Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Auntie is embarking...

...on post-graduate studies.

Intriguing the questions one is now asked on official forms.(Nothing to do with the actual college where I will be studying, btw,which is excellent) My ethnicity? I'm honestly not really sure...perhaps some Saxon, maybe a bit of Viking, who knows?  Never thought about it. I meekly agree that I'm just "white" which seems a bit bleak, but all they want is a category...did my parents complete any further education after leaving school? Well, no - a bit busy defending our country in a world war. But being able to put a confident negative to that question will, I now realise, put me into the category of Underprivileged Person, which is both amusing and inaccurate. Oddly, however, there is a lack of questions which would give useful information about me: about my marital status, for example, or my relationship to the person I list as Next of Kin.

But of course the idea isn't to obtain information in order to assist me in my studies, but to announce commitment to the correct ideological perspective. Marriage is a no-no topic, but thinking in social class categories  might help to make the right sort of noise. All officialdom feels obliged to do this now. I can live with it. But it has a lunatic quality that adds a spooky feeling to everyday living. And at least they didn't ask the question a colleague had to answer the other day when completing some obligatory form for officialdom: is the gender to which you now wish to be assigned the same one as on your birth certificate?

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