Last year I was working the middle of Whitehall for the Department of Energy and a particular album of music fit like a glove and it's only after the next London stint has started and I've stayed here at length that I've come realise why.
I'm not to into Philip Glass, (only really got into him via his versions of Heroes and Low) but Akhnaten is awesome. A fantastic operatic soundtrack to ominous reading of the inscriptions around the Pharaoh's tomb, ending with the sad little notice given to tourists, it was very weirdly appropriate listening in the middle of the English white marble Vatican city of civil service bureaucracy.
Lately I've come to realise that London is in a wider sense starting to resemble ancient Egypt. Not in climate terms obviously. But in social mobility terms.
The non-domicile tax status provided by successive British governments (that we now know have been terrified of the media elite) have made London the preferred haunt of the 1% of the 1%.
A British Monaco? Sounds good?
Aside from further completely isolating London from the nation of which it is supposed to be the capital city, and as a Northerner I probably feel that more than most, it also creates a creeping unease with some of the scum you are sharing the pubs and environs with.
This morning over coffee Akhnaton came on as I read this..
.. which prompted me to blog today
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