Bourgeois complacency

Leaning against the hotel bar after dinner on the first evening of our residential erotic-writing course. On my right, John, a tall young energetic skinhead theatre director. On my left, Yannis, a short dignified old Greek intellectual who was kicked out of Greece by the Colonels. Yannis owned the hotel. John and I were would-be erotic writers. Our trio was a sort of self-consciously male enclave in a bar jam-packed with wine-swilling female erotic writers.

We hadn’t met before. John wanted to talk politics straight away. Worse still, he wanted to shake Yannis and me out of our — presumably — bourgeois complacency. He kicked off by lamenting the fact that none of the political parties was committed to an ideology these days. In particular, he yearned for the day when New Labour threw off its disguise and turned Britain into a socialist republic. For surely socialism was the only thing an intelligent human being could really believe in, was it not?

John looked at me. I think he’d been outside for a joint. His eyes were glassy and they had a slightly fatuous, slightly supercilious squint. And he was obviously one of those fellows who thinks his brain is his cock. I said I thought that English socialism had too much Methodism in it for my simple tastes. John immediately focused his attention on Yannis, like a teacher determined to go round the class until he gets the right answer.

I didn’t know it at the time, but as well as being a hotel proprietor Yannis Andricopolous is also a philosopher. His latest work is a 200,000-word history of political philosophy from Aristotle to the present day, in which he urges the Western democracies to re-examine themselves in the light of the ancient Athenian model.