Low Life | 8 November 2008

It’s a proud day when your boy goes for his first job interview with a career in mind and says he wants to borrow your suit. He left school two years ago, aged 16, knowing a bit about the Nazis and how to bake a scone and that’s about it. He gained no qualifications, something of an achievement these days. The parents’ evenings I attended each year were like going from one party political broadcast to another. Through their unhappy smiles, his overworked teachers assured me that my boy was either ‘brilliant’ or ‘doing brilliantly’. Which was a strange thing for anybody concerned about academic excellence to say about a lad who has never read a book in his life, nor shown the slightest inclination to do so. Neither can anyone at home recall a single occasion when we saw him flourish a pen. I reconciled myself to this discrepancy by assuming that the language of approbation has become so devalued that the word ‘brilliant’ now means, at best, ‘crap’.