my latest little post just got me thinking about a pair of middle-class friends of mine, that I fell out with a couple of years back. Well, not fell out with , exactly. It's just that i felt too glum after my last visit to return as planned . And now it suddebly strikes me that i never sent them a Christmas card this year, nor even let then know that I;ve moved , and passed on my new address. And I'm not at all sure that I want to put that right
It's not that they're remainers , exactly. I will happily overlook political differences. It's that they voiced the opinion that Brexiteers are all racists. And they followed that up with the observation that they had some very nice Polish people as well as Pakistanis living in their neighbourhood, and how much they enjoyed the multicultural vibe, just as if that were relevant to the question in hand (which concerned the Housing Crisis, at that point in the conversation) . And these are really intelligent people, which made it all the more depressing.
I would probably have swallowed my sense of offense at being casually put down as racist, and got over that. But then, after changing the subject, and chatting away for an hour or so about more agreeable topics, we got on to talking about Asperger's and one of them suddenly chimed in with "We're all on the spectrum, arent we "
Huh. Well, maybe that was supposed to reassure me that we have something in common. But, somehow, it had the polar opposite effect. Never felt so roundly dismissed in my life.
PS. oh! and hark at me, calling them ""middle-class friends"
when i would normally, much more warmly, call them "very old friends whom I've known since my schoodays" at which point in time i never understood, nor even noticed those class distinctions. Even now, I dont consider it especially meaningul, normally. That must be my óngoing sense of alienation talking, eh? *sigh *