True Stories

I attended a black-tie party this weekend to celebrate a milestone birthday of a long-standing family friend. It was quite a formal do and pulled together many different strands of people, well over 100 came, the weather was glorious and we had a nice meal and party down by the Thames at Sonning. The particular person who's birthday it was happens to be very (Christian) religious and subsequently many of her closest friends are church-related friends, during the evening we all had several "let us pray" moments, not that that was any kind of problem, but did provide me with some excellent people-watching opportunities (I was one of the few who's eyes remained firmly open) 

Generally, I'd say that you'd probably classify this group as "posh", the car park was full of posh cars, the frocks and suits were posh and the accents edging toward the plummy end of the spectrum. Most of the stories being told about the birthday girl were about things like, boozy lunches in Harvey Nicks, skiing exploits in Val d'Isere or Meribel and exotic trips to far flung places. There were lot's of tales of drinking to excess, spending to excess and plenty of innuendo about inappropriate liaisons with inappropriate boys, snatched in the back of Triumph Spitfires. From a superficial reading of the crowd you'd have struggled to distinguish them from any flavour of Western, secular, wealthy, middle-aged people who have (mostly) lead privileged lives, benefiting greatly from resources provided by their similarly well endowed parents and families. The religion bit seemed to me to cut across it all in a rather orthogonal way, almost like they felt that the success and excess parts of their lives needed to be counter-balanced by an appropriate amount of deistic grovelling. Of course who knows how many of the people there actually believed it all, and how many just go along for the ride, I must say that the whole thing did have a kind of "Masons" vibe to it. These particular Christians were certainly a million miles away from the literalist end of the scale, more your "cafeteria" style perhaps, picking and choosing when and what to attribute to that part of their lives but otherwise doing sterling impressions of liberal capitalists and atheists. Maybe this religion/Christian thing is much more about simply being "in a club" than I'd perhaps realised.