Bring out yer snobs

I saw a headline for a local newspaper yesterday that read something like this:

"Is the town centre being overrun with snobs?"

Ah, you gotta love small town England, no murder/rape/hijacking to report (lucky buggers), but a scourge of snobs, better watch out for them.

I want to know where these snobs are, I have never seen one. The town I live in does have its posh bits, we do have the word "Royal" attached to the town name after all, but those bits are almost quarantined from the rest of town. 

All that I see on the streets are chavs, drunks and bums. I do not object to them, but that's the way it is. I have never seen anyone who could qualify as a snob in the town centre. Perhaps they teleport themselves into the shops, then make a sprint for their chauffeured cars in order to avoid the great unwashed. Dunno.

When I came to the UK I had an idea about English accents and manners (roughly based on Absolutely Fabulous, Fawlty towers and the Queen) which was smashed into smithereens about 2 seconds after I stepped off the plane. I still struggle to understand some of the accents I encounter. For example: 

"Goh-A loi?" roughly translates into "Do you have a light?" To which my usual reply is "sorry what?" and then the poor person moves on to someone less cretinous, who knows that the letter "t" is officially extinct.

I would love to meet a snob, just to hear that sexy accent, which as far as I can see, no real English person would be able to understand. But I feel that they all keep to themselves in their little suburb where there are actual gardens and actual spaces between the houses. They probably don't even know that my part of town (the wrong side of the tracks - the place for students, crack heads and foreigners, me being one and a half of these) exists.

Strange to think that by UK standards, myself and most of my South AFrican friends would qualify as snobs, whereas over here, we can barely afford to rent a flat next to the crackheads. 

Such is life :)