otherwise?  

People (middle-class people) snort and pull faces when I complain about things like this.  But that is to misread the target of my ire.  It's not the working class whose nose I aim to bloody (I am one of them after all), it is scumbags I have a problem with.  These two cohorts tend to get confused by the media and polite English society at large.  I suppose my own class is partly to blame for this.  There is a creeping mistrust of education and erudition among today's hoi polloi.  

This is at odds with the prevailing wisdom I was brought up with.  Then, working class children were encouraged to amass book learning if they felt inclined to.  And those to didn't take to formal education were expected and encouraged to learn a practical skill.  As a boy, my (exclusively working class) friends and I revelled in knowing stuff - not Greek myths or calculus maybe, but abstract notions that appealed to us and facts.  Nothing wrong with a distended arsenal of facts, my boy.

Working class children nowadays wallow in their ignorance and this I find contemptible.