Suburban mediocrity. A culture that openly worships the average. A society which allows the idea of the elite to exist only in relation to sport. A culture of fat people, lazy people, people who watch reality television, people who aren’t interested in anything except celebrity, people who eat in the street, people who betray their ordinariness every time they open their mouths. The City of London is one of the few places in which this tyranny of the mediocre, the mean, the average, the banal, the ordinary, the complacent, is challenged. The City is one of the few places in which you are allowed to be extraordinary. No – it was better than that. The City is one of the only places in which you are invited to demonstrate that you are extraordinary. It did not matter what you claimed; claiming to be this or that meant nothing. Claiming has no effect. You have to show it. This is what Roger’s deputy was thinking about as he rode the train, clunketa clunketa, out to his parents’ house in Godalming.
