Do you enjoy having opinions? Do you have lots? Big, booming, confident certainties that trash all doubts and ambiguities.
It's easy. You just lie back, have a mental tic, and inflict your view on others.
It's often balderdash, especially if it's about education. You choose your topic – free schools, private schools, the English bac, streaming, mixed ability, psychotic phonics, psychometric testing, failing teachers, tuition fees … and off you go.
It helps if you've no actual experience of a state school – you can deny the quicksilver complexity of the classroom and unleash unearned certitudes at your hapless victims, especially if they're teachers. You can creep up on us at parties, funerals, bus stops, broken lifts – and have some.
I used to pretend to be anything but a teacher – a loan shark, estate agent, Elvis, Stan Bowles, Satan – but I always got rumbled, and off they'd go. It drives you nuts.
Once I lost it completely – at a very modish party in Holland Park. A cherry-veined, plum-voiced, Oxbridge duffer was giving it large about Holland Park School – where I taught.
"Who do you think you are?" I yelled. "What the fuck do you know about it?"
He thought he was Peter Jenkins, who edited most of the Guardian, knew rather a fucking lot and had a wife called Polly Toynbee. Mine was called Jill, and kicked me vigorously on the shins and carted me off the premises...
We've stuck to this arrangement over the years.
If I look like having a turn, she kicks me thus. It generally works, though the recent party season has been a bit of a challenge. There you are, sipping the Merlot and jigging about and, wallop, you're mugged by a big, fat opinion.
"Rupert and I have always believed passionately in state education, but it's not good enough for Hugo/Hysteria/Rhapsody. You can't sacrifice them on the altar of liberal ideals."
Kick! Kick!
"Teachers are too soft/left/thick!"
Kick! Kick!
"Canes never did me any harm!"
Kick! Kick!
"Media studies are mickey mouse!"
I try to construct a look of benign fascination at this witless stuff and to resist launching into something nuanced like: "Avaunt, you thick, ill-informed, smug, prune-faced, Tory buffoon!"
I count to 10. Then rant. Mrs Fielding does the kicking and carting and, Lady Macbeth style, explains that the pills are wearing off.
All those opinions, eh? I think I might have had some once.
Now it's your turn … you just lie back and think of Swedish models, baccalaureates, dumbing down, the tyranny of Oxbridge, media studies, psychometric phonics … whatever.
It's easy. If you're not a teacher.
