Good Ness Communications

On Saturday I went to Loch Morlich and fell in love, all over again, with Michael Bywater. He wasn’t there, as far as I know; I read his article on social mobility, as the train dawdled through scenery that people spend a fortune to come here and grace with their full attention.

It was all over again because he was at Cosmopolitan when I used to study every inch of my mother’s copy. In love with because he could write the paragraph above in less than half the words and with the kind of wry flourish that has you smiling every time you think of it for the rest of the day. But also because it was a ‘that’s why I like you so much’ moment. Why do I like this posh bloke’s clever way with words and right-on humour more than the dozens of others meeting that description? It’s more common for me to not get through the first paragraph and never return. I’m not a read everything kind of writer – I wish I was. I’m very fussy about who I spend time with and can go for months without finding a novelist or journalist that makes the grade. But in Saturday’s essay for The Independent, Michael Bywater wrote of how he’d gone to Cambridge on an organ scholarship and that getting that far had relied on a lot of luck in finding himself with a father who sought out good connections and in a time when there were a lot more scholarships to good schools and such hard to imagine things as state-funded music classes. He contrasted his experience to a gifted academic without those advantages, who is currently struggling to stay in academia. I don’t dislike rich people: you can’t help what you’re born into. What I dislike is those who imagine there is anything more than luck at play and there is an awful lot of them. I didn’t know he wasn’t one but maybe that’s what’s why I’ve found his words so particularly delighting for more than a couple of decades now.