I once wrote a headline for a leading daily newspaper saying Daniel O’Donnell is so middle-of-the-road he should be run over…
And after all these decades I’m still waiting in the layby, engine purring like a cat!
To my mind Daniel is the doyen of the anodyne and of the pointless … songs with titles like Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, Blackboard of My Heart, Medals For Mothers and Danny Boy speak volumes.
Basically he is a middle-class mummy’s boy.
My problem is that I’ve never understood why so many people like him want to be stuck in the middle, doing fair-to-middling on a mid income (unlike Daniel) driving a mid-range eco car with a mid-line engine, living in a mid-terrace in Middleton Scriven in the Midlands (unlike Daniel).
Maybe the family is in the middle of a divorce (unlike Daniel, although…). And dad’s mid income is being split down the middle by child support agency middle management.
It might even end up in a mid-life crisis. After all he was a middle child, from Middlehampton…
Stuck in the middle with you eh..?
Me? I was brought up in the middle you see – right in the middle of the mental conflict between working class in the 1960s and middle-class pretentions that stay at your psyche’s heart until that wooden box folds you up six feet underground.
Yep, in the 60s we lived in a tiny detached on neat tidy avenue full of replicant houses and replicant people in their cardigans and Hush Puppies.
It was very nice, apparently.
It was this way of life that made me ask many decades ago, what is the value of becoming middle-class?
On the surface, of course, it is far safer than being on the edge … being far out.
Or just being lost.
But I have never understood how people can expect to stand out in a crowd if, like chilly penguins, they are desperately trying to fight their way back into the middle of everything. And nothing.
The middle-classes, to me, are the cogs in the machine, the oil in the engine of society, the propaganda poster boys and girls … those who drive electric Renault Fluences, go for two weeks in the Costa-Not-Very-Mucha with their two-and-a-half kiddly-winks and the bubbly pink missus spilling out of her Marks and Sparks ‘big pants’ bikini for the middle-aged!
I say we should all get out of the middle, drift too far from shore, balance on the edge … and go over the top!
#middleclass #workingclass #actory #jobs #twoandahalfkids #danielo’donnell
