It was part of the convenience of modern life that information about agents in the area should have been immediately accessible to me at the touch of a few keys on a keyboard. Shortly thereafter, however, a rather less pleasant aspect of modernity made itself manifest: most of the agents charged their callers for calling them.
No doubt some will applaud this as evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit that has seized the whole nation. But it seems to me that this misses something about the modern British spirit. At first, I could not quite put my finger on what it was that it missed, and then it came to me in a flash of inspiration, in the shape of a single word that is not much heard nowadays, perhaps because it is too near the bone: spiv.
It is not easy to define spivvery but, like kitsch, it is not difficult to recognise.
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