Cowes Week

Well it is Cowes week, the big sailing festival of the year, and it is raining. The forecast for the rest of the week looks to be pretty much the same.

The town of course is full, and the locals welcome all the visitors with inflated prices and hand over your money ingratiation. The town loves Cowes Week as it brings in money and also keeps Cowes on the map. It may be a tiny seaside town with only one hotel, but it has the accolade of sailing Mecca for the rich and famous for one week in the year.

I guess there were times when it was just for the upper classes, and was part of the "Season". Nowadays it is for everyone who wants to drink all day and sit watching people passing by. Even since I have been here, I sense that it is gradually slipping down the same slope as everything else, into a fully accessible, commercialised miasmic plateau of dumbed down mediocrity.

The town at night is becoming the meeting point for the chavs, who occupy the bars, and with their carrier bags full of cheap supermarket vodka, generate an atmosphere that is becoming less and less appealing and to some extent even threatening. They bring little to the festivities other than an erosion of freedom for others.

Dumbing down is a slippery slope with no ending. However we wrap it up, society is a mixed bag and always will be. Making everything accessible to everyone is sheer nonsense. I agree fully with equality of opportunity, and there should always be ways out of the holes that people dig for themselves, or that they fall into, but should everything be downgraded to accommodate the lowest common denominator?

Should Jemima, with her three grade D GCSE's be encouraged to become a doctor or an airline pilot? Should we make sure that all books are produced as cartoons? Should the Royal Opera House open a McDonalds franchise while reducing perormances to bursts of 5 minutes in order to take into account short attention spans?

I worry about the way that we are heading. I'd like to think that there are pinnacles that are inaccessible to me, and places that I cannot go and targets that I cannot meet. Such things raise aspirations for self improvement as well as adding to life's mysteries.

Groucho Marx once said that he wouldn't want to join a club that would have him as a member. Oh how right he was!