I’ve blogged quite a bit over the years about the friction some people will always feel (myself included) between the desire to be protected by the herd/pack/tribe, and the need to ‘call out’ every last case of unethical, pretentious, mindless or irresponsible behaviour. But often the comment thread afterwards suggests that a lot of people think I’m just being self-important, or – worse – they’ve no idea what I’m on about.

It is far too easy in our society to come across as an inveterate moaner. But ‘moaner’ is another of those thinly veiled ‘frames’ into which keen observers can be force-fitted in order to ignore them: grumpy old man, tree-hugger, Leftie, and so on. So perhaps the best method is to give some personal examples from the past about how the pack-pressure to conform can be subtly (and yet devastatingly) applied….and at the same time, how the non-conformist too can be in denial about what it all means.

When I was going through my London MoU period, I was a frequent attender of cinema, theatre, opera and concert. I suppose you could say that, at the time, I was in the company of what became known as The Chattering Classes. But two specific occasions will always stand out to me.

The first was being invited to an Eric Clapton concert at the Allbert Hall. For a while, the Clapton concert there almost became part of The Season: something one simply must attend, dahhhling. I’ve been a follower of Clapton’s music since his very earliest days, and so I fancy myself as knowing quite a bit about his music. He’s not a great lyricist, but he is without doubt an outstanding R&B guitarist with a wonderfully throaty rock n roll voice.

This time, the first half of the evening was devoted to classic Cream tracks, along with some other highlights of his career. It was great stuff, albeit  oddly out of sync with the drug-addled trio I remember from the late 1960s.

Then in the second half, he was backed on various ballads and rockers by a full classical orchestra. Let’s not beat about the bush here, it was utter crap. It sounded like Sergeant Pepper meets Mozart through the medium of Cliff Richard. But by the end of the set, everyone in the Albert Hall was a-whoopin’ and a yo-yo-yoin’ as if they might be demented. I remained firmly in my seat, wondering WTF I was doing there.

Later we all went to dinner, and I was asked why I “hadn’t joined in”. I said, “Because I don’t enjoy an artist like Clapton behaving like a pretentious berk”. What one might call a heated debate then ensued, after which on the way home my first wife accused me of ingratitude. I had, as I said earlier, been invited – that is, our host had purchased all the tickets. This struck me at the time as a very strange illogic: ‘you’ve been invited, so pretend you like it’. I had, after all, been given no more than a free ticket; but this, it seemed, was enough to buy my critical faculties lock, stock, and barrel.

The second occasion involved attendance at a Polo match. To my surprise, on discovering Polo I found it an exciting game to watch. But the social class overtones were ever-present, and on this occasion the match itself (featuring Prince Charles, Stephanie Powers and several striking Gauchos) was completely overshadowed by the evening’s entertainment: a Gipsy Kings concert.

It would be hard from this distance in time to describe adequately just how comprehensively naff the Gipsy Kings were; but for one summer in the mid 1980s they caught the tragically limited imagination of Sloane Rangers to such an extent, it became a Thought Crime in their company to suggest they just might be roughly on a par with Mantovani, minus only the creativity.

On both these social occasions, I felt the intense frustration of watching otherwise intelligent people talking tripe. And indeed, it is the same feeling I get today – every day – when I hear people talking about the UK’s “economic growth”, QE, the Coming Recovery, and the lack of any alternatives to globalist monopolism pretending to be neoliberal laissez-faire economics.

But what didn’t occur to me all those years ago (as it should’ve done) was to undertake the thinking process on a broader scale in the context of my life as it then was. Thus, I didn’t extrapolate to conclude I was in the wrong milieu, the wrong job, and the wrong marriage.

Eventually, my wife voted with her feet (having told me that I needed “to move on”) and I went through a further life-stage during which I made similar mistakes involving the belonging v critiquing thing. My second wife left twenty years later telling me I needed to “get a grip”. Her mother blamed the failure of the marriage on me “messing about on the bloody computer”, a judgement which is up there with the concept of children begging adults to rape them.

Sometimes, to state the empirical can leave one utterly alone. The task from here onwards, it seems to me, is to join up the huge numbers of people around the Globe who are still capable of discerning the difference between sh*t and putty. The people whose conversation extends beyond the special offers at Tesco, the new chiropodist in town, and who’s going to get through to the final of Britain’s Got Talent.

The aim, surely, is to help those who feel lonely and disenfranchised to realise that they are not isolated eccentrics, but rather responsible citizens who can see what’s coming down the road.

Such people do not labour under any illusions of being ‘special’. They see themselves merely as being real. And they are right to feel that way.