Fancy things
I have mixed feelings when it comes to doing fancy things. By fancy things, I mean things that are fancy. Or rather, things that people think of as fancy, like fine dining, attending the the-A-ter, or that perennial South Australian pass-time: wine tasting.
On the whole, I mostly enjoy these fancy things, particularly when undertaken with good company, as my most recent foray into wine tasting was, but I can never shake the feeling that I don’t belong there, or more accurately, that I don’t really ·É²¹²Ô³ÙÌýto belong in these rarefied settings.
What I put this down to is largely my own personal politics, but I think there is an aspect to ‘fancy’ things that is deliberately exclusionary but in a much more nuanced, softer way than traditional notions of exclusion.
It’s about social cues, or social etiquette. The way everyone at a wine tasting speaks in hushed tones, and the jargon they use to describe various types, blends, vintages, and varieties of wine (I’m doing it, too!). If I was being generous, I would say that ‘fancy’ places don’t intend to exclude people. They just like things to be ‘nice’ and, above all, to develop and then maintain a reputation for ‘excellence’, or something like it.
What that means is a code of conduct that is learned through social interaction, as most are, between similar people who all wish to present themselves with some degree of status, displayed by their mastery and understanding of the intricacies of whatever task is at hand.
It means that, while the act of wine tasting might not be prohibitively expensive, the cultural cues that surround it mean that only certain types of people feel comfortable being there. As a result, I take great pleasure in somewhat gently transgressing the boundaries of these cues in order to try to expose their very existence and their hollow nature. That’s my way of dealing with the internal conflict that swells inside me at ‘fancy’ places, which is I suppose some sense of class betrayal.
Ultimately, I think that everyone should feel comfortable visiting anywhere and taking part in any experience they may wish to. The wines might drink quite nicely, but I find snobbery pretty hard to stomach.